Readymade Digital Colour: an Expanding Subject for Painting

Home , Ann Temkin, Blinky Palermo, Ellsworth Kelly, Georges Valmier, Gerhard Richter, Lawrence Kupferman

READYMADE DIGITAL COLOUR:

AN EXPANDING SUBJECT FOR PAINTING

Doctorate of Philosophy

DAVID SERISIER

2013

College of Fine Arts

University of New South Wales

ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

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CONTENTS

Abstract vii

Acknowledgements ix

Glossary of Terms x

List of Illustrations xii

Introduction 1

1 Dada – The Readymade 12

1.1 Introduction 12

1.2 Background 13

1.3 Dada: Born of Chaos / Society as Subject 15

1.4 Non-Composition – Arp and Taeuber 18

1.5 Duchamp – Validity of Variation 21

1.6 Schwitters – Elemental Matter: Biographical Marker 26

1.7 Conclusion 29

2 Ellsworth Kelly – Colour and the Readymade 39

2.1 Introduction 39

2.2 Post-War America 1945-1949 41

2.3 Post-War Paris 1949-1954 47

2.4 Cage in Paris 54

2.5 Collage and Indeterminacy 57

2.6 Nature 63

2.7 The Transfer 66

2.8 Kelly and the Avant-garde 68

2.9 The Matrix 76

2.10 Readymade Colour, its Variation, and the Contemporary Museum 82

2.11 Conclusion 87

3 Fluxus - The Expansion of the Readymade to Include the Ephemeral Event 98

3.1 Introduction 98

3.2 Fluxus 98

3.3 Abstraction and The Event Score 100

3.4 Photography, the Readymade and George Brecht 105

3.5 Conclusion 108

4 Blinky Palermo – Art as a Readymade Subject 111

4.1 Introduction 111

4.2 Background 113

4.3 Porosity and Exchange 114

4.4 The Sphere of Influence 116

4.5 Colour and Meaning 120

4.6 Colour Systems, Art, and the Readymade Subject 121

4.7 Readymade Colour and Consumption 126

4.8 Readymade Colour, the Monochrome 130

4.9 Conclusion 132

5 The Studio Research 145

5.1 Introduction 145

5.2 Memory - Colour Remembered 146

5.3 Perception - Fluorescent Colour Event 148

5.4A The Digital Record – Nature 152

5.4B The Digital Record – Travel 156

5.5 The Multi-generational Transfer – Concretisation 160

5.6 Studio Research Conclusion 162

6.1 Thesis Conclusion 193

Table of Work 197

Bibliography 202

Appendix 1 211

Appendix 2 CD

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to identify the significant contribution to the re- definition of subject conventions within non-representational painting made by the utilisation of readymade colour, from Dada to digital applications in current contemporary art. It describes how artists shifted away from the orthodoxy of universal themes towards the specificity of context within the everyday. I argue that this contextual shift developed beyond the confines of the object to include the perception of ephemeral phenomena and its re-formation. Moreover, the objective of this thesis is to show how the readymade has been expanded to include painting and thereby, artists’ intellectual property as subject. The thesis analyses the artwork of the American artist, Ellsworth Kelly (1923-) and the German artist Blinky Palermo (1943-1977), to demonstrate the provenance of transferred readymade colour in painting. It investigates these artists’ innovative focus on colour, not as an element of expression, but as a readymade subject, and then, as already-made colour, that is, repeated, exponential transfers of readymade colour in non-compositional painting. The research acknowledges the undermining impact of Dada and Fluxus ideas on orthodoxies in painting. This resulted in an expansion of the parameters of the readymade to include the ephemeral event and through that, photography as tools in the exploration of readymade colour. My studio led research extends this expansion by utilising technologies and processes associated with digital colour as readymade colour and already- made subject. The subject comprises an investigation of perception through the physiological capacity of the eye, memory and its subjective, mechanistic implications, supported by digital capture. The sensation of colour omitted from the ephemeral event of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light installations at Marfa, Texas, first viewed on a road trip, is the context of these experiments. Flavin’s installations comprise six U-shaped barracks housing parallel diagonal configurations of coloured fluorescent lights, which I re-contextualise into the everyday through multi-generational transfer. My research investigates digital colour as a means to transfer to painting the ephemeral and exponential as subject. Generational variations to

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readymade colour within this painting process question the rigidity of closed systems and introduce expanded contextual possibilities for colour.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Bonita Ely and Nicole Ellis for their guidance and support and in particular for Bonita’s insights into Fluxus and Nicole’s understanding of my developing position as an artist. I thank my wife Gillian Serisier for her encouragement, patience and editing. Thanks also to my mother and sister,

Annette for understanding the demands of this research project. I am indebted to the ongoing support of the Painting Department at the National Art School, especially

Susan Andrews, John Bloomfield, Andrew Donaldson and Stephen Little. Special thanks to James and Jacqui Erskine and Sarah Hetherington of Liverpool Street Gallery for the endless encouragement and support of all my projects. I would also like to thank

Bridget Pirrie and Stephen Grant for their long term and ongoing support including the kindness shown in allowing me to use the GRANTPIRRIE space to present my thesis exhibition. Finally, I would like to thank Chris Goffin for navigating me through the digital world.

Glossary of Terms

Readymade: A pre-existing entity awaiting contextual re-assignment.

Epitomising this is the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s

Fountain (1917) which re-contextualised a pre-existing urinal by

placing it on its back on a plinth in a gallery, signing it

“R.Mutt,” and declaring the object an artwork. In doing so,

Duchamp negated the object’s functional purpose and re-

assigned it as an artwork.

Already-made: As defined by Yve-Alain Bois an already-made is a pre-existing

motif or subject (idea or form) that needs to be re-formed

through a process to facilitate its contextual re-assignment.1

Ellsworth Kelly’s, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris

(1949), for example, transfers information from the motif of the

window through painting without being a representation of the

window. Effectively, the transfer, in this case, the process of

painting, serves as an alternative to representation.

1 Yve-Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-Composition in Its many Guises,” trans. Gregory Sims, in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954, by Yve-Alain Bois, Jack Cowart and Alfred Pacquement, ed. Mary Yakush (Munich: Prestel), 14.

Transfer: A physical process used to contextually re-assign a pre-existing

subject. Transfer occurs when a readymade subject, such as

colour, undergoes a process to create an artwork. A simple

example of a transfer is when the subject, coloured fluorescent

light is re-formed with paint (of an equivalent colour) as a

painting. The transfer (noun) is the referent subject transferred

(verb).

Subject: Within this thesis, subject is the original premise informing the

artwork. Effectively, subject connotes the perception from

which the artist extrapolates meaning, form or concern to

produce an artwork. For example, the readymade colour yellow

is perceived by the artist, then transferred by painting to a linen

surface to make an artwork with yellow as the subject.

Non-representational painting:

Non-representational painting refers to the practice of painting

that rejects reliance on representational or pictorial strategies

(including the figure-ground relationship) as the purveyor of

subject as a means to convey visual, symbolic or conceptual

meaning.

List of Illustrations

1. Dan Flavin, Untitled (Marfa project), 1996.

2. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917, replica 1964.

3. Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colors for a Large Wall”, 1951.

4. Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a large Wall, 1951.

5. George Brecht, Keyhole, 1962.

6. Blinky Palermo, To the People of New York City, 1976.

7. Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages, 1913.

8. Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913.

9. Hugo Ball performing sound poetry at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1916.

11. Jean Arp, Geometriche Collage (Geometric Collage), 1916.

12. Jean Arp and Sophie Taueber, Duo Collage, 1918.

13. Sophie Taeuber, Vertical-Horizontal Composition, 1916.

14. Jean Arp, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to Chance), 1916- 1917.

15. The Blindman No.1 (Front cover), April 10, 1917.

16. New York Dada (Front cover), April, 1921.

17. Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921.

18. American Coca-Cola.

19. Mexican Coca-Cola.

20. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1919-1938.

21. David Serisier, untitled (Penske Yellow Interstate-10), 2011.

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22. David Serisier, untitled yellow square painting (Interstate-10), 2010.

23. Ellsworth Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949.

24. Ellsworth Kelly, White Relief, 1950.

25. Ellsworth Kelly, Toilette, 1949.

26. Ellsworth Kelly, Head with a Beard, 1949.

27. Pablo Picasso, Etudiant à la Pipe, 1913-1914.

28. Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Cite”: Brushstrokes Cut into Twenty Squares and Arranged by Chance, 1951.

29. Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Seine”, 1951.

30. Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI, 1951.

31. Ellsworth Kelly, Red Yellow Blue White, 1952.

32. Robert Rauschenberg, Collection, 1954.

33. Aleksandr Rodchenko, Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, and Pure Blue Colour (collectively known as The Last Painting), 1921.

34. Marcel Duchamp, Piston de Courant D’air, 1914.

35. Imi Knoebel, 24 Farben-für Blinky (24 Colours – for Blinky), 1977.

36. Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo at the Fluxus Festival der Neuen Kunst, Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 1964.

37. Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter, Wandmalerei und Skulptur, 1971.

38. Invitation card, Blinky Palermo exhibition, René Block, Berlin, 1969.

39. Blinky Palermo, Composition with 8 Red Rectangles, 1964.

40. Kazamir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915.

41. Blinky Palermo, Flipper, 1965.

42. Blinky Palermo, Straight, 1965.

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43. Piet Mondrian, New York City, 1942.

44. Blinky Palermo, Rot-Rosa, 1966 -1967.

45. Blinky Palermo, Rosa/Orange/Schwarz, 1968.

46. Blinky Palermo, Projection,1971.

47. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Title (Untitled), 1969.

48. Blinky Palermo, Times of the day I, 1974-5.

49. Blinky Palermo, Times of the day V, 1976.

50. Blinky Palermo, Coney Island I, 1975.

51. Blinky Palermo, Coney Island II, 1975.

52. Blinky Palermo, Zu Wandmalerei Treppenhaus (To Mural Staircase), Documenta 5, Kassel West Germany, 1972.

53. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1973.

54. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1973.

55. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1973.

56. Yves Klein, Untitled Blue Monochrome, (IKB 104), 1956.

57. Blinky Palermo, Blaues Dreick (Blue Triangle), 1966.

58. Blinky Palermo, Blaues Dreick (Blue Triangle), 1969.

59. David Serisier, untitled violet light painting, 2008.

60. David Serisier, untitled pink light painting, 2008.

61. David Serisier, untitled green light painting, 2008.

62. David Serisier, untitled warm yellow light painting, 2008.

63. David Serisier, untitled green light painting no.1, 2008.

64. David Serisier, untitled pink light painting no.1, 2008.

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65. David Serisier, untitled blue light painting, 2008.

66. David Serisier, untitled cool yellow light painting, 2008.

67. David Serisier, untitled green red fluorescent light grid, 2011.

68. David Serisier, untitled red fluorescent light grid, 2011.

69. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light grid, 2011.

70. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light grid no.2, 2011.

71. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light grid, 2011.

72. David Serisier, untitled blue blue-black fluorescent light grid, 2011.

73. David Serisier, untitled blue pink fluorescent light grid, 2011.

74. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009.

75. David Serisier, untitled red fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009.

76. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009.

77. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009.

78. David Serisier, untitled pink fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009.

79. David Serisier, untitled blue-black fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009.

80. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.1, 2009.

81. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.2, 2009.

82. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.3, 2009.

83. David Serisier, untitled dawn light no.1, 2009.

84. David Serisier, untitled dawn light no.2, 2009.

85. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.1, 2011.

86. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.2, 2011.

87. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.3, 2011.

88. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.4, 2011.

89. David Serisier, untitled blue square painting (Interstate-10), 2010.

90. David Serisier, untitled (Ozuchishima), 2011.

91. David Serisier, untitled grey painting (Naoshima), 2010.

92. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012.

93. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012.

94. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012.

95. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012.

96. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012.

97. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012.

98. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012.

99. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012.

100. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012.

101. David Serisier, untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012.

102. David Serisier, untitled red and red fluorescent light painting, 2012.

103. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light painting, 2012.

104. David Serisier, untitled fluorescent light painting sequence no. 1-10, 2012.

105. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2007.

106. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2007.

107. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009.

108. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009.

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109. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009.

110. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009.

111. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009.

112. David Serisier, installation view, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, GRANTPIRRIE Project Space, Redfern, 2013.

113. David Serisier, installation view, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, GRANTPIRRIE Project Space, Redfern, 2013.

114. David Serisier, installation view, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, GRANTPIRRIE Project Space, Redfern, 2013.

115. David Serisier, installation view, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, GRANTPIRRIE Project Space, Redfern, 2013.

116. David Serisier, installation view, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, GRANTPIRRIE Project Space, Redfern, 2013.

117. David Serisier, installation view, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, GRANTPIRRIE Project Space, Redfern, 2013.

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Readymade Digital Colour: An Expanding Subject For Painting

Introduction

The advent of the readymade and the ensuing evolution of colour as a readymade subject, constitutes one of the most important paradigm shifts in the history of abstract art. This thesis examines the readymade as pivotal in the move away from pictorial or representational traditions, whereby a different focus on the object and its perception as both subject and art form coexist. The objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the ongoing potential of readymade colour as a subject for painting that expands to include the actions, technologies and situations of everyday life.

The experimentations of key art movements and artists during the twentieth century negated the rules of the subjects of art. Previously subject had been limited to the physical element to be reproduced, however, within the new paradigm, subject expanded to connote the key concern of the artwork, whether, actual, metaphoric, conceptual or ephemeral. This allowed the readymade subject to develop an expanded definition, including the already-made, colour, the ephemeral, photography, a concept and art itself, all of which conflate to exponentially expand readymade colour as subject beyond the original premise of paint taken straight from the industrially manufactured tube. This evolution is key to my studio based research where the subject is drawn from photographs I take of readymade ephemeral colour emanating from the American artist,

Dan Flavin’s light installation, Untitled (Marfa project) (1996), Marfa, Texas (Fig.1).2 It

2 Dan Flavin (1933-1996): American Minimalist sculptor and installation artist noted for his use of coloured fluorescent light tubes. In the fall of 2000 the Chinati Foundation officially inaugurated Dan Flavin’s Untitled (Marfa project), 1996 as a posthumous work. Although originally commissioned in 1979 by the Dia Art Foundation, Flavin did not complete his instructions for the Marfa project until shortly before his death in1996. The project was completed with the aid of the Lannan Foundation. Untitled (Marfa Project) is an architectural installation of various combinations of pink, green, blue, and yellow fluorescent lights within six U-shaped buildings. Parallel fluorescent lights are installed in angled barriers that divide the connecting arm of each building. The light tubes are each 243.8 cm long and openly spaced allowing a view from one wing to the other. The coloured light formed from the confluence of each light source is projected outward into both wings of the building. The lights forming the installation in building 1 and 2 are pink and green; in building 3 and 4, yellow and blue; and in 1

is via multi-generational transfer including photography, the digital image and digital print that my practice transforms phenomena into painting.

To briefly clarify, the term readymade describes a pre-existing entity that is contextually re-assigned by the artist, while an already-made, as explained by the

French art historian Yve-Alain Bois,3 denotes a motif or subject that needs to be formed through a subsequent process known as transfer, such as painting.4 Transfer occurs when a readymade subject, such as colour, undergoes a process to create an artwork.5

These terms are examined and unpacked through relevant examples throughout the thesis.

Critical theory exploring Kelly’s and Palermo’s development of readymade colour is dominated by Benjamin Buchloh6 and Yve-Alain Bois and as such, their theories are drawn on extensively. The analysis of Brandon Joseph,7 Rosalind Krauss,

Ann Temkin,8 Helen Molesworth,9 Owen Smith,10 and David Reed,11 are also explored.

Wherever possible direct quotes from the artists are utilised, this however is with the exception of Palermo who died at a young age leaving very little documented evidence of his thoughts and opinions. building 5 and 6, pink, green, yellow and blue. At the far end of each building’s wings are two windows that allow natural light into the space and a view of the landscape. The rooms have no other light source. 3 Yve-Alain Bois (1952-): French art historian whose specialist area ranges from Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly. At present Bois is compiling a catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s painting and sculpture. Bois is currently Art History Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. 4 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 14, 16, 22. 5 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Summons,” in Spencertown (London: Anthony d’Offay, 1994), 38. Bois revises his terminology for Kelly’s non-compositional strategies from “the ‘readymade,’ the aleatory, the all over grid and additive elementarization” (See Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 10) to “the transfer (or index), chance, the grid, the monochrome panel.” 6 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (1941-): German born American art historian, currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University. 7 Brandon W. Joseph: American art historian; currently the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Director of Art Humanities, Columbia University. 8 Ann Temkin: American art historian and curator; currently Chief Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 9 Helen Molesworth: American art historian, critic and curator; currently the Chief Curator at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. 10 Owen F. Smith: American art historian, curator, artist, writer and teacher; currently Director of New Media / Associate Professor of Digital Art, University of Maine. 11 David Reed (1946-): American artist noted for his abstract paintings and conceptual practice. 2

The evolution of readymade colour is explored in this thesis through the art movements Dada12 and Fluxus13 with reference to key practitioners including Marcel

Duchamp,14 Jean (Hans) Arp,15 Sophie Taeuber (-Arp),16 Kurt Schwitters,17 John Cage18 and George Brecht.19 These movements and artists achieved momentous shifts away from established conventions of art practice. Moreover they laid the framework for future developments and the significance of their legacy continues to have great relevance. In relation to my own practice the evolutionary advancements made by the

American artist, Ellsworth Kelly20 and the German artist, Blinky Palermo21 are of particular note and each will have a chapter devoted to their experiments for expanding colour as subject.

Given Dada’s objection to rules, it is ironic that Dada established the provisions that allowed the readymade a place in contemporary art. The French artist

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) (Fig.2), was the first readymade, comprising a porcelain urinal re-contextualised as a work of art through placement and the addition of a signature, ‘R. Mutt 1917.’ Presenting a pre-existing object as art, Duchamp

12 Dada movement (1916-1923): the first Dada review opened in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire on 5 March 1916. Dada was open to all artists, performers and poets. Dadaists include Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Marcel Janco and Richard Heulsenbeck. In 1916 the first Dada journal; Cabaret Voltaire was launched. The Dada movement spread rapidly across Europe and then the world with publications in Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Leiden, Barcelona, Zagreb and New York. 13 Fluxus movement (late 1950’s -): an informal internationalist Neo-Dada group active in the visual arts, music, performance, video, and literature. 14 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968): French artist associated with Dada and Surrealism whose influence expanded painting possibilities through the introduction of the readymade. 15 Jean (Hans) Arp (1887-1966): German-French abstract artist and poet, husband and collaborator with Sophie Taeuber (-Arp). Founding member of the Dada movement in Zurich, 1916. 16 Sophie Taeuber (-Arp) (1989-1943): Swiss textile and graphic artist, painter, sculptor; wife and collaborator with Jean Arp. 17 Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948): German artist linked to Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Noted for painting, sculptor, and poetry. Schwitters published the periodical Merz between 1923-1932. 18 John Cage (1912-1992): American experimental composer, poet, and theorist, a recognised influence on the Fluxus movement. 19 George Brecht (1926-2008): American Fluxus artist, avant-garde composer and student of John Cage. 20 Ellsworth Kelly (1923-): American artist noted for highly individual painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing that influenced Minimal art, colour field painting, hard edged painting and Post-Painterly Abstraction. 21 Blinky Palermo (1943-1977): German artist noted for his paintings, objects, and installations. 3

emphasised authorship as an essential element in creating art. He posited that regardless of execution being painting or placement, the creation of art was an act of authorship by the artist, given that both methods stem from the artist’s choice. By creating art through re-contextualisation, representation was no longer a requisite of subject, the subject could simply be in and of itself. Effectively, this paved the way for readymade colour to be applied directly from the tube, in that colour was no longer limited to representing something other than itself. Yellow, for example, freed from representing subjects such as sunlight and daffodils, could now exist as a subject in its own right.

Compounding this was the introduction of chance and the grid by German-

French Dada artist Jean Arp and the Swiss Dada artist Sophie Taeuber who explored the grid as a means of eliminating representation and composition. Within this non- hierarchical structure, colour as subject was further endorsed, and where, to continue the example, yellow alone is the subject, the monochrome is born.

The German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters explored Duchamp’s re- contextualisation proposition in reverse. By acknowledging the personal human origins of otherwise randomly collected detritus it is the context of source that gives the elements meaning, while the whole is attributed to art by authorship of the artist. A pencil stub, for example, is simply a piece of wood until imbued with the associative meaning of having been taken from the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s desk.22 In this case the transferred object is an elemental component of the artwork, effectively demonstrating that elements for making art can exist as both subject and the material, or matter. Arp and Taeuber’s use of coloured pieces of paper to both create the work and be the subject is in accord with Schwitters, in that it confirms matter as subject.

22 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969): German-American architect, last director of the Staatliches Bauhaus and a pioneer of modern architecture. 4

Kelly’s development of the already-made subject, where variation inherent in transfer signalled colour as a subject, is of particular interest to this research. The influences pushing Kelly away from the accepted avenues of abstraction are attributable to both his American and French experiences. In France, Kelly was influenced by the thinking of American experimental composer John Cage to expand subject, and by Arp and Taeuber to expand experimentation, particularly chance and non-representational strategies. Kelly’s nascent philosophical position however, was also influenced by the

British art critic Herbert Read, whom he encountered in Boston.23 Effectively, it was

Read that prompted Kelly to forgo convention, whether ascribed or presumed, rendering him free to adopt or reject elements from presiding groups without accepting their manifestos.24 Under these combined influences, Kelly identified the already-made subject and commenced his experiments with chance and the grid.

Key to these developments was the transfer, where an identified already- made subject, for example the collage, Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colors for a

Large Wall”, (1951) (Fig.3) was re-formed as Colors for a large Wall, (1951) (Fig.4) through the act of painting. The collage is an already-made artwork, or subject, which is re-formed by the artist through painting to create another artwork. Variations within the transfer however, do not negate the sourced colour as subject. Variation is inherent in the transfer as a process, while the subject, yellow for example, remains referent to the original yellow.

Inherent to the transfer are social or cultural aspects of the sourced colour, which remain intact despite contextual or material change. This is exemplified by the coloured gum papers of Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colors for a Large Wall”, which

23 Herbert Read (1893-1968): British anarchist, art and literature critic, and poet. 24 David Thistlewood, “Herbert Read (1893-1968),” in PROSPECTS: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 2002) vol.24, no.1/2 1994, 3-4, accessed June 24, 2013. http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/reade.pdf 5

continue to reference the place and the era of their origin. Exponentially expanding this is Kelly’s self-referentiality, which as the German-American art historian Benjamin

Buchloh has identified, positions the self or biographical marker as subject, thereby identifying life, particularly the life and era of the artist, as subject.25

The late fifties’ emergence of the informal group, Fluxus, signified a return of the art combatant with further modes of practice being overturned and questioned.

Fluxus posited freedom from convention and built on the foundations of Duchamp and

Dada, which Cage had developed in the preceding decades.26 The American Fluxus artist George Brecht is of particular importance to the expanded definition of readymade colour. In this thesis I will argue that it was his observations of Duchamp’s and Cage’s practice that expands the readymade subject to include the ephemeral event as a readymade subject. This realisation, in league with his development of the event score, has led, as the American art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss27 argues, to the inclusion of photography as both a means for framing and capturing the ephemeral event.28 This is particularly true for Keyhole (1962) (Fig.5), which presents both the frame and a given field of perception as an artwork and will be discussed in depth. Effectively, photography facilitates the concretisation of the ephemeral event and provides a practical means for its transfer as an already-made subject. Extending this premise further, the ephemeral event has no limitations and thereby includes phenomena as subject. The emanating colour in the glow of fluorescent lights is thus shown to be a valid subject for transfer.

25 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Kelly’s Matrix: Administering Abstraction, Industrializing Color,” in Ellsworth Kelly: Matrix, ed. Adam Lehner (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003), 6, 10. 26 Julia E. Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model: In the Event of George Brecht & the Conceptual Turn in the Art of the 1960’s” (PhD. Diss., Princeton University, 2008), 120. 27 Rosalind E. Krauss (1941-): American art critic and theorist; University Professor 20th century Art and Theory, Columbia University; editor and co-founder of October magazine. 28 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986), 206. 6

Influenced by Fluxus, indeed influenced by many, Blinky Palermo progressed readymade colour’s evolution in an altogether unexpected direction. As a student under the German artist and pedagogue Joseph Beuys29 at the Kunstakademie in

Düsseldorf, West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), Palermo was introduced to a broad and varied set of influences, particularly the seminal examples of European avant- garde practice and the strengthening influences of American Abstraction. While

Palermo’s approach to these various influences has been described as “porous” it is arguably more about exchange than acquiescence.30 Palermo identified ‘concept’ as a readymade subject, that is, the intellectual property of other artists such as their colour systems are recognised as a transferable art brand.31 The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s32 signature red, yellow and blue for example is transferred as a readymade colour system.

That Palermo neither reproduces, as an already-made transfer, nor tries to resemble any particular Mondrian art work is important in that it is the key visual impression of the overall Mondrian brand rather than the image of a particular art work that is transferred.

It was not however, essential that brand identity be recognised and Palermo’s final work,

To the People of New York City (1976) (Fig.6) remains open to interpretation as either the colours of the German Flag or as a reference to Native North American Indians.33

29 Joseph Beuys (1921-1986): German artist and pedagogue known for his sculpture, installations, and performances. Associated with Fluxus and the development of Conceptual art. 30 David Reed, “Exchange,” in Palermo: To the People of New York City, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder (Dusseldorf: Richter; New York: Dia Foundation, 2009), 111. 31 Benjamin Buchloh, “The Palermo Triangles,” in Blinky Palermo Retrospective 1964-1977, ed. Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder (New York: Dia Art Foundation in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010), 35. Buchloh cites Robin Winters, “New York Conversations.” 32 Piet Mondrian (1872-1944): abstract painter and founder of Neo-plasticism with Theo Van Doesburg with whom he co-planned and contributed to the De Stijl art review; a member of Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. Lived Paris 1912-1914, 1920-1937. 33 Christine Mehring, Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 171. Dark blue (nearly black), red, yellow and white forms the basis of the Native American colour system used to denote spatial orientation and cultural signs. The colour system has the innate flexibility to accommodate the shifting needs of cultural circumstance, context and location. 7

As Palermo’s practice developed, so too did his subject and by the early

1970s Palermo’s transferred subject came to include his own work.34 This was further expanded by multi-generational transfers that shifted his subject back and forth between the concrete, ephemeral, interactive and commercial. Moreover, Palermo posited the commercialisation of art as a subject by deliberately engaging marketing strategies through material and figure ground composition.35 This was further explored by his deliberate use of industrial paints to usurp their utilitarian associations through re- contextualisation as high art.36

Kelly’s and Palermo’s expansion of the readymade have direct bearing on my studio based research. In particular Kelly’s adoption of the already-made in unison with the monochrome panel and the grid is a strategy in my practice. So too is the transfer, which I engage through a multi-generational exploration of a subject’s ability to retain residual associations with its source. Similarly, Palermo’s acceptance of another artist’s colour system as a readymade is a strategy I utilise when transferring the ephemeral information of Flavin’s light installations using digital photography. Each of these artists is working on a foundation of strategies developed by Dada, and, or, Fluxus and I argue the role of these movements in readymade colour’s evolution, demands and deserves acknowledgement. As such, while the primary chapter of this research is dedicated to Kelly and the secondary chapter explores Palermo, these are contextualised by chapters on Dada and Fluxus. A chapter exploring my studio based research and its outcomes concludes the thesis.

34 Susanne Küper, Ilka and Andreas Ruby, “Stairway 1,2…,” in Palermo, ed. Susanne Küper, Ulrike Groos and Vanessa Joan Müller (Düsseldorf: Dumont, 2007), 80, 95, n. 1. 35 Mehring, Palermo, 59. 36 Mehring, Palermo, 151. 8

1. Dan Flavin, Untitled (Marfa Project), 1996. Installation view. The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, United States. From: The Chinati Foundation, www.chinati.org/visit/collection/danflavin.php (accessed February10, 2013).

2. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917, replica 1964. Porcelain, unconfirmed: 36 x 48 x 61 cm. The Tate, London. From: The Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573 (accessed February 10, 2013).

3. Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colours for a Large Wall”, 1951. Collage, 20 x 19.7 cm. Private collection. From: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1999. Plate 116.

4. Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951. Oil on canvas mounted on sixty-four joined panels, 239 x 239 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954. Munich: Prestel, 1992. Plate 74.

5. George Brecht, Keyhole, 1962. Ink on paper in artist's frame and two metal escutcheons mounted on wood, framed score: 17 x 14.2 x 2.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A756&page_number=8&te mplate_id=1&sort_order=1 (accessed February 10, 2013).

6. Blinky Palermo, To the People of New York City, 1976 (installation view Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Photo by Lee Stalsworth.) Acrylic on aluminium in fifteen parts Part I: 3 panels 21 x 16 cm each; Part II: 4 panels 21 x 16 cm each; Part III: 3 panels 21 x 16 cm each; Part IV: 3 panels 21 x 16 cm each; Part V: 3 panels 26.5 x 21 cm each; Part VI: 2 panels 100 x 44 cm each; Parts VII-X: 4 panels each; 52 x 43 cm each; Parts XI-XIV: 1 panel each; 100 x 200 cm; Part XV: 1 panel 125 x 110 cm. Dia Art Foundation, Beacon New York. From: The Hirshhorn Museum, www.hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/hirshhorn-past- exhibitions/#detail=/bio/blinky-palermo-retrospective-1964-1977/&collection=hirshhorn-past-exhibitions (accessed February 10, 2013).

Chapter 1 Dada - The Readymade

1.1 Introduction

Of particular importance to this research is the Dada movement’s contribution of the readymade to the development of abstract, or non-representational art. While acknowledging that Dada artists introduced the deployment of chance and the grid as strategies for abstraction, the objective of this chapter is an exploration of the

Dadaist strategies that allowed readymade colour a place in abstraction. This chapter will also discuss Dada’s response to an emergent spirit of cultural dissatisfaction that expanded art practice and its subjects to include the object and contemporary society.

Within Dada practice the readymade presented the commodity or circumstance as a fully formed subject or element, awaiting adjustment, re- contextualisation or direct transfer. In taking this approach Dada anticipated the non- compositional strategy of the already-made subject as an extension of the readymade.

This, when combined with the grid, facilitated the direct transfer of the subject by providing a non-hierarchical structure free from remnant representational conventions.

Chance procedures, introduced by the German-French artist Jean Arp, undermined the entrenched logic of representation and the subjective patterns of freeform composition.37 French artist Marcel Duchamp’s readymades emphasised the importance of the object, its context and its consumption. Dada however, also rejected purity in favour of impurity, thereby allowing the used or second-hand commodity a place as both elemental form and biographical subject, as exemplified by the work of Kurt

Schwitters.

37 Arp randomly scattered paper shapes to form Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17. Torn and pasted paper, 48.6 x 34.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 12

Dada was further advanced by its willingness to adopt new technologies whilst maintaining superseded technologies and processes when effective.38 The introduction of new processes blurred boundaries between high and low art, fundamentally rejecting the previous cultural elite. In realising a homogenous platform for art, free from convention, Dada facilitated the introduction of an expanded subject drawn from contemporary life.

1.2 Background

Within the scope of this research Dada’s expansion of subject to include everyday life cannot be underestimated, as it forms the platform supporting later expansions of painting’s subject, including readymade colour.39 As such, it is important for this research to recognise the contributions of the successive waves of avant-garde artists whose efforts formed the foundation for Dada’s expansion of practice and subject.

Most particularly, this research acknowledges the significance of Duchamp’s pre-Dada experiments in pursuit of a non-representational art, as this laid the foundation for experimentation towards expanded subject.

