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 ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. 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Date .............................................................................. iii 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 iv 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 v 6.1 Thesis Conclusion 193 Table of Work 197 Bibliography 202 Appendix 1 211 Appendix 2 CD vi 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 vii readymade colour within this painting process question the rigidity of closed systems and introduce expanded contextual possibilities for colour. viii 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. ix 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. x 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. xi 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.