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Lot Essay
'He seeks to lure us ever more deeply into the flux of time and the gaps of space by drawing the viewer into the work of art and drawing the work of art into the field of the viewer... Within his frame of reference, time is no longer a prison from which we seek to escape but is the vital medium of life itself'
(M.C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 132).
'The left/right and top/down opposition seem to structure a series of other contrasts or dual oppositions that form the subject of the painting: unfinished/finished, nature/culture, unique/mass production, darkness/light, abstract/figurative, and cave-base ment/museum-gallery'
(J.Haagemann, The Raw and the Frame, Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, 1995, p. 3)
'I think of the painted picture as an embodiment of the very problem that we face with the notion of 'reality'. The problem or question is, which reality? In a painted picture, is it the depicted reality, or the reality of the picture plane, or the multidimensional reality the artist and viewer exist in? That all three are involved points to the fact that all pictures are inherently problematic'
(M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York 1992, p. 132).
'There is really very little that is visible in the format of a picture. The value of thinking in terms of a crossroads or pictorial intersection is that if not all that much is visible, then what little there is ought to involve vital trajectories and points of collision and encounter between a variety of cultural, formal, or figural systems'
(M.C. Tansey, quoted in A. C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 132).
Enveloping the viewer in a richly detailed panorama spanning almost two and a half metres The Raw and the Framed, 1995, is an epic painting by Mark Tansey. Debuted at Mark Tansey, Galleri Faurschou, Copenhagen, it was acquired in 1995 and has remained in the same private collection since this time. Cloaked in a rich turquoise blue, the tableau invites a close reading, both in its remarkable handling of paint and its postmodern inquiry into the ways of looking at painting. Peering through the stalwart columns and gilded picture frames in the foreground, the viewer is presented with a paradoxical mural-like allegory of the creation of painting. Reading the composition from left to right, the subterranean industrial quarry mining raw roughhewn blocks of ore on the left leading to the ornately decorated museum in all its exquisite grandeur on the right. The two scenes are united by the linear track of the conveyor belt: as the slabs of abstracted rock reel along, they undergo an alchemic transformation into gilded masterpieces as they trundle into the museum. The whirling movement of the intricately detailed conveyor belt echoes the act of reading as our eyes move across the exquisite surface from left to right. Tansey depicts the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examining a painting in an ornate frame unaware that the industrialized origins of the work that he is admiring was mined from rough blocks of ore. An erudite enquiry into the nature of artistic production and reception, in The Raw and the Framed, Tansey offers up an insightful postmodern pun where machines are metaphors for artistic production and paintings are literally the product of their environment.
Created the same year as the artist's solo exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, The Raw and the Framed was first conceived in a series of drawings entitled The Framework Suite. Described by Mark C. Taylor in the artist's monograph as the most interesting work in the Frameworks suite, a preparatory work on paper with the same title from the artist's personal collection was included in Tansey's 1993 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, with another work on paper version housed in The Broad Art Foundation (M.C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 61). Forming part of a relatively small output, other works by Tansey form part of The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth collections.
Physical frames and notions of framing become critical in this work: from formally employing repoussoir devices such as the architectural features that draw the viewer's eye into the composition, to the ornate frames which form the columns, to the presence of Lévi-Strauss who guides our critical framing of discussion. Rooted in Lévi-Strauss' theories of anthropological structuralism and frameworks, Tansey was directly inspired by the academic's celebrated book The Raw and the Cooked. Lévi-Strauss suggested a framework of grids or diagrams as visual charts to illustrate the binary oppositions inherent in society. The orderly, contemplated composition is divided by its horizontal axis like the left and right hemispheres of a brain. Setting up this opposition, Tansey's inventive narrative simultaneously endorses and subverts the oppositions that have been set by Lévi-Strauss' archetypical system of gridded frames.
As Mark Taylor posits, 'After reading Lévi-Strauss, Tansey [began] experimenting with the use of grids to generate the subject matter of his paintings, which developed to Tansey designing Lévi-Straussian grids in order to generate the subject matter of his painting. These grids are the first introduction of the frame' (M.C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London 1999, p. 61).