During the first half of the twentieth century representational painting and sculpture dominated the visual arts. The leading schools of the avant-garde included

Cubism,40 Futurism,41 and Expressionism,42 along with various sub groups of abstract

38 Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Pen-Pals,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman with Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 270. 39 Stephen Johnstone, “Introduction: Recent Art and the Everyday,” to The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Stephen Johnstone (London: Whitechapel Ventures Limited; Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008), 13. Johnstone defines the everyday as a subject previously overlooked that unites both art and life. 40 Cubism: an early twentieth century avant-garde art movement focusing on the analysis and abstraction of form. Co-founded by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist George Braque (1907- 1911). 41 Futurism: an Italian art movement (1906-1916). Founded by the Italian artist Fillippo Marinetti, exploring themes of the future including speed and technology. 42 Expressionism: a modern art movement beginning in Germany in the early twentieth century focussing on emotional content rather than description. Early Expressionist artists included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Auguste Macke, Käthe Kollwitz and Paul Klee. 13

art.43 Each however operated within, or in response to, a set of rules pertaining to representation, whereby art material’s role was the depiction of something other than itself.

The introduction of new technologies, in conjunction with the rapid social changes accompanying mass industrialisation, the devastation of World War One, and mechanisation, forced the visual arts to reassess its role or face cultural irrelevancy. As such, artists started to explore new avenues for meaning and subject. Cubist structural investigations, for example, prompted the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky44 and the

Munich based Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter 45 to forge spiritual aspirations into a new pictorial language where colour, free of form, questioned the ingrained assumptions of representation as the foundation for visual meaning.46 In 1913 Duchamp further questioned representation and the artist’s role by challenging painting’s object status with non-compositional experiments. These were to include chance procedures such as with 3 Standard Stoppages (1913) (Fig. 7) and nascent experiments with the readymade including Bicycle Wheel (1913),47 (Fig. 8) which comprised a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. Effectively, Duchamp’s refusal to accept prevailing logic constitutes an important precursor to an emergent spirit of cultural dissatisfaction that evolved as Dada three years later.

43 The twentieth century boasts a prevalence of abstract artists including, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Theo Van Doesburg, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Kazimir Malevich, and Wassily Kandinsky. 44 Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944): Russian painter and pioneer of abstract art. 45 Der Blau Reiter (1911-1914): a loose association of expressionist painters formed in Munich by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky and the German artist Franz Marc. 46 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, trans. Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 120-126. 47 The Bicycle Wheel, 1913 is arguably Duchamp’s first readymade despite Duchamp not formulating the term until 1915. See the National Gallery of Australia’s notes accompanying the 1964 reconstruction. Accessed February 17, 2013. http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=49305&PICTAUS=TRUE 14

1.3 Dada – Born of Chaos / Society as Subject

The platform established by Duchamp facilitated Dada’s non- representational strategies, including subject’s expansion, to evolve in response to the radical social changes of the early twentieth century. Compounding this, Dada artists, freeing themselves from the restriction of style or traditional art mediums, were able to engage and advance abstraction beyond its representational roots. Moreover, the combination of societal upheaval and anarchic responses allowed a critique of society as the subject of art.

Dada, as a cultural movement within the historical avant-garde, remains an enigma unbounded by style or manifesto as I.K. Bonset (Theo van Doesburg) 48 the editor of the Dada publication Mécano states:

Dadaism represents the chaos in which we live. Dada existed in the atmosphere. It

did not come into being, it was not created – it simply was; there was no expression

at the time to distinguish this general spiritual condition from all the other spiritual

attitudes. And indeed this word: DADA, which was found accidently in a

dictionary, means nothing. It was constructed from the sensitivity to a particular

moment. One needs a slogan that suddenly calls up an entire world in the

imagination.49

Reacting to the barbarities of World War One, Dada rejected the reason and logic supporting early twentieth century industrial society, openly ridiculing, criticising and abandoning its conventions and orthodoxies. 50 Indeed, Dadaists attacked the meaning

48 Theo Van Doesburg (1883- 1931): Abstract painter and instigator with Mondrian of the De Stijl movement; committed to Neo-Plasticism from 1915 until 1925; driving force and joint publisher of Art Concret manifesto 1930; lived in Paris between1929 and 1930. I.K.Bonset: Theo Van Doesburg’s nom de plume as literary editor of Mécano, published 1922-1924; and as a contributor to De Stijl published between 1917-1931. 49 Theo Van Doesburg, “Dadaism,” trans. Michael White. In The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 288. First published in Merz, No.1, January 1923. 50 Rosalind Krauss, “1916a,” in Art Since 1900, ed. Hal Foster et al. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 135. 15

of language, derided the structural tools of economy, and celebrated the absurd and dysfunctional through the visual arts, poetry, text, performance and publication.51 Even the tools at hand were considered inadequate for bringing a new subject into art practice.

To counter this lack, Dada introduced a new and expanded range of strategies for art making including the readymade, chance, collage, assemblage and photomontage.52

Compounding this was Dada’s capacity to absorb other art movements including abstraction, which marks it as unique, in that it comprised a complex meld of agendas.

However, it also sat squarely in favour of individual intention.53

And so Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust towards unity.

Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognise no theory. -Tristan

Tzara 54

In combining individual and common purpose, Dada’s unique position enabled the inclusion of contemporary society, its products, values, and marketing systems as subjects for art.55 Dada, and particularly New York Dada, not only questioned the art object per se, but actively critiqued its commodity value, thereby raising issues of authenticity, audience response, and ultimately consumption or end use.

Dada’s chief tool with which it both rejected and claimed reality was abstraction,56 or non-representation. Dada however was not confined to the visual arts, it branched into poetry and performance:

51 Krauss, “1916a,” 136. 52 Krauss, “1916a,” 137. 53 Dawn Ades, introduction to “Cabaret Voltaire, Dada and Der Zeltweg,” in The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16. 54 Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” In The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 37. First published in Dada, issue 3, December 1918, Zurich. 55 Helen Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy Goes Shopping,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman with Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 173-189. Molesworth explores Dada’s critique of production and consumption through an examination of Duchamp and the publication New York Dada. 56 The term abstraction for this research defines the process by which visual artists render subject to its elemental state. 16

… losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to the Fine

Arts. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we

recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. – [Jean] Hans Arp 57

Unlike the visual arts, where the object provided concrete outcomes, Dada performance embraced the fluidity of the physical opportunities for an interactive relationship with the audience.58

The first Dada review opened in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire59 on 5 March,

1916 with the experimental sound poem, “Verse Ohne Worte” by the impresario behind

Dada, the German poet Hugo Ball60 (Fig.9).61 In both his poetry and performance Ball willingly adopted non-representational strategies for language and physical rendition.

As American art historian T.J. Demos argues, Ball’s strategy paralleled early twentieth century shifts within abstraction towards the inclusion of the everyday as an already- formed subject.62 Effectively the actual sounds of the cabaret hall are absorbed within the work, not as a representation, but as an already-formed component, similar to the inclusion of artefacts in collage.

The assimilation of the random sounds of the everyday within performance can be identified as a precursor to the compositions and art of the experimental composer John Cage.63 Cage’s adoption of time as the key structural element for music organised the random elements of sound in much the same way as Arp and Taeuber’s use of the grid regulated chance colour. This strategy, when combined with indeterminacy, allowed Cage to present the sounds of ‘silence’ (the chance noise of the

57 Hans Arp, “Dadaland,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Arp, On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912-1947, (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948), 39. 58 T.J. Demos, “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman with Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 7, 19. 59 Demos, “Zurich Dada,” 7, 27 note 2. 60 Hugo Ball (1886-1927): German poet, author and founder of Dada. 61 Ades, “Cabaret Voltaire,” 16. 62 Demos, “Zurich Dada,” 7. 63 John Cage, foreword to Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), xi. For further information see Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 17. 17

environment) as subject, thereby rejecting the limitations of established conventions separating sounds from music in favour of an expanded subject.64

1.4 Non-Composition: Arp and Taeuber

The French art historian Yve-Alain Bois asserts the readymade is an entity preformed awaiting contextual assignation.65 Following Bois’s logic I will argue that

Arp’s experiments with a non-representational strategy coexists with Duchamp’s Tu m’

(1918) (Fig.10) as first instances of readymade colour as subject. In particular Arp’s

Geometriche Collage (Geometric Collage) (1916) (Fig.11) and his collaboration with

Taueber: Duo Collage (1918) (Fig.12) allows commonly made coloured paper to exist in its own right, and not as a representative component. The paper continues to express the functional role of origin, whether a folder, book binding or ticket blank, thereby carrying a reflection of the culture of the day. Importantly, the material is not used to visually represent the original use, but for its colour, marking, pattern or textural contribution. By allowing origin to be evident, Arp and Taeuber’s experimental, non- representational strategies expanded subject to include the vernacular contemporary society. Arp and Taeuber’s adoption of non-representational strategies for collage has particular relevance to this research as it functioned as a precursor to Ellsworth Kelly’s non-compositional strategies and in particular his adoption of readymade colour as a subject for painting.

Arp’s rejection of representation, similar to that of first wave Dada performance, was not accompanied by a rejection of the world. Nor was the abandonment of representation a dismissal of subject or structure per se, but a rejection

64 John Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 39-40. 65 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 26. 18

of pictorial logic as the purveyor of meaning. 66 This was manifest in his use of a non- hierarchical structure, the grid, which enabled the transfer of a fully formed component with no representational intent. The grid effectively removes any figure-ground relationship and as such, the last vestige of representation, thereby liberating colour from form. 67

When examining Arp’s thoughts on imagination and freeform composition,

Ball raises the possibility of the already-made subject:

[Arp]… assumes … that the images of the imagination are already composites. The

artist who works from his freewheeling imagination is deluding himself about

originality. He is using a material that is already fully formed and so is undertaking

only to elaborate on it (1 March 1916).68

In accord with Ball’s logic, I argue that Arp recognised subject as readymade, thereby anticipating the extension of the readymade beyond the object and Kelly’s identification of an already-made subject.69 To illustrate: for Geometric Collage (1916) Arp selected the grid (the already-made) as a fully formed subject, which he concretised through an arrangement of fully formed units of coloured paper and card (the readymade).70 The coloured paper constitutes both the readymade and the grid (the already-made), in that the grid is a virtual readymade (an idea) requiring a re-formation from abstract to reality by the act of being made. In this context the readymade – the coloured paper – is a functional component as it makes the grid. As such, readymade colour, as an already- made subject, draws foundational support from the Dadaist use of readymade

66 Eric Robertson, Arp: Painter Poet Sculptor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 50. Robertson argues that material presence rather than image is the driver for Arp’s non-representational collage. 67 Demos, “Zurich Dada,” 24. 68 Demos, “Zurich Dada,” 24. Demos cites Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Dairy, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996), 53. 69 To reiterate the logic of Bois, an already-made subject differs from the readymade being preformed and ready for making, whilst the readymade is preformed awaiting contextual assignation. 70 Robertson, Arp, 50. 19

componentry, whether as subject or matter and this research acknowledges its role in expanding subject.

It is important at this stage to acknowledge the contribution of Taeuber in these developments as she and Arp shared non-representational objectives and collaborated to produce work. For example, Taeuber’s Vertical-Horizontal Composition

(1916) (Fig. 13) utilised a grid structure to present a composition of squares of colours and non-colours. In addition, Taeuber’s choice of needlepoint as her method of production questions the origin of the grid structure, arguably locating it within the applied arts as opposed to the fine arts.71 What separates Taeuber’s Vertical-Horizontal

Composition from Arp’s Geometric Collage is, the coloured needlepoint squares have been formed on the grid rather than transferred as readymades. As such, Taeuber’s grid is an already-made subject, which may be transferred (formed) through a subsequent process. The coloured wool squares being non-existent prior to the formation of the grid are, however, devoid of any readymade status, while the wool itself, from which they are formed, constitutes a readymade, as does its colour.

Taeuber’s contributions to the development of non-representational strategies are further evidenced in her collaborations with Arp on works such as

Untitled (Duo-Collage) (1918). For this piece, Arp and Taeuber introduced silver leaf into the range of materials forming the readymade squares and in so doing acknowledge commodity value through the addition of a precious metal to the base articles of trade.

Furthermore their introduction of chance procedures to determine placement, negates developed composition and effectively undermines any hierarchical value associated with commodity exchange or subjective choice.72

71 Robertson, Arp, 44. 72 Demos, “Zurich Dada,” 24. 20

Arp had previously experimented with chance procedures in Untitled

(Collage with Squares Arranged According to Chance) (1916-1917) (Fig. 14), dropping torn squares of black and white paper onto a grey paper ground to determine placement.

The purity of Arp’s chance procedures is subject to doubt as the compositional rigour implies adjustment.73 The need for augmentation however was resolved by Arp and

Taeuber’s adoption of the grid in Duo-Collage. This provided a structural solution to free-form composition that reinforced the democratic nature of chance procedures by reducing the determinism of subjective choice in favour of a random outcome.

The fashioning of coloured manufactured paper into squares of colour and affixing them into positions within a grid structure provided an active methodology for

Kelly’s non-composition, which is discussed in depth in the Kelly chapter. Furthermore, the relaxation of contextual constraints provided the framework to support the initial expansion of the readymade to include readymade colour. Subsequently this has come to include virtual readymade colour, including digital colour. My particular interest lies in the transfer of ephemeral colour, that is, the glow from Flavin’s Marfa installations, via the camera to the virtual world of digital colour. This is then developed as both a screen viewed entity and photographic print, thereby facilitating subject transfer for my painting research.

1.5 Duchamp –Validity of Variation

This section argues that Duchamp expanded the boundaries of the readymade beyond the restraints of the object by introducing brand identity as a means to convey the idea of the readymade. As such, Duchamp’s 1921 journal “New York

Dada No.1” introduced the seemingly oppositional ideas of brand identity and product

73 Robertson, Arp, 50. 21

variation as subjects for art.74 In doing so, Duchamp confronts issues of product identification, authenticity and marketing in the arts industry, which when applied to product variation provides a framework to assess market position or context.

Duchamp’s critical expansion of subject is highly relevant to this research into readymade colour as it presents the art market’s acceptance rather than product integrity as a basis for validity. As such, context – as endorsed by consumption – reinforces the validity of variation to readymade colour resulting from formation and re-formation processes, including the process of painting.

The general sentiment of New York Dada stands aligned with that of

European Dada, however, the physical and therefore psychological distance between

New York and Europe contributes to marked differences within the groups. This was compounded by the United States’ affluence as an industrial giant, which further cemented the general populace’s faith in industrialisation. Moreover, the United States was not disadvantaged by the First World War. As such, New York Dada’s engagement with the tools and products associated with the industrial society critiqued its cultural ambitions. Furthermore, Duchamp’s critique of authorship, which traditionally signals discerning choice as a prerequisite for the creation of art, extends to include the adjusted readymade and its transformed state as a point of connection between the object and its audience or end-users. As such, New York Dada’s primary differentiation lies in its direct engagement with the commodity and the market.

In 1917 Duchamp produced, and Henri-Pierre Roche75 published, the second issue of The Blindman76 (Fig. 15) with the express purpose of justifying

74 Marcel Duchamp, New York Dada, N° 1, April 1921, produced by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray (New York: New York Dada, 1921). Single issue 75 Henri-Pierre Roche (1879-1959): French novelist, journalist, art collector and dealer involved with the avant-garde and Dada. 76 The Blindman: first issue published in New York, April 1917; second issue published as P.B.T The Blind Man, May 1917. 22

Duchamp’s readymade, Fountain,77 which had been rejected that same year by New

York’s Society of Independent Artists.78 Fountain, a readymade artwork, had its origins as a Bedfordshire model porcelain urinal before its contextual reassignment as an artwork. Effectively the urinal was re-contextualised when Duchamp signed “R.Mutt

1917” on its side and declared the object as an artwork. 79 Duchamp explained his logic in The Blindman where he argued for Fountain’s legitimacy on the premise of choice:

“Whether Mr.Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. HE

CHOSE IT.”80 In 1961 Duchamp revisited the readymade and stressed that as an artwork the readymade resided away from an aesthetic value system and inhabited a position of indifference:

The point I very much want to establish is that the choice of these Readymades was

never dictated by an aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of

visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste.81

The American art historian, critic and curator Helen Molesworth in her essay, Rrose

Sélavy Goes Shopping, argues that Duchamp’s engagement with the trademark is anything but indifferent, as his signing of the readymade usurps the Bedfordshire trademark and subverts its original purpose by transforming it into an art object.82

The publication, New York Dada (1921) afforded Duchamp the opportunity to transform the readymade into a trademark and exploit its potential not only as a product, but as a marketing device. From cover to cover New York Dada (Fig.16) raised issues concerning product validity and appeal through both written argument and the cover design. The cover graphic by Duchamp comprised the all over linear, but upside

77 Dawn Ades, introduction to “The Blind Man and New York Dada,” in The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 146. 78 New York’ Society of Independent Artists an artist group modelled on the Parisian Salon des Independents. 79 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy,” 179. 80 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy,” 174. 81 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy,” 173. 82 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy,” 179. 23

down repetition of the magazine’s name – the brand – surrounding an image of a perfume bottle – the product, identifiable with a woman’s face in the middle – the trademark. By inverting, shrinking and repeating the title, New York Dada, Duchamp reverses the normal marketing aims of the brand, that is, clarity and easy recognition.

The product is a readymade artwork, but not an ordinary readymade, an adjusted readymade carrying a humanising trademark. The image is moreover in itself an adjusted readymade, being of the author, Duchamp, though altered from his normal guise to his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, photographed by Man Ray, who Molesworth identifies as the “ad man” and creator of the trademark, the Sélavy image, “which

Duchamp then affixed, trademark-style, onto products”.83 The product, in this case the readymade Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921) (Fig.17) was photographed and printed as the adjusted product, thereby simultaneously existing as a product in its own right and as an element of the magazine cover, also a product.

For Molesworth and indeed for the marketers of commodities, the trademark is the point of contact between the product and the consumer. Molesworth expands:

A trademark, however, is the slogan and / or logo identified with a commodity. The

typeface and script of “Coca-Cola” establish it as a trademark, and the

accompanying slogan, “It’s the real thing,” is also a trademark. This slogan is

particularly apt because it defines the very purpose of the trademark: to guarantee

that the commodity in question is authentic. In effect, the trademark is like a

signature on a work of art or a check; it signifies the maker’s authority to guarantee

the authenticity of the product.84

The ubiquitous everyman’s can of Coke however, blurs the commodity trademark equation. While manufactured to a secret recipe, Coca-Cola in the USA differs from

83 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy,” 181. 84 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy,” 178. 24

Coca-Cola produced in Mexico (Fig. 18 and 19). Yet both are branded as Coca-Cola, and now compete in the same American Market.85

The trademark, as a means of establishing a product’s authenticity despite variances, can be extended to readymade colour re-formed through painting. For example the red and white of the Coca-Cola can presents a readymade colour system that once re-formed through painting will exhibit slight differences while the subject remains intact. Ultimately it is the trace of the hand, the characteristic signature, or connection to the author that establishes authenticity of both subject and its execution.

The artwork, and its individual circumstance, thereby function as an effective trademark endorsing the commodity and increasing its potential for consumption. In the case of readymade colour re-formed through painting, it paradoxically strives for both commodity recognition and individual status. The question that arises is whether or not the product, readymade colour, can survive the variation and maintain its functional status? Arguably Coca-Cola proves that both the original and the variation can exist side by side and compete within a market without undermining the trademark. As such, transferred and transformed readymade colour can simultaneously exist with the original, drawing both context and referential status from the original while claiming a unique position and actively competing within the same market.

This has become apparent within my studio research with regard to digital colour where two systems exist. The RGB (Red, Green, Blue) model is a viewing system, which is device dependent causing colour to vary in response to each individual manufacturer’s screen specifications. Colour in the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow,

Key) system used for printing is subject to variation depending on the choice of printer

85 Bruce Kennedy, “Mexican Coca Cola is finding Sweet Success in the U.S.” Daily Finance, September 20, 2010, accessed 12 may 2012. www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/20/mexican-coca-cola-is-finding- sweet-success-in-the-u-s/. In the USA Coca-Cola is made from high-fructose corn syrup and in Mexico it is made from cane sugar. 25

and printing system. As such, the same colour, produced through digitalisation (RGB and CMYK) and re-formed through painting, will include variations inherent to both digital systems, the materials used, the shifting viewing conditions, and the trace of my hand. The subject however, has not altered. Moreover, the validity of the readymade colour’s subject status remains true, despite the variations inherent in re-formation, in that executionary differences are immaterial to subject. To demonstrate, the ephemeral coloured light of Flavin’s work constitutes the subject. This is the readymade consumable product. By digitally recording, printing and then painting it, I actively consume the product, while simultaneously creating a product for consumption, but at no time has the subject become something other than the ephemeral coloured light.

1.6 Schwitters – Elemental Matter: Biographical Marker Schwitters’ adoption of the used or second-hand product as a component in his assemblages and constructions expanded art’s subject matter by introducing a biographical context. Effectively, the artist presented an alternative to the purity of the newly manufactured commodity and in doing so introduced a commodity’s history, or biography as a qualifier. This has particular relevance to this research as a tool utilised by the German artist, Blinky Palermo to further expand colour by introducing the social commodity, that is, the recognisable colour systems of other artists as subject. This is discussed in the Palermo chapter. Schwitter’s expansion of subject has further importance to this research of readymade colour in that it acknowledges the relevance of context as a qualifier to the systematic record of an event. In doing so it can be related to the unique origin of a digitally photographed and reproduced colour.

Furthermore, Schwitters’ exploration of organic expansion (naturally evolving growth)

in Merzbau (1919-1938) (Fig. 20)86 changed the role of the viewer from passive to interactive by introducing multiple viewpoints and differing levels of engagement.

Schwitters’ journal Merz, published between 1923 and 1932,87 stands as a singular document identifying his evolution as a freeform Dadaist who absorbed the logic of Constructivism while rejecting its need for purity of form and function. 88 In

Merz No.6 his shift in sentiment becomes evident:

Style is an expression of the common will of many…style is mostly a compromise

of art and non-art, of play and purpose. Artistic construction knows of no purpose.

The work of art is composed only out of its means. The means of art are clear. Art

is exclusively balance[d] through the assignment of value to the parts.89

In equating art and its componentry to a value system Schwitters claims value for the art object and its materials beyond its representational capacity, effectively identifying matter as subject. As such, colour, and its commodity value, can simultaneously exist as both matter and subject. Moreover, Schwitters expands his system by placing equal value on the natural and the fabricated believing they are one and the same within a state of constant growth and renewal:

Everything creative, whether it be nature, the artist, or any individual whatsoever,

has to construct a medium in order to triumph over our unending road. We only

move forward and distance ourselves form [from] the past by the visible realisation

of our work. That is why, always creating anew, eternal beauty is just a myth. All

the trouble we give ourselves to fix the beauty of nature is and will remain fruitless,

for, as we are nature ourselves, we struggle to change the face of the world. Nature

86 Merzbau’s assimilation of all before it, including architecture, introduced an immersive and interactive experience to construction and assemblage. In breaking from the passive convention of observing work from a singular viewpoint, Merzbau pre-empts both installation art and interactive art. 87 Emily Hage, introduction to “Merz,” in The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 286. 88 Leah Dickerman, “Merz and Memory: On Kurt Schwitters,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman with Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 107. 89 Kurt Schwitters, “Watch Your Step!,” trans. Michael Kane, in The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 299. First published in Merz, No.6, October 1923. 27

itself does not want eternal beauty, for by the continual alteration of its forms it

gives birth incessantly to the new. – The modern world is the other half of nature,

that which derives from man.90

In accord with his logic, Schwitters rejected the pursuit of aesthetics as the motivation for art, taking an all-inclusive view of materials that holds the products of man as natural.

Schwitters’ constructions, while non-representational, differed from

Constructivism in that he rejected purity in favour of impurity, that is, the commodity after social consumption (for example the cigarette butt, rather than the cigarette). His assemblages, commencing in 1919, were formed from the social detritus that he collected, combined, and layered into impenetrable conglomerations,91 which culminated in his architecturally scaled assemblage, Merzbau in 1938.92 Merzbau was literally constructed from biographical markers that he transformed organically into a compendium or archive. Hans Richter describes Schwitters’ obsession for detail, highlighting the importance of each object’s biographical context:

He cut off a lock of my hair, and put it in my hole. A thick pencil, filched from

Mies van der Rohe’s drawing board, lay in his cavity. In others, there was a piece

of shoelace, a half-smoked cigarette, a nail paring, a piece of tie (Doesburg), a

broken pen. There was also some odd (and more than odd) things such as a dental

bridge with several teeth on it, and even a little bottle of urine bearing the donor’s

name. All these were placed in the separate holes reserved for the individual

entries.93

Schwitters’ chosen objects, as with readymade colour, are defined by context and origin, however, if that status is lost, they are returned to an inert state.

90 Kurt Schwitters, “Merz”, trans. Michelle Owoo, in The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 303. First published in Merz. Issue No. 8/9, April-July 1924. 91 Dickerman, “Merz and Memory,” 105. 92 Dickerman, “Merz and Memory,” 115. 93 Dickerman, “Merz and Memory,” 115-16. 28

Within the context of this thesis, Schwitters initiative is expanded by Blinky Palermo’s use of biographical context. Colour systems for Palermo, similar to material for

Schwitters, authenticate subject beyond material attributes. As such, in both artists’ practices, subject is expanded through the introduction of the individual author as a qualifier to the art experience.

1.7 Conclusion In a response to the horror of the First World War Dada rejected established cultural solutions and their subjects, preferring to explore alternatives within everyday life. Importantly, as a group of individuals, they introduced a diverse range of experimental approaches to art practice including a synthesis between abstraction and the readymade. In doing so they introduced an array of non-representational strategies.

Arp and Taeuber explored collage as a process to structure random information and introduce non-representational colour as a preformed material and subject, whereby the everyday was subject. To this end, colour sourced from the everyday, such as ticket stubs, was transferred. Importantly, despite transfer, it maintained its functionalist origins and referred to the society of the times without being representational. Schwitters expanded this further by introducing the used commodity as a preformed subject, which effectively linked biographical history with matter and re- enforced the importance of consumption as a qualifier of product integrity.

Duchamp’s readymade paved the way for a radical shift in the way colour was viewed, ostensibly allowing colour to exist as a subject in its own right. In a radical reassessment of visual arts practice, Duchamp introduced the pre-existing object as an alternative to representation. With this move Duchamp evaded the existing conventions of both representational and abstract painting and replaced the necessity for qualities associated with authorship, that is, inspiration and skill, with a new emphasis on the

artist’s choice. The readymade results from the artist’s selection of a pre-existing object and its contextual assignment away from its original circumstance into the rarefied condition of art.

Duchamp’s defence of the readymade results in a definitional expansion beyond the constraints of the object and allows variation through a series of multi- generational transfers. Moreover, his adjustment of the readymade, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, through photography introduces the multi-generational transfer and consumption as an adjunct to choice. As such, Duchamp expands the readymade away from the constraints of the initial object and introduces the photograph as an alternative readymade. The photograph in itself, moreover, presents a precursor to the readymade’s later expansion to include both the ephemeral event and the idea.

Free from style or manifesto, Dada’s experimental approach removed any continuing obligation to material convention, theoretical orthodoxy, or tactical consolidation, which was rejected in favour of an expanded definition of art’s subject.

Within this dismissal of perimeters, Dada absorbed individual and collective potential from all areas of the arts, whether high or low without imposing consensus, judgement or hierarchy. Dada’s experimental approach also allowed a shift away from representation and broadened subject through the inclusion of context realised as past

(manufactured commodity) and future (consumable or consumed commodity). This further expands to include the already-made subject and as such, colour, and looking forward, virtual colour. Compounding this evolution is Dada’s willingness to reject purity in favour of the impurity introduced via the post-consumption commodity.

Effectively this allows a used object’s context to be viewed as a subject, thereby absorbing the role of painting in that it is an act of consuming the readymade and producing already-made colour. As such, painting’s processes and individual

interpretation expand readymade colour to include the original manufactured colour and its history of re-formation, consumption and presentation.

7.Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages, 1913. Wood box 28.2 x 129.2 x 22.7 cm, with three threads 100 cm glued to three painted canvas strips 13.3 x 120 cm, each mounted on a glass panel 18.4 x 125.4 x 0.6 cm, three wood slats 6.2 x 109.2 x 0.2 cm, shaped along one edge to match the curves of the threads. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78990 (accessed February 9, 2013).

8. Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913). Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81631 (accessed February 9, 2013).

9. Hugo Ball performing sound poetry at the Cabret Voltaire, 1916. Photographer Jörg P. Anders. Dimensions unknown. Kunsthaus Zurich. From: “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile,” in The Dada Seminars. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005. Plate 1.

10. Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918. Oil on canvas, with bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt, 69.8 x 303 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. From: Yale University Art Gallery, http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/collection/popups/pc_modern/details19.html (accessed April 23, 2013).

11. Jean Arp, Geometriche Collage (Geometric Collage), 1916. Collage, card and coloured paper, 89 x 69 cm. Stiftung Hans und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V., Rolandseck. From: Arp: Painter Poet Sculptor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Plate 14.

12. Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber, Duo-Collage, 1918. Collage of paper, board, and silver leaf on board, 82 x 62 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. From: The Dada Seminars. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005. Plate 6.

13. Sophie Taeuber, Vertical-Horizontal Composition, 1916. Wool, 50 x 38.5 cm. Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno. From: Arp: Painter Poet Sculptor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Plate 12.

14. Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17. Torn and pasted paper, 48.6 x 34.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: Arp: Painter Poet Sculptor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Plate 13.

15. The Blindman No.1 (Front cover) April 10, 1917. From: The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Plate 34.

16. New York Dada (Front cover) April 1921. Single issue. From: The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Plate 38.

17. Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921. Perfume bottle with collage label inside oval violet cardboard box. Assisted readymade bottle: 15.2 cm tall. Box: 16.3 x 11.2 cm. Collection Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé. From: The Dada Seminars. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005. Plate 2.

18. American Coca Cola (Photo REUTERS). Bottles of Coca-Cola in a supermarket in Arizona, USA, October 20, 2009. From: www.ibtimes.com/secret-coca-cola-recipe-revealed-american-life-267189 (accessed February 10, 2013).

19. Mexican Coca-Cola (Photo Bruce Kennedy). From: www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/20/mexican- coca-cola-is-finding-sweet-success-in-the-u-s/ (accessed February 10, 2013).

20. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1919-1938. (Partial view: Large Merzgruppe) (Merz structure, Detail of the Larger Group), 1933. Destroyed in 1943. © Photographer: Wilhelm Redemann. From: Hannover: Sprengel Museum, www.sprengel- museum.com/painting_and_sculpture/spaces/index.htm?bild_id=71919653&PHPSESSID=d59a586ada25 469a2980a26661ef35c5 (accessed April 26, 2013).

Chapter 2

Ellsworth Kelly – Colour and the Readymade

2.1 Introduction

This chapter describes the development of American artist Ellsworth

Kelly’s oeuvre as the provenance of my practice, where digital colour is the subject.

This research acknowledges the importance of Kelly’s combined non-compositional strategies: the transfer (re-formation of an already-made subject), chance, the grid, and the monochrome-panel. I will also discuss the role of Kelly’s strategies to transform colour as an already-made subject. Of particular interest to this research is the monochrome panel. 94 Kelly developed this strategy through multi-generational transfers, whereby readymade colour – as an already-made subject – is transferred from one art work to another and is transformed through the process of painting. During the transfer, variation from the original readymade source is inevitable as differences of material and scale enter the equation, as does choice.95 I argue that despite this variation, the innate qualities of the readymade source remain integral and that elements of subjectivity and the autobiographical may be included without undermining the origin of the readymade.

I claim that Kelly’s variations of colour during its transfer is deliberate. As a painter, his adjustments affirm the entirety of the referent as subject, rather than the individual panels of colour. As such, it is the experience, rather than the base information that is transferred.

