Unlike Modernisms role of privileging subjective thought as meaning or Postmodernisms withdrawal of subjective agency as supplied by the frames of new technology, I will explore how, in the 21st century, the ubiquity of screen imagery simultaneously transforms both the painters subjectivity and ontological relations to making; that the context and presentation of painting is imaginatively informed and reflected through transferable identification with and through the digital screen. I will argue that rather than adopt the position of the withdrawal of the postmodern subject in particular, the everyday presence and use of the digital screen gives rise to a complex and dialogical activity that which circumnavigates subjective usurping or dualist division as outlined in the quote above.
To do this I will need to combine a number of seemingly varied or competing philosophies from different academic fields. I will begin with Andrew Benjamin’s notion that contemporary abstract painters transform modernist formalism by re-staging a repetition of abstractions history. This re-staging will then be compared and contrasted with the art historicism of Clement Greenberg’s singular, modernist, media specific relation of painting that denies any reference to exterior representation. I will then overlay these two opposing theories onto Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological claim that the painter reverses the relationship between the body and a painting by imaginatively overlapping the interior sense of self with the world of external objects; subjectivity as a mirroring of the world of objects as he puts it. I will then attempt to further link contemporary and historical painting, phenomenology and subjectivity by studying Stephen Perrella’s ‘Hypersurface’ that proposes a non-subjective, architectural deterritorialisation; a fluxus of transparent, fluid systems of multi-dimensional signs in which the contemporary subject traverses and which is activated by the digital screen.
In order to make sense of these seemingly conflicting claims and explore in more detail how they reflect and co-exist with digital representation we therefore need to (i) Redefine Clement Greenberg’s singular definition of media specificity by utilising Andrew Benjamin’s model of a ‘staged historical repetition’ in abstract painting. (ii) Understand how Merleau-Ponty’s internal equivalent of the imaginary texture of the real acts as an ontological reversibility of the subject/object through the act of physical making. (iii) Discover how being and making are accessed in and through digital subjectivity in Stephen Perrella’s architectural Hypersurface. And finally (iv) how these correlations are re-presented in the material practices of contemporary painters such as Charlene von Heyl, Albert Oehlen, David Reed, Chris Ofili and my own work.
I will demonstrate how these artists, consciously or otherwise, build into their painted practices strategies in relation to reversible disembodiment; how the (physical) application of their medium (or mediums) may in some instances appear as flat mimics of the screen, but in others retain thick painterly gesture that doesn’t necessarily adhere to the surface ‘look’ of the flat screen. For example, unlike David Reed (or myself) who disguise the trace of the hand gesture through flat, painted application, Charlene von Heyl and Albert Oehlen reveal a trace of their hand by applying paint gesturally or thickly. Although these four artists appear diametrically opposed in style, they all ‘replicate’ the tropes of Abstract Expressionism. In the context of historical tropes or even cliché, their work I will suggest, is imaginatively re-framed in relation to the screen and changes the body’s sensuous relation to time and space which is central to contemporary painting’s criticality.
