拍品专文
Flames lick the edge of Wade Guyton’s Untitled, an incandescent example of the artist’s inkjet paintings. Three brightly colored U shapes float atop the black ground, which the dancing inferno threatens to consume. It is a seductive and searing interplay, and one that invokes the enthralling, totemic power of fire. “I thought of it as romantic, but camp,” noted Guyton. “Destructive, but also generative. And of course hot … The first time I printed the fire on linen was one of those brutally humid New York summer nights. No AC in the studio. I was sweating, and the paintings were melting” (W. Guyton, quoted by S. Rothkopf (ed.), Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 204). Like Yves Klein’s fire paintings of the 1960s, for which the artist ignited paper and cardboard to create novel abstract patterns, Untitled, too, is a revelatory reimagining of what a painting could be.
Untitled was executed in 2005, the year that Guyton first began to create his inkjet paintings on linen, a landmark moment within the artist’s career. The artist had first begun to explore the printer as an artistic apparatus three years prior: Having always hated drawing, Guyton set out to find a new means of image production. At first, he created rudimentary patterns in Microsoft Word, which he then printed onto pages torn out from various books. Although he chose the computer because it was “right there,” Guyton later realized that Microsoft Word possessed its own capabilities; it has a “language” and a “structure” (W. Guyton quoted in C. Vogel, “Painting, Rebooted”, The New York Times, 27 September 2012, online).
For several years, Guyton continued in this way, uniting pages ripped from books in his extensive collection and the simple images he crafted using Word. In 2005, however, the artist radically reconceived how he went about creating a composition. He began by scanning his support into the computer and editing it digitally before printing the final image directly onto swaths of linen. Cleaved from their original source and reproduced in ink, what were once physical, three-dimensional objects become pictorial images, proffering novel representations of themselves—and thus a new aesthetic language.
Indeed, works such as Untitled seem intent on answering the question posed by the art historian Douglas Crimp more than four decades ago: “What makes it possible to see a painting as a painting?” (D. Crimp, “The End of Painting”, October, vol. 16, Art World Follies (Spring, 1981), p. 72). Guyton’s idiom seizes upon the nature of visual culture, namely, the way in which images travel and mutate across various platforms, from literature and printed ephemera to the internet, the phone, and social media. Yet despite their digital origins, these works are wholly analogue, and their tactility—their very physical presence—is poignant, “a counterattack of the spirit on a culture whose proliferating technical means, by eclipsing the handmade, disembody imagination,” (P. Schjeldahl, “Man and Machine”, The New Yorker, 8 October 2012, online).
Far from venerating the industrial, Guyton instead complicates the means of technical image production by courting mess and error. While his machines are able to print on linen, these interactions are far from smooth or pristine, and the splotches, spots, slips, and shadows that occur during the printing process are fundamental to the final painting. But such snags and impediments serve as reminders of Guyton’s involvement; they register the artist’s hand, allowing him to exploit the painterly possibilities of the printer. As he observed, “This is a recording process as much as a production process. And I have to live with it, smears and all” (quoted in op. cit., 2012). The inclusion of the flames only heightens this sense. Fire evokes a primordial history, Promethius stealing from the Olympian gods, mankind’s earliest wonder. Paired with the simple signs—here a U—and Untitled could have been wrested from the walls of a terrestrial cavern, a cave painting for the modern world.
Untitled was executed in 2005, the year that Guyton first began to create his inkjet paintings on linen, a landmark moment within the artist’s career. The artist had first begun to explore the printer as an artistic apparatus three years prior: Having always hated drawing, Guyton set out to find a new means of image production. At first, he created rudimentary patterns in Microsoft Word, which he then printed onto pages torn out from various books. Although he chose the computer because it was “right there,” Guyton later realized that Microsoft Word possessed its own capabilities; it has a “language” and a “structure” (W. Guyton quoted in C. Vogel, “Painting, Rebooted”, The New York Times, 27 September 2012, online).
For several years, Guyton continued in this way, uniting pages ripped from books in his extensive collection and the simple images he crafted using Word. In 2005, however, the artist radically reconceived how he went about creating a composition. He began by scanning his support into the computer and editing it digitally before printing the final image directly onto swaths of linen. Cleaved from their original source and reproduced in ink, what were once physical, three-dimensional objects become pictorial images, proffering novel representations of themselves—and thus a new aesthetic language.
Indeed, works such as Untitled seem intent on answering the question posed by the art historian Douglas Crimp more than four decades ago: “What makes it possible to see a painting as a painting?” (D. Crimp, “The End of Painting”, October, vol. 16, Art World Follies (Spring, 1981), p. 72). Guyton’s idiom seizes upon the nature of visual culture, namely, the way in which images travel and mutate across various platforms, from literature and printed ephemera to the internet, the phone, and social media. Yet despite their digital origins, these works are wholly analogue, and their tactility—their very physical presence—is poignant, “a counterattack of the spirit on a culture whose proliferating technical means, by eclipsing the handmade, disembody imagination,” (P. Schjeldahl, “Man and Machine”, The New Yorker, 8 October 2012, online).
Far from venerating the industrial, Guyton instead complicates the means of technical image production by courting mess and error. While his machines are able to print on linen, these interactions are far from smooth or pristine, and the splotches, spots, slips, and shadows that occur during the printing process are fundamental to the final painting. But such snags and impediments serve as reminders of Guyton’s involvement; they register the artist’s hand, allowing him to exploit the painterly possibilities of the printer. As he observed, “This is a recording process as much as a production process. And I have to live with it, smears and all” (quoted in op. cit., 2012). The inclusion of the flames only heightens this sense. Fire evokes a primordial history, Promethius stealing from the Olympian gods, mankind’s earliest wonder. Paired with the simple signs—here a U—and Untitled could have been wrested from the walls of a terrestrial cavern, a cave painting for the modern world.