During the course of this chapter, the primary investigation commences with an examination of Kelly’s foundational experiences in East Coast America (1945-

1948) before focusing on his Parisian years (1949-1954). The principal theorists to be

94 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 26-27. 95 Bois, “The Summons,” 38 n. 8. 39

examined include the French art historian Yve-Alain Bois, the American art historian

Brandon Joseph, the German-American art historian and theorist Benjamin Buchloh, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York curator, Ann Temkin.

A key to Kelly’s development is his exploration of subject matter free of the limitations of representation and his consequent identification of all subjects as “already made”.96 This term is clarified by Bois as distinct from the Duchampian readymade, in that Kelly’s motif or subject is already-made, but needs to be formed through a subsequent process, such as painting, defined as ‘transfer’, while Duchamp’s readymade is “simply made”, existing preformed ready for contextual re-assignment. 97 Transfer occurs when a readymade subject, such as colour, undergoes a process to create an artwork.98 A simple example drawn from my practice is the transfer of the yellow of a

Penske truck to the flat surface of a canvas by painting the colour (Fig. 21 and 22). 99

Adding further depth to this process is Kelly’s identification of his own artworks as subjects, whereby, through transfer, one artwork can become the subject of another, without engaging pictorial representation.100

Kelly’s uniqueness stems from his ability to discerningly select which influences to accept, and which to reject. In my own practice I favour Kelly’s already- made as a means to expand subject. Both Kelly’s and my practice operate on a platform of variation contained by self-set parameters. My practice utilises digital information and light sources as the readymade, and poses a number of different questions. However,

96 John Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1971), 28. 97 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 14. 98 For the purpose of this research, following Bois’s logic, the transfer (noun) is the referent subject for transfer (verb). A transfer (v.) occurs when a readymade subject, such as colour, undergoes a process to create an artwork. 99 Penske Corporation is an American transport company easily identified through the use of yellow as a branding device and the Penske name as a trademark. 100 Nathalie Brunet, “Chronology, 1943-1954,” trans. Thomas Repensek, in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954, by Yve-Alain Bois, Jack Cowart and Alfred Pacquement, ed. Mary Yakush (Munich: Prestel), 187. 40

variation in transfer remains. As such, I have found in both theory and practice that readymade colour when accepted as an already-made subject offers vast possibilities.

2.2 Post-War America 1945-1949

The primary objective of this examination of Kelly’s post-war American period is to identify it as the origin of Kelly’s empirical subject, his need to transform, and his aversion to convention, all of which are fundamental to his development of the already-made. The Eurocentric culture prevalent within post-war American modernist circles ensured Europe’s promotion and acknowledged orthodoxy by American institutions. However, the American position was factionalised and fractious. On the one hand, the French school, including the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso,101 continued to work with recognisable subject matter, while figures such as the Russian artist Wassily

Kandinsky espoused a new freedom to be found in the rejection of nature and recognisable form.102 New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under the directorship of Alfred Barr103 advocated the supremacy of the modernist French

School.104 The Boston Institute of Modern Art (BIMA) directed by James Sachs Plaut105 supported Northern European Figurative Expressionism. Each party put forward strong arguments supported by excellent work. For a burgeoning student such as Kelly, this atmosphere of conflict was the perfect environment for selecting and rejecting aspects of each movement. Indeed it was within this milieu that Picasso, Max Beckman, and

101 Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer; cofounder of Cubism and dominant influence on 20th century European art. 102 Alfred H. Barr, What is Modern Painting? (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 27. 103 Alfred H. Barr was the Director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art 1929 -1943; Director of Collections 1943-1968. 104 Clare Bell, “At Play with Vision,” in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, ed. Diane Waldman (New York: Guggenheim Publications, 1996), 69. 105 James Sachs Plaut (1912-1996): Director of the Institute of Modern Art, Boston (1939-1956). (Named The Institute of Contemporary Art from 1948.) 41

Herbert Read combined as influences towards Kelly’s development of a unique path away from the conventions of abstraction.

During this period, European artists continued their pre-war established dominance of the American museums to such an extent that emergent local schools, including the Abstract Expressionists, were denied recognition until the fifties.106 The

School of Paris and its chief progenitor, Picasso, fully endorsed by Barr with MoMA retrospectives on either side of the Second World War, received unprecedented exposure. As such, Picasso’s presence in museums, commercial galleries, and as the subject of multiple publications left none immune to his prolific output, including Kelly, who visited MoMA to view his work.107

The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA) where Kelly studied from 1946 to 1947, was embroiled in the critical debate pitting the French

Modernist School against Figurative Expressionism.108 Kelly’s recollections of this time confirm the school’s leanings under expatriate German Expressionist painter Karl

Zerbe:109

In the U.S. I was very involved in the school I was going to, trying to be a painter,

and that probably didn’t leave me enough time to think in an autonomous way. My

teachers were pushing us towards German Expressionism.110

Kelly’s exposure to Expressionism in Boston, however, was atypical, as it introduced a dialogue between colour and fragmented form and an experimental relationship with subject, as well as the traditional, and prevalent, physical rendering of form in paint.111

106 Robert Motherwell, in Robert Motherwell & The New York School: Storming The Citadel, DVD, directed by Catherine Tatge (West Long Branch NJ: Kulture, 2009). 107Brunet, “Chronology,” 178. 108 Bell, “At Play with Vision,” 68. 109 Karl Zerbe (1903-1972): German born American expressionist painter and teacher. Head of the Department of painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1937-1955). 110 Ann Hindry, “Conversation with Ellsworth Kelly,” in Art Studio, issue 24, Printemps, 1992, ed. Ann Hindry (Paris: Art Studio, 1992), 22. 111 Bell, “At Play with Vision,” 69. 42

Zerbe112 actively participated in the debate supporting the Figurative

Expressionist idiom and defended the rights of the individual against institutional control.113 Zerbe brought the debate into the Boston SMFA through the forum of a visiting lecture program that included the German Expressionist Max Beckman114 and the British art critic and poet Herbert Read.115 Arguably, Zerbe’s selection of Beckman and Read went beyond their distinguished personas and was fuelled by their advocacy of individual creative freedom.

Beckman argued for transformation of subject to achieve a true abstraction.116 Read argued for the abandonment of any institutional control, the extended possibility for painting through an engagement with architecture and an expanded role for the avant-garde as progenitors of unique and innovative techniques and concepts, whereby serving the collective society need not denote an absence of the individual.117 An examination of Kelly’s oeuvre shows these influences reflected in his transformation of subject, the rejection of institutional control, expanded possibilities for painting through architecture, and an expanded role for the avant-garde. As such, there is clear evidence to endorse a pre-Parisian influence counter to Kelly’s own claims.118

Supporting this argument is Kelly’s Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris,

(1949) (Fig. 23) in that it rejects figure/ground composition by re-forming its already- made subject as a painting/object devoid of spatial illusion. In addition, it expands

112 Bell, “At Play with Vision,” 68. As noted by Bell, Zerbe, David Aronson, Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, H.W. Janson, Karl Knaths and Lawrence Kupferman met in Boston on March 25, 1948 to call for the end of institutional meddling in the affairs of artists. 113 Bell, “At Play with Vision,” 68. 114 Max Beckman (1884-1950): German Expressionist painter. 115 Brunet, “Chronology,” 178. 116 Brunet, “Chronology,” 178. 117 Brandon W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and The Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 2003), 96. 118 Ellsworth Kelly, “Notes from 1969,” in Ellsworth Kelly: Paintings and Sculptures 1963-1979, by Barbara Rose (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1979), 34. Kelly states: “I owe nothing to American art except [John James] Audubon, the Pre Columbian and [Alexander] Calder.” 43

painting’s role by transforming the preformed subject, rather than replicating it as an object. Moreover, the status of Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris as a painting/object asserts its physical independence and rejects the traditional subservient role of painting to architecture as decoration.

Read’s talk at SMFA focused on the artist’s role in society through the introduction of two radical subjects, that is, a Marxist critique of easel painting and the proposition for an integrated relationship between painting and architecture.119 It is important to note that this lecture would not have been a conventional presentation of

Marxism, as Read rejected both Marxism and Socialism in favour of anarchy. Indeed, his adoption of anarchism was due to its unique position as the only non-structural social movement and its ability, therefore, to allow a role for the avant-garde at the forefront of creativity.120 Read’s radical position rejected established convention and institutional control in favour of the expansion of creative options for the individual as a continuance of avant-garde practice.121

Read’s rejection of institutional structure not only placed the emphasis on the path of individual creativity, but emphasised the role of the individual as the developer of artistic practice.122 According to Read, the avant-garde artist no longer needed to follow the dictates of the structured state or institutions that linked creativity to commodity and service, nor did they need to serve the bourgeois classes by creating products for consumption. 123 Following this logic Read concludes, the avant-garde artist, once freed from the obligation to commodify, maintains social relevance through

119 Joseph, Random Order, 96. 120 Thistlewood, “Herbert Read,” 3-4. 121 In this thesis the term avant-garde, a French word meaning vanguard refers to innovative developments in Modernist visual arts leading to new concepts, genres and techniques. 122 Thistlewood, “Herbert Read,” 3-4. 123 Thistlewood, “Herbert Read,” 3-4. 44

the expansion of possibilities within art’s ever-expanding field of engagement.124 For

Read this involves the inclusion of architecture, which in turn creates possibilities for a public voice.125

Arguably Read’s lecture profoundly influenced Kelly’s thinking by providing a framework that allowed logic and intuition to function in parallel, without conforming to convention or any of the abounding new manifestos. Evidenced by his later architecturally responsive and functionalist work, it can be assumed that during his post-war sojourn in Paris, Kelly was able to apply Read’s theories to encounters of the mind, absorbing and rejecting to suit his own needs.126 Furthermore, Kelly’s rejection of convention in favour of an individual approach to painting mirrors Read’s blueprint for avant-garde activity founded on anarchist and anti-institutional lines.127

Beckman’s talk at the SMFA took the form of a Letter To A Young Artist, which Kelly recalls in great detail:

Learn the forms of nature by heart so that you can use them like the musical notes

of a composition….The impression nature makes upon you must always become

an expression of your own joy or grief, and consequently in your formation of it, it

must contain that transformation which only then makes art a real abstraction.128

Beckman’s talk effectively aligned Barr’s (MoMA) and Plaut’s (BIMA) critical positions by returning to the origin of subject in the natural world, whilst instilling the need to transform, if art was to achieve validity. Beckman highlighted the importance of a connection with nature as a source of inspiration and structural innovation, and aligned the transformation of subject matter with the unquantifiable qualities of human

124 Thistlewood, “Herbert Read,” 3-4. 125 Joseph, Random Order, 96. 126 Brunet, “Chronology,” 178. 127 Thistlewood, “Herbert Read,” 3-4. 128 Brunet, “Chronology,” 178. 45

emotion. In doing so he separated the transformation process from systematic prescription and introduced an expanded subjectivity via the autobiographical.

The fractious dialogue positioned on both sides of the modernist canon formed a critical developmental platform for Kelly. Effectively it enabled him to select, reject, and combine aspects of continuing practice in an engagement with painting that was sceptical of convention, but requisite of transforming subject to achieve real abstraction. This foundational position enabled Kelly to assess the ongoing implications of Picasso’s experimental platform of stylistic convention and its intrinsic relationship with his personal chronological development. It also provided him with the basis for a developing strategy, which would support an approach to painting beyond the confines of easel painting, and strive for an extended dialogue with society via architecture.

Moreover, it permitted an unconventional approach to subject, which incorporated aspects of representation, though not illusion. As such, Kelly’s practice absorbed the intrinsic qualities of anarchism, devoid of any institutional loyalty and melded them with a pragmatic engagement with his everyday world.

Both Read and Beckman’s ideas concerning the needs and possibilities of art are of continuing relevance to my studio practice. Beckman’s emphasis on individual interpretation and therefore transformation of subject, is in accord with my decision to combine natural phenomena and readymade colour to form an expanded subject for painting. Read’s ideas are explored through my transformation of the architectural space of my studio to create a contained ephemeral event that is both an artwork and subject.

Moreover, Read’s philosophies, particularly his espousal of the art and architecture hybrid, unite with Beckman’s to form an extended platform for painting within the auspices of an experimental practice.

2.3 Post-War Paris 1949-1954

In this section an examination of post-war Paris highlights the paradoxical conditions of exhibiting societies. Within the abstract painting societies, this period featured a culture debating the dominant extremities within the established orthodoxies.

This environment provided Kelly with the opportunity to engage with factional leaders and independent minds while simultaneously providing an arena to experiment with his developing non-compositional strategies. It also enabled him to select and meld aspects of both non-objective and objective intent. As an emerging artist Kelly allowed his work to be misread as belonging to several schools of abstraction, thereby avoiding inclusion in any one faction.

Although formally enrolled at the Ecôle des Beaux-Arts, Paris from 1949 to

1954, Kelly pursued a largely independent form of study outside the restrictive structures of a formal art education.129 Post-war Paris was a city of contradiction; simultaneously the hub of French modernism, while its museums were home to the historically significant European masterpieces of the previous millennia. Yet for many artists post-war Paris was a culture of diminished opportunity, where contemporary geometric abstract painting epitomised a culture of scepticism, restriction, and convention, as Buchloh states:

… postwar culture is primarily defined by the rapidly disappearing options of

artistic production, options such as subjective agency; individual expression; and

psychic differentiation in gesture, chromatic definition, and structural

organization.130

The crux of the post-war Parisian cultural dilemma can be blamed on the established tradition of approval or inclusion based on a “refusal model”. In this system

129 Brunet, “Chronology,” 179. 130 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 7. 47

one party confirms the orthodox convention while the oppositional party rejects the limitation, in much the same manner of the Westminster Parliamentary system.131 The workings of the refusal mode are concisely outlined by the American art historian John

Rajchman:132

The Parisian avant-garde had worked on a “refusal model,” where it fell to the

Academy to determine the criteria of identification of a painting and to the avant-

garde to refuse them. The great battle of personalities, styles, and ideologies of the

institution of refusal carried with it a conception of the pictorial event as a radical

or revolutionary break with tradition, eventually inducing the “fantasy of the tabula

rasa.”133

The defect in the system became evident in Paris when the two party oppositional system became a single body governing both convention and variation. The result was a conglomeration, whereby the avant-garde and the Salon merged, that is, a single arbiter epitomised by the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. The falsity of the ‘blank slate’ is further endorsed by the prevalent misconception that repetitions of the fundamental conventions of abstraction were equivalent to the ground breaking 1912 -1917 period, exemplified by Piet Mondrian’s transition from figuration to abstraction and Theo van

Doesburg’s 1917 publication of De Stijl.134 The resultant culture was one of muddied intention whereby an organisation that professed the radical nature of avant-garde practice, also championed what had become the orthodoxies of convention, albeit conventions of the recently established.

131 John Rajchman, “The Two Abandonments,” forward to Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, by Thierry de Duve, trans. Dana Polan with de Duve (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1991), x. 132 John Rajchman: art historian currently Adjunct Professor Theory and Art Criticism, 20th century Art and Philosophy, Columbia University. 133 Rajchman, “The Two Abandonments,” x. 134 Michel Seuphor, A Dictionary of Abstract Painting, trans. Lionel Izod, John Montague and Francis Scarfe, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen and Co Ltd, 1960), 37. 48

The three main exhibiting societies comprised Cercle et Carré (established in 1929), Abstraction Création (established in 1931), and the Salon des Réalités

Nouvelles (first exhibition in 1939, closed for the duration of the war – reopened in

1946). Cercle et Carré was established by the Belgian artist and writer Michel

Seuphor135 and the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia.136 Abstraction Création was established by the Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo137 and the French artist Auguste

Herbin.138 Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, was a continuation of the legacy of the earlier societies.139

Seuphor, and his group Cercle et Carré, were arguably the inheritors of

Mondrian’s neo-plasticism. Abstraction Création were the inheritors of van Doesburg’s legacy for composition based on a rigorous and detached application of mathematics and logic. Known as Art Concrete, the movement was expounded in the 1930 pamphlet:

Art Concret (Art Concret).140 This is the inaugural appearance of the term ‘concrete art’ used instead of the previously undisputed term ‘abstract art’.141 To acknowledge Art

Concrete’s hard line position its manifesto’s translation is cited in full:

We state:

1. Art is universal.

2. The work of art should be fully conceived and spiritually formed before it is

produced. It should not contain any natural form, sensuality or sentimentality. We

wish to exclude lyricism, dramaticism, symbolism and so forth.

135 Michel Seuphor, pseudonym of Fernand Berckelaers (1901-1999): Belgian artist and writer who moved in Dutch, Belgian and French avant-garde circles. Author of multiple books on abstract painting. 136 Joaquin Torres Garcia (1874-1949): Uruguayan plastic artist and founder of Constructive Universalism. 137 Georges Vantongaloo (1986-1965): Belgian abstract painter and sculptor. Founding member of De Stijl. 138 Auguste Herbin (1882-1960): French abstract painter. 139 Seuphor, “Dictionary,” 49. 140 Seuphor, “Dictionary,” 49. 141 Seuphor, “Dictionary,” 49. 49

3. The painting should be constructed completely with pure plastic elements, that is

to say, with planes and colours. A pictorial element has no other meaning than

what it represents; consequently the painting possesses no other meaning than what

it is by itself.

4. The construction of a painting and its elements should be simple and direct in its

visualization.

5. The technique should be mechanical, that is to say, precise rather than

impressionistic.

6. Absolute clarity should be sought.142

In 1939 the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles closed for the duration of the

Second World War. It reopened in 1946 to resume its pursuit of the foundational premises of abstraction143 as exemplified by the 1946 tribute exhibition, which included

Van Doesburg and Mondrian.144 The complexity of the dialogues within the society’s factions was underwritten by dispute, as identified by French artist Auguste Herbin in his letter dated February 3, 1949 to Hilla von Rebay,145 the founding director of the

Museum of Non-objective Painting, (now the Guggenheim), New York.

Here in Paris we continually discuss the precise meaning of the words ‘abstract art’

– ‘non-figurative art’ – ‘non-objective art’ and others as well. Our opponents take

various different points of view; it will never end!146

142 Gladys Fabre, Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, ed. Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hötte (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 187. Fabre reproduces the Art Concret manifesto ‘The Basis of Concrete Painting’, Art Concrete, April 1930, 1. Signatories to the manifesto were Otto Carslund, Theo van Doesburg, Jean Hélion, Léon Tutunjian, and Marcel Wantz. 143 Seuphor, “Dictionary,” 50. 144 Realities Nouvelles,“60 ans d’abstraction – Les grand dates (60 years of abstraction – The important dates),” accessed February 23, 2013. http://www.realitesnouvelles.org/pdf/60-ans-d-abstraction-les-grdes- dates Artists honoured in the 1946 memorial exhibition included French artist Robert Delauney (1885- 1941), Theo Van Doesburg, French artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1878-1918), Swedish artist and film maker Viking Eggling (1880-1925), German artist Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), Kandinsky, Russsian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Matevitcti, Mondrian, Russian-French artist Wladimir Baranoff- Rossiné (1888-1944), Sophie Taeuber, and French artist Georges Valmier (1885-1937). 145 Hilla Von Rebay (1890-1967): German American painter. Founding Director of the Museum of Non- objective Painting, (now the Guggenheim), New York. 146 Bell, “At play with Vision,” 74. Herbin originally quoted in Joan M. Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (New York: Braziller, 1983), 261. 50

Despite these conflicts, the Salon des Réalitiés Nouvelles was united by a common desire to maintain figure/ground composition as the continuing standard for easel painting.147 This became the dominant and unifying convention for the Salon in that figure/ground composition was the last vestige of representation and therefore epitomised context and meaning within abstraction.

Kelly’s decision to reject figure/ground composition along with any form of pictorial illusion automatically alienated him from the dominant path for abstraction in post-war Paris. A further differentiator from abstraction of the period was Kelly’s ability to reject the fundamental premise of the various groups, while adopting their strengths. For example, he adopted the strengths of geometric painting such as pure plastic elements, clarity, perceived impersonality, preformed internal logic (on occasion), and the ability to provide an extended context. Kelly however, rejected abstract painting’s dominant conventions including figure/ground structure and pursuit of an ideal. In effect, Kelly allowed his strategies to be flexible enough to pick and choose aspects from differing established schools without feeling a need to comply with the full suite of directives. This in turn could be shaped by the overlay of other seemingly discordant strategies and as Bois has pointed out, there is considerable danger in viewing the physical qualities of Kelly’s works or strategies in isolation.

For what matters is not so much the existence of a certain motif, nor even which

particular motif it might be, but rather A) what kind of motif it is; B) how it is used;

and, finally, C) how this referential strategy relates to the other modes Kelly used

at the time. Failing this one remains ignorant of the specificity of his work. 148

147 Bell, “At play with Vision,” 75. 148 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 13. 51

To illustrate: in accord with the Art Concret manifesto, Kelly’s painting transfers were constructed with ‘pure plastic elements’ comprising planes and colours.149 However,

Kelly’s transfers were presented as a single dominant plane that negates any spatial change from his combination of two planes. Thus augmented, the resultant work may be construed as a second-generation transfer. Kelly’s Window, Museum of Modern Art,

Paris, for example, presents a two-dimensional flatness despite being comprised of multiple panels. For this work, Kelly selected the transfer based on simplicity, predominant frontality and suitability for re-formation through painting.150 This development allowed Kelly to engage with structure observed in architecture, while rejecting the conventional compositional ploys of painting and particularly those of abstract painting.

Kelly however, gave his paintings the outward appearance of this convention by not revealing his strategies for non-composition or their sources within the everyday world.151 Kelly was thus able to successfully mask his dissenting practice beneath a veil of orthodox purity until the 1950 rejection of his painting, White Relief

(1950) (Fig. 24) by the Salon on the grounds that it was not art.152 Other work however, was exhibited with Kelly identified as a geometric abstractionist firmly within the tradition of Neo-plasticism. In 1951 for example, Kelly showed thirty works in a solo exhibition at Galerie Arnaud. The exhibition received a range of critical comments concerning the colour and structure of his paintings, with each placing him within geometric abstraction with uncompromising zeal:

149 Fabre, Van Doesburg, 187. 150 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 14. 151 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 12-13. 152 Brunet, “Chronology,” 187. 52

The paintings and reliefs of Kelly…have the wherewithal to seduce the admirers of

Mondrian and Vantongerloo. (The “Flâneur des Deux Rives” in the Nouvelles

Litéraires, 3 May)153

American, Kelly…returns to the old Russian Suprematist strategy of white on

white…In him, the spirit of investigation that formerly reigned with such

ruthlessness at the Bauhaus is reborn… (The Arts critic, 4 May) 154

[The paintings]…of Kelly are the work of a pure technician whose concern in fact

seems to be painting/objects. (Combat, 8 May) 155

As such, Kelly’s first one-man exhibition identified him as a hard line practitioner of the principles of geometric abstraction. His identification as a “pure technician” focused on painting and the object, linked him with an internal logic of organisation and historical convention, while links to design, via the Bauhaus, construction, and the

Suprematists connected him to a non-objective logic.

The attendant confusion in reading Kelly’s paintings was in fact a direct result of his failure to acknowledge his sources and procedures. This was further muddied by his decision to not reveal the amalgamation of conflicting strategies of chance and intervention at play in his work, which created a false link to the dominant conventions of abstract painting prevalent in post-war Paris.156 This confusion continued until the nineties when Bois revised the previous waves of critical review by

E.C. Goosens, John Coplans, and others who had located Kelly’s sources, strategies, and context as external to abstraction.

153 Brunet, “Chronology,” 189. 154 Brunet, “Chronology,” 189. 155 Brunet, “Chronology,” 189. 156 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 12-13. 53

Kelly’s ability to selectively engage with the restrictive post-war culture of

Paris enabled him to succinctly identify his objectives for a painting strategy outside the conventions of post-war painting. He adopted the appearance of abstraction and yet refused to be content with pursuing his personal subjective interpretation of the ideal.

Kelly instead, chose to pursue his subjectivism through a preformed subject located within the world.

2.4 Cage in Paris Kelly’s initial desire for an expanded subject was encouraged by his chance meeting with John Cage. The level of direct influence Cage exerted upon Kelly is open to conjecture, but his philosophical stance was in accord with Kelly’s desire to pursue an expanded possibility for subject without the confines of representation. The meeting also proved fortuitous in that it paved the way for Kelly to introduce the transfer as a non-compositional strategy and thereby circumvent the pursuit of the compositional ideal, while enabling a direct engagement with his surrounding world.

In June of 1949, Cage and the American dancer and choreographer Merce

Cunningham157 were in Paris to perform Effusions avant l’heure, and Amores at the

Vieux-Colombier Theatre. Their stay at the Hotel de Bourgogne led to a meeting with

Kelly and a viewing of his Parisian work including Toilette (1949) (Fig. 25) described by Bois as “an anthropomorphic figure whose head consists of a stylized representation of a Turkish or “squat” toilet, immediately recognizable by anyone familiar with

Parisian cafés”.158 Kelly in turn visited Cage in his hotel room and was fascinated by his collection of Japanese stencils gathered from the second hand bookshops along the

157 Merce Cunningham (1919-2009): American dancer, and choreographer who introduced chance operations into contemporary dance, and collaborated with a range of artistic luminaries including his partner John Cage, experimental musicians, and artists including Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. 158 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 15. 54

Seine.159 Kelly accompanied Cage on one of his expeditions and made his own stencil purchase. As a transferred already-made this stencil provides the subject for White

Relief (1950), which he later dedicated to Cage.160

As a composer and a teacher, Cage actively encouraged expanded subject and structure as evidenced by his “Lecture on Nothing” delivered at the Artist Club in

New York later that year. In this lecture Cage posits that subjects drawn from the everyday can be reinvigorated through reappraisal.161

I begin to hear the old sounds – the ones I had thought worn out, worn out by

intellectualization – I begin to hear the old sounds as though they are not worn out.

Obviously, they are not worn out. They are just as audible as the new sounds.

Thinking had worn them out. And if one stops thinking about them, suddenly they

are fresh and new. 162

Despite Cage actively encouraging an indeterminate approach to subject and composition free from conventions, Bois conjectures Cage’s dialogue with Kelly was non-interventionist, determining that Cage would be encouraging rather than didactic:

In fact, given Cage’s particular brand of open-mindedness (which is also an

openness to the world at large), there is every reason to think that his

encouragement would have consisted less in launching Kelly on the path of the

ready-made than in making the idea of the already made (the “anything goes” side

of his work) more acceptable to him.163

159 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 33 note 29. 160 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 20. 161 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 126. 162 Ann Temkin, “Color Shift” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, by Ann Temkin, ed. Emily Hall, Anne Doran, Nell McClister and Stephen Robert Frankel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 19. The form of the text is as reproduced in “Color Shift” and differs from the structure as reproduced in Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 117. 163 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 15. 55

Whatever the form of the dialogue between Kelly and Cage there is no doubt that

Cage’s timely support encouraged Kelly to be sceptical of convention and open to including an expanded range of subjects into his developing painting practice. 164

The watershed event in Kelly’s career took place in Paris when a serendipitous moment, fuelled by Read’s advocacy for anarchism and Cage’s push for an extended subject matter, provided Kelly with the impetus to embrace the possibility of an already formed subject for painting:

In October of 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris I noticed the large

windows between the paintings interested me more than the art exhibited. I made a

drawing of the window and later in my studio I made what I considered my first

object, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris. From then on, painting as I had

known it was finished for me.165

The realisation of an already-made subject allowed Kelly to question the basis of composition itself, as well as the subjective ideal founded on the historical legacies of abstract painting.166

Cage’s influence is effectively evidenced by Kelly’s adoption of an expanded subject. The inclusion of the everyday as subject, which allowed Kelly to develop the already-made is also attributable to Cage. As is his endorsement of Kelly’s burgeoning way of thinking, which was navigating him beyond the limitations and restrictions of previous practice. Kelly however, is just one of many influenced by Cage, whose role is imperative to the evolution of readymade colour.

164 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 15. Bois notes that Kelly does not remember discussing Marcel Duchamp with Cage (although Cage was aware of Duchamp’s presence since the 1930’s). 165 Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, 28-29. Coplans’ quotes Kelly’s thoughts on increasing awareness of the already-made subject in reference to Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949. 166 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 16. Bois links the problems of subjectivity and composition together in a paradox when he proposes that Kelly’s solution lay in his invention of ways of avoiding invention. 56

2.5 Collage and Indeterminacy

While in France Kelly developed collage to a finely tuned procedure that strongly influenced his pursuit of non-composition. Kelly’s inclusion of collage as a means for transfer stems from a range of influences, both historical and empirical, including Kelly’s interactions with artists and the study of influential work. The collage in concert with the non-compositional strategies of the transfer, the grid, chance, and the monochrome panel, enabled Kelly to introduce readymade colour as subject.167

Furthermore, the collage formed by the first-generation transfer of readymade colour, formed the subject for the second-generation transfer via painting, thereby introducing the readymade colour variation.

In early 1949, Kelly adopted collage as a means to flatten pictorial illusion with Head with a Beard (1949) (Fig. 26) an early example.168 In July of that same year

Kelly and the American artist Ralph Coburn169visited the home of Alice B. Toklas170 to view the art collection of Gertrude Stein.171 It was here that Kelly first encountered

Picasso’s collage, Etudiant à la Pipe (1913-1914) (Fig. 27) formed from brown paper.172

A visit to Jean Arp’s studio in Meudon in 1950 gave Kelly his most important exposure to collage. He was introduced to the experimental approach Arp and

Taeuber had taken with collage, chance and the grid. The particular relevance these aspects have to Kelly’s practice lies in their ability to circumvent the orthodoxies that had evolved from pictorial representation as the foundation for meaning.

167 Bois, “The Summons,” 38. 168 Brunet, “Chronology,” 181. 169 Ralph Coburn (1923-): American artist, graphic designer and life long friend with Kelly. Travelled with Kelly to Brittany in 1949 and to Sanary in 1950, and 1951. 170 Alice B.Toklas (1877-1967): American partner of Gertrude Stein and co-host of the salon in Paris that attracted expatriate Americans and avant-garde artists including Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. 171 Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): Experimental novelist, playwright and poet; lived Paris from 1903 until her death in 1946; compiled with brother Leo Stein an important collection of modern art. 172 Brunet, “Chronolgy,” 182. 57

Early in his career Arp experimented with chance composition making

Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916-17), from the random dropping of torn paper onto a paper support. The procedure appears to have included some assistance to achieve the desired outcome.173 Even so, the work broke free from any direct connection to pictorial composition, being simultaneously structured and unstructured, designed and random. The relationship between random possibilities and the prescription of design has been a constant point of conjecture, as French theorist,

Georges Bataille posits: 174

We can’t suppress the fact that at one point everything and every law was decided

according to the whims of chance – or luck – without reason entering the picture,

except when the calculation of probabilities allowed it to.175

To counter the universality of Bataille’s possibilities for chance, George Brecht, an

American Fluxus artist, former student of Cage, and practitioner of chance procedures, explored the idea of restriction as a governing law to manage the endless possibilities.

The introduction of this strategy allowed random outcomes to be identified and separated from automatic procedures and the unconscious, thereby realigning chance procedures to a finite state. Brecht however, counters his own argument by identifying an anomaly inherent in painting, whereby the subconscious inserts itself through the physical act:

Chance images are characterized by a lack of conscious design… Chance is

sometimes used in painting in such a way that the images are neither clearly

173 Robertson, Arp, 46. 174 Georges Bataille (1897-1962): French intellectual, art historian, philosophical theorist, and sociologist initially attracted to Surrealism before falling out with André Breton and other Surrealists. 175 Georges Bataille, “Chance, 1944,” trans. Bruce Boone, in Chance: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Margaret Iversen, (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 30. Previously in, Le Coupable (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1944). 58

automatic nor random, and here we can only refer to chance-images or chance-

processes.176

Another significant artist who used chance, Taeuber worked collaboratively with Arp on numerous projects including the Duo-Collages. Arp described their working processes as follows:

In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms,

using painting, embroidery and pasted paper. These were probably the first

manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning

or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a

description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.177

The collaboration brought together two singular positions through the common pursuit of simplification and elemental form.