Setting up this opposition, the structural logic of the painting becomes complicated as the pillars propping up the ceiling dissolve in and out of perspective like the impossible hypnotic constructions of M.C. Escher. In doing so, Tansey's inventive narrative simultaneously endorses and subverts the oppositions that Lévi-Strauss's system frames. As the artist has suggested, 'the idea of representational content as matters of framing: art production as framing frame as substitutes for subject matter' (M. Tansey, quoted in J. Freeman, Mark Tansey, exh cat., Los Angeles Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1993, p. 70). Commenting on the Greenbergian art historical criticism of the 1960 and 70s - which suggested either painting as flat surface where materiality of self-referential object is more important than meaning, Tansey's decidedly painterly process oscillates and uses the painted surface to discuss both meaning and content.
Ironically undermining the narrative of mechanized artistic production, Tansey deftly exercises a variety of painting techniques in The Raw and the Framed. Unifying the framework through the mesmerizing expanse of turquoise, Tansey defines the monochromatic composition by sponging, rubbing, brushing, scraping, and scumbling the semi-opaque colour. Laying down single layers of pigment on canvas, the quick-drying nature of the thin veils of colour restricts the window of time in which Tansey has to manipulate his composition. In a process that is both additive and subtractive, the images emerge from the monochromatic abyss by means of wiping and pulling pigment away in order to render the painstaking details with the assistance of an arsenal of tools. According to the artist, 'a painting takes a few days to a few weeks depending on the complexity of subject matter. The quick and intense painting process is usually a pleasurable antidote to the preceding months of preparation' (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 127). Tansey's various painting techniques act as a metaphor for the hybridized narrative which blend modernist structure and ornamental decoration, traditional art historical references and modern day industrialized culture. Blurring the outlines that divide history and fiction, Tansey probes the limits of the structural framework, ultimately eluding formal conclusions and forcing us to question the ways in which we interpret the works of art that we encounter.
Tansey's monochromatic palette is key to his practice. Across his entire oeuvre, Tansey's formal practice of working in a restricted pallette of blue, sepia, and grisaille monochrome references the tradition of academic painting. This approach resonates with his former job as an illustrator for The New York Times. This dual reference is a constant reminder of the essential falsehood of all painting, recalling the hedcut portraits in The Wall Street Journal, to the reproductions of masterworks in art history books. The use of monochrome is also a means to focus the viewer's attention upon the ideas presented. Creating a sweeping uniformity across the canvas, the harmonized colour allows us to read the frames as a cohesive narrative. As the artist suggests, 'one of the most obvious effects of monochrome is its production of a 'seeming' unity. Photographic conventions play the key role here, by establishing a plausible space-and-time framework. This framework becomes the container for whatever cultural, ideological, conceptual, or formal conclusions that might occur within it. In a sense it's a matter of seeing how much force of content the framework can take before its apparent unity breaks down' (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York 1992, p.128).
Tansey's rich trove of imagery seamlessly blends allegory, intellectual theory, art historical criticism, and irreverent deadpan dialogue. Indeed, growing up with parents who were both art historians, Tansey has spent a lifetime looking at and thinking about pictures. For Tansey, approaching a work of art is the product of stretching, rotating, or cropping forms, combining images, and photocopying them over and again until he has produced a preliminary study for the painting in the form of a collage. This reductive process allows Tansey to excavate his images with archaeological, photographic, and surgical precision. And, while his work makes use of motifs lifted from historical paintings and depicts important artists and philosophers of our time, the allegories they contain also present Tansey with the essential problem inherent in representational painting.
Not merely reproducing or illustrating 'the real', Tansey searches for a modus vivende, for the disparate interpretive trajectories exploded by paint on canvas. 'In my work,' he says, 'I'm searching for pictorial functions that are based on the idea that the painted picture knows itself to be metaphorical, rhetorical, transformational, fictional. I'm not doing pictures of things that actually exist in the world. The narratives never actually occurred. In contrast to the assertion of one reality, my work investigates how different realities interact and abrade. And the understanding is that the abrasions start within the medium itself' (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Visions and Revisions, New York 1992, p.132). In the end, it is Tansey's arcane ability to juxatapose the fantastic with the real in order to develop an end product that is both synergistic and larger than the sum of the parts.
