Neil Pardington

Operating Theatre #8,
2005






McDonald, Ewen. "Neil Pardington." Contemporary New Zealand Photographers. Ed. Strongman, Lara. Auckland, NZ: Mountain View, 2005. 48-49.

Ewen McDonald is a New Zealand fine arts writer and curator. This essay was written for the book ‘Contemporary New Zealand photographers’ that was supported by an exhibition at Starkwhite gallery in Auckland to launch the book celebrating 20 of the country's most significant photographers. This chapter is about Neil Pardington’s photography. Neil is an artist, designer and filmmaker based in Wellington and studied at Elam School of Fine Arts.

McDonald writes in this essay that Neil Pardington’s photography encompasses two kinds of truths. The ”Truth as in fidelity to circumstance” and truth as a kind of essential, “elemental truth that emerges in the looking” that reinforces a certain identification with the subject, where we all may rediscover aspects of our own space and time (McDonald, 48).

I am interested in if and how I can discover aspects of my own space and time in Pardington’s work and at what level, and how this resonates with Pardington’s intentions. I additionally read the book ‘The Vault’ and ‘Camera Lucida’ to inform my findings.

McDonald writes; Pardington’s photographs are not only ‘objective’ representations but also something more that can be experienced or sensed. They allude to something, the images evoke and act as metaphors for every viewer differently. Pardington sets us up to project our own experiences onto the photograph and whatever we project comes from our own personal history, reinforcing the photograph’s ability to function as a symbol. He constructs this deadpan aesthetic, a fidelity to circumstance, utilising realism to invite the senses (the subjective truth). He facilitates the making of meaning in his photographs, by clever use of a key element: ‘emptiness’. This ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ makes room for the viewer to create, to give meaning to the photograph (McDonald, 48).

Pardington’s notes state that he is looking past the obvious, to how the image fits into other lives and other stories. His subject matter is of great importance for us to give meaning. Pardington writes the reason for ‘The Clinic’ series is simple: “It is a subject that engenders strong reactions and emotions, because whatever happens, it is about life and death, and we know the stakes could not be higher”( McDonald, 49).

When I first experienced the photograph ‘Operating theatre #8’ I thought the work as a stylized and a tame cold registrational exercise and decided my appreciation was because of the formal qualities as the clean lifeless elegant aesthetic and recording and ordering of the world around us. I wasn’t quite sure where to fit in the subjective meaning. To find out more about these other meanings I read Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, which is about the photograph’s ability to function as a symbol rather than a mere representation. Barthes reflects on the relationship of the studium and the punctum, on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society. Whether or not the punctum is triggered, it is an addition; Barthes writes, “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55). The punctum works within us and could accommodate a certain latency. Ultimately, to experience a photograph well, we do it best by closing our eyes, to make the image speak in silence, to allow detail to emerge (54-55). Barthes reveals why photography’s is able to speak, what at first sight seems to be purely naturalised and registrational experience, can have fabricated and highly structured meanings.
Strongman writes the human presence is rather virtual and yet the image has a narrative function. She also finds Pardingtons’ objects and spaces are saturated with a “radical subjectivity” (13). I feel almost relieved with Pardington’s answer that his “approach is actually even more objective than the Neue Sachlichkeit” and it is not as much about him “making the images that affects the reading but about how people now see photographs”, because it’s not imperative to find this subjective meaning.

Intrigued I read more about the ‘Vault’ series. As a subject matter this series contains not only an underlying idea that the camera is a storehouse of ideas and images (a metaphor for memories if you like) but vaults also have this paradoxal function, they are a place where we store things that are precious, yet obsolete and unwanted for example archives, museums, art galleries, banks and libraries have vaults, which adds to the invitation of establishing an empathetic relationship (McDonald, 48). The Vault’s spaces address larger cultural concerns as opposed to personal as in ‘The Clinic’ series (Pardington,13). Resonating the collected culture and history of those things we deem important enough to keep, and what they tell us about ourselves (Pardington,19).

I found these readings very useful for my own practice in which I feel I sometimes utilize similar aspects to make room for the viewer’s own possible projected meaning.

Bibliography

Bathes, Roland. “Camera Lucida, reflections on Photography”, translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981

McDonald, Ewen. "Neil Pardington." Contemporary New Zealand Photographers. Ed. Strongman, Lara. Auckland, NZ: Mountain View, 2005. 48-49.

Hall, Ken, Lara Strongman, White, Anna-Marie. "The Vault: Neil Pardington" Ed. Simpson, David. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand, 2009. 7-19.

http://www.starkwhite.co.nz/exhibitions/previous/contemporary-new-zealand-photographers.aspx

Rober Morris

Morris, Robert. Notes on Sculpture 1-3, Art in theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 828-835



Robert Morris, «The Box with the Sound of its Own Making»
© Robert Morris


Robert Morris (1931) is an American artist and art theorist. Morris articulated his ideas of Minimalism in “Notes in Sculpture” an essay published in Art Forum in 1966. Morris's style and media have changed many times during his career, his works imply that art can be made of anything, interested in the relationship between viewer and object. With pre war avant gardists Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp as his guideposts (Rose, 132). He made contributions to conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, land-art, process art, installation art. His later work is described as neo-Gothic, maximalist and symbolist (web, medienkunstnetz)

In part III, Notes and Nonsequiturs, Morris argues painting as such has become antique. “Specifically, what is antique about it is the divisiveness of experience which marks on a flat surface elicit”. Antique not because of its inescapable illusionism but its ability to imply which causes subjectivity and divisiveness. The mode of painting is in default; most paintings have not been shaped to emphasize actuality or literalness. For a long time the duality of thing and allusion sustained itself, but it has worn thin and its ability to satisfy on a flat surface has come to exhaustion (Morris, 833).

In this essay Morris describes the taking of reductive aspects of late modernism to react against abstract expressionism by stressing the importance of ‘the new three dimensional’ work’s ability to encompass his ideal of the work as a ‘whole’ (Gestalt effect) and by doing so forming a bridge to Post Modern art practices.

I was curious to find out what motivated Morris to reject the two dimensional surface for his ideals. In his view the new work differs not through the use of new materials, and not in the non compositional structuring of the work. The difference lies in the kind of ordering of the work, that lies not in previous art orders, but in an order based in the culture. The cultural infrastructure of forming itself, which comes together and becomes palpable in the technology of industrial production (Morris, 833).
To me it sounds almost like pop-art but Morris claims it connects to a different level of the culture. This new three dimensional art refers to manufactured objects, even the set parameters are the same as common elements in industrial production: “Symmetry, lack of traces of process, abstractness, non-hierarchic distribution of parts, non anthromorphic orientations, general wholeness” (Morris, 835).
These industrial processes lead to a somewhat reductive style with simple lines and forms. Resulting into the removal of the traces of the maker, the work is self referential and therefore referring to the culture instead of the artist (relinquishing authorship).
Morris continues these clear decisions form lots of positives i.e. the work is literal, has openness and is accessible. Most probably boring for those who seek exclusiveness, but this is art for everyone and not only for the happy few who are seeking specialness, “the experience of which reassures their superior perception” (Morris, 835).

Rose writes that in the late 1950s in the US, there was an emergence of a new generation called “the silent generation”. Artist like Morris, Donald Judd, Sol le Witt and Carl Andre refused to express what they were thinking. Not only because they found gesture and expression of emotional state was no longer viable, but also because they were unimpressed with the political repression at the time. Having to serve the Korean War they chose not to express any ideology and they became active members of the anti-war resistance during the Vietnam