Kelly introduced the grid, chance procedures, and the elementary unit into his collage process in response to Arp’s and Taeuber’s ideas and practice. It was also at this point that he commenced his adoption of an anonymous, empirically derived, subject matter. Also in keeping with Arp and Taeuber’s practice, the grid structure provided a non-hierarchical field for Kelly to conduct his experimental foray into the use of the readymade and chance. 178

Kelly’s collage, however, while structurally referential and visually similar to the Arp and Taeuber model differed through intention: Kelly pursued external contexts, whilst Arp and Taeuber conveyed an internally focused self-referentiality with external content conveyed as secondary. Moreover, Kelly draws from the alternative model of collage originating within Cubism, as exemplified by Picasso’s work of this

176 George Brecht, Chance-Imagery (New York: A Great Bear Pamphlet, 1966), 10. 177 Diane Waldman, “Ellsworth Kelly,” in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, ed. Diane Waldman (New York: Guggenheim Publications, 1996), 18. Waldman quotes Jean Arp previously quoted in Herbert Read, The Art of Jean Arp (New York: Abrams. 1968), 34, 38. 178 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 23-26. 59

genre. Picasso’s Cubist collages occupied the opposing position to Arp and Taeuber’s detachment by providing an orthodox polyphonic interaction of subject. When this is the case, the voice of the artist combines with the voice of the transferred subject, to form a third voice:

The sheet of newspaper was never used in order to make a newspaper… It was

never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual definition

at the point of departure and its new definition at the point of arrival…. This

displaced object has its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to

make people think about because we were aware that our world was becoming very

strange and not exactly reassuring.179

As such, Picasso claims a position of interaction within the world at large. Kelly similarly desires to engage with the world, however he wants that engagement on his own terms, without the remnant voice of the collage interfering with his transferred subject. Kelly’s solution lay in his adoption of readymade coloured gum paper as subject and material for collage in that it was free from narrative while remaining connected to the everyday. In identifying the inert nature of Kelly’s materials for collage, John Coplans recognises the functional properties of Kelly’s colour: its availability in preformed pre-coloured papers, its flexible nature and adaptability for re- forming within the grid. He also recognises collage’s potential to introduce the poetic, that is, the paper’s association with a particular French period and the innocence of school years. However, the implications of a multi-layered discourse are not viewed as an avenue Kelly pursued and Coplans posits a purely functionalist use. Importantly, the transformative capacity of painting within the transfer of colour from collage to object/painting is observed as an accepted difference, as are changes to the arrangement.

179 Robertson, Arp, 40. The quote from Picasso was extracted from a reported conversation between Picasso and François Gilot, previously cited in Nielson Cox, Cubism, (London: Phaidon, 2000), 291. 60

In the first place, up to that time its use in purely nonobjective art was rare.

Furthermore, paper as a material for collage was invariably used for its associative,

referential, or poetic overtones. Kelly used it instead as an inert or anonymous

material to test vigorously spatial and organizational possibilities. Inherent in

collage, of course, is the artist’s freedom to rapidly rearrange loose pieces … Very

often these collages are quite different from the paintings in both color and

organization. 180

Kelly’s great leap forward with chance procedures and collage occurred when he combined all his non-compositional strategies, that is, chance, the grid, the monochrome panel, and the transfer.181 Before this strategic breakthrough, Kelly in Cite

(1951) concluded that the pursuit of endless possibilities of arrangement within the grid was futile, hence his decision to accept the initial configuration formed in the collage,

Study for “Cite”: Brushstrokes Cut into Twenty Squares and Arranged by Chance

(1951) (Fig. 28).182 Subsequently, with Study for “Seine” (1951) (Fig. 29) following the logic he explored through drawing, Kelly introduced a chance procedure governing the placement of black and white rectangular units within a rectangular format of the so called landscape format.183 Next, in the collages for Spectrum Colors Arranged by

Chance, Kelly replaced the annotated drawing process with the physical forms of collage. In doing so he introduced and manipulated compositional complexity by originally pursuing a central cluster before shifting to an all over weight by evenly dispersing the black units in Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI (1951) (Fig.

30).184 Kelly made seven collages for Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance (1951)

180 Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, 40. 181 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 10. 182 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 25. 183 E.C. Goosen, Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 30-32. See Goosen’s notes for Study for “Seine”. 184 Jack Cowart, “Method and Motif: Ellsworth Kelly’s “Chance” Grids and His Development of Color Panel Paintings, 1948-1951,” in Ellsworth Kelly in France, 1948-1954, by Yve-Alain Bois, Jack Cowart and Alfred Pacquement, ed. Mary Yakush (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 43. 61

initially introducing a square unit within a rectangular format, which was later replaced with the square format. In selecting the square, one can assume that Kelly determined to reduce choice and limit associations with natural phenomena. Culminating this exploration is Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colours for a Large Wall” (1951) in which

Kelly reduced the number of elements. In doing so, he removed the excessive complexities evident within the Spectrum collages185 and emphasised the monochrome panels of coloured paper within the structure.186

Where collage was successful as a singular transfer, the pervasiveness of its readymade and singular characteristics lacked the flexibility of painting.187 The conjunction of Kelly’s strategies for non-composition, with the process of transferring empirically derived subject matter however, enabled him to introduce a multi- generational approach. This approach was adopted into the painting process where issues of scale and transfer instigated innate variation and a means to expand readymade colour. Conceptually this is further expanded by Kelly’s selection of coloured paper as a subject for collage from his daily experience as a teacher at the American School in

Paris (1950-1951). In doing so, and notwithstanding Coplans’ claim for functionalist decisions, Kelly’s colour is placed, not only within the society of the time, but also within his personal chronology. Thereby the role for the autobiographical is facilitated, not only within the collage, but also in its next stage of transfer and re-formation through painting.

Within my studio practice the equivalent of collage is the digital image, in that it includes a capacity for transfer and originates from the everyday. Despite collage

185 Kelly’s Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colors for a Large Wall”, 1951 is sometimes named Study for Colors for a Large Wall, 1951 for example, Temkin, Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, page 50, which is the same work. 186 Bois,” Ellsworth Kelly,” 26-27. 187 Although a single-generation transfer Red Yellow Blue White, 1952 breaks free the restraints of the square or rectilinear format and directly engages architecture by introducing the white of the wall as an active component alongside the white of the fabric. See Buchloh, “Matrix,” 18-20. 62

being actual while the digital image is virtual, the digital image, like the second- generation transfer, exists as an already-made requiring formation through a subsequent process. Moreover, the incidental information of my everyday life informs my choices within the transfer process whereby the autobiographical insinuates itself. For example, having watched Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) the night before going to the studio,

I might, not thinking of the movie, select a particular shade of yellow for transfer.188 In doing so, the era of the movie, 2003, the era of the movie’s visual reference, 1970s and

Kumiko Ogawa and Catherine Thomas’s costumes inform the transfer. Simultaneously the innate elements that comprise my unique makeup as a person who would watch this particular movie, subtly insert themselves as autobiographical markers within the transfer.

2.6 Nature

There is evidence to suggest that the physical environment also influenced

Kelly’s selection of colour. These influences include a range of natural and social forces: the light and colour of rural and urban environments comprising the natural; the availability and quality of manufactured colour products representing the social or industrial. The conjunction of natural and social/industrial influences in Kelly’s practice is pertinent to my studio led research in that it foreshadows the combination of pragmatic logic and incidental circumstance determining my choice of colour and medium.

188 Kill Bill Volume 1, DVD, directed by Quentin Tarantino (2003 cinematic release; Buffalo NY: Miramax Films, 2004 DVD release). The influence of movies like Kill Bill can be described as mediated experience. However, my use of digital images in my painting research is not directed towards the analysis of the mediated image, but rather, as a tool in the development of the traditional medium of painting. For further reading on new media and its relationship to traditional methods of practice see Christine Paul, New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 2-4. 63

Kelly’s presentation of large areas, or panels, of flatly applied colours – drawn from a range of spectrum colours and the non-colours of classic abstraction, white, black, and grey – can mislead the viewer to a superficial reading based on appearance alone. Analysis however, reveals a complex meld of natural and industrially sourced influences.189 Within this context, aesthetics are of particular interest, as they occupy a secondary position to colour selection, prompting arbitrary experimental strategies for chance. The outcome, as such, may be augmented by choice, and thereby simultaneously inhabit both the industrial and natural world.

Critical analysis of Kelly’s colour choice is divided into two primary positions regarding environmental influence. Ascertaining and identifying the influence of locale, and therefore environment, on Kelly’s colour choice comprised the first wave of critical review. Theorists such as the American, Barbara Rose,190 signalled his time in the South of France, for example, as a prime stimulus and a recognisable prompt for

Kelly’s adoption of an increased chromatic scale.

The conditions of light Kelly has worked in have affected his paintings in a

remarkable manner. In the pale grey Parisian light, he produced white and pastel

paintings. On the Riviera, he painted his first brightly colored works.191

This argument may be extended to all his environmental influences including Paris, the

Mediterranean, New York City, and up-state New York, thereby invoking the autobiographical connection between each painting and its place of inception. The second position, asserted by Bois, claims that Kelly’s conceptual and painting needs were the prime motivation for his adoption of a particular colour.192 Both opinions

189 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 27. 190 Barbara Rose (1938-) American art historian and art critic well known for her writing on Abstract art, Minimal art, and Monochrome painting. 191 Barbara Rose, “Ellsworth Kelly: The Focussed Vision,” in Ellsworth Kelly: Paintings and Sculptures 1963-1979, (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1979). 192 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 28. Bois’s examination of chance and system presents the development of non-compositional strategies as Kelly’s primary motivation for his use of readymade colour. 64

contain varying degrees of truth, as Kelly’s selection of colour refuses dominance by a singular influence or convention.

Whether formed from the influence of the particularities of natural or social environment or conceptual intent, what distinguishes Kelly’s readymade colour is its status as a fully formed subject ready for transfer as a singular monochrome panel.

Paradoxically, the colour selected stands independent from any associated pictorial references despite carrying references to its functional origins within Kelly’s everyday world. As with most aspects of Kelly’s hybrid intention for painting it is extremely difficult to isolate any individual influence, as his primary aim is to avoid the limitations of a single convention. Examination of the individual strategies at the expense of the combined outcome presents a distorted reading of intention, as Bois has noted.193 As such, the influence of environment can be seen to function as a prompt for the selection of individual colours within an intellectually contrived strategy designed to limit choice.

Within my studio practice, the paradox extends to include the transfer of natural phenomena into digital imagery, whereby a hybrid category of readymade colour is achieved.194 This unlikely combination of nature and system is further expanded by the extreme malleability and individual focus of painting. The act of painting, moreover, shifts readymade colour beyond manufactured coloured paint, printing inks, and lights to facilitate the absorption of natural environment and references drawn from my life, mediated by photographic technology.

193 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 13. 194 A digital camera capable of 24-bit colour with a sensor equivalent to ¾ of a 35mm SLR film camera has 16.8 million colours to capture image. See James R. Carr, “Using A Digital Camera To Teach The Physics Of Light,” (Reno: ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001), accessed May 23, 2013. www.icee.usm.edu/icee/conferences/FIEC2001/papers/1049.pdf 65

2.7 The Transfer Kelly’s adoption of the transfer as a non-compositional strategy was a result of his endeavours to establish an expanded domain for subject that included contextual relevance within the everyday. Compounding this was his desire for a reduction of arbitrary subjectivity. Kelly’s strategy for transfer is further complicated by his fundamental need to transform his selected subject while being averse to convention, including conventions of his own inception. In effect the monochrome was his final strategy for non-composition and his most refined subject for transfer, despite variation resulting from multi-generational transfer. The functional origin of the readymade colour however, is compounded by its origin within Kelly’s everyday life to introduce a chronological context for the reading of readymade colour. As such, it raises the possibility of viewing the transfer in terms of the autobiographical, despite his efforts to exclude subjectivity.

Kelly’s rejection of inspiration in favour of the mimetic transfer initiated a direct relationship between his painting and the quotidian world.195 However, the transfer did not remove all compositional decisions from his selective procedure when locating subjects suitable for transfer. The deductive logic supporting choice of transfer and its re-formation as object is evident in Kelly’s recollection of his first painting/object:

The paintings became painted reliefs rather than easel paintings, the wall became

the ground and the panels became the marks on the wall. The first work that has

this literal space is Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris. It is a replica of a

window that does not exist as either window or painting but as painting/object. The

actual window is an integral part of the building and was built into the wall; what I

did was to build a relief that loses its identity. The flattening of the forms in

195 Quotidian world refers to the everyday world and its common and mundane occurrences. 66

paintings condenses vision and presents a three dimensional world reduced to two

dimensions.196

Kelly’s consideration of the interrelationship between the painted panel and the wall, exists not as a rejection, but as a continuation of the traditional figure/ground relationship. This confirms his own continuous questioning of the integral connection between his work and conventional approaches to representation. Kelly’s intention was to extend painting through the introduction of a new field of play, that is, the wall. The transfer within this new context for painting formed a new entity, a physical object separate from the original with a singular presence that required its own identity. Kelly complied with the painting/objects’ singularity by naming it Window, Museum of

Modern Art, Paris.

Bois acknowledges the impossibility of a pure state of detachment in his analysis of the anti-compositional painting of Francois Morrellet, a friend and contemporary of Kelly in post-war Paris.197

He often shows that choice can never be entirely eliminated, that there is always “a

compositional residue”: all the artist can do is limit the number of decisions to be

made.198

I would argue that the impossibility of achieving pure detachment through painting extends to any finite conclusion concerning the rejection or influence of any aspect of

Kelly’s formative platforms. This compounds further if we accept the premise that

Kelly’s transfers continued an engagement with representation, albeit a non- conventional one. In addition, it is a qualification for the argument that Kelly’s transfers, comprising panels that strive for non-hierarchical and anti-illusionistic relationships, refer to their origins. Furthermore, Kelly’s deliberate engagement with allusion through

196 Brunet, “Chronology,” 184. From Kelly’s Letter to John Cage, 4 September 1950, as reproduced by Brunet. 197 Francois Morellet (1926-): French geometrical abstract painter, sculptor and light artist. 198 Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 36 note 65. 67

readymade colour (even when subjected to minimal transformation) maintains a link to his biographical development and introduces a selective commentary through the autobiographical relationship between the artist and painting/object. Effectively, Kelly’s

American experience continues to influence his time in France in both his impulse to transform subject, and his scepticism towards orthodoxies and convention.

Kelly’s decision to adopt the non-compositional strategy of transfer was inseparable from his desire for an expanded possibility for subject and need to break free of the divisive conventions supporting objective and non-objective art practice. His focus on an individual solution and his ability to identify and select essential aspects of both approaches allowed him to fashion a unique solution to the problems separating representation and the ideal. Kelly’s solution, that is, the transfer, and its generational variation, question the definitional parameters of a functionalist interpretation in that the variation is both innately connected to the readymade and an expanded possibility. This is further explored in my practice where digital technologies capture, transfer, and re-form readymade colour as subject for painting.

2.8 Kelly and the Avant-garde

To understand the implications of Kelly’s readymade and his generationally advanced readymade variant it is necessary to briefly examine the post-revolutionary

Russian avant-garde model. This model was formed around the Russian artist

Aleksander Rodchenko’s presentation of sequential monochrome panels devoid of representational content as the terminal end of painting and the tradition of representation.199 Rodchenko’s paintings removed any obligations for the artist to

199 Aleksander Rodchenko (1891-1956): Russian painter, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. One of the founders of Constructivism and a leader of the Russian avant-garde. 68

accommodate the needs of bourgeois society, instead presenting a functionalist alternative for pure colour as both subject and commodity.

The essential concerns defining this historical model for the avant-garde focused on the eradication of representation – as remnants of bourgeois decadence – and the introduction of colour away from aesthetics or pictorial concern as commodity. The

American art historian Brandon Joseph posits this model to critique the variation within

Kelly’s multi-generational transfer as a perpetuation of conventional modernism’s ongoing dilemma, that is, the endless cycle of subjective review. This is compounded by Joseph’s identification of Kelly’s intentions as localised and individual rather than focused on the collective society. Joseph concludes that Kelly fails to meet the criteria for the historical model of the post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde. In this section I will argue that Joseph’s criteria is overly narrow in that the Russian model presents only one avenue for testing eligibility. As such, while Joseph is correct in determining that

Kelly’s work is not tied to a functionalist paradigm, where utilitarian materials remain reflective of practical purpose, he neglects to view the avant-garde as inclusive of experimental and unique developments. Nor does he consider the very different socio- economic environments of Paris and Russia during this period and what avant-garde means in these very different conditions.

Joseph in his treaty Random Order, deems Kelly’s engagement with a functionalist, avant-garde paradigm as arbitrary rather than fully committed.200 He states that Kelly’s painting experiment did not engage with “the death of modernist painting but another stage in its seemingly perpetual rebeginning”.201 Joseph bases his argument on what he sees as Kelly’s abandonment of a readymade colour system. To illustrate his point, Joseph presents Red Yellow Blue White (1952) (Fig. 31) as one of a small group

200 Joseph, Random Order, 102. 201 Joseph, Random Order, 102. 69

of functionalist anomalies within Kelly’s oeuvre. Made from industrially dyed and manufactured cloth, Red Yellow Blue White was Kelly’s ultimate collage in terms of ambition, scale, and interactivity. What separates this work from all the others is that it exists within a single generation of process. As this work satisfies the painting/object status requiring no further transformation it remains a one of a kind work within Kelly’s oeuvre, as it exists without the transformative process of painting. He speculates that

Kelly would have maintained a functionalist alignment if he had continued with this use of readymade colour. In singling out this work Joseph discounts the validity of the functionality of material beyond the initial transfer. Citing this work as the yardstick by which all other work should be measured, he concludes that Kelly’s intention was to achieve individual outcomes, rather than maintain a collective intention.

If it had remained at this level, the relationship of Kelly’s work to the commodity

would have been aligned with the functionalist paradigm that he espoused. As

opposed to a modernism predicated on autonomy, in which the encroachments of

industry and commercialism are adopted only to be transcended in the process of

artistic transformation, the functionalist strain of the avant-garde willingly

assimilated the products and productive tenets of industrialization as a means of

transcending individual artistic creation.202

The individuality afforded by the painting process, as Joseph points out, is of more interest to Kelly than the selective readymade process. Kelly’s use of readymade colour for example, is based on the pragmatic selection of available resources and processes necessary to sidestep convention. They are also selected for their ability to expand painting’s possibilities, rather than reinforce the functionalist integrity of each subject with each act of transfer. Indeed, counter to collectivism, Kelly’s pragmatic approach resulted from an unwillingness to sacrifice his individual position to serve a common

202 Joseph, Random Order, 99. 70

social outcome. When Kelly stated the objectives for his work to be anonymous, and independent, alongside forms constructed in the past that exemplify man’s purpose, or forms that merely exist as part of the random physical order, it was not his intention to surrender his individual purpose. Rather, as American art historian Roberta Bernstein203 argues, Kelly was rejecting the limitations of a signature style and the narrow range of possibilities offered by the conventions of easel painting.204 This however, should not be seen as outside the avant-garde, but as distinct from the Russian model.

Joseph’s model for the avant-garde is unwaveringly entrenched in the ideals of a collective utopian paradigm.

To have adopted his colors readymade would therefore not have been out of line

with the historical avant-garde’s optimistic, even utopian (though already

outmoded) vision of industrialization as an emancipatory force capable of

overcoming class and regional distinctions and fostering the universal, collective

culture that Kelly desired.205

The constraints Joseph has placed on his definition of the avant-garde prove inadequate when applied to contemporary circumstance. Despite acknowledging that Nikolai

Tarbukin’s206 definition of the Russian avant-garde was “already outmoded” Joseph only tests Kelly’s eligibility against Tarbukin’s criteria, which stipulates that subject be based on socially justified content and utility.

In 'production skill', ‘the content' is the utility and expediency of the object, its

tectonism which conditions its form and construction, and which justifies its social

203 Roberta Bernstein: American art historian specializing in post-war American art, noted for research on Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly; currently Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Albany. 204Roberta Bernstein, “Multipanel Paintings,” in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, ed. Diane Waldman (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997), 42. 205 Joseph, Random Order, 99. 206 Nikolai Tarabukin (1899-1956): Russian art historian, philosopher best known for his Productivist tract, From the easel to the Machine (1923). 71

purpose and function. –Nikolai Tarabukin (1923)207

This is compounded by Joseph’s assumption that Kelly pursued a “universal collective culture”. Joseph’s resulting investigation is thereby limited to an emergent cultural shift inherent in a socio-economic environment that was in fact, alien to Kelly’s experience.208

Joseph’s summation of Kelly’s modernist paradigm is furthered by his positing of Kelly’s self-referentiality as a continual repetition based on an internal chain of logic.

In so transcending the relation between his colors and the commodity form, Kelly

finally proves himself a consummate modernist, reenacting not the death of

modernist painting but another stage in its seemingly perpetual rebeginning.209

Joseph believes that Kelly strove to repeat the past through a series of plays and counter-plays, that eventually return to an initial starting point. He argues that Kelly was not pursuing an ideal and had made no binding agreement limiting or creating strategies or conventions for abstraction. As such, Joseph finds that Kelly fails to fit the functionalist model of the avant-garde.210 Kelly’s position however, is equitable to the

207Nikolai Tarabukin, From the Easel to the Machine, trans. Christina Lodder (Moscow, 1923), 8. Accessed February 8, 2013. http://ebookbrowse.com/tarabukin-nikolai-from-easel-to-machine-rtf-d258996018 208 Joseph, Random Order, 99. While Joseph argues to position Kelly relative to the Russian post- revolutionary avant-garde he acknowledges this model is already outmoded. 209 Joseph, Random Order, 102. 210 The overriding intention of Joseph’s argument was to define the parameters of an investigation of painting after modernist painting. In so doing, he heralds the American artist Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925-2008) assemblages at the forefront of a late functionalist dialogue. His argument is based on an appraisal of Rauschenberg’s pursuit of a functionalist paradigm through transfer and citation. See Joseph, Random Order, 95-110. Rauschenberg’ s Collection, 1954 (Fig. 32) stands as a pivotal example of painting after the dominant position of Abstract Expressionism, in that it combines readymade colour, chance strategies and the expressionist idiom of mark making, not in pursuit of self-progression, but as a citation. Joseph aligns Rauschenberg’s chance strategies within Cage’s approach to indeterminacy. Rauschenberg purchased unmarked cans of coloured paint to reduce subjective choice. In so doing, Rauschenberg extends the Duchampian premise of the readymade to include cans or tubes of paint (as later identified by the Belgian art historian and theorist Thierry De Duve (1944-) as a readymade). See Joseph, Random Order, 105-106. Rauschenberg’s variation stands as an individual solution to the dilemmas of American painting in the mid fifties. What it does not do is translate into a total strategy for art practice in the rapidly advancing contemporary society. De Duve expands on Duchamp’s logic that nothing starts from scratch as expressed in a 1961 interview between Duchamp and Katherine Hull. See Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1996), 162. 72

pursuit of an uncharted pathway through art conventions, in that he rejected the newly established conventions, including those of the readymade and developed strategies outside the paradigm of modernism, such as the already-made.

In an interview with the American art historian Roberta Bernstein for her

1996 catalogue essay, “Multipanel Paintings,” Kelly stated that he was unaware of

Rodchenko until 1988. Despite this declaration Kelly was intuitively engaged with the functionalist capacity of colour through his direct transfer of readymade colour.211 As

Joseph notes, the direct transfer of readymade is limited within his oeuvre. This aside,

Kelly’s relationship with the Russian avant-garde was minimal, as Bois acknowledges in his recent essay, “The Availability of Malevich”:

…Kelly had certainly heard of [Kazimir] Malevich212 at the time…and he might

have seen some of his works at MoMA before heading for France (though, given

what he was painting then, it is unlikely that they would have fully registered).213

Kelly’s lack of acquaintance with Rodchenko’s monochrome paintings during his time in Paris does not negate a comparison between what appearance deems to be two very similar approaches to painting, however, intent does.214 Rodchenko’s Pure Red Colour,

Pure Yellow Colour, and Pure Blue Colour (collectively known as The Last Painting)

(1921) (Fig. 33) was an intentional statement of finality, whereby the artist emptied all representation from painting reducing it to matter alone. Rodchenko defined his achievement as the end of representation:

211 Bernstein, “Multipanel Paintings,” 51, note 6. 212 Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935): Russian abstract painter, and designer, pioneer of geometric abstraction and founder of Suprematism. 213 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Availability of Malevich,” in Malevich And The American Legacy, ed. Alison McDonald and Ealan Wingate (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011), 23. 214 Bernstein, “Multipanel Paintings,” 40. Bernstein separates Kelly’s intention from European Modernists on the basis of his American empiricism and his desire to present, rather than depict, the object in space. 73

I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue,

and yellow. I affirmed: It’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there

is to be no more representation.215

Nikolai Tarabukin hypothesised in “From the Easel to the Machine” the extended possibility for Rodchenko’s monochromes within an ideal state, whereby functionality or utility were the only considerations for a new value system. 216 In accordance with such a value system, he advocated the replacement of representation with functional objects and skills that would aid the development of a new and advancing society of post-revolutionary Russia.217

Kelly’s readymade colour variation, in the context of Rodchenko’s final reduction of painting towards matter, raises the possibility of adjusted colour as a subjective equivalent to representation. Kelly’s augmentation of the readymade further positions his painting away from Rodchenko’s reductive model and its positive collective faith in the rapid industrialisation of post World War 1 Russia. I argue, in actuality, any perceived correlation between the artists’ intentions is non-existent.

Rodchenko’s reductive model is driven by his optimistic response to the collective, while the individuality of Kelly’s purpose arises from his need to transform subject, avoid convention, and include an avant-garde role within his mode of experimentation.

Importantly, Kelly is pursuing these outcomes within his own socio-economic/cultural paradigm, which, as described by Buchloh, is characterised by scepticism and restriction. Kelly’s adjustment of colour, in fact, endorses a direct link between readymade colour and a complex economic society, as it introduces the rising status of the individual, and thereby extends the paradigm away from collective purpose.

215 Joseph, Random Order, 80. Aleksandr Rodchenko previously quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” In Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990), 238. 216 Tarabukin, From the Easel to the Machine, 135-144. 217 Joseph, Random Order, 80. For Joseph, Tarabukin established the definitive parameters for the Russian avant-garde relative to socially justified content and utility. 74

Counter to Rodchenko, Kelly’s intention was not to reduce options. Rather, his adoption of non-compositional strategies aimed to expand possibilities for abstract painting. As such, while Kelly’s colour enjoyed a detached position from form, he did not aim to remove external references in favour of a focus on matter as the inherent base to construct a commoditised art form. Kelly’s introduction of the multi-generational transfer compounds this, in that the subsequent emergence of the readymade variation questions the ongoing status of functionalist origins.

Kelly’s limited awareness of the utopian endeavours of post-revolutionary painting confirms his adoption of readymade colour as exploratory and based on experimental procedures. It can also be argued that Kelly was at no time working within a convention or following prescribed procedures. Compounding this is the well- documented environment of post-war France, which can only be seen as very different to post-revolutionary Russia. Kelly was furthermore, the product of a democratic culture that espoused the freedom of the individual, rather than collective intention. As a result, any attempt to weigh Kelly against the Russian avant-garde model is mistaken.

Conversely, within a contemporary model, Kelly’s practice answers all requirements for avant-garde status being experimental, free of convention and pursuant of a new pathway for painting. Moreover his unique contribution, that is, the already-made, validates his place in the contemporary avant-garde.

In today’s culture the most prevalent form of industrial colour is found in the digital colour systems where colour information exists within a virtual state that can be re-formed on demand for presentation or objectification. Each circumstance (the needs of viewing or printing) demands its own unique form of presentation (print format or screen type). The system, however, is limited, in that each presentation is generic and highly utilitarian, serving a mass purpose rather than individual need. The

failure to engage with the individual fosters the continuing relevance of the processes of transfer, such as painting, which tailors readymade colour to engage with personal need.

2.9 The Matrix

In his catalogue essay “Kelly’s Matrix: Administering Abstraction,

Industrialising Color” the German-American art historian and theorist Benjamin

Buchloh defined post-war Paris’s condition as post-industrial. More pointedly, he describes an advanced economic society of rapidly disappearing options for artistic endeavour. This emphasised the need for an individual solution, rather than collective intent and makes clear the distinction between Kelly’s working environment and that of the Russian avant-garde.218 Building on this premise, Buchloh’s introduction of the

“matrix,” as a specific term for an environment that was simultaneously confining and generative, locates Kelly’s radical and experimental painting away from both the

Russian model for the avant-garde and the prescriptive dictates of abstraction.219

Rather than originating in Malevich’s and Mondrian’s anticipatory or emancipatory

visions of abstraction, Kelly’s work from 1949 onwards, in particular in regards to

its often undecidable status as either painting, relief, or sculpture, operates as a

model of dialectical perceptual experience rather than as a utopian practice.220

To explore the extent to which Kelly pursued a unique path for abstraction, Buchloh utilises the term matrix within its epistemological context.221 As defined by The Oxford

English Dictionary the matrix constitutes “the cultural, social, or political environment

218 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 7. 219 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 6. 220 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 6. 221 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 28, note 2. Buchloh acknowledges the foundational importance of Michel Foucault’s definition of episteme in: Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972), 191. Buchloh quotes Foucault as follows: “By episteme we mean the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences and possibly formalized systems…it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a period, between the sciences, when one analyzes them at the level of discursive regularities.” 76

in which something develops: Oxbridge was the matrix of the ideology.” 222 Ostensibly

Bochloh’s use of the term describes the philosophical zeitgeist in which Kelly pursued his experiments away from the dominant schools of thought.

… the extreme confinement and the rigorous disciplinary limitations of perceptual

and poetical experience imposed by modernity, a condition that has generated the

aesthetic episteme of the matrix: the practice of working within and against the

hidden rules of this confinement to convey a sense of veracity in painting.223

As “the synthesis between the readymade and abstraction”224 the matrix has historical precedence in Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages and Arp’s Squares Arranged

According to the Laws of Chance of 1913 and 1916 respectively. In both these works the readymade and chance strategies combine in critical response to advancements for non-representation.225 However, Buchloh argues that the issue is not whether Kelly or any other artist was aware of the preceding historical platform, but rather, how it affected the choice of options for the current generation:

… it is equally important to recognize that the operations of the matrix are not

conveyed through the influence of one generation of artists on the next as

knowledge or ignorance of particular works. Rather, postwar culture is primarily

defined by the rapidly disappearing options of artistic production…226

Buchloh defines Kelly’s role within this environment as strategic with an equivalence to gamesmanship “as defined by borders and rules ”.227 As such, historical precedence is moot. Accordingly, anything outside of the immediate circumstance, or rules of the game, are irrelevant to the next move, including the solutions of the previous generation.

Buchloh expands:

222 Oxford Dictionaries, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), accessed March, 9, 2013. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/matrix?q=matrix 223 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 6-7. 224 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 7. 225 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 7. 226 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 7. 227 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 8. 77

… a matrix is as much a structure of external determination and limitations as it is

the progenitor of multiple combinatory structures… This means that a work of

abstraction in 1951 gained its historical significance and credibility precisely to the

degree that it succeeded in identifying the available options for abstraction and

either continued along the lines that the avantgarde had formulated in the prewar

period … or recognise that none of these models were actually available any

longer.228

Returning to Kelly’s direct historical precedents, Buchloh identifies the dilemma of each successive wave of abstraction as dependent on the realisation of having failed to break the shackle of historical referentiality:

… in spite of its cyclical reiteration of claims to have coined a universal language

and to have finally overcome all ties to the determinism of history and

referentiality, … each project of abstraction had actually remained deeply

intertwined with the specific demands of its historical moment.229

Joseph also sees modernism as being caught in a “seemingly perpetual rebeginning”.230 However, where Joseph sees Kelly reiterating convention and declares him a “consummate modernist,” Buchloh identifies quite a different strategy. Indeed, it is in response to the cyclical limbo of a “perpetual rebeginning” that Kelly formulated his tactical response to avoid the limitations of convention. Specifically, Kelly developed a complex meld of non-compositional strategies and generational tactics that allowed self-referentiality. However, he did not limit the engagement to the internal dialogue of the panels, but included the relationship to the actual referent, the initial transfer, and its subsequent re-transfer.