(M.C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 132).
'The left/right and top/down opposition seem to structure a series of other contrasts or dual oppositions that form the subject of the painting: unfinished/finished, nature/culture, unique/mass production, darkness/light, abstract/figurative, and cave-base ment/museum-gallery'
(J.Haagemann, The Raw and the Frame, Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, 1995, p. 3)
'I think of the painted picture as an embodiment of the very problem that we face with the notion of 'reality'. The problem or question is, which reality? In a painted picture, is it the depicted reality, or the reality of the picture plane, or the multidimensional reality the artist and viewer exist in? That all three are involved points to the fact that all pictures are inherently problematic'
(M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York 1992, p. 132).
'There is really very little that is visible in the format of a picture. The value of thinking in terms of a crossroads or pictorial intersection is that if not all that much is visible, then what little there is ought to involve vital trajectories and points of collision and encounter between a variety of cultural, formal, or figural systems'
(M.C. Tansey, quoted in A. C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 132).
Enveloping the viewer in a richly detailed panorama spanning almost two and a half metres The Raw and the Framed, 1995, is an epic painting by Mark Tansey. Debuted at Mark Tansey, Galleri Faurschou, Copenhagen, it was acquired in 1995 and has remained in the same private collection since this time. Cloaked in a rich turquoise blue, the tableau invites a close reading, both in its remarkable handling of paint and its postmodern inquiry into the ways of looking at painting. Peering through the stalwart columns and gilded picture frames in the foreground, the viewer is presented with a paradoxical mural-like allegory of the creation of painting. Reading the composition from left to right, the subterranean industrial quarry mining raw roughhewn blocks of ore on the left leading to the ornately decorated museum in all its exquisite grandeur on the right. The two scenes are united by the linear track of the conveyor belt: as the slabs of abstracted rock reel along, they undergo an alchemic transformation into gilded masterpieces as they trundle into the museum. The whirling movement of the intricately detailed conveyor belt echoes the act of reading as our eyes move across the exquisite surface from left to right. Tansey depicts the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examining a painting in an ornate frame unaware that the industrialized origins of the work that he is admiring was mined from rough blocks of ore. An erudite enquiry into the nature of artistic production and reception, in The Raw and the Framed, Tansey offers up an insightful postmodern pun where machines are metaphors for artistic production and paintings are literally the product of their environment.
Created the same year as the artist's solo exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, The Raw and the Framed was first conceived in a series of drawings entitled The Framework Suite. Described by Mark C. Taylor in the artist's monograph as the most interesting work in the Frameworks suite, a preparatory work on paper with the same title from the artist's personal collection was included in Tansey's 1993 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, with another work on paper version housed in The Broad Art Foundation (M.C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 61). Forming part of a relatively small output, other works by Tansey form part of The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth collections.
Physical frames and notions of framing become critical in this work: from formally employing repoussoir devices such as the architectural features that draw the viewer's eye into the composition, to the ornate frames which form the columns, to the presence of Lévi-Strauss who guides our critical framing of discussion. Rooted in Lévi-Strauss' theories of anthropological structuralism and frameworks, Tansey was directly inspired by the academic's celebrated book The Raw and the Cooked. Lévi-Strauss suggested a framework of grids or diagrams as visual charts to illustrate the binary oppositions inherent in society. The orderly, contemplated composition is divided by its horizontal axis like the left and right hemispheres of a brain. Setting up this opposition, Tansey's inventive narrative simultaneously endorses and subverts the oppositions that have been set by Lévi-Strauss' archetypical system of gridded frames.
As Mark Taylor posits, 'After reading Lévi-Strauss, Tansey [began] experimenting with the use of grids to generate the subject matter of his paintings, which developed to Tansey designing Lévi-Straussian grids in order to generate the subject matter of his painting. These grids are the first introduction of the frame' (M.C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London 1999, p. 61).
