Painting: Horizontality and the Gestures of Assemblage Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Patrick Robert O’Rorke Graduate Program in Art The Ohio State University 2012 Thesis Committee: Laura Lisbon, Advisor Michael Mercil Ann Hamilton Copyright by Patrick Robert O’Rorke 2012 Abstract My work is informed by the praxis of the discipline of painting. The traditional surface and support become one In the same through the direct adhesion of tape to plastic. It is from this place that moments can be culled or new relationships exposed through addition of painted paper and crude geometric patterns, either found or made. These patterns range from loosely organized simple patchworks to more rigid and complex arrangements. Thinking of my work as a form of assemblage I have taken inspiration from other types of assemblage. These take varied forms, from the loosely organized or makeshift to the more structured or totalized. But I have found the former to be of the most interest. These assemblages take the physical form as the patchwork of a quilt, the combination of sentences that author William S Burroughs cut apart and taped together or the combine works of artist Robert Rauschenberg. In addition, the horizontal surface of the workbench has been important to the development of my work. It is this surface where relationships between materials ii are evaluated and works are produced. This production is the results of a series of gestures; these gestures are less the kind of the Action Painting, but more the kind of the crafts person or the quilt maker. iii Dedication Dedicated to my friends who have pushed, challenged and encouraged me through the years. iv Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the members of my committee, thank you Laura, Michael and Ann for your sincerity, guidance and support over the past two years. In addition none of this would have had been possible without the love and generosity of John and Lois Staugaitis and especially their daughter Emily. And finally to my friends far and wide, especially my fellow grads, thank you for the community, love and good times. v Vita 1998 ....................................................... Hillsborough High School 2004 ....................................................... B.F.A. Major in Painting, Minor in Art History, Maine College of Art 2010-2012 .............................................. Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Art, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Art. vi Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................. ii Dedication ............................................................................................................ iv Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. v Vita ....................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures......................................................................................................viii Chapter 1: Introduction..........................................................................................1 Chapter 2: My Work ..............................................................................................5 Chapter 3: Assemblage: Patchworks and The Cut-Up........................................13 Chapter 4: AB EX, Gesture and Rauschenberg’s Combines ..............................21 Bibliography.........................................................................................................30 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Tarp........................................................................................................ 7 Figure 2: Tarp (Maine State Flag) ......................................................................... 7 Figure 3: Untitled ................................................................................................... 9 Figure 4: Kickstand Series .................................................................................. 12 Figure 5: Quilt (House Top)................................................................................. 16 Figure 6: Bed....................................................................................................... 27 viii Chapter 1: Introduction There is an element of assemblage that is crucial to my work and has taken shape in different ways. In the studio it has most recently emerged as building three-dimensional objects. These objects, while not immediately identifiable as paintings, have nonetheless been informed by my interest and background in the praxis of painting. This happens when materials are in-between my hands. It is through a series of gestures at the horizontal surface of the workbench that the organization and construction happens. In a similar manner, this written piece is a combination of different elements of influence, visual, literary or philosophical and is an opportunity for me to organize some of the concepts that have driven my investigation in the studio over the last two years. What I am interested in are accumulations, intersections, stacking, attaching, connections, layers, or any other type of assemblage. Combined, assemblages of physical elements that create a structure. These structures can take their forms in different ways, and loosely following an organizational model that philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari set up, these structures can come into being in different representations. Deleuze and Guattari write about 1 two types of substances, one that is more “supple, molecular, and merely ordered” and the other that is “more rigid, molar, and organized.”1 The first substance can bend and the other can break. For Deleuze and Guattari the second substance constitutes a “phenomena of centering, unification, tantalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization.”2 Through this process they arrive at a structure, “the sum of these relations and relationships.”3 So if this rigid organization of parts is the second substance, the first substance represents an organization that is more malleable. This supple substance is the stuff of the slapdash, the haphazard, the makeshift, the transitory, the make-due, and the patchwork. In both these substances live narrative and metaphor, strata and organic elements. But what is most important for me in both of these substances are their respective results, a physical structure, something haptic or tactical that shows the elements or pieces of its making. This physicality can take its shape as an aesthetic in either substance. The more supple substance lends itself better to assemblage, gesture or patchwork. Unlike the rigid, which, if speaking aesthetically, may lend itself better to the color-field, the monochrome or the monolith. The first space is where I draw inspiration. Recently this is how I 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 41. 2 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 41. 3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 41. 2 approached my own practice as a maker; there is malleability to the work, both in the material and the approach. These multiple elements, or pieces, find a level of organization for me on a horizontal surface. Leo Steinberg describes a flatbed picture plane as an “allusion to hard surfaces such as table tops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information is received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.”4 One of these surfaces, the workbench, is a place where parts are moved around and these parts create relationships. It is at the workbench, not the easel, where my recent work is made. Through a series of gestures and experimentation, by moving parts and pieces around through my hands, the work is built. Taking painting off the easel and onto the workbench renewed my interest in similar processes throughout the history of painting in addition to that of different fields of making. This making, including the assemblage of parts and fragments to create new works or new meanings is an important aspect of my work. I take influence from varied sources that may not seem to be connected to one another, aside from their construction through a process of assemblage. These 4 Leo Steinberg, “Excerpt from Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane,” accessed June 6, 2012, web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/othercriteria.pdf.(Steinberg) 3 influences include quilts and their fabrication from scraps or smaller pieces of fabric to form new wholes. Additionally, the author, William S. Burroughs, and artist, Robert Rauschenberg, both piecemealed works together. The parts include either found objects, parts of their own creation (as in Burroughs’ manuscripts) or personal items (Rauschenberg’s quilt or his photos of his family). In their own ways, Burroughs and Rauschenberg deconstructed and recombined pieces to create a new series of relationships within works of art. Burroughs cut apart his manuscripts, rearranged them and ended up with non-linear narratives that jumped around places, times and even levels of consciousness. Rauschenberg assembled paintings with personal mementos