228 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 15-16. 229 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 6. 230 Joseph, Random Order, 102. 78

Buchloh extends Kelly’s self-referentiality into what he identifies as a

“radical tautology of self-referentiality”.231 Importantly, the shift in interpretive emphasis towards self-referentiality necessitates a shift away from “history and referentiality”. That is, individual history replaces general history. Buchloh, references

Kelly’s Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris to illustrate and expand this argument by introducing the contextual arenas of architecture and the museum:

Here it had established a direct correlation between the episteme of the renaissance

window, on one hand, and, on the other, the condition of painting as a mere object

whose meaning and value are constituted only within the architectural and

discursive framework of the museum.232

Issues of context and interpretation are thereby expanded to include an extended dialogue: the direct through architecture, and the indirect through the delayed and controlled interpretation of the museum.

Thus, one could argue that Kelly’s model…replaces Duchamp’s…meditation on

the conditions of (abstract) painting after the demise of a centered subjectivity,

with a reflection on the condition of painterly abstraction at the moment of the

emergence of the society of administration and control.233

The direct extension, achieved through architecture, connotes an unbound field of expansion for self-referentiality within painting. In the first place the window exists as an historic reference, which remains through multi-generational transfer. Additional elements of self-referentiality are introduced through the associative biographical history of where and when Kelly initially saw this shape, the mood of post-war Paris and the light conditions of the physical environment. Architecture further introduces itself as a direct vehicle where the artist’s endeavours are not only housed, but

231 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 10. 232 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 10. 233 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 10. 79

interactive with the built environment. The engagement between art and architecture is furthermore fundamental to transforming the singular propositions of art and architecture from neutral to active. Extending the matrix forward is the architectural role of the museum as a contextualising arena denoting the imprimatur of institutional acclaim. Architecture, as such, is the ultimate preformed subject for transformation.

Buchloh, cites Red Yellow Blue White, to equate the engagement with the wall as a conflation of actual and theoretic.

…the painting achieves a transition from planarity to spatiality within the coloristic

restrictions themselves. That is, the shift from virtual space to actual space is

conceived as nothing more (or less) than as an alternate type of coloration, that of

the non-color white or the achromatic condition of the wall. The support wall itself

now becomes the real counter-space and counter-color of the reliefs in Kelly’s

oeuvre.234

The relationship between art and architecture, as such, is not dependent on complimentary position or shared intent. Rather, Kelly and architecture are positioned by Buchloh as like entities, forged and stymied by the same socio-economic/cultural factors, yet free to explore independent outcomes:

One might even speculate that his work recognizes the absence of a social reality

within which radical Modernist architecture could find the historical fulfilment of

its promise of an egalitarian, freely self-constituting and self-determining subject.

It is that subject, or rather its absence, that Kelly addresses in his mural-size

painting Colors for a Large Wall (1951).235

Buchloh’s lexical selection exploits the cyber vernacular epitomising late twentieth and early twenty-first century popular culture with terms such as “actual” and “virtual”. In doing so, Kelly’s shift to the architectural space is likened to a self-generating

234 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 19. 235 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 14. 80

environment, where the artist is free to exploit all dimensions as a substrate to creativity.

This expanded context suggests a virtual world governed by its own logic, with an unlimited capacity for universal expansion that is only restricted by its own determination. Moreover, in locating the work’s contextual position within the parameters of the advanced economic society Buchloh further separates Kelly from the

Russian avant-garde. His use of “egalitarian,” “self-constituting,” and “self- determining,” reinforces the idea of social structures that are wholly applicable to democratic government systems.

To conclude, both Buchloh and Joseph identify socio-economic structures as predetermining factors for the definitional placement of Kelly’s readymade variations.

As such, both theorists identify self-referentaility as a means of testing the boundaries of the modernist canon. Where Joseph determines that Kelly’s self-referentiality is simply a repetition of modernist tenets, Buchloh posits Kelly’s self-referentiality as a strategy that separates him from the dictates of abstraction and legacy of the Russian avant-garde. In making this observation Buchloh marginalises the historical model to a secondary position and presents Kelly’s transfer as an individual means of navigating the cultural blockade epitomising post-war Paris.

Through an ongoing engagement with the light works of Dan Flavin my research is fulfilled as a multi-generational transfer, processed through digital images, and ultimately, through painting. Each transfer, while engaging strategies for non- composition, is marked by the peripheral information informing my experience as I drive across the desert of the Southwestern United States, to and from Marfa, Texas. As such, my paintings are layered with the concrete elements of the transfer’s referent, including Flavin’s historical position. There is also however, the intangible

biographical information that subconsciously informs my choices, thereby imbuing the work with self-referentiality regardless of intent.

2.10 Readymade Colour, its Variation, and the Contemporary Museum

Buchloh positions the museum’s role as one of contextualisation, whereby meaning and value are expounded. While, as Buchloh makes clear, this role is after the fact of the painting having value and meaning in its own right, the museum, when functioning at its best, brings the dialogue into new light. While Kelly’s relationship with museums has been well established through prestigious solo and group exhibitions, his work has often been included for its iconic significance within the abstract canon, rather than individual exploration. Contemporary curatorial practice, however, with

MoMa curator Anne Temkin at the vanguard, is moving beyond the restrictive definitional structures of categorisation based on historical precedence. Within this new paradigm, Kelly’s practice no longer needs to be endorsed in accordance with established historical models. As such, models for categorisation such as the avant- garde or abstraction per se become moot. The measure instead is focused on the possibilities for expanded interpretations of isolated modes of practice.

In 2008 Temkin, the then Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator in the

Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art236 curated the exhibition Color Chart: reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, at MoMA.237 Her aim was to present the motivational circumstances of a historically diverse group of artists united

236 Temkin is currently, the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at New York’s MoMA. 237 Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art New York from March 2-May 12, 2008. The exhibition included Marcel Duchamp, Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, François Morrellet, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Jim Dine, John Chamberlain, Giulio Paolini, Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, On Kawara, Alighiero Boetti, Michael Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Jennifer Bartlet, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, André Cadere, Bas Jan Ader, Jan Dibbets, John Baldessari, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, David Batchelor, Carrie Mae Weems, Byron Kim, Katharina Fritsch, Mike Kelley, Christopher Williams, Sherrie Levine, Damien Hirst, Liz Deschenes, Walid Raad, Jim Lambie, Angela Bulloch and Cory Arcangel. 82

by a common reference to the commercial colour chart.238 By including Kelly, and

Palermo in the exhibition, Temkin draws upon the imprimatur of her title and academic weight in conjunction with that of the museum, to administer a shift in the way these artists are viewed. Moreover, by curating Kelly and Palermo amongst artists such as

Cory Arcangel (America, 1978- ),239 Angela Bulloch (Canada 1966- ),240 Liz Deschenes

(America, 1966- )241 and Jim Lambie (Scotland 1964- )242 she presents the exploration of readymade colour as a wholly valid contemporary dialogue. The culmination of

Temkin’s curation echoes a pronounced shift in institutional attitude away from national contexts and isolation, towards an international dialogue of inclusion and exchange.243

The exhibition’s accompanying publication contains Temkin’s essay,

“Color Shift,”244 in which she explores the move towards a democratisation of subject in twentieth century art practice. She bases her argument on a general recognition of the potential of commercial products, as exemplified by colour, to function as subject for art practice. For Temkin, the dialogue between colour and the everyday was initiated by

Duchamp’s painting Tu m’ (1918), which introduced the commercial colour chart as subject. It is within this definitive subject that Temkin continues Buchloh’s theory of the matrix away from the conditions of the avant-garde and abstraction and places

238 Temkin, “Color Shift,” 16. 239 Corey Arcangel (1978-): American contemporary artist working across various media including video games, video, music and sculpture. 240 Angela Bulloch (1966-): Canadian contemporary artist educated at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice is noted for colour, light and sound installation. 241 Liz Deschenes (1966-): American contemporary artist working in an expanded field of photography. 242 Jim Lambie (1964-): Scottish contemporary artist noted for his large scale coloured installations. 243 In 2004 the American curator Lynn Zelevansky, while the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized Beyond Geometry: Experimentation in Form, 1940s to 1970’s, which stands as evidence of a groundbreaking shift in the reassessment of the American-International dialogue for abstraction away from one of isolation and displacement to one of exchange. In the exhibition Zelvansky included Ellsworth Kelly and Blinky Palermo within an extensive grouping of American, European, Asian and South American artists. It also, stands as an important example of the growing recognition of Palermo’s contribution to the expanding discourse of abstract art. For Further information see Lynn Zelvansky, Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70’s (Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2004). 244 Temkin, “Color Shift,” 16-27. 83

Kelly’s exploration of readymade colour within an international discourse relative to

Duchamp and Cage:

Cage inspired artists as various as [the American artist Robert] Rauschenberg and

Kelly, whom he befriended in Paris in 1949, to approach their art without

preconceived ideas. Like Duchamp, he gave license to a contemporary form of

iconoclasm that gently but swiftly toppled long-heralded heroes and ideals. Cage’s

presence and influence were transatlantic, and his thinking had as much resonance

for the American Minimalists as for [German artist Gerhard] Richter or [French

artist] Daniel Buren.245

Temkin’s curatorial inclusion of both Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colors for a Large

Wall” (1951) and Colors for a Large Wall (1951), is founded on their origins in industrially manufactured coloured paper.246 That one is a collage and the other a painting bears no relevance to subject, which remains the same despite a change of medium. In recognising both works, Temkin establishes Kelly’s pivotal dialogue with the readymade (comprising an investigation of colour as object) to be inclusive of both colour and artwork.247

He had not intended the collages to be studies for paintings, and the 64-unit one, in

particular, perplexed him. After he made the collage, it was several days before he

decided to ask the cabinetmaker who worked downstairs to make him sixty-four

stretchers. The resulting painting’s modular format—a grid of individual paintings

compromising a whole—was an extraordinarily bold innovation, yet it was in part

a practical decision: Kelly did not have the means to store or ship a large-scale

canvas.248

245 Temkin, “Color Shift,” 19. 246 Ann Temkin, “Ellsworth Kelly,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, by Anne Temkin, ed. Emily Hall, Anne Doran, Nell McClister and Stephen Robert Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 46-47. 247 Temkin, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 47. 248 Temkin, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 47. 84

As such, and in accord with Buchloh’s summation, both collage and painting are independently conceived and accorded singular entity status.

To contextualise the relationship between the readymade, chance procedures, transformation and abstraction Temkin’s explains Kelly’s procedure:

… he pencilled a grid of sixty-four units, a structure he chose for its chessboard-like

neutrality, onto a sheet of paper and arrayed the squares “very, very quickly,

without thinking.” 249 Because only thirty-six colored squares remained, twenty-

eight spaces remained empty and white. Each row has three to six colours, with

several repeating (black appears ten times), although squares of the same colour are

never adjacent.250

Kelly’s method of colour and non-colour placement as elemental units, presents a methodical practicality, coupled with a conscious flexibility that enabled effective solutions to problems arising from a limited colour sample. Compounding this was the random element of practicality that further demanded innovation and non-systematic thinking to maintain non-subjectivity and non-composition, even if the outcome was a system in itself.

Temkin posits that in taking a purely theoretical position, Kelly shows that colour, once selected, is readily transferable. To the extent of first-generation transfer this is correct. Coloured sheets are selected, transferred fully formed, and placed elementally as individual monochromes within the grid. In theory, the second- generation transfer should be problem free. However, in practice, there are innate differences between printing inks and paint pigments that are extremely difficult to mask. For example, the top right corner of Kelly’s collage is a slightly warm almost transparent reddish brown while in the painting it is a cooler, darker and more opaque

249 Temkin, “Ellsworth Kelly, 47.” Temkin quotes Kelly from her conversation with the artist on January 9, 2006. 250 Temkin, “Ellsworth Kelly,” 47. 85

chocolate brown. These variations may be ascribed to material and application differences alone, however the visual composition is clearly augmented by these shifts within the colour.

Effectively, a change in scale undermines established levels of colour balance and weakens the integrity of the two-dimensional plane, thus creating the undesirable illusion of spatial hierarchy. As such, the necessity to adjust colour, in accordance with changing circumstances remains a prime consideration for Kelly, the painter. Whether the adjustment results in the estrangement of a puritanical functionalist reading of the readymade, as a preformed commodity is debatable. In terms of whether he fits the model of the Russian avant-garde, Joseph decisively argues that any estrangement from the functionalist reading disallows inclusion. As a painter however, the functionalist origin remains the same, as the adjusted solution negates experiential changes inherent in a shift in scale and material. Therefore, I argue that the adjusted transfer is truer to the experience of the initial subject, than a direct copy. For example,

Kelly’s adjustment of the slightly reddish brown top left hand corner square of the much smaller collage (20 x 19.7 cm) towards a darker chocolate brown in the painting (240 x

240 cm) serves to balance the grid by equalising the visual weight between the twenty- eight white squares, the twenty-seven colour squares and the nine black squares in such a way that neither group recedes to form a spatial hierarchy. In doing so, Kelly ensures the painting is a true transfer of the experience of the collage, rather than a scaled expansion of the colour information, which would have exhibited hierarchical anomalies not present in the smaller work. As such, the referent subject is transferred in entirety, thereby affirming the subject as an already-made.

Temkin reminds us that Kelly’s intention supported the singular position of each work. As such, the collage Study for “Sixty-Four Panels: Colors for a Large Wall”

occupies an independent position as a collage/object formed from transferred readymade colour, free from transformation despite a change of context. The painting,

Colors for a Large Wall is also a singular entity, but unlike the collage the transfer has undergone a transformation, which Temkin highlights, rather than denies, by exhibiting the works side by side. Each colour has been adjusted to maintain the neutrality of the picture plane, thereby transforming the readymade colour through the hybrid need of individual and industrial purpose. The resulting outcome is the unique and singular object/painting, Colors for a Large Wall, which exemplifies the expanded possibility for the readymade beyond the conventions of the first generation.

The colour variations of Kelly’s augmented multi-generational transfers, endorse a continuance of readymade colour as subject as Temkin claims. Temkin’s acknowledgement of Kelly’s intent and the linked, but separate, nature of each generation expands the possibility for the introduction of a broad range of media without the erosion of context. Moreover, the singularly unique, but self-referential works of Kelly’s practice are placed independently within an international historical context under the banner of Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today in what

Buchloh would describe as an extended dialogue of referentiality that includes a combination of biographical, national and international circumstance under the auspice of the museum.

2.11 Conclusion

Kelly’s unique pathway for abstraction is clearly within the contemporary parameters of avant-garde practice. His early encounter with the philosophical positions of Read and Beckman instilled in Kelly a desire to seek alternatives to conventions of both thought and practice. Moreover, the fractious atmosphere of Kelly’s art school years in Boston uniquely qualified him to question and reject the dominant paths for 87

abstraction he encountered in Paris. Chief among those directives were second and third-generation abstraction. These practices, while making some new ground were largely manifest as a perpetual reiteration of the conventions established by Mondrian,

Van Doesburg and their peers at the vanguard of abstraction forty years previously. As such, conventions such as figure/ground composition and the ideal remained as foundational elements to abstraction.

Once in Paris, Cage’s philosophical position affirmed Kelly’s nascent rationale away from representational subject. This allowed Kelly to start thinking beyond figure/ground composition and instigated his pursuit of readymade subject. Arp and Taeuber gave him the tools to explore chance and colour as subject. The combination of these influences allowed Kelly to think and act like no other artist.

Indeed, where Kelly differs, is his lack of adhesion to either the ideas/ideals of the abstractionists or the functionalist subject of the Russian avant-garde. Rather, Kelly utilised his strategies to pursue a unique blend of structure and the subjective as Bois, and Buchloh affirm.

The defining moment for Kelly was his recognition of an already-made subject, whereby an existing object or colour may be adopted as a subject, without being represented, via the act of transfer. This was compounded when he recognised his own artwork as an already-made subject and instigated the second-generation transfer.

Kelly’s adoption of readymade colour as subject and its subsequent hybrid state extends the possibilities for readymade colour beyond the original sourced colour while retaining its integral functionality. This is achieved through the multi-generational transfer, which while augmenting colour and scale to suit individual circumstance, transfers the whole, thereby turning the primary source, that is, the readymade, into an already-made.

Kelly’s transfer is imbued with traces of the autobiographical, both natural and social. In doing so, the everyday asserts itself within what appearances deem a rarefied exploration of intellect driven concept. The combination however, connotes a unique shift within the matrix, away from conventions or accepted paths, and therefore equates to avant-garde practice in the broader sense of being uniquely experimental.

Of particular interest to my research is Kelly’s adoption of colour as a readymade, which as argued, retains its functionalist origins despite or because of variations in the second-generation transfer, or indeed multi-generational transfer.

Imbued in the transfer is the environment of inception, whether physical, conceptual or social, which contributes to our understanding of the subject’s self-referentiality. In my research I have found that it is possible to create a graded index of colour only through artifice, as the natural introduces itself though random changes to the light and therefore intensity of colour. When clouds form, for example, the depth of colour becomes more marked. Conversely a sudden shift to bright sunshine can render the colour non existent.

With the introduction of my observations of colour in nature, there is variation and random aspects to the index, however both the primary and influenced colour remains referent to the original readymade. Thereby each singular concretisation of the perceived colour, though augmented by random influences, is a true transfer of the readymade coloured light. Extending this logic, digital photography expands the notional idea of readymade by introducing data as a virtual readymade. This virtual subject, similar to Kelly’s already-made is fully formed and simply requires making. A transfer from the virtual to the actual world through painting involves what Buchloh describes as “the synthesis between the readymade and abstraction” as it involves the personal selection and transformation of subject.251 The digital colour/painting transfer,

251 Buchloh, “Matrix,” 7. 89

as with its predecessor, the readymade colour/painting transfer, thereby maintains context through a chain of self-referentiality that includes expanded subjectivity.

21. David Serisier, untitled (Penske Yellow Interstate-10), 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

22. David Serisier, untitled yellow square painting (Interstate-10), 2010. Oil on oil primed linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm. (Photography Jenni Carter)

23. Ellsworth Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949. Oil on wood and canvas, two joined panels, 128 x 50 x 2 cm. Private collection. From: Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954. Munich: Prestel, 1992. Plate 36.

24. Ellsworth Kelly, White Relief. 1950. Oil on wood, 100.3 x 70.2 x 3.2 cm. Private Collection. From: Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997. Plate 9.

25. Ellsworth Kelly, Toilette, 1949. Oil on canvas, 61 x 45.7 cm. From: Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954. Munich: Prestel, 1992. Plate 21.

26. Ellsworth Kelly, Head with Beard, 1949. Newspaper cut out on paper, 26 x 15.9 cm. Private collection. From: Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954. Munich: Prestel, 1992. Page 181.

27. Pablo Picasso, Etudiant à la Pipe, 1913-1914. Gesso, sand, pasted paper, oil and charcoal on canvas, 73 x 58.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: Museum of Modern Art, New York, www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80436 (accessed February 9, 2013).

28. Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Cite”: Brushstrokes Cut into Twenty Squares and Arranged by Chance, 1951. Ink and collage, 31.1 x 38.4 cm. Private collection. From: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Harvard University Art Museums and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1999. Plate 98.

29. Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Seine”, 1951. Pencil and ink on paper, 12.1 x 40.3 cm. From: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Fort Worth Art Museum. From: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Harvard University Art Museums and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1999. Plate 109.

30. Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI, 1951. Collage, 94.6 x 94.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Harvard University Art Museums and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1999. Plate 113.

31. Ellsworth Kelly, Red Yellow Blue White, 1952. Dyed cotton 25 panels in five parts separated by 55.9 cm intervals, 30 x 30 cm each panel, overall 152 x 376 cm. Private collection. From: Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997. Plate 17.

32. Robert Rauschenberg, Collection, (Formerly Untitled), 1954. Oil, paper, fabric, wood, metal mirror on canvas, 203 x 243.8 x 8.9 cm. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/262# (accessed February 9, 2013).

33. Aleksandr Rodchenko, Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, and Pure Blue Colour, 1921. Oil on canvas each 62.5 x 52.5 cm. Private Collection. From: Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. Plate 88.

Chapter 3

Fluxus - The Expansion of the Readymade to Include the Ephemeral Event

3.1 Introduction

The Fluxus Movement’s identification of the ephemeral event as readymade and its subsequent expansion to include photography is of pivotal importance to this research. The objective of this chapter is to examine Fluxus activities in relation to the influences driving a shift from the object, towards an ephemeral subject. In particular, the American artist George Brecht’s analytical approach to experimental art practice will be examined, as it successfully absorbed both French artist Marcel Duchamp’s critique of authorship and American experimental composer John Cage’s structured indeterminism. In doing so, Brecht instigated an art of language and proposition, which placed emphasis on the field of perception.

This shift allowed the readymade to be expanded to include everyday actions and situations. It also allowed photography, as both a structural readymade and a source of readymade content, to inform the source of art’s subject. Fluxus is relevant to my studio research, where digitally printed colour taken from digital photographs of the ephemeral, forms the basis of my subject for painting.

3.2 Fluxus

As an informal group Fluxus emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s in

Europe, Japan and the United States on a post-Cagean252 platform of experimental

252 The post-Cagean platform refers to art practice as released from the traditional restraints of conventions by Cage’s approach to music composition that expanded subject through his application of indeterminate theory, chance and readymade strategies for music composition. For further reading see Liz Kotz, “Post Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score,” in October, Vol. 95, Winter 2001 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 55-89, accessed April 26, 2013, www.intermediamfa.org/imd501/media/1235422081.pdf 98

music, poetry and the visual arts. 253 It has been described as neo-Dada;254 an attitude;255 a wave of conceptual development; 256 a shift in the perception of art to include the world,257 politics258 and society;259 a magazine;260 funny;261 and according to

Fluxus artist Ben Vautier “a pain in art’s ass”.262 Fluxus has been positioned between a

Marxist critique of bourgeois subjectivity and the Duchampian critique of authorship.263

It has also been located within a post-Second World War cultural environment marked by convention, pessimism and reduced opportunity.264

American art historian Owen Smith, in Fluxus: The History of an Attitude identified two distinct phases of Fluxus development: Proto-Fluxus (1959-1961)265 and

Institutional Fluxus (1962-1978).266 Proto-Fluxus primarily refers to its developmental stage, which focused on experimentation and performance, often called happenings.267Brecht’s development of the event score during this period is of key interest to my research as it enabled the expansion of subject to include the ephemeral aspects of everyday life.

253 Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1998), 39. 254 Smith, Fluxus, 60. In a speech George Macuinas gave in late 1962 at the Galerie Parnasse in Wuppertal, near Düsseldorf, he defined Fluxus practice in Neo-dadaist terms before presenting the Fluxus stance against illusion and conventional art practice. George Macuinas (1931-1978): Lithuanian American artist and cofounder of Fluxus. 255 Smith, Fluxus, 1. 256 Smith, Fluxus, 20. 257 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), xiv. 258 See Macuinas’s letter to Tomas Schmidt in which he presents his political sympathies and aim for collective action. George Macuinas, Letter to Tomas Schmit (January 1964) reproduced in John Hendricks, Fluxus Codes: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: Abrams, 1988), 37. 259 Benjamin H. Buchloh, “Robert Watts: Animate Objects, Inanimate Subjects,” in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2000), 532. 260 Smith, Fluxus, 2. 261 Macuinas’s offset print, Fluxus (Its Historical Development and Relationship to the Avant-Garde Movements), 1967. Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection Detroit. Reproduced Higgins, Fluxus, 78. In the print Macuinas lists vaudeville, gags, Charlie Chaplin, Spike Jones, and Hoffman as foundational in Fluxus development and relative to the historical avant-garde. 262 Higgins, Fluxus, xiii. 263 Buchloh, “Watts,” 532-533. 264 Buchloh, “Watts,” 532. 265 Smith, Fluxus, 25. 266 Smith, Fluxus, 3. 267 Smith, Fluxus, 25-26. 99

Effectively, Brecht recognised that all ephemeral events within a field of perception constituted readymade chance-images. The exponential expansion was compounded by Institutional Fluxus’s development of mechanisms, which, as Smith has identified, promoted a shift away from traditional object-oriented outcomes to a new emphasis on process and function.268 This element in particular was expanded by

German artist Blinky Palermo who recognised artistic process as an already-made subject, which will be discussed in the chapter dedicated to Palermo. As a whole,

Fluxus rejected traditional value systems based on quality, as the material object itself was no longer necessarily the focus of the artwork.269

3.3 Abstraction and the Event Score

Brecht’s development of the event score, comprising simple language to describe an event, established a new model for abstraction in which temporal and concrete structures framed perception as a field of activity unique to each composition.

In doing so, the event score formed a generational advancement on the Cagean model by shifting its field of activity from music composition to the visual arts.270 Participants in Cage’s summer of 1958 class,271 including Brecht, were directed to conduct chance- based experiments in music, performance and poetry.272 A ground-breaking moment occurred when Cage directed the students to use words to write a composition. 273 In doing so, Cage realised the potential of language not only as a strategy for musical composition, but for the visual arts.

268 Smith, Fluxus, 26. 269 Smith, Fluxus, 6-7. 270 Robinson, “Brecht,”122. 271 Higgins, Fluxus, 1. Cage taught a class in Experimental composition at the New School for Social Research, New York from 1957 to 1958. 272 Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 2. 273 Robinson, “Brecht,” 104. Robinson cites Dick Higgins, Postface/Jefferson’s Birthday (New York: Something Else Press, 1964), 51. 100

In “Forerunners of Modern Music” Cage defines the role of structure and strategy within musical composition relative to form. Founded on a structural system that combines selection (determinism) and detachment (indeterminism) Cage’s process for composition utilises structure and random events to create a composition:274

“Likewise material may be controlled or not, as one chooses”.275 As such, the criterion for an effective composition includes a balance between the oppositional forces of action (strategy), and inaction (chance), with an awareness of the structural capacity of temporality. This combination contrives to frame and present the ephemeral event.

Cage’s position on structure and strategy was endorsed by his use of random sounds as a source for composition. In the “Future of Music Credo” Cage expands the potential for everyday sounds for music:

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us.

When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per

hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these

sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.276

Effectively, where Cage established random sounds as the event, Brecht established random actions or situations as the event, and where Cage engaged temporality to structure the aural event, Brecht utilised an object or action to specify a field of perception. And, where Cage at first used musical notation then line as a structural division, Brecht used words.277 For example Brecht’s event score Keyhole (1962), uses language to define and propose a framed field of perception as a future event.

274 Robinson, “Brecht,” 102. Robinson cites Dick Higgins as cited in Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. 275 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 62. 276 John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3. 277 Cage followed Brecht and used language to score music. For example, an examination of the score sheets for Cage’s 4’33” shows a generational development from a method of traditional notation, to one of structural divisions, and then language. Cage’s score for 4’33” evolved generationally to its final structure through language. See Robinson, “Brecht,” 359 for David Tudor’s 1989 reconstruction of 101

Keyhole

through either side

one event 278

Keyhole, engages the viewer to look through a keyhole, much as one would look through a camera lens, to observe the active situation on the other side.279 The physical and temporal elements of the work, that is, the keyhole, and the length of time of the performance, combine to structure the event by establishing set parameters to the chance occurrences of the everyday. As such, the ephemeral is introduced as a concrete element and subject for art. The event score’s capacity for future performance allows that the scoresheet is both actual (concrete) and virtual, through its promise of future activity. The flexibility afforded by instructions, whether written, drawn, typed, printed or photocopied, fosters the dissemination of ideas and introduces expanded possibilities for traditional print mediums beyond reproduction. The event score enables the presentation of the work of art in perpetuity.

The act of looking through a keyhole proposes a role for the viewer that is both active and passive. It reflects on the historical tradition of painting where subjects have been presented in personal or everyday activities while positioning the viewer as an outsider, free to observe but not act. It references the framing capacity of the camera, through which the photographer views the chosen field of activity. By harnessing the potential of language, the event may be imagined by the reader, who readily slips into a past experience where they have directly viewed or imagined an event. As such,

Cage’s original 1952 score for 4’33”; 360 for Cage’s 1952 proportioned notation of 4’33”; and 360 for the text version of 1960. 278 Transcribed from George Brecht, Keyhole Event, 1962. Handwritten Event card 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. 279 Higgins, Fluxus, 2. Higgins described Keyhole Event as framing what happened on the other side of a door through a keyhole as minimalistic performance. 102

Brecht’s use of language to realise an event provides a structural alternative for other mediums where the object presented is not the end result.

The event score (language), therefore replaces the musical score as a means to structure and frame activity by specifying a field of perception. In doing so, the event score emphasises the process of choice when combining non-compositional strategies including the readymade and chance procedures, to embrace the ephemeral as both subject and form within the visual arts. Continuing Keyhole as the example, choice is deployed to decide on the subject, that is, the field to be framed by the keyhole, while chance constitutes the random events that may occur within that field.

For Brecht the generic keyhole is a readymade, but not a traditional readymade where the intention is centred on the object being re-contextualised, but rather as a preformed experiential instrument. Its re-contextualisation is achieved through the repositioning of a banal experience of the everyday into the arts. The keyhole, concrete within its object status, both frames and enables an ephemeral visual experience as an equivalent of concrete form comprising the actions and situations of everyday life. As such, Keyhole embodies Cage’s conditions for composition through its balance of structural form and chance content. This has particular relevance to the inherent conditions I encounter when photographing American artist, Dan Flavin’s installations at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (December 2007 and 2009). The camera – positioned by my choosing – frames the event, while the degree or spread of colour is subject to chance elements of light, humidity and position. Effectively this renders the subject ephemeral until made concrete by my decision to take the photograph.

103

Chance and choice are further explored in Brecht’s pivotal work of 1958

Confetti Music,280 which radically differs from painting in that it presents both the ephemeral and the object as outcomes, rather than the object alone. In equating colour with sound and adopting and combining non-compositional strategies of chance and the all-over structure of the grid, Brecht also indirectly references Pollock’s chance/field paintings of the early fifties.

In Brecht’s 1957 essay Chance-Imagery, his analysis of Pollock’s paintings of 1947-1951 identified a model for the chance-image that could be freely applied to the random forms of nature:

Paintings get to be what they are physically through an interaction of method and

material, and they have their effect in an interaction between painting and observer.

As far as the observer is concerned, Pollock has demonstrated that the ability of

humans to appreciate complex chance-images is almost unlimited. Here I would

like to introduce the general term “chance-imagery” to apply to our formation of

images resulting from chance, wherever these occur in nature.281

Brecht’s argument allows a position for both the real and the imagined in the formation of his model for the chance-image.

(The word “imagery” is intentionally ambiguous enough, I think to apply either to

the physical act of creating an image out of real materials, or to the formation of an

image in the mind, say by abstraction from a more complex system.) 282

As such, the realm of chance-image expands exponentially once abstraction is equated to all processes whether physical or conceptual. From this foundation Brecht further expands abstraction to include both proposition (future events) and memories (past

280 George Brecht’s early Event score, Confetti Music, 1958 structures chance by utilising a grid format, similar to a game, in which coloured tags are randomly strewn across a grid to determine both type and position of sound. The players/performers are bound by the score yet free to improvise if the placement of the tags fails to specifically determine when each sound is activated. The grid provides a structure that simultaneously maps the colour/sound and scores the temporal shifts within the composition. 281 Brecht, Chance-Imagery, 6-7. 282 Brecht, Chance-Imagery, 7. 104

events). Keyhole, for example, evokes memory simply through its title and may be realised at any time in the future. Moreover, in allowing the chance-image to include natural chance, forms, content and therefore subject, are democratised:

One reason for doing this is to place the painter’s, musician’s, poet’s, dancer’s

chance images in the same conceptual category as natural chance-images (the

configuration of meadow grasses, the arrangement of stones on a brook bottom),

and to get away from the idea that an artist makes something “special” and beyond

the world of ordinary things.283

It is Brecht’s rejection of any boundaries separating natural and conceptual processes that inevitably leads to his embrasure of language and life as structure, subject and form.