Setting up this opposition, the structural logic of the painting becomes complicated as the pillars propping up the ceiling dissolve in and out of perspective like the impossible hypnotic constructions of M.C. Escher. In doing so, Tansey's inventive narrative simultaneously endorses and subverts the oppositions that Lévi-Strauss's system frames. As the artist has suggested, 'the idea of representational content as matters of framing: art production as framing frame as substitutes for subject matter' (M. Tansey, quoted in J. Freeman, Mark Tansey, exh cat., Los Angeles Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1993, p. 70). Commenting on the Greenbergian art historical criticism of the 1960 and 70s - which suggested either painting as flat surface where materiality of self-referential object is more important than meaning, Tansey's decidedly painterly process oscillates and uses the painted surface to discuss both meaning and content.
Ironically undermining the narrative of mechanized artistic production, Tansey deftly exercises a variety of painting techniques in The Raw and the Framed. Unifying the framework through the mesmerizing expanse of turquoise, Tansey defines the monochromatic composition by sponging, rubbing, brushing, scraping, and scumbling the semi-opaque colour. Laying down single layers of pigment on canvas, the quick-drying nature of the thin veils of colour restricts the window of time in which Tansey has to manipulate his composition. In a process that is both additive and subtractive, the images emerge from the monochromatic abyss by means of wiping and pulling pigment away in order to render the painstaking details with the assistance of an arsenal of tools. According to the artist, 'a painting takes a few days to a few weeks depending on the complexity of subject matter. The quick and intense painting process is usually a pleasurable antidote to the preceding months of preparation' (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 127). Tansey's various painting techniques act as a metaphor for the hybridized narrative which blend modernist structure and ornamental decoration, traditional art historical references and modern day industrialized culture. Blurring the outlines that divide history and fiction, Tansey probes the limits of the structural framework, ultimately eluding formal conclusions and forcing us to question the ways in which we interpret the works of art that we encounter.
Tansey's monochromatic palette is key to his practice. Across his entire oeuvre, Tansey's formal practice of working in a restricted pallette of blue, sepia, and grisaille monochrome references the tradition of academic painting. This approach resonates with his former job as an illustrator for The New York Times. This dual reference is a constant reminder of the essential falsehood of all painting, recalling the hedcut portraits in The Wall Street Journal, to the reproductions of masterworks in art history books. The use of monochrome is also a means to focus the viewer's attention upon the ideas presented. Creating a sweeping uniformity across the canvas, the harmonized colour allows us to read the frames as a cohesive narrative. As the artist suggests, 'one of the most obvious effects of monochrome is its production of a 'seeming' unity. Photographic conventions play the key role here, by establishing a plausible space-and-time framework. This framework becomes the container for whatever cultural, ideological, conceptual, or formal conclusions that might occur within it. In a sense it's a matter of seeing how much force of content the framework can take before its apparent unity breaks down' (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York 1992, p.128).
Tansey's rich trove of imagery seamlessly blends allegory, intellectual theory, art historical criticism, and irreverent deadpan dialogue. Indeed, growing up with parents who were both art historians, Tansey has spent a lifetime looking at and thinking about pictures. For Tansey, approaching a work of art is the product of stretching, rotating, or cropping forms, combining images, and photocopying them over and again until he has produced a preliminary study for the painting in the form of a collage. This reductive process allows Tansey to excavate his images with archaeological, photographic, and surgical precision. And, while his work makes use of motifs lifted from historical paintings and depicts important artists and philosophers of our time, the allegories they contain also present Tansey with the essential problem inherent in representational painting.
Not merely reproducing or illustrating 'the real', Tansey searches for a modus vivende, for the disparate interpretive trajectories exploded by paint on canvas. 'In my work,' he says, 'I'm searching for pictorial functions that are based on the idea that the painted picture knows itself to be metaphorical, rhetorical, transformational, fictional. I'm not doing pictures of things that actually exist in the world. The narratives never actually occurred. In contrast to the assertion of one reality, my work investigates how different realities interact and abrade. And the understanding is that the abrasions start within the medium itself' (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Visions and Revisions, New York 1992, p.132). In the end, it is Tansey's arcane ability to juxatapose the fantastic with the real in order to develop an end product that is both synergistic and larger than the sum of the parts.