As Australian art historian Julia Robinson argues, for Brecht, abstraction was at the heart of “all conceptual processing of the raw material of reality, and art was simply a special case of this”. Robinson reflects that Brecht “conceived of “abstract” as a process rather than a style, a verb rather than a noun”. 284

Similar to the Ellsworth Kelly’s non-compositional strategies in which he combined the grid, chance, and the readymade subject to form a painting strategy,

Brecht combined language, temporality and readymade subject to construct an event.

Although Kelly’s already-made was preformed in the physical world and Brecht’s readymade was ephemeral by nature, both non-compositional strategies emphasised a choice of subject and relied on the predetermined conditions of physical existence.

3.4 Photography, the Readymade and George Brecht Brecht’s identification of photography’s potential as a readymade is pivotal to the recognition of the events within a field of perception as subject, as Robinson argues:

283 Brecht, Chance-Imagery, 7. 284 Robinson, “Brecht,” 133. 105

Perhaps Brecht envisaged both the readymade and the photograph as capturing a

particular state for a given object in time, revealing it in a particular light, at the

specific moment of its having been seen.285

Moreover, each position or variation of the readymade not only contributes to an indexical position, but expands to include the experience of perception within a defined visual field. The photograph as such, readily equates with the role of the event score as the purveyor of definitive form. Ultimately this heralds an expansion of the readymade to include the photograph as a momentary record of perception, as American art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss argues:

The readymade’s parallel with the photograph is established by its process of

production. Its about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of

reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or

selection.286

Brecht’s understanding of photography’s role is supported by his reference to Duchamp’s Piston de Courant D’air (1914) (Fig. 33) a photograph of three pieces of gauze blowing in the wind.

What is the relation [of the readymade] to photography? (note D[uchamp]’s piston

de courant d’air) Cat. 120

The whole thing has to do with a concern for the object…

Readymade structure, readymade content. Do we consider “readymades” found

pieces assembled?287

In structuring and capturing a single moment within an ephemeral event on film,

Duchamp unveils the potential of the readymade free from the constraints of the object.

285 Robinson, “Brecht,” 186. 286 Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” 206. 287 George Brecht, Notebook IV, September 1959-March 1960, ed. Hermann Braun (Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König , 1997), 131. 106

For Brecht the camera’s aperture, similar to use of language in the event score, structures and captures a visual experience for presentation. This in turn highlights the importance of the process of choice in determining both readymade structure and content, as Brecht notes when considering the nature of the readymade:

Note no.198 (Lebel) Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood

Does the signature Rrose Sélavy…constitute an ambiguous “readymadeism”? (see

Lebel, item 151, p. 171)

The position (importance) of the concept of “choice”. The elements of all works of

art have always been “chosen”. What is chosen: what is emplaced, informed…?

The concept of “control”. (Systems approach)

Note the relation of things one “has made” (the door opening both ways, the hand

in Tu’m [Tu m’].)288

The process of looking through the lens of a camera is inherently an act of choice, in that it is determining structural possibilities for the field of perception. This in turn determines the readymade element and performance field relative to natural phenomena and systems. Choice also expands the readymade to include an active directorial role by incorporating temporal shifts. This is exemplified by “the door opening both ways” (which is framed by a conceptual index of imagined and actual action). Importantly to this research, it also includes the capacity for variation through adjustment. This is exemplified by Confetti Music, where the player has the option to determine outcome when the position of the coloured tags fail to adequately determine the sequence of sounds.

In my studio research, choice is engaged throughout the process, but most significantly in the final stages when determining what colour will or will not work at a particular scale. Here, context, as a qualifying agent to experience, is explored through

288 Brecht, Notebook IV, 131. 107

my digital photographs of Dan Flavin’s light based installations. The work combines an ephemeral experience of coloured light formed from banks of commercially manufactured coloured fluorescent tubes within an architectural structure. However, due to the influence of natural phenomena there is an almost imperceptible shift within the perception of the work determined by when and from which position the viewer sees the work. Being naturally lit at one end by two windows the environment is highly engaged with the day’s progress, shifting from bright light to blackened night. This results in an opposite correlation of intensity of colour, being at its most intense when the ambient light is at its least. As such, the inter-relationship between the external world and the fluorescent light installation is anything but neutral. Similarly, each photographic record, whether film based or digital, will include colour variation resulting from innate characteristics pertaining to each process. Brand and quality variation - add a further element. The sum of these variances renders the photographic record, similar to the experience of the event, subject to a continual process of contextual re-evaluation and change.

3.5 Conclusion Fluxus, like Dada before it, connotes a matrix of ideas and possibilities to be explored through experimentation, whereby ideas from the previous decades could be expanded without the constraints of a singular manifesto, but rather, as tools for individual exploration. Within the context of this research, Cage and Brecht’s expansion of Duchamp’s readymade to include the ephemerality of everyday life and, in particular, the photograph as a readymade subject are of key importance as they facilitate a shift away from the object. Specifically, Cage and Brecht’s identification of the readymade potential of the ephemeral event continues to authorise phenomena, including colour, as

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a readymade subject. This is compounded by Brecht’s recognition of photography as readymade subject.

The ephemeral event of changing coloured light connotes an already-made subject. As such, it may be re-formed as the transfer through the process of painting and as such, has the propensity for transfer from the ephemeral to actual. My studio practice explores the readymade’s ongoing potential as a subject, free from the constraints of a single form. Moreover, the multi-generational transfer utilises the ephemerality of digital colour to transfer information in a concretised form that allows truth of subject to be realised. As such, this investigation shows that Brecht’s realisation of the ephemeral as subject in concert with his realisation of photography as a means of concretisation has ongoing and significant importance for painting.

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34. Marcel Duchamp, Piston de Courant D’air, 1914. Gelatin silver print, 58.74 x 50.17 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. From: University of California Press, http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3w1005ft&chunk.id=d0e1503&toc.id=d0e338& brand=ucpress (accessed June 15, 2013).

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Chapter 4 Blinky Palermo - Art as a Readymade Subject

4.1 Introduction

The German artist Blinky Palermo’s expansion of the readymade to include the art of other artists during the sixties and seventies is of considerable importance to this research. By transferring the intellectual property of artists as the subject, Palermo repositions the artist as a producer of a readymade subject. As such, Palermo’s significant contribution to the expanded position of readymade colour as subject for painting, rests on his refusal to accept definitional boundaries for either painting or the readymade. In response to a wave of conceptual revision, Palermo rejected painting’s traditional object-centric limitations and re-directed attention towards consumption, interaction, intellectual property and experience.289 Paradoxically, this did not result in a rejection of the painted object per se, but expanded painting’s potential through an increased emphasis on context and individual interpretation.

Drawing on a range of disparate and sometimes oppositional influences as varied as the historical avant-garde,290 the French neo-avant-garde,291 Fluxus, and

American abstraction,292 Palermo developed an analytical approach to painting.293 He

289 Lynne Cooke, introduction to Palermo: To the People of New York City, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2009), 11. 290 The historical avant-garde unites various groups and movements at the forefront of art practice in the beginning of the twentieth century including Constructivism, De Stijl, The Bauhaus, and Dada. 291 French Neo-avant-garde refers to Yves Klein and the Nouveau Realistes who were organised by the art critic Pierre Restany to redefine the readymade in terms of appropriation. For a brief summary see: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh “1960,” in Art Since 1900, by Hal Foster et al. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 434-438. 292 American abstraction refers to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism and waves of revision including Minimal artists such as Frank Stella, Brice Marden; Minimalists including Donald Judd and Carl Andre; conceptual artists including Sol Le Witt; and environmental artists including Walter De Maria. 293 Similar to the practice of Fluxus artist George Brecht founded on experimentation and analysis Palermo searched for an expanding premise for painting. For greater insight see Gerhard Richter’s memories as presented in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: The Cage Paintings (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 39-57. The tradition of artists making transcriptions from historically important art works is a well established tradition as exemplified by the French artist Edouard Manet’s (1832-1883) Olympia (1863) painting from the Italian painter Titian’s (1485-1576) Venus of Urbino (1538). See Alan Krell, Manet 111

furthermore extended the domain of abstraction by replacing its universal subject (the ideal) and reliance on convention, with Dada’s informality and expansion of subject to include the everyday. This allowed Palermo to redefine established subject boundaries for painting by testing and then rejecting the limitations of the painted object and its contextual position. Palermo explored possibilities by examining seminal works of abstraction, including those of the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich and the seminal Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian. This, however, was not with the intention of identifying and entrenching primary values, but rather as a source for absorbing and redeploying the recognisable colour systems and process of other artists. As such,

Palermo adopted the intellectual property of artists as a readymade subject suitable for transfer.

Palermo’s expanding subject was not however, limited to either historical or contemporary art and had developed by the seventies to utilise his own colour systems including those founded on memory and imagination. To explore these themes it is necessary to identify and analyse Palermo’s developing ideas through key works. The individual events that populate his chronological development are also important, including his formative years as a student under the German artist Joseph Beuys and

Palermo’s Germany in general. Moreover, the influence of Fluxus should not be underestimated. Palermo’s practice has particular relevance to my research in that my subject is sourced directly from the artwork of American artist Dan Flavin. My process of transfer however, negates recognition of Flavin’s colour systems.

(London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 55. Where Palermo differed from past practice is that he explored colour, rather than image as a preformed subject for painting. 112

4.2 Background

Palermo’s practice has been described as an incursion into the social and administrative spaces of contemporary society, as largely mnemonic,294 and as part of a shared response to the collapse of the utopian values and lost promises of avant-garde abstraction.295 Benjamin Buchloh advanced the argument that “American neo-positivist and empiricist formalism allowed him to articulate the contrary predicaments in postwar Germany”.296 In doing so, Buchloh locates the origin of Palermo’s diversity within the conflicting positions of the visual arts relevant to post-World War II, and the emerging counter culture spirit of the sixties.297 As such, to understand Palermo’s experimental approach to painting and the importance of cross-dialogue or exchange it is necessary to briefly explore the complexity of this period.

Germany as a united national entity no longer existed after the Second

World War having been divided between the Federal Republic of Germany (West

Germany)298 and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).299 In West

Germany, the separation led to the relaxation of post-war restrictions. This allowed

Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard to introduce the social market economy as a balanced system that included liberal capitalism, union bargaining and a welfare state.300 Its relaxed administrative approach to capitalism succeeded in developing a

294Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “1972,” in Art Since 1900, by Hal Foster et al. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 559. Buchloh describes Palermo’s practice as mnemonic, as it recalls the lost promise of abstraction. 295 Buchloh, “1972,” 558-559. 296 Buchloh, “1972,” 559. 297 Buchloh, “1972,” 558-559. 298 The Federal Republic of Germany was formed in 1949 from the Western Zones occupied by the United Kingdom, France and the United States after the end of the Second World War. 299 The German Democratic Republic was formed in 1949 from the Soviet Zones of occupation after the Second World War. 300 Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ludwig Erhard,” accessed January 1, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/191359/Ludwig-Erhard 113

platform for success that was commonly described as the economic miracle.301

Conversely, East Germany followed the Soviet economic model for collective advancement, and failed to match the rapid economic success achieved in the West.302

By the mid-sixties, regional centres in West Germany were prospering, as was the burgeoning art market, and in 1967, Cologne was chosen by the newly formed

Verein Progressiver Deitscher Kunshändler (Association of Progressive Art Dealers) to host the first art fair: Kunstmarket 67.303 Similarly Düsseldorf had become an important centre for the arts. Indeed, the prestige of the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, which

Palermo attended, was well established.

Compounding the strengthening socio-economic awareness of art was the passing of West Germany’s copyright law on the first of January 1966, which strove to achieve social fairness and economic prosperity. The law granted artists the right to one per cent of the resale price of an artwork and in doing so recognised the artist’s ongoing intellectual content. In 1969 this was further endorsed when the royalty percentage was raised to five per cent.304 Effectively this allows the virtual aspect of art, that is, concept, to be viewed as a distinct element.

4.3 Porosity and Exchange In 1984 Beuys described Palermo’s openness to influence: “He just has a far greater porosity than the others. He points to something different.”305 It is important to note that it is not Palermo’s susceptibility to influence that is of interest, but his

301 Christine Mehring “Light Bulbs and Monochromes: The Elective Affinities of Richter and Palermo,” in Palermo: To the People of New York City, ed. Lynne Cook and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder (Dusseldorf: Richter, 2009), 45. 302 Mehring, Palermo, 67. 303 Mehring, Palermo, 67. 304 Mehring, Palermo, 67. 305 Lazlo Glozer, “On Blinky Palermo: A Conversation with Joseph Beuys,” in Palermo: To the People of New York City, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2009), 27. Interview first published in Arts magazine 64, 1990. 114

processes of filtration and formation, that is, his ability to absorb the processes, materials and colour systems of other artists as strategies for use in his own work.

David Reed, the American abstract painter used Palermo’s own word “exchange,” to define Palermo’s openness as a process of interchange rather than acquiescence.306 In doing so, Reed acknowledges and places emphasis on Palermo’s interaction within a contemporary discourse, where originality or authorship are moot:

I’m not talking about influence; I’m not talking about competition – who did

something first or better. It’s a misconception that one person can alone claim

artistic discovery, since art develops socially and psychologically.307

The complexity of Palermo’s process of exchange is further enriched by the intricate weave of personal and objective dialogue, collaboration, and direct experience, with which Palermo’s practice is marked. This is further expanded by both historical and contemporary models being viewed by Palermo as an opportunity for exchange.308 As such, each observed model of practice, whether formal or informal, or, inside or outside painting’s hegemony, offered a means for Palermo to reassess his shifting position within an increasingly relaxed mode of contemporary exchange. As Reed observes,

Palermo’s approach to his peers and their work was far from formal:

Looking over the notes from my talks with artists who knew Palermo, I’ve been

struck by a common theme: Alan Uglow309 told me how he and Palermo cut a hole

in the fence so they could sneak onto the field at Pratt to play soccer. Ryman310 and

Palermo played pool in Ryman’s studio while discussing the technical problems of

306 Pia Gottschaller, Palermo: Inside His Images (Munich: Siegl, 2004), 75. In Palermo’s application to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) of December 1974 one of his arguments for visa extension is based on the “exchange of ideas with American artists”. 307 Reed, “Exchange,” 111. 308 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in conversation with Lynne Cooke, “On Palermo,” in Palermo, ed. Susanne Küper, Ulrike Groos and Vanessa Joan Müller (Düsseldorf: Dumont, 2007), 154. In a discussion with Buchloh, Cooke raises the possibility of Palermo seeing artist’s practice outside of historical sequence and elicited Buchloh’s positive response when she stated that Palermo would see Malevich and Barnett Newman simultaneously. 309 Alan Uglow (1941-2011): English born, New York resident abstract artist. 310 Robert Ryman (1930- ): American abstract painter known for his all white paintings. 115

painting on metal surfaces…Exchanges can happen in many ways: games are one.

Play can be a way to open up rigid systems.311

The Australian art historian and curator Lynne Cooke312 has noted Palermo’s openness to exchange as having origins within an internationalist approach to subject boundaries and within Fluxus’s informal model of post studio practice.313 Freed from the constraints of disciplinary conventions Palermo used these exchanges to embark on a reassessment of colour as intellectual property. This allowed a radical expansion of the readymade to incorporate art practice, and in particular signatured colours.

4.4 The Sphere of Influence

During his brief career Palermo created five distinct groups of work in overlapping time periods that included drawings and works on paper, paintings and objects, cloth paintings, wall paintings, and metal paintings. Although each body of work can be distinguished by particular physical characteristics and varying agendas, each was formed in response to Palermo’s increasing level of awareness of painting’s complexity and possibilities. Indeed, what becomes evident is Palermo’s neo-avant- garde stance, manifest in his development of a unique pathway for painting that foregoes a reiteration of convention.

As a student, Palermo’s foundational position as an artist and painter evolved away from convention, primarily due to the influence of his professor, Joseph

Beuys. Beuys’s approach to art education did not focus on instruction, but rather on promoting an environment of self-learning. Beuys encouraged the students to justify their own position and decisions within the context of individual circumstance by

311 David Reed, “Exchange,” 128. 312 Lynne Cooke, formerly the Chief Curator at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid Spain and currently the Curator at Large, Dia Center for the Arts, New York. 313 Lynne Cooke, “An-Other Alexandrian,” in Palermo: To the People of New York City, ed. Lynne Cook and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2009), 171. 116

rejecting established conventions to assess the success or failure of work, advocating rather, for the artist to form individual criteria for evaluation.314 At this time Beuys’s own practice was attracting increasing attention in response to his sculpture, installation, and performance work. Despite this, he rejected instilling his own practice as an exemplar, preferring the group discussion – often away from the studio – as a means to dissect and weigh concerns of contemporary art practice and society in general.315

Under Beuys’s tutelage, ‘Blinky Palermo’ was ostensibly ‘born’ at nineteen years of age when he adopted both a new name and a new direction in abstract painting.316 Under Beuys, Palermo instigated a radical shift within his art practice that involved the beginning of an extended dialogue with the legacies of the historical avant- garde.317 However, for Palermo this dialogue was anything but confined to the past as it introduced the concepts of peers, including for example, Malevich’s colour, that is,

314 Mehring, Palermo, 8. 315 Mehring Palermo, 11. 316 Blinky Palermo, born in Leipzig in 1943, in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) as one of twin boys. Named Peter Schwarz before being adopted in that same year by Erica and Wilhelm Heisterkamp and renamed Peter Heisterkamp. In 1952 the Heisterkamps leave Leipzig and relocated to Münster in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) a move designed to advance the family’s economic prospects. In 1962, after a brief period of study at the Werkkunstschle (School for Arts and Trade) Heisterkamp commenced study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with the German painter Bruno Goller and then from 1964 to 1968 with the German sculptor, installation, and performance artist Joseph Beuys. Shortly after joining Beuys’s class Heisterkamp adopted the name Blinky Palermo after fellow student Anatol commented on Heisterkamp’s similar appearance to the American gangster Blinky Palermo. Palermo’s name change accompanied the new direction in his painting towards abstraction. In 1962 Palermo, along with fellow art students Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke attended Festus-Fluxus- Fluxorum at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The Fluxus festival included work by Beuys, the American experimental composer and artist John Cage, the American Fluxus artists George Brecht and George Macuinas, and the Korean Fluxus artist and pioneer of video art Nam June Paik. In 1964, Palermo and Richter attend the Fluxus Festival der Neuen Kunst at the Technische Hochschle, in Acchen. In 1970 Palermo travels to New York with Richter. In 1973 Palermo is awarded the Berliner Kunstpreis and returns to New York where he visits the American abstract painter Robert Ryman. In December that year Palermo moves to New York on a semi-permanent basis. In 1974 Palermo and the German artist Imi Knoebel take a road trip through the South West of the United States visiting the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas and the American sculptor Walter De Maria’s Las Vegas Piece. He also befriends the American painter Brice Marden. 1976 Palermo returns to Germany. On February 17, 1977 Palermo dies, at the age of thirty-three on Kurumba Island in the Maldives. 317 Bernhart Schwenk, “Painting in the Social Dimension: Palermo’s Rhineland Years, 1962-1973,” trans. Ishbel Flett, in Palermo: To the People of New York City, ed. Lynne Cook and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2009), 32-33. 117

standardised red and white, as a preformed system.318 The radical nature of Palermo’s adoption of an established colour system could be dismissed as student homage, however his continued questioning of the preformed status of colour suggests the nascent recognition of an alternative readymade subject.319 In a conversation between

Palermo and the American artist Robin Winters the subject of colour as an element of an artist’s style was raised.

For example, I remember that we had a long conversation about his blue triangle…

Beuys’ use of that brown… and Yves Klein’s blue also came up because we

discussed how important it was to have a signature style. You can say that it was an

early conversation about ‘branding’ and what it means to build an identity.320

Winter’s recollection attests to Palermo’s awareness of colour’s potential to denote the art of a particular artist. It also shows that Palermo was cognisant of brand and therefore the deliberate transfer of intellectual property, in that it is the recognisable brand rather than the aesthetics, concerns or ideals that are transferred. In 1977 after

Palermo’s death the German artist Imi Knoebel321 completed 24 Farben-für Blinky (24

Colours – for Blinky) (Fig. 35) in an act of continuing exchange with his friend and peer

Blinky Palermo. The work has been described as an appropriation of colour and theme.322 However, the work effectively endorses Palermo’s logic by continuing an art based conversation that recognises Palermo’s strategy of utilising another artist’s intellectual property as a readymade, in this case Palermo’s own expanded palette:

318 Gottschaller, Palermo, 39, Fig. 8. Gottschaller illustrates the continuing importance of Malevich for Palermo by reproducing a 1975 photograph of Palermo’s desk in his Fulton Street Studio, New York that includes Malevich’s The Non-objective World published in German in 1962. 319 Whether Palermo travelled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam or relied on reproductions is largely inconsequential as Malevich’s Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915 had entered the contemporary dialogue through the publication of Malevich’s The Non-objective World and the administrative efforts of Stedelijk Museum. 320 Buchloh, “The Palermo Triangles,” 35. 321 Imi (Klaus Wolf) Knoebel (1940- ): German abstract painter and sculptor. 322 Petra Richter, “Between Beuys and Malevich: Knoebel’s Time At The Düsseldorf Art Academy,” in Imi Knoebel: ICH NICHT Neue Werke (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 30. 118

Well, Palermo was a master of colour and that’s why I dedicated it to him. He was dead

and it wasn’t until then that I took the colours. It was not without reason that he

accompanied me in my search for the green. I didn’t have any experience with colours.

I didn’t even know what they were. I had never before painted a colour. And that was

actually an act of violence – to take the colours, to use them. But the time was ripe!323

Compounding Palermo’s recognition of the art brand was his first hand experience of Fluxus freedom (Fig. 36).324 Palermo’s friend and collaborator, the

German artist Gerhard Richter,325 recalls the developmental importance of Fluxus to fellow students at the Kustakademie, including Palermo.326

It was a key experience. It put a lot of things in motion and created a sense of

joining. Fluxus liberated our minds, our thinking. – Gerhard Richter, 2 April 2008.

327

Indeed for Palermo, Fluxus did not constitute an end in itself, but rather a fluid model for experimentation and analysis that valued both structure and chance.

323 Reed, “Exchange,” 112. 324 Beuys collaborated with George Macuinas to organise the Fluxus Festival at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in 1963; and participated in the Fluxus festival at Technishe Hooschule, Aachen in 1964. 325 Gerhard Richter (1932-): German artist noted for his pursuit of painting’s validity as a relevant method of art practice. Able to shift between abstract and representational modes Richter explored painting’s premise free from orthodox restrictive definitions of practice. He commenced his exploration of readymade colour in the 1960s with a series of paintings of commercial paint colour charts. For example Ten Large Colour Panels (1966) explored colour as a subject away from description, symbolism and expression. For further reading see: Ann Temkin, “Gerhard Richter” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, by Ann Temkin, ed. Emily Hall, Anne Doran, Nell McClister and Stephen Robert Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 90. In the 1970s Richter returned to the subject of readymade colour with a further series of colour chart paintings and a new series of larges scale monochromatic paintings formed from photographs of coloured paint samples. BMW commissioned the monochromes: Yellow (1973), Red (1973), Blue (1973), for its corporate headquarters in Munich. For further reading see: Helmet Friedel, Gerhard Richter: Red, Yellow, Blue The BMW Paintings (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel 2007). In 2007 Richter returned to readymade industrially sourced colour with a major work 4900 Colours exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London. In this work Richter explored chance as a determining factor for the arrangement of colour within a complex system of interchangeable grids. For further reading see: Melissa Larner, Rebecca Morrill and Sam Phillips ed. Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours (London; Ostifildern: Sepentine Gallery; Hatje Cantz, 2007). Richter’s contribution to the subject of readymade colour continues to be of considerable importance. However, Blinky Palermo’s exploration of artists colour systems as a form of readymade has more immediate relevance to my studio research and particularly the body of work generated for this thesis. 326 Palermo and Richter attended Fluxus festivals at the Kustakademie Düsseldorf in 1963 and at the Technishe Hooschule, Aachen in 1964. 327 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: The Cage Paintings (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 48. This statement was excerpted from a three-way conversation between Richter and Catharina Manchanda in Richter’s Cologne studio, and Robert Storr on a telephone link from New Haven, USA. 119

Fluxus’s expansion of the definitional parameters of the readymade, to include the ephemeral actions of the everyday, proved pivotal for Palermo’s developing practice. Fluxus, in this capacity, laid the foundation for his pursuit of colour’s potential as both conveyor of external subject and a vehicle for ephemeral experience.

Consequently, Palermo’s expansion of painting’s form included experience and interaction. Where Palermo’s approach to the readymade differed from previous models however, was his recognition of art and artistic identity as a social product and therefore a pre-existing or readymade subject.

4.5 Colour and Meaning

The installation Wandmalerei und Skulptur (1971) (Fig. 37) at Galerie

Frederich in Cologne is of significance to this research as it introduces context as a purveyor of meaning. The work comprised an installation of plaster cast portraits of

Richter and Palermo painted grey and placed on white plinths facing each other in central positions within the room. Palermo hand painted the walls ochre to heighten the viewer’s awareness of the space and locate the viewing experience in the present.328 In doing so, Palermo’s annexation of the architectural space presented Richter’s historically founded objectification in an interactive dialogue with the contemporary art environment, away from conventional commodification and consumption.

His use of exterior house paint introduced a base element into a high art discourse; this however is not as a disruptive force, but rather one of assurance, as the particular paint (Bayerisher Ocker Münchner ocker) was drawn from the local architectural palette.329 The introduction of association as a determining factor for colour recognition became an influential element Palermo continued to investigate

328 Mehring, “Light Bulbs,” 68. 329 Mehring “Light Bulbs,” 68-9. 120

through his use of a preformed colour as both physical material and subject. For example, in To the People of New York City (1976), Palermo allows the viewer to determine the colour’s contextual meaning (German flag and the Native American

Indian are the primary speculations) based on personal experience rather than directive.330

It could be argued that today's art operates in a dialogue of explanation, so while my paintings remain largely untitled, their subject source is generally available through support documentation. This aside, the viewer is free to conjecture origin based on their individual experience. Unlike Palermo's approach to locating the source of his subject, my strategy is to remove any direct reference, allowing the viewer to respond, undirected, to the sensate qualities of the artwork. Moreover, the subject of my studio based research, that is, Dan Flavin’s permanent installations at Marfa, Texas is an unknown entity for most viewers and as such, will neither inform nor limit the colour’s contextual meaning. Effectively this allows the viewer to imbue my paintings with their own experience of a particular colour.

4.6 Colour Systems, Art, and the Readymade Subject

Palermo’s investigation of readymade colour as an expanded subject for painting melds the formal language of abstraction with the informal principles of

Dada.331 His divergent concerns and openness to experimental procedures enabled him to expand the definitional parameters of the readymade to include colour systems, including fully formed elements of art practice, as available for transfer. To understand

330 Mehring, Palermo, 171. 331 Storr, Gerhard Richter, 50. Storr quotes Richter’s reminiscence of Fluxus in terms of freedom, which when applied to Palermo’s approach to abstraction, allowed for his use of the language of abstraction without being bound by its conventions. This freedom Richter identified had its origins in Dada’s informal approach to art practice. 121

this expansion and its ramifications it is necessary to examine key examples of his practice and their contextual premise.

Buchloh argued that Palermo’s exploration of Malevich’s abstract painting stemmed from his need to fill the cultural vacuum resulting from the National Socialist government’s ban on avant-garde practice prior to the Second World War.332 For

Buchloh, Palermo’s examination of Malevich’s painting laid “the foundations of a new abstraction”333 that enabled reassessment of French artist Yves Klein’s colour brand, beyond the limitations of art.

…rather than claiming to have invented a new hue and patenting it, as Klein did

with International Klein Blue, 334 Palermo reduced his triangular monochrome blue

paintings to the status of “the readymade and the tube of paint,” 335as Thierry de

Duve once identified Duchamp’s approach to color.336

Buchloh argues that Palermo’s actions reposition International Klein Blue alongside other defined states of colour. He further argues that this act physically promoted colour consumption by the “participating spectator,” that is, the cultural consumer.337

Arguably, Palermo pushed this point further by using the blue triangle as his exhibition invitation, thereby completing the transfer of Klein’s brand to his own (Fig. 38).

332 Beginning with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in1933 and culminating in the 1937 travelling exhibition, Degenerate Art, the Nationalist Socialist government actively opposed avant-garde art and practice. Artists identified as degenerate were forbidden from selling their work and were dismissed from teaching or public positions. This policy lead to an exodus of artists and intellectuals from Germany. 333 Buchloh, “The Palermo Triangles,” 28. 334 Hannah Weitermeir, Yves Klein, 1928-1962: International Klein Blue Klein (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 17. Klein received patent no. 63741 dated 18 May 1960 that declared the chemical composition of IKB a protected invention. 335de Duve, Kant after Duchamp,162. Marcel Duchamp interviewed by Katherine Kuh originally referenced in Thierry de Duve “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” in Artforum, issue 24. No.9 (May 1986), 110-21. Can also be found in: Katherine Kuh The Artist’s Voice: Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (New York Harper and Rowe, 1962) 90. 336 Buchloh, “Palermo Triangles,” 37. 337 Buchloh, “Palermo Triangles,” 37. 122

The German art historian and curator Christoph Schreier 338 in his essay

“Merely an Aura and Yet a Force: On Palermo’s Paper Work” introduces Palermo’s relationship with previous artwork as a model for practice.

Palermo neither abstracts his vocabulary of form from the optical data provided by

external reality nor – at least not at the time – does he want to act back on it. His art,

as paradoxical as this may sound, is born of art, of the search for form, for the

definitive pictorial solution, for which there is, logically, no magic formula.

Only other pictures, other artists, can serve as models - and this only

in a metaphorical sense, for example, artists like Mondrian or Malevich, whom

Palermo admired particularly … The challenge posed by the canvas, the white

sheet of paper, is always a new, completely concrete and individual one. There are

no preformulated solutions.339

Where Schreier proposes a dialogue confined to the metaphorical I will argue that

Palermo’s relationship with models of practice went beyond the metaphorical and embraced the preformed solution of colour systems. Importantly this was not as a transfer that presents the work as a fait accompli, but rather, as a readymade element and functioning component that is transferable in the production of art. For Palermo art is an elemental form from which art can be made. For example, in Composition with 8

Red Rectangles (1964) (Fig. 39) Palermo assumes a readymade system of colour and reductive geometry in a direct response to Malevich’s Suprematist Painting: Eight Red

Rectangles (1915) (Fig. 40), a work that stands as an exemplar of non-objective practice.340 Colour in Malevich’s work is utilised to unite a group of disparate geometric forms within a single movement. Its remnant figure-ground structure presents a cluster of uniformly red rectangular forms within a diagonal movement across a field of white.

338 Christoph Schreier: German art historian and curator; currently Deputy Director Kunstmuseum Bonn. 339 Christoph Schreier, “Merely An Aura And Yet A Force: On Palermo’s Paper Work,” in Palermo Volume II, ed. Thordis Moellor (Bonn: Oktagon, 1995), 254. 340 Buchloh, “Palermo Triangles,” 28. 123

Palermo’s Composition with 8 Red Rectangles responds to Suprematist Painting: Eight

Red Rectangles by negating the diagonal movement and deliberately flattening the picture plane. He also undermines any allusions to a pursuit of the ideal by the inclusion of an incomplete red form in the top left hand corner of the painting that carries an implication of continuity beyond the canvas. The subtle differences between Palermo’s and Malevich’s trace of hand places emphasis on the author’s presence as a force within the work. These variances from the original, both in composition and execution, serve to highlight the transfer of an idea as subject re-formed through the act of another artist.

In my studio based research it is similarly the idea that is transferred, in that only isolated colours (rather than the complete experience) are transferred from the multi- hued originals of Flavin’s installation.

Following his adoption of the colour system, Palermo continued his investigation of the readymade subject by exploring the alternative outcomes of non- compositional and non-representational strategies for painting. To illustrate, Flipper

(Fig. 41) and Straight, (Fig. 42) both of 1965, present differing investigations with clearly defined intentions. The strategic intention of Flipper concerns the preformed or readymade subject (the pinball machine brand) and its transfer and re-formation through painting, whilst the intention of Straight is to continue the investigation of already-made colour systems (Mondrian’s non-objective painting).

Although Palermo utilised the non-hierarchical structure of the grid in both paintings, what separates them is the division between the already-made subject and the emerging and radical proposition that practice or process can exist as a readymade. To illustrate: Flipper introduced the already-made subject (the colour system on the pinball machine) into his abstraction, thereby contributing to its expansion by introducing an

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external context.341 Straight expanded the idea further by denying the status or claim of the individual, reducing it instead to a recognised brand, in this case the Mondrian brand.

The origin of Flipper’s gridded colour resides in its function as the trademark identifying Palermo’s favourite pinball machine in a Düsseldorf bar.342 Conversely,

Straight’s origins exist within the tradition of non-objective painting. The red, yellow, blue, and white are signature elements within Mondrian’s pre-existing system of colour.

Once identified, the subject is available for transfer and re-formation as an elemental component in painting. Effectively, what separates Flipper’s preformed subject from

Straight’s is that Flipper’s original purpose is located within commodity production and collective consumption. Straight, however, is drawn from the Mondrian model embodying an individual solution that stands as an anathema to the arena of mass production and consumption.343

Mondrian’s New York City (1942) (Fig. 43) presents a possible model for

Straight. Its individual solution formed from horizontal and vertical overlays of yellow, red and blue taped lines over a white field could have been viewed by Palermo in

Michel Seuphor’s definitive and widely disseminated monograph on Piet Mondrian344 published in 1956.345 As per the Coca-Cola argument, (which establishes that variations within an established brand are superseded by brand identity), colour variances within the Mondrian brand are irrelevant in determining its readymade status. Brand identity is determined by Mondrian’s use of yellow, red, blue and white, which had been firmly established through a history of consumption via exhibition and publication. Similarly,

342 Ann Temkin, “Blinky Palermo,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, by Ann Temkin, ed. Emily Hall, Anne Doran, Nell McClister and Stephen Robert Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 46. 343 Gottschaller, Palermo, 41- 45. Gottschaller analyses Palermo’s painting in reference to Malevich and Mondrian. 344 Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian: Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1956), 183. 345 It is highly unlikely that Palermo would have viewed Mondrian’s New York City (unfinished), 1941, as it was in a private collection in New York at the time and did not enter the local collection of the Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf until 1980. 125

variation from the original colours decorating the pinball machine are irrelevant, as they have been transformed and relocated in Palermo’s personal biography, thereby conveying biographical information and implications of self-referentiality as well as the colours of the brand.

4.7 Readymade Colour and Consumption

It is near impossible to examine Palermo’s cloth paintings without referencing Ellsworth Kelly’s Red Yellow Blue White (1952), which stands as an archetypal model for painting formed from commercial fabrics.346 Whether Palermo was aware of Kelly’s work is immaterial, as close examination reveals that while these artists are united by similarities of process and material, their strategies differed. Where

Kelly’s work formed a singular investigation of readymade colour within non- compositional strategies, Palermo’s cloth paintings used the commercial fabric as a readymade coloured element within a compositional process. Also, where Kelly’s work explored links with readymade colour as a commodity, Palermo explored art as a commodity for trade. Indeed his stoffbilder or cloth paintings were introduced as a strategic foray into the market place and a direct response to the increasing presence and power of American abstract art in post-war West Germany.347

Having joined the Heiner Frederich Gallery in Cologne in 1966 Palermo was introduced first hand to an array of contemporary American artists including the

Minimalists Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, the conceptual artist and early

Fluxus collaborator Walter De Maria, and the reductive and serial abstract painter

346 Yve-Alain Bois, Christine Mehring and Ann Temkin, “Palermo’s Cloth Pictures: Modernism by the Yard,” in Palermo, ed. Susanne Küper, Ulrike Groos and Vanessa Joan Müller (Düsseldorf: Dumont, 2007), 46-49. 347 Mehring, Palermo, 46. 126

Robert Ryman.348 These artists introduced Palermo to a new focus on the object through an emphasis on experience and conceptual position. This contact rapidly expanded

Palermo’s understanding of American abstract painting beyond his initial experience of

Abstract Expressionism. Expanding this further, the American presence in Europe,

(manifest as exhibitions of post-war Abstraction and the heroic paintings of Jackson

Pollock and the New York School) continued to evolve with the emergence of subsequent waves of Minimal and concept based art. 349

Palermo’s early cloth paintings strongly referenced the formal concerns of

American abstraction and in particular those of Newman and Rothko, but away from any pursuit of the ideal. The twin, vertical, coloured panels of Palermo’s first cloth painting, Rot-Rosa (1966 -1967) (Fig. 44) for example, explore the ambiguous relationship between the object and the void as a formal subject for painting. Indeed, each vertical colour panel competes for ascendancy in an endless struggle to dominate the picture plane.

Palermo’s reaction to the new American art was one of open exchange.

Where the Americans rejected any links with a representational tradition, Palermo embraced them.350 For example, where the American Minimalists, including Judd and

Andre, introduced materials on the basis of utility,351 Palermo introduced functional products as a means to create work, but also as subject, placing new emphasis on their contextual position and as readymade elements. For example, Rosa/Orange/Schwarz

(1968) (Fig. 45) was made from strong bright fabrics as a robust material for construction and epitomised home decoration of that time, thereby making the material

348 Mehring, Palermo, 63. 349 Mehring, Palermo, 142. 350 Buchloh, “On Palermo,” 152. 351 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, New York University Press, 2005), 187. First published Arts Year Book 8, 1965. 127

choice one of functionality and subject.352 Palermo’s decision to introduce a dominant horizontal structure into his cloth paintings, furthermore, functioned as a marketing strategy designed to prompt residual associations with the landscape. Ostensibly this format increased market viability and placed emphasis on the art object as a consumable.353

The cloth paintings allowed Palermo to fully explore the multi-generational potential of colour as subject. In 1971 Palermo produced Projection (Fig. 46), a limited edition of offset lithographic prints from a photograph taken of a slide of a cloth painting, projected onto an external wall. The work projected is believed to be Ohne

Title (Untitled), (1969) (Fig. 47) a slightly vertical off-square work comprising two blue panels (of differing dimensions) and a red panel.354 By projecting the work into an urban environment Palermo re-contextualised its consumption away from its status as a commodified art object and relocates it as an ephemeral experience. In doing so,

Palermo introduces a shift away from the object–centric conventions of painting towards an interactive engagement with the public space.355 Palermo’s projection further extends the definitional parameters of the readymade by introducing the ephemeral event. The projected image stands as a multi-generational work that expands the definitional premise of the readymade to include not only art, but Palermo’s art.

Furthermore, the projection stands as further evidence of painting’s ongoing potential for an expanded dialogue within the social space. However, by photographing an ephemeral event to create a new art work, Palermo brings it back to the realm of the concrete, which is then reinvested with commodity status by being printed and sold as a limited edition. In this way Palermo tests, negates and deploys new boundaries for

352 Mehring, Palermo, 55. 353 Mehring, Palermo, 59. 354 Küper, “Stairway,” 95, n. 1. 355 Küper, “Stairway,” 79-80. 128

colour as subject by allowing colour to simultaneously exist as object, commodity

(fabric), event, experience, commodity (photograph), commodity (print) and commodity

(the reproduced archive).

In his final strategy to expand subject, Palermo introduced the imagined readymade, whereby the colour remembered from a particular experience is transferred as a readymade to create the artwork. Times of the day I (1974-5) (Fig. 48) for example, occupies the position of an imagined subject drawn from his experience of shifts in light and colour through the day. Compounding this, the green Palermo remembered or imagined from the experience, is then transferred as a readymade colour to create Times of the day V (1976) (Fig. 49). In doing so, Palermo tests the rigidity of abstraction’s boundaries exemplified by Mondrian’s use of primary and non colours through his introduction of an imagined colour (green), and its associative references. In 1975

Palermo continued to engage the imaginary through the Coney Island series of paintings

(Fig. 50 and 51), which utilised his memory of coloured beach huts drawn from a visit to the fun pier.

These aspects of Palermo’s practice foreshadow my research into the expansion of the readymade subject to include digital colour. Here readymade colour, sourced from Flavin’s light installations at Marfa, is re-formed across multiple generations using digital printers and painting. As such, my practice comprises an exploration of painting’s continuing role in the expansion of readymade colour as subject. In accord with Palermo, my practice explores the complex meld of collective and individual contributions to readymade subject that range from the personal and biographical (and occasionally imagined) to the preformed and systematic products of society.

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4.8 Readymade Colour, the Monochrome

Throughout his practice Palermo explored readymade colour within the context of monochrome painting. Whether referencing pre-existing models including

Rodchenko’s final statement for painting Pure Red Colour, Pure Blue Colour, Pure

Yellow Colour (1921), or Yves Klein’s patented International Klein Blue, Palermo explored the potential of utilitarian, readymade paint as a vehicle for high art. In doing so, Palermo questioned the proprietorial claims of defined art materials and art spaces.

Furthermore, his use of utilitarian paint proved that readymade colour could be ascribed new meaning through re-contextualisation.

Palermo’s contribution to the international art exhibition Documenta 5 in

Kassel West Germany 1972, Zu Wandmalerei Treppenhaus (To Mural Staircase) comprised painting the landing wall of the stairwell in a monochrome orange using a rust preventative undercoating paint (Fig. 52). The work, despite its use of everyday materials and its physical positioning within a transitional context, induced an experience beyond the pedestrian. For Buchloh, it is a surprising outcome, which he says “attains an unforeseen transcendence”.356 It is important to note that Buchloh’s use of the word ‘transcendence’ does not denote an engagement with the ideal. Rather, as

Ann Temkin explains of the post-ideal generation of artist:

… the color chart furnishes a compelling allegory for an approach to color adopted

by those contemporary artists who disavow transcendent goals of truth or beauty

while forging a new quotidian sublime.357

In the year following Documenta 5, Palermo returned to the monochrome with three untitled one metre square paintings on steel. Again Palermo used rust inhibiting undercoats, selecting three differing types based on colour (red, grey and

356 Buchloh, “1972,” 559. 357 Temkin, “Color Shift,” 18. 130

orange) (Fig. 53, 54, and 55). While distinctly anti-illusionistic, each painting evokes an experience of the void that undermines the physical presence of the object. The medium scale format, as opposed to the experiential nature of an all over colour filling the viewer’s peripheral vision, presents a contemplative experience where the presence of the object reaffirms the viewer’s position within the everyday. Compounding this, the medium scale format signifies the object as art, which when contextualised by the gallery wall conflates to contradict the utility of the coloured paint in favour of the high art experience. In doing so Palermo undoes the utilitarian semiotics of particular colours, thereby further expanding colour as subject to include the metaphysical.

German-American art historian Christine Mehring358 argues that Palermo’s enquiry, beyond the material, lay in his approach to painting as image first, and object second. Palermo states, “If I were to work with canvas and stretcher, the whole image of the pictures would be a completely different one”.359 With this quote Mehring introduces the discrepancies of translation as a prime force in the continuing interpretation of Palermo’s material concerns.

The original German phrasing here is peculiar (and is even more awkward in

English translation) – and it is telling. Palermo did not write that the pictures, that

is the Bilder, would be different if made of materials other than metal, but that the

“image” of the pictures, das Image der Bilder, would be different.360

Effectively, Mehring’s translation of Palermo’s view of his work includes the whole of the surrounding architecture. In doing so, she positions Palermo’s art as experiential in accord with both Buchloh’s “transcendence,” and Temkin’s “quotidian sublime” in that the work expands to include the everyday environment while transmitting the

358 Christine Mehring, German-American art historian: Currently Associate Professor Art History and the College, The University of Chicago. 359 Mehring, Palermo, 151. An excerpt from Blinky Palermo’s letter to Evelyn Weiss for the XIII Bienal de São Paulo as reproduced by Mehring. 360 Mehring, Palermo, 151. 131

experience of high art. Mehring’s translation gives a further insight into how Palermo views the art of others, that is, as part of an image, and thereby as an element, a subject available for transfer.

4.9 Conclusion

Palermo’s expansion of the readymade subject to include the intellectual property identified in the colour systems of artists, should not be underestimated. Indeed, by the early seventies Palermo had developed his strategies and his brand identity sufficiently to allow his own colours to become a subject for transfer. The blue triangle is a particular example that reappears continually throughout his oeuvre in many forms, which, despite arguably having its origins in Yves Klein’s blue, for example Untitled

Blue Monochrome, 1956 (Fig. 56), had come to signify the Palermo brand (Fig. 57 and

58).361 From 1974 onwards Palermo also included his imagination as a subject source.

Effectively this expanded his subject beyond the material and served to negate any limitation previously ascribed to subject. This, when compounded by Palermo’s ability to re-contextualise the utilitarian into the domain of high art, confirms Palermo as key to the exponential expansion of readymade colour as subject.

Using digital processes and technologies, my research further extends the avant-garde provenance of colour as subject. These innovative experiments with new technologies and studio methods, and their outcomes are described and analysed in the following chapter.

361 Buchloh, “Palermo Triangles,” 37. Buchloh explored brand identity and consumption relative to Palermo’s Blaues Dreik (Blue Triangle), 1969 a work comprised of a stencil, brush and tube of blue paint and imbued with an endless capacity for multiplication. 132

35. Imi Knoebel, 24 Farben-für Blinky (24 Colours – for Blinky), 1977 (installation view of 5 of 24 panels at Dia Foundation Beacon, New York). Dia Foundation, Beacon. From: Dia Foundation, www.diaart.org/exhibitions/main/10 (accessed February 10, 2013)

36. Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo at the Fluxus Festival der Neuen Kunst, Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 1964. From: Blinky Palermo: To the People of New York City. New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2009. Page 30.

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37. Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo, Wandmalerei und Skulptur, 1971 (also known as Zwei Skulpturen für einem Raum von Palermo - Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo). Installation Galerie Frederich, Cologne. From: Gerhard Richter: www.gerhard-richter.com/exhibitions/gerhard-richter- blinky-palermo-550/two-sculptures-for-a-room-by-palermo-5814/?p=1&sp=32 (accessed April 23, 2013).

38. Invitation card, Blinky Palermo exhibition, René Block, Berlin, 1969. From: Blinky Palermo Retrospective 1964-1977. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Page 24.

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39. Blinky Palermo, Composition with 8 Red Rectangles, 1964. Oil and graphite on canvas, 96 x 111 cm. Private Collection. From: Blinky Palermo Retrospective 1964-1977. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Page 104.

40. Kazamir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915. Oil on canvas, 58 x 48.5 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. From: Blinky Palermo Retrospective 1964-1977. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Page 28.

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41. Blinky Palermo, Flipper, 1965. Oil on canvas, 89.7 x 70.2 cm. Private collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 22.

42. Blinky Palermo, Straight, 1965. Oil and pencil on canvas, 80 x 95 cm. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 27.

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43. Piet Mondrian, New York City, 1942. Oil on canvas, 19.3 x 114.2 cm. Centre National d’Art et de Culture George Pompidou. From: Piet Mondrian: Life and Work. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1956. Page183.

44. Blinky Palermo, Rot-Rosa, 1966 -1967. Synthetic fabric on stretcher, 78 x 80 cm. Private collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 49.

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45. Blinky Palermo, Rosa/Orange/Schwarz, 1968. Dyed cotton fabric on stretcher, 200 x 170 cm. Hallen für Neue Kunst, Schaffhausen. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 79.

46. Blinky Palermo, Projection, 1971. Four-colour offset print on offset cardboard, 40 x 40 cm (detail). Edition of 150. Annual edition of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, 1977. From: Palermo. Düsseldorf: Dumont, 2007. Page 80.

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47. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1969. Dyed cotton fabric, 200.5 x 190.6 x 2 cm. Private Collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 97.

48. Blinky Palermo, Times of the day I, 1974-5. Acrylic on Aluminium, four parts: 56.8 x 52 cm, each; 56.8 x 520 cm overall. Dia Art Foundation, New York. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 174.

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49. Blinky Palermo, Times of the day V, 1976. Acrylic on Aluminium, four parts: 56.8 x 52 cm each; 56.8 x 520 cm overall. Private collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 189.

50. Blinky Palermo, Coney Island I, 1975. Acrylic on Aluminium, four parts: 26.7 x 21 cm each; 27.7 x 147 cm overall. Private collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 178.

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51. Blinky Palermo, Coney Island II, 1975. Acrylic on Aluminium, four parts 26.7 x 21 cm each; 27.7 x 147 cm overall. Collection Ströher, Darmstadt. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 179.

52. Blinky Palermo, Zu Wandmalerei Treppenhaus (To Mural Staircase), 1972. Red lead paint on cardboard on the right next to black and white photograph of installation laminated to wood pulp board, 66 x 90 cm. Kunstmuseum Bonn. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 602.

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53. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1973. Paint primer on steel plate, 100 x 100 x 0.15 cm. Private Collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 167.

54. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1973. Grey primer paint on steel plate, 100 x 100 x 0.15 cm. Private collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 168.

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55. Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1973. Red lead paint on steel plate, 100 x 100 x 0.15 cm. Private Collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 169.

56. Yves Klein, Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 104), 1956. Dry Pigment and synthetic resin on gauze on canvas on panel, 78 x 56 x 2.5 cm. Adolf-Luthor-Stiftung, Krefeld. From: Yves Klein: With The Void, Full Powers. Washington: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2011. Page 124.

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57. Blinky Palermo, Blaues Dreick (Blue Triangle), 1966. Casein on nettle cloth on wood, base 45.6cm, left side 32 cm, right side 32.7 cm. Private collection. From: Palermo. Bonn: Oktagon, 1995. Plate 43.

58. Blinky Palermo, Blaues Dreick (Blue Triangle), 1969. Cardboard stencil, brush, and paint on cardboard box, painted original and paper with text. Edition of 50, published by René Block in 1969. From: Blinky Palermo Retrospective 1964-1977. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Page 36.

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Chapter 5 The Studio Research

5.1 Introduction

The summation of a research project often neglects to acknowledge the experimental nature of the research itself. My research evolved out of a need to investigate the possibilities for non-compositional painting. Previous to this research, I recognised colour’s potential as a subject for non-representational painting. I also recognised its capacity as a subject within the limitations of non-compositional painting, as a system devoid of any continuing pictorial structures. As such, I was specifically interested in testing the limits of a closed system by exploring colour as an externally located subject. I was, however, unaware of how I would structure the investigation and at commencement, had only a theoretical understanding of the readymade and its capacity for transfer and re-contextualisation. During the course of this research my understanding of the readymade’s potential expanded with each discovery directing the subsequent phases of my research.

The research methodology evolved to accommodate an empirically driven shift away from reliance on perception towards a process that enabled the concretisation of ephemeral colour, thereby making it suitable for transfer and re-formation. In doing so, my research led to the recognition of printed digital colour as both a readymade subject and already-made in its own right. Within this context, Ellsworth Kelly’s already-made subject has a direct application to my research.

While based on my own discoveries, this research acknowledges the primary importance of Duchamp’s readymade. Its subsequent expansion to include the ephemeral sound event by Cage and Brecht’s inclusion of the actions and situations of

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everyday life as readymades formed or located by chance, are of equal importance. To facilitate an understanding of my research methodology and its evolution I have outlined the objectives, processes and outcomes of the studio based research. These comprised four distinct phases: memory; perception; the digital record (nature and travel); and the multi-generational transfer.

5.2 Memory - Colour Remembered

Objective

My research commenced with the untitled colour light painting series of

2008 (Fig. 59-66). My aim was to explore whether non-compositional painting had the capacity to absorb an externally located subject (colour) while maintaining its pursuit of non-representational and non-pictorial objectives. I chose to paint colour from memory as a means to test this proposition.

I chose to attempt to substantiate my December 2007 memories of Dan

Flavin’s fluorescent coloured light event, Untitled (Marfa Project) (1996). My decision to focus on Flavin’s work as a subject was historically motivated by his place in the modernist canon, coupled with his use of colour as a readymade. Arguably, when I photographed the ephemeral light my subconscious realised the work’s capacity to be re-formed as monochromes. Effectively, the work lends itself to the digital presentation of compositional images that are very different to the perceptual experience. It is important to note that my visit to Flavin’s Untitled (Marfa project) was a scheduled stop,

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rather than the objective of the road trip across the South West of the United States. As such, my visual memory of the artwork is informed by the experience as a whole.362

Process

The series comprises eight monochromes in oil paint: violet; pink; green; yellow; and blue. Violet stands in a hybrid position, blending the point of confluence between two distinct coloured light sources. The monochromes are painted on supports of primed linen on square stretchers abutted together to form a single vertical form. My process for painting is founded on a system of trial and correction, whereby each decision is subjected to analysis and revision. Within such a system my memory of colour is approximated, reassessed and adjusted through incremental layers of coloured paint. The paint is applied in multiple layers of semi-opaque pastel coloured oil paint that visually coalesce the veils of colour to slowly form the colour recollection. The coloured oil paint is spread across the surface of the canvas in a manner that adjusts the previous layer rather than covering it.363 As a result, the layered surface is a composite of painted history imbued with a complexity reminiscent of the coloured light event.364

Outcome The vertical panelled format and the human scale of the untitled colour paintings introduced a focus on the painted object rather than the painted field.365 The

362 The digital photographs taken at the time were intended to document the journey (as a vacation record) rather than serve as a primary source of information or readymade colour. As such, they were not used to inform the untitled colour light painting series of 2008. They did, however provide the readymade colour that was transferred and re-formed in my later series untitled fluorescent light paintings of 2012. 363 The applied colour results from mixing and tinting the forming colour with a lean lead white. The oil paint is thinned with a slow drying white oil based medium that results in a predominantly matte surface. The series of oil paintings includes two size variations (213 x 106.5 cm and 183 x 91.5 cm). 364 This painting method is used throughout the studio based research with the exception of the untitled fluorescent light grids of 2009. 365 Human scale in this instance refers to the size and proportion of the paintings relative to an adult male or female. For example according to the Australian bureau of statistics the height of the average Australian male in 2007-8 was 176 cm and the average female was 162.1 cm. There is no data collected on the average male and female shoulder width. 147

use of two linked but independent panels further emphasised object status by interrupting the vertical colour field. This however, was simultaneously denied by the introduction of layered applications of subtly different colour positions in oil paint, which heightened the ephemeral nature of colour. The colour experience is thereby in opposition to matter, in that it dissuades the eye from resting on what it knows to be concrete. The manifest result both confirms and denies concrete status.

The whole is further complicated by my inability to remember colour accurately. The imposing influences of my memory of the road-trip as a whole and life more generally further muddied the subject being transferred. Effectively, while my memory of a colour seemed vivid, the realisation of that colour was degraded to such an extent that the paintings, while conveying a true record of my memory and evocative of coloured light per se, are not a true record of the subject.

5.3 Perception - Fluorescent Colour Event

Objective

Examining my photographic record of Dan Flavin’s work I observed that the untitled coloured light paintings differed significantly from the subject in colour and tone. To address this anomaly my intention was to develop a means for transferring ephemeral colour that would manifest a result closer to the fluorescent light event.

Specifically I aimed to adjust my methodology to include a process of measured experimentation and analysis whereby the result would more closely reflect the colour subject.

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Process

In the summer of 2008/9, to reduce subject disparity, I transformed my studio environment from a neutral space into an interactive environment. This was achieved by introducing coloured fluorescent lights (blue, blue/black, pink, red, yellow and green).366 Each bank of fluorescent colour was installed in the existing light fittings that ran in parallel lines (north south) at a height of 2.74 metres at the top of a plasterboard wall. The fluorescent colour projected directly onto the wall and filled the space.

On commencement of the experiment I became aware of shifts in the intensity of the coloured light. The studio has a sawtooth roof that includes skylights within the north-east vertical expanse, covered with semi-transparent corrugated fibreglass panels. This is augmented by a grid of windows, which have been over painted with a semi-opaque white paint in the south-west. Effectively this means that the coloured light responds to changes in the intensity of the external light, caused by the passing of a cloud or the movement of the sun from east to west. Rather than close off the studio to the effects of external forces I chose to incorporate them as random

(chance) elements. As such, the direction of my studio research shifted from my original purpose, an examination of pure fluorescent colour (the industrial product), towards an examination of its ephemeral nature in a particular context.

Cage’s experimentations with sound provided a model for my analysis of the ephemeral light event, whereby the studio’s architectural structure set the parameters for chance occurrence of the everyday. As such I selected a common physical format (61cm) for the painting supports and a common period of analysis (180

366 The decision to include red was pragmatic as I was unable to locate a supplier of pink fluorescent tubes until later in my research. The pink tubes are only made in Germany and not in China where the other colours are manufactured and sourced by a local supplier. 149

minutes). For each fluorescent colour, I consecutively painted 16 panels (primed marine plywood, 61cm x 61cm, taking roughly 12 minutes each). The primary aim was to create a colour record, rather than a painting per se, so it was only necessary to use a single layer of oil paint. As a record of my perceptions of the shifting intensity of the fluorescent light, the panels should have resulted in a steady decline or increase in colour intensity consummate with the day’s progression, or the diminishing ambient light.

Shortly after commencing I discovered that I was having difficulty distinguishing coloured light from coloured light within a single hue. The coloured light was becoming less intense the longer I observed it. This in turn made it difficult to create a true index. Science explains this reduced colour intensity as a direct response to continuous exposure to high levels of light and the overloading of the photoreceptor cells in the eye.

The neural response of the photoreceptor cells (the rod and cone cells) is dependent on the reaction to light of the photopigments contained within their cells. The photoreceptor cells respond to the stimulus of achromatic (rod cells) and colour light

(cone cells). If the cells are functioning at a maximum level and there is an increase in light intensity, their ability to react is reduced in what is described as a process of saturation and response compression. The rod and cone cells are connected through a network of neurons in the retina and back to the optic nerve, which in simple terms, relays the information to the brain. An adaptive process within the neural system mitigates the effects of response compression in a manner that effectively scales down or up the response to light relative to background luminance. A further augmentation called the subtractive process serves to reduce base levels of activity caused by constant

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background light.367 As a result, the continuous fields of light generated by banks of coloured fluorescent light promote physical responses that reduce levels of colour and light sensitivity, effecting levels of vision. This results in a less intense experience of colour over time. While unaware of why it was happening I was sufficiently aware of this phenomena to photographically document and video record the process to compile an accurate record of the colour (Fig. 67-73).

Outcome

The experiment generated six series of paintings, the untitled fluorescent light paintings (grid) (2009) (Fig. 74-79). The grid format presented the least subjective vehicle for arranging the work. To further reduce subjectivity I used the first system tried (similar to Ellsworth Kelly), that is, to place the panels from left to right as they descend the grid structure.368 The result however was not an incremental increase of colour intensity, as chance shifts in light had disrupted the even shift of light. My reduced ability to see colour following lengthy exposure further muddied my perception.

However, in trying to resolve these issues the digital camera was introduced thereby providing me with a new avenue for experimentation.

367 James A. Ferwerda, “Fundamentals of Spatial Vision” (Ithica NY: Cornell University, 1969), 9-10, accessed May 23, 2013. http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/ferwerda/publications/notes_final.pdf

368 Brunet, “Chronology,” 190. In a conversation with Brunet, Ellsworth Kelly recounts making the painting Seine, 1951 and specifically the composition process that resulted in his acceptance of the first drawing/collage format as the best format. 151

5.4A The Digital Record: Nature

Objective

In 2009 and 2010, to counter the short fallings of direct perception, I commenced my investigation of digital records of the ephemeral event as a readymade subject for painting. The digital images recorded aspects of my life, including the ordinary and the extraordinary. The aim was to explore my perception of colour as a digitally realised transfer of the ephemeral event. Moreover, the suitability of digital colour was being tested against my memory of the colour experience.

Process

The colour that forms the subject of each work was selected, isolated through digital process, and transferred through the process of painting that served to concretise my perceptions of a digital screen. At this point I was viewing the digitally collected colour on the computer screen only. The format and structure of each work comprises variations derived from the grid (except untitled night sky paintings (Fig. 80-

82) where the format is off-square and relative to the dimensions of an architectural space).

The first paintings to examine the relationship between nature and the readymade are drawn from the shifts in colour and light of the dawn and night sky.

More specifically, they are re-formations of my perceptions of the digital record of these events. All images were taken facing east. The digital photographs of the dawn sky were taken on a clear winter morning at an isolated property on the Oberon Plateau in central New South Wales. The digital photographs of the night sky were taken at The

Gap, a lookout at the top of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs, on a clear summer night. 152

In an attempt to increase the accuracy of the colour transfer I introduced an extra layer of colour analysis into the painting process, whereby I subjected the digital colour record to scrutiny within the Adobe Photoshop image editing software program.

This particular examination was conducted within a CMYK colour system used for printing, despite the fact that I was not, at this stage, printing the results. In this analysis, colour is reduced to proportional levels of contributory colours or tone (cyan; magenta; yellow; and key) and assigned a numerical value.

Previously, calibration was achieved by comparing a digital record with the event, or my memory of that event. Ratio analysis introduced a less arbitrary means of determining colour weight. As such, digital colour analysis stands as a generational advancement on my previous methodology and introduces the numerical outcome as an alternative readymade colour.

Both untitled dawn light painting, no.1, and untitled dawn light painting, no.

2 of 2009 (Fig. 83 and 84) are comprised of twelve 50 x 50 cm acrylic plywood panel squares that are formed together in a 100 x 300 cm grid. The panels, although painted independently, are physically fixed onto a plywood frame. The 2009 paintings: untitled night sky painting, no.1, untitled night sky painting, no.2, and untitled night sky painting, no.3 introduce the grid through the repetition of a single format (183 x 193 cm). 369 For both the dawn sky paintings and the night sky paintings I used Photoshop to examine the digital colour.

The night sky paintings are not singular records of the passing of time.

Rather, they chronicle the effect of looking upwards and eastward into the night sky. To expand, the distinct phases of colour recorded in the night sky at 90°, 75° and 60° were

369 The untitled night sky paintings, 2009 were commissioned as work for a private house in Watsons Bay, Sydney. The proportions were influenced by the wall sizes of the intended architectural space. 153

not easily discernable through direct perception of colour presented on the computer screen, but were quite marked within the CMYK numerical system. As such, this analysis highlighted the subtle shifts in the predominantly dark blue colour of the digital record towards orange as the horizon nears. The numerical shift can be described in simple terms as increasing levels of yellow, and decreasing levels of magenta, cyan, and key (tone) as the recorded angle of elevation shifts from 90°, to 75°, to 60°. This resulted in an experimental shift to a more formulaic approach to layering colour according to dominance in the descriptive numerical ratio. However, as a painter, perception of the event outweighed both formula and differences between the screen colour and paint pigment. As such, while the ratio analysis allows me to see the colour differences more clearly, to convey the experience of subject, subjectively based augmentation remains requisite.

The application of paint and choice of support, while foundational to painting, are dictated by my focus on readymade colour and its transfer. In this context, painting and subject are fully entwined. The process of applying oil paint across the surface demands extreme care to ensure brush mark and paint quality are in accord with colour to avoid any distraction from the colour experience. To serve this need, the choice of a traditional oil-primed linen support provides a sympathetic surface for colour transfer, in that it both absorbs the oil paint and expresses its innate materiality in the painting’s final statement as an object.370 To emphasise the experience rather than an indexical position, a large-scale monochrome format was selected. However, the sequential positioning of the paintings served to re-enforce position within a contextual chain.

370 An oil-primed linen is largely unsealed until the first layer of oil paint oxidises sealing the surface. 154

Outcome

The dawn and night sky paintings introduced the digital image as a direct source of readymade colour and subject into my non-representational and non-pictorial painting process. The use of the grid within differing forms allowed the continuance of a non-hierarchical presentation of colour as subject. The grid also allowed for the indexical interpretation of colour. The level of viewer interpretation is, however, limited to the levels of information given, or to the viewer’s own experience thereby allowing interpretation by the viewer. The digital record of the natural event contributed to my increasing awareness of the ephemeral event as both a source of readymade subject and as a readymade itself. The digital image as a record of the ephemeral event remains firmly connected to the event, as does its multiple re-formations, whether by digital process, numerical system or through painting. As such, digital colour is synonymous to readymade colour.

The introduction of a numerical equivalent to colour, while adding another generation of transfer, remains dependent on my subjective perceptions.371

Compounding this further, are the various independent colour systems (RGB, CMYK, and pigment based colour), which, whether isolated as distinct and singular transfers, or as a group, form multiple options for transfer and re-formation. Painting’s solution to this breadth of colour possibilities lies in its ability to adjust colour through incremental layering and adjustment. As a result, the painting solution introduced an individual solution that stands besides the RGB viewing system, and the CMYK numerical system, as singular transfers and re-formations of readymade colour.

371 The colour projected from the computer screen is ephemeral due to a combination of forces including my perception, its electro-magnetic pulse and the changing light conditions in the studio. However, it is also a concrete readymade being reproducible within the RGB viewing system. 155

5.4B The Digital Record: Travel

Objective

In 2010 I introduced to my studio research the digital colour record of my experiences of travel. My intention was to expand readymade colour and place new emphasis on its connection to everyday life via an exploration of composite colour as an alternative to the singular status of readymade colour. The objective was to compress the multiple experience of a single subject (for example a blue desert sky) (Fig. 85-88) into a single experience (the desert blue sky). This was facilitated by each digital image being re-formed through painting as a layer to arrive at a single colour. In doing so I aimed to test the rigidity of the definitional parameters of readymade colour and explore the validity of composite digital colour as an extension of the readymade subject and viable alternative to a single isolated colour.

A further aim of the travel paintings was to explore composition and its influence on readymade colour as subject. Composition within this phase of my studio research continues to be non-pictorial and is based on variations of the grid.

Process

In June 2009 I travelled to the Island of Naoshima, located on Japan’s

Inland Sea, to view the installations and collections of the Benesse Corporation including the Chichu Art Museum. In December of the same year, I travelled by car across the South West of the United States on the Interstate-10 Highway. During both trips I documented my experiences in digital images and videos.

As with the dawn and night sky paintings of 2009, to facilitate transfer I isolated specific digital colours. These were then analysed in Photoshop to determine

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colour and tonal positions within the CMYK colour system. I then viewed the RGB colour image on my computer screen, and with the knowledge supplied from the analysis, attempted to transfer and re-form the colour through painting. What separates the travel paintings from the night and day paintings is the travel paintings’ new emphasis on layering and compositional structure (non-pictorial). Previously my colour subject was determined by a single colour being isolated and then transferred through painting as a single experience.

untitled yellow square painting (Interstate 10) (2010) instigated my experiments with composite colour. Sourced from a single digital photograph of a yellow Penski truck, the image records my experience of looking at the standing truck in Fort Stockton Texas. The photograph is a digital re-formation of a concrete colour.

The yellow of the Penski truck is an important element of the American transport company’s branding and firmly located within the everyday due to its ubiquitous presence across the South West and its status as a transport brand. I noticed, however that the colour is significantly influenced by the intensity of the light in the Texas desert and differs from the brand specific shade. The yellow was isolated digitally and re- formed in the RGB viewing system and then re-formed through painting, however the ephemeral information, between myself and the truck, continued to inform the colour, prompting me to recognise the innate layering of colour within a digital record. As such, the re-formation of the readymade colour centred on the layering of painted colour that aimed to match the truth of the digital colour as a layering of information. Each subsequent layer of colour adjusted the previous colour in a composite process of paint application.

Also from the American trip is untitled blue square painting (Interstate-10)

(2010) (Fig. 89). For this work I isolated multiple colours of the sky recorded at

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different times as I drove across Texas and Arizona. To form a compound record of the entire experience I selected images, which were re-formed through painting as layers.

The layering contributed to an increasingly dense surface and colour. The format of the paintings was derived from the grid and comprised two double square panels abutted horizontally to form a square. Although intentionally non-pictorial, the physical joining of each horizontally oriented panel carried subliminal references to the pull of the distant horizon that marks a road trip.

Naoshima, Japan, in June typically features warm temperatures, high humidity and hazy skies. As one walks around the island the view is punctuated by a small seemingly grey island (Ozuchishima), on a grey sea, below a grey sky (Fig.90).

The grey sea and sky are evocative of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic series of the oceans of the world, which is re-enforced in the outdoor installation of this series of works at various locations around the island.372 Exhibited in this manner, the works serve to structure the viewer’s experience of the shifting ocean.

My digital photographs of the grey-island, sky and sea respond to Sugimoto’s installation and capture my ephemeral experiences of the island.

For my research, the photographed colour was then reduced to three distinct greys by using Adobe Photoshop to isolate colour within a single photographic record.

Each colour was then singularly re-formed through painting via my perception of each colour as it presented on a computer screen. The format of the paintings is derived from the grid and is comprised of three vertical double squares abutted together. The decision to present untitled grey painting (Naoshima) (2010) (Fig. 91) as a horizontal, rather than

372 Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948-): Japanese contemporary artist noted for his photographic series on subjects with distinctive themes including modernist architecture and seascapes. 158

vertical progression explores the progression of time when walking rather than reaffirm the contextual origin of the colours in the landscape.

Outcome

These paintings effectively explore the travel record as an external subject thereby introducing the everyday subject to my studio research. The readymade colour’s connection to the everyday and to its contextual origin has been compositionally activated within the grid structure to maintain reference to the initial event. Moreover, the composite readymade serves to expand readymade colour through an alternative to the singularity of the readymade. The composite readymade questions the parameters of readymade colour by standing as an alternative to the conventional single colour.

Within Duchamp’s analogy below, the composite, whether digitally formed or compositionally executed within the grid, remains a readymade:

Let’s say you use a tube of paint; you didn’t make it. You bought it and used it as a

readymade. Even if you mix two vermilions together, it’s still a mixing of two

readymades. So man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from

ready-made things like even his own mother and father. 373

As such, the composite evidences the continuing expansion of a readymade colour subject within painting.

The exploration of subject, through variations within the grid, re-introduced composition, albeit non-pictorial composition, to my painting practice. Format or system variation through panel arrangement served to re-enforce the original experience and therefore the contextual position of readymade colour as a subject for painting. As

373 de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 162. de Duve quotes Duchamp. 159

such, the painting’s structure shifts from an inactive component within my painting methodology to an active and influential position.

5.5 The Multi-generational Transfer: Concretisation

Objective

The primary objective of this phase of my studio research was to expand the transfer chain by introducing the digital pigment print. The research had previously explored the transfer of the ephemeral event (staged or chance derived) through my perception of both the event and the digital record. The digital record was limited to the

RGB viewing system or the CMYK printing system to analyse the proportion of colour and tone in a selected digital colour.374 The final stage of this transfer process is completed through painting. However, the whole is heavily weighted towards colour perception and is subject to varying levels of external influence. The numerical analysis of colour remains arbitrary, as paint’s pigment colour is not an exact match with the

CMYK colour system.

The introduction of the colour transfer using a digital print as a concrete re- formation of readymade colour is intended to reduce arbitrary decisions from the transfer process. In limiting subjectivity and perceptual error it brings to my studio methodology a standardised and concrete form of readymade colour. This functions as an equivalent of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly’s already-made subject in that it is a colour already-formed and awaiting transfer and re-formation through painting.

374 Within this chain of transfer the numerical equivalent of colour arguably exists as a separate readymade colour transfer. 160

Process The untitled fluorescent light paintings (2012) (Fig. 92-104) are the result of multi-generational re-formations of readymade colour images.375 For this body of work

Flavin’s installations are revisited as a source of readymade colour (Fig. 105-111).

Memory and digital image are replaced by digital printing as a means of transfer. The methodology for making these paintings was developed through very clear stages of colour production. First I examine the digital images on my computer screen as RGB colour images. Then I transfer the images to Adobe Photoshop, where colour is isolated and stored as a unique colour file. From the growing index of colour files, particular colours are then selected for re-formation within a composite system of print colour.

The CMYK system is then applied to the adobe 1990 colour system (as updated 2011).

The Adobe print system is highly compatible to the files re-formed within the Adobe

Photoshop system ensuring minimum transformation in the final transfer product. The file is then printed using an Epson Stylus Photo 2100 printer colour system.376 The pigment colour is printed on to Hahnemühle smooth 100 per cent cotton white Photo rag paper A3+ (308 grams). The digital colour prints are then compiled into a series from which colour is selected for re-formation through painting.

Once externally focused decisions have been made377 my attention is focused on pure painting decisions (layering, edges, paint density, colour accuracy). The final painting is a product of readymade or preformed colour (the digital record transformed across generations) and materials (paint, support). Each transfer however,

375 The digital photographs of Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa Project), 1996 were taken in December 2008 and again in December 2010. 376 This system is based on a variation of the CMYK master system, in that it utilises seven cartridge inks: Matte Black or Photo Black; Light Black; Cyan; Light Cyan; Magenta; Light Magenta; and Yellow. 377 The painting process involves the selection of stretcher size, linen or canvas type and weave, priming quality (smooth or rough), paint type (oil, brand) and mediums and additives (white oil / odourless solvent medium, wax paste medium, marble dust, pumice powder). Finally the structure of the painting is determined (square, monochrome, grid format). 161

has been tailored to the need of the individual consumer (the artist). And while the artist’s role is effectively complete with the exhibition of the work, the object (and intellectual content) continues to function as a readymade within the chain of consumption as a product, second hand product or recycled material, or subject for re- processing and eventual re-formation as another product.

Outcome

I found that the introduction of a printed readymade colour allowed the transfer to be more exactly realised. Effectively, my perception of the colour on the paper could be matched with the colour being applied to the canvas. Moreover, the slight variations inherent in differences between printing and painting pigments added to the object status of the painting and my satisfaction with the resultant work.

That said, while the layered paint successfully transferred the colour subject and the pigmented colour of the digital print, I remained unable to achieve this in a single layer. This resulted in the development of a further index of colour, where all the colours applied to the paintings were recorded in a book of colour and in small colour paintings. This index presents a parallel collective system and functions as a systematic record of an individual interpretation. Importantly, any transfer of readymade colour through painting exists within the context of the society that produced the colour. As such, the colour exists as a direct response to the conditions of the time.

5.6 Studio Research Conclusion

My studio based research, while influenced by the historical evolution of colour as subject, was driven by my desire to paint a colour which only existed as an

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ephemeral event. To achieve this outcome I progressed from memory, to the digital screen and then to digital print. In doing so, I became aware of my inability to remember or perceive colour accurately unless it is concretised. The fact of concretisation, moreover, shifts the proposition from already-made to readymade, which is further compounded by the exhibition of the works, in that the exhibition presents a single subject in multiple forms, which are identifiable as Serisier, rather than Flavin despite the subject.

Before commencing the fluorescent light painting series, which complete my studio research, I revisited the digital records accompanying each phase of my previous research with the intention of creating an index of colour. As soon as I started the project I noticed that the intensity of the printed colour far exceeded the colour formed in oil paint as a record of my perception of the fluorescent light events staged in my studio. This difference between concrete colour (materially formed) and perceived colour (ephemeral) served to highlight the influence my perception and interpretation of colour, the human variable, imposed on the research project. In acknowledgement of the arbitrary influence of perception I commenced the creation of a print based colour index as a method designed to reduce my personal influence on the research project.

The CMYK colour system enabled the formation of a two-dimensional colour index that served to bridge the distance between the record of the ephemeral event and its re-formation through painting.378 The digital print, while a product fashioned to meet collective intent, enabled the development of an individual solution for colour re-formation through painting. In simple terms, a printed pigmented colour

378 The print colour index includes the following readymade colour series: pink fluorescent light colours; green fluorescent light colour; blue fluorescent light colour; blue black fluorescent light colour; yellow fluorescent light colour; red fluorescent light colour; dawn light colour; snow video colour; and Flavin light colour. The index is a work in progress. 163

on a two dimensional surface is easier to match than coloured light presented on a computer screen or recalled from memory.

The introduction of digital photography led to a dramatic shift in my understanding of readymade colour as a subject. Until this time I had recognised the coloured fluorescent tube and the light it emitted as differing, but comparable readymades. Digital photography, however, allowed ephemeral readymade colour to be transferred as a fully formed already-made subject. Moreover, the digital camera expanded readymade colour exponentially, as it allowed the inclusion of approximately

16 million colour permutations available to be transferred from a 24-bit colour digital system.379 As Duchamp argues, the mixing of two readymades, remains a readymade; therefore, the mixing of 16 million readymades, while complex, remains a readymade.

The digital image is effectively both a readymade and a record of the ephemeral event. This posits natural phenomena, including the actions of everyday life, as both readymade and as a suitable subject for painting. As such, readymade colour, mined from the digital image, carries the implications of the circumstance of its origins.

In doing so, it constitutes an expansion of readymade colour’s potential as a subject per se and as a subject for painting.

Compounding the definitional complexities of readymade colour, re-formed through painting, is the ability of its variants to co-exist within the single context of the solo exhibition. To expand; all colour within the exhibition is transferred from a common digital system that captures and re-forms variations of subject. Whether ephemeral or concrete, singular or composite, colour’s innate capacity for evolution allows it to be transformed through generations of digital re-formation processes. In

379 A digital camera capable of 24-bit colour with a sensor equivalent to ¾ of a 35mm SLR film camera has 16.8 million colours to capture image. See note 237 for reference. 164

doing so, colour’s readymade status is assigned and maintained through the contextual chain. Within the paradigm of the exhibition, colour’s readymade status is reliant on market acceptance and consumption. In a parallel to the argument that allows variation with the brand Coca-Cola, the exhibition is branded by a distinctive trademark that endorses multiple singular variations within the artist’s single body of work or brand.

The readymade colour subject captured from Dan Flavin’s ephemeral light event exists as a highly tailored product formed from everyday fluorescent coloured lights. It is however, marked by its transformed state and individual position. This colour experience, recorded by a readymade colour system, is transformed through multi-generations of transfer and yet is contextually linked to Flavin’s unique position.

My untitled colour fluorescent light paintings, while holding a uniquely individual position, are qualified by not only the collective system of capture that forms the digital image and its subsequent chain of re-formation as a virtual and actual product, but by

Flavin’s individual product. This readymade colour system provides a bridge enabling and promoting the exchange of ideas. Indeed, within our cultural society, these ideas may range from the experiences and memories of the everyday to artefacts that include high art and other cultural experiences within a chain of consumption that has an unlimited capacity for inclusion.

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59. David Serisier, untitled violet light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

60. David Serisier, untitled pink light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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61. David Serisier, untitled green light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

62. David Serisier, untitled warm yellow light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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63. David Serisier, untitled green light painting no.1, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

64. David Serisier, untitled pink light painting no.1, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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65. David Serisier, untitled blue light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

66. David Serisier, untitled cool yellow light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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67. David Serisier, untitled green red fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

68. David Serisier, untitled red fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

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69. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

70. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light grid no.2, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

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71. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

72. David Serisier, untitled blue blue-black fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

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73. David Serisier, untitled blue pink fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

74. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable. (Photography: Damian Dillon).

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75. David Serisier, untitled red fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 30.5 x 270 cm installation, variable. (Photography: Damian Dillon).

76. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable. (Photography: Damian Dillon).

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77. David Serisier, untitled blue daylight fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable. (Photography: Damian Dillon).

78. David Serisier, untitled pink fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable. (Photography: Damian Dillon).

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79. David Serisier, untitled blue-black fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable. (Photography: Damian Dillon).

80. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.1, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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81. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.2, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

82. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.3, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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83. David Serisier, untitled dawn light no.1, 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood construction, 100 x 300 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

84. David Serisier, untitled dawn light no.2, 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood construction, 100 x 300 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

178

85. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.1, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

86. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.2, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

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87. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.3, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

88. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.4, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

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89. David Serisier, untitled blue square painting (Interstate-10), 2010. Oil on oil primed linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

90. David Serisier, untitled (Ozuchishima), 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

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91. David Serisier, untitled grey painting (Naoshima), 2010. Oil on linen, 182.9 x 274.3 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

92. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

182

93. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

94. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter). 183

95. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

96. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

184

97. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

185

98. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

99. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 92 x 92 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

100. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

186

101. David Serisier, untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

102. David Serisier, untitled red and red fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

187

103. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

104. David Serisier, untitled fluorescent light painting sequence no.1-10, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each. (Photography: Jenni Carter).

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105. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2007. Digital image (JPEG).

106. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2007. Digital image (JPEG).

189

107. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG).

108. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG).

190

109. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG).

110. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG).

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111. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG.)

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6.1 Thesis Conclusion

Under the impact of Cage’s theories and his mediation of the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, the

ready-made object (cultural or natural…) would now be conceived as an exchangeable factor

that could inhabit multiple object positions, functioning either as a textual, a musical, or a visual

structure (or any combination thereof). - Benjamin Buchloh 380

As a contribution to knowledge, this thesis maps the evolution of colour from a representational element to an ephemeral subject. Specifically, I pursue the historical shifts of the past century, in conjunction with studio based experimentation, to determine a means whereby an ephemeral event may be successfully transferred as a readymade subject. The outcome, in both theory and practice, attests to colour as a perpetually expanding subject that will continue to present new avenues for exploration as technologies develop.

The thesis is structured chronologically to highlight the expansion of the definitional parameters of the readymade and the expansion of readymade colour as a subject for painting. Chapter 1 explores Dada practice and the readymade through the examination of key Dada practitioners, including Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Sophie

Taeuber, and Kurt Schwitters. Duchamp’s foundational position within this research is first raised in this chapter, however his influence is omnipresent to the evolution of colour, as is the thinking of John Cage. Chapter 2 focuses on American artist Ellsworth

Kelly’s development of the already-made subject within the circumstance of post-war

Paris and explores its extended implications through the examination of practice and key historical texts and theories including those of Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh and Brandan Joseph. Chapter 3 touches on the international Neo-Dada group, Fluxus, and examines Cage and George Brecht’s expansions of definitional parameters of the readymade leading to the identification of the ephemeral event as a form of readymade.

380 Buchloh, “Robert Watts,” 535. 193

Chapter 4 examines the German artist Blinky Palermo’s expansion of the readymade to include colour derived from the intellectual property of other artists. Chapter 5 presents my studio research of readymade colour’s potential as an external subject for painting using digital technologies.

These definitional expansions of the readymade endorse my use of the digital image as the concrete record of an ephemeral event and as a readymade in its own right. The expansion of the readymade to include the actions and situations of daily life re-emphasises the contextual chain between the readymade, the digital image, digital colour, and personal and public life.

A further effect of the ubiquitous presence of the digital image is the democratising of images. That is, the hierarchy that formerly separated public events from private lives is no longer existent in digital archives, as all images exist on the same plane. For example, digital images recorded on my vacation, which included images of both high art and life, attract no tiered standing consummate in their status.

The photograph of the Texas road, for example, may be recorded consecutively with a

Jasper Johns painting.381 Similarly, images from the past may be filed with those of the near present. All images, however, whether past, recent, everyday or art derived, exist as ready-mades in their own right and as a source for readymade colour available for transfer through printing, painting or multi-generational transfer. As such, the digital record serves to undermine historical linearity as the determining factor for contextual position and places a new emphasis on visual content or subject as the determining factor.

381 Jasper Johns is represented in numerous collections in the South West of the United States including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Menil Collection, Houston; and The Museum of Art, University of Arizona, Tucson.

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Palermo’s identification of the intellectual property informing pre-existing colour systems is a foundational premise underlying this research. Where Christoph

Schreier identified Palermo’s use of pre-existing practice as a metaphor, my research recognises Palermo’s transfer of intellectual property as a physical reality facilitated by

Palermo’s identification of the idea as a readymade subject. In relation to my practice, this endorses my use of the American artist Dan Flavin’s Untitled (Marfa Project)

(1996), as a readymade subject. Palermo’s proclivity for exchange, allowed intellectual property, including colour and colour systems, to bridge historical divisions and enabled art practice to be included as readymade subject. This inclusion of individual solution, as readymade subject, was further expanded by Palermo to include his own colour. In doing so, Palermo linked individual and collective production in an expansion of the readymade. Moreover, colour transferred from existing art practice, as a readymade element, evidences a shift in which the readymade expands beyond the object to include the intellectual property of the artist.

The untitled fluorescent light painting series confirms my recognition of colour as a readymade subject and its expansion to include digital colour. While, variations within readymade colour are apparent at each stage of the multi-generational transfer, context is maintained through a combination of external references. These include art history (referentiality), and through what Buchloh terms a radical tautology of self-referentiality, in that, readymade colour (the subject) is re-formed and continues to exist across multiple generations (self-referentiality). Effectively, the subject, while remaining true to the historically selected subject of Flavin’s work, is imbued with my perception of the event or its record. This in turn is informed by my experience of the event, which is further altered by my memory of the event, as informed by the surrounding experiences. Similarly, immediate occurrences influencing my perception

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will also be imbued in the transfer. As such, the artist’s everyday life informs the transfer on every level, making the painted object as much a record of the subject as a record of everyday life, thereby blurring the boundaries between art and life.

These influences and breakthroughs in thought and practice combine to create a framework supporting my research of readymade colour as a subject for painting. Through my practice I have explored readymade coloured light as an extension of the ephemeral event and found that it is a subject loaded with external implications for non-representational painting. Importantly, the iterative process of testing facilitates the development of methodologies for the multi-generational transfers of readymade colour. These utilise new technologies (digital process) and traditional methodologies (painting) to form an expanding premise for readymade colour that effectively introduces all aspects of everyday life as subject within the paradigm of non- representational painting.

196

Table of Work

1 Memory - Colour Remembered

1.1 Painting

1. untitled violet light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm.

2. untitled pink light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm.

3. untitled green light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm.

4. untitled warm yellow light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm.

5. untitled green light painting no.1, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm.

6. untitled pink light painting no.1, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm.

7. untitled blue light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm.

8. untitled cool yellow light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm.

2 Perception - Fluorescent Colour Event

2.1 Painting

1. untitled green fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed marine plywood, 16 panels each 61 x 61cm; total dimension 244 x 244 cm.

2. untitled red fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed marine plywood, 16 panels each 61 x 61cm; total dimension 244 x 244 cm.

3. untitled yellow fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed marine plywood, 16 panels each 61 x 61cm; total dimension 244 x 244 cm.

4. untitled blue fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed marine plywood, 16 panels each 61 x 61cm; total dimension 244 x 244 cm.

5. untitled pink fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed marine plywood, 16 panels each 61 x 61cm; total dimension 244 x 244 cm.

6. untitled blue-black fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed marine plywood, 16 panels each 61 x 61cm; total dimension 244 x 244 cm.

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2.2 Digital

1. untitled green red fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm .

2. untitled red fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

3. untitled yellow fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

4. untitled yellow fluorescent light grid no.2, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

5. untitled blue fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

6. untitled blue-black fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

7. untitled blue pink fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

8. untitled blue black fluorescent light index 2009, 2011. Set of 18 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

9. untitled blue fluorescent light index 2009, 2011. Set of 16 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

10. untitled green fluorescent light index 2009, 2011. Set of 16 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

11. untitled yellow fluorescent light index 2009, 2011. Set of 16 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.382

12. untitled red fluorescent light index 2009, 2011. Set of 16 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

382 Due to the influence of the white and colour balance programs within the Canon G10 photographic system the yellow index is a record of mishap. Nevertheless, it is an index of yellow just the same. 198

13. untitled pink fluorescent light index 2009, 2011. Set of 16 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

3A The Digital Record: Nature

3A.1 Painting

1. untitled dawn light no.1, 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood construction, 100 x 300 cm.

2. untitled dawn light no.2, 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood construction, 100 x 300 cm.

3. untitled night sky painting no.1, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm.

4. untitled night sky painting no.2, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm.

5. untitled night sky painting no.3, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm.

3A.2 Digital

1. untitled dawn light index 2009, 2011. Set of 25 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

3B The Digital Record: Travel

3B.1 Painting

1. untitled yellow square painting (Interstate-10), 2010. Oil on oil primed linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm.

2. untitled blue square painting (Interstate-10), 2010. Oil on oil primed linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm.

3. untitled grey painting (Naoshima), 2010. Oil on linen, 182.9 x 274.3 cm.

3B.2 Digital

1. untitled (Penske Yellow Interstate-10), 2011. Digital image (JPEG.)

2. untitled (Interstate-10) no.1, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

3. untitled (Interstate-10) no.2, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

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7. untitled (Interstate-10) no.3, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

8. untitled (Interstate-10) no.4, 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

9. untitled (Ozuchishima), 2011. Digital image (JPEG).

4 The Multi-generational Transfer: Concretisation

4.1 Painting

1. untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

2. untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

3. untitled green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm.

4. untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

5. untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

6. untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm.

7. untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

200

8. untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 92 x 92 cm.

9. untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm.

10. untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

11. untitled red and red fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 53 x 153 cm.

12. untitled blue fluorescent light painting, 2012, Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm.

13. untitled fluorescent light painting sequence, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each.

14. untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 65 x 52 cm.

4.2 Digital

1. untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011. Set of 62 digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

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APPENDIX 1

This appendix documents the installation of the PhD. Candidature Exhibition, David

Serisier, Fluorescent Light Paintings and Digital Prints. The exhibition was hosted at the

GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery, at 86

George Street Gallery Redfern NSW, from 5 to 30 August, 2013.

112. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left: untitled fluorescent light painting sequence, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each. Centre: untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil and wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Far right: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Near right: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Far table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm. Near table: untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

211

113. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left wall: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Left wall centre: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Left wall far: untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Far wall: untitled blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm. Far table: untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 32.9 x 48.3 cm. Near table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

212

114. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Wall: untitled fluorescent light painting sequence, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each. Table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

213

115. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left back wall: partial image, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Right back wall: untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Table: untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

214

116. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left back wall: partial image, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Right back wall: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011- 2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm.

215

117. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

216 APPENDIX 2

The work documented in this Appendix was produced between 2008 and 2013.

The Appendix includes installation views of the PhD. Candidature Exhibition hosted at the GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool street

Gallery, 86 George Street Gallery Redfern NSW from 5 to 30 August 2013.

1. David Serisier, untitled violet light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm (Fig. 59).

2. David Serisier, untitled pink light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm (Fig. 60).

3. David Serisier, untitled green light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm (Fig. 61).

4. David Serisier, untitled warm yellow light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 213 x 106.5 cm (Fig. 62).

5. David Serisier, untitled green light painting no.1, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm (Fig. 63).

6. David Serisier, untitled pink light painting no.1, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm (Fig. 64).

7. David Serisier, untitled blue light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm (Fig. 65).

8. David Serisier, untitled cool yellow light painting, 2008. Oil on linen, 183 x 91.5 cm (Fig. 66).

9. David Serisier, untitled green red fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 67).

10. David Serisier, untitled red fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 68).

11. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 69).

12. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light grid no.2, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 70).

13. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 (Fig. 71).

14. David Serisier, untitled blue blue-black fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 72).

15. David Serisier, untitled blue pink fluorescent light grid, 2011. Digital pigment print on cotton rag paper, 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 73).

16. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable (Fig. 74).

17. David Serisier, untitled red fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 30.5 x 270 cm installation, variable (Fig. 75).

18. David Serisier, untitled yellow fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable (Fig. 76).

19. David Serisier, untitled blue daylight fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable (Fig. 77).

20. David Serisier, untitled pink fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable (Fig. 78).

21. David Serisier, untitled blue-black fluorescent light painting (grid), 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood panel 16 panels 61 x 61 cm each, 307.5 x 270 cm installation, variable (Fig. 79).

22. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.1, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm (Fig. 80).

23. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.2, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm (Fig. 81).

24. David Serisier, untitled night sky painting no.3, 2009. Oil on oil primed linen, 183 x 193 cm (Fig. 82).

25. David Serisier, untitled dawn light no.1, 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood construction, 100 x 300 cm (Fig. 83).

26. David Serisier, untitled dawn light no.2, 2009. Oil on acrylic primed plywood construction, 100 x 300 cm (Fig. 84).

27. David Serisier, untitled (Penske Yellow Interstate-10), 2011. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 21).

28. David Serisier, untitled yellow square painting (Interstate-10), 2010. Oil on oil primed linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm (Fig. 22).

29. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.1, 2011. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 85).

30. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.2, 2011. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 86).

31. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.3, 2011. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 87).

32. David Serisier, untitled (Interstate-10) no.4, 2011. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 88).

33. David Serisier, untitled blue square painting (Interstate-10), 2010. Oil on oil primed linen, 182.9 x 182.9 cm (Fig. 89).

34. David Serisier, untitled (Ozuchishima), 2011. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 90).

35. David Serisier, untitled grey painting (Naoshima), 2010. Oil on linen, 182.9 x 274.3 cm (Fig. 91).

36. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 92).

37. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 93).

38. David Serisier, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm (Fig. 94).

39. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 95).

40. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 96).

41. David Serisier, untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm (Fig. 97).

42. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 98).

43. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 92 x 92 cm (Fig. 99).

44. David Serisier, untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.3, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm (Fig. 100).

45. David Serisier, untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 101).

46. David Serisier, untitled red and red fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 153 x 153 cm (Fig. 102).

47. David Serisier, untitled blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm (Fig. 103).

48. David Serisier, untitled fluorescent light painting sequence no.1-10, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each Fig. 104).

49. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2007. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 105).

50. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2007. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 106).

51. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 107).

52. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 108).

53. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 109).

54. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 110).

55. David Serisier, untitled (Flavin Marfa Project), 2009. Digital image (JPEG) (Fig. 111).

56. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left: untitled fluorescent light painting sequence, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each. Centre: untitled yellow and green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil and wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Far right: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Near right: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Far table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm. Near table: untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig.112).

57. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Projects Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left wall: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Left wall centre: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Left wall far: untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Far wall: untitled blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 93 x 93 cm. Far table: untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 32.9 x 48.3 cm. Near table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 113).

58. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Wall: untitled fluorescent light painting sequence, 2012. Oil and wax on linen, 62 x 62 cm each. Table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 114).

59. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left back wall: partial image, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Right back wall: untitled yellow and yellow fluorescent light painting no.2, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Table: untitled fluorescent light painting index, 2012. Leather bound book of 24 pages, oil on paper, each page 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 115).

60. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery. Left back wall: partial image, untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Right back wall: untitled green fluorescent light painting no.1, 2012. Oil, wax, pumice and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Table: untitled fluorescent light index, Marfa 2007, 2011-2013. Set of digital pigment prints on cotton rag paper, each 32.9 x 48.3 cm (Fig. 116).

61. David Serisier, PhD. Candidature Exhibition, installation view at GRANTPIRRIE Project Space in association with Liverpool Street Gallery, untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012. Oil, wax and marble dust on linen, 214 x 214 cm (Fig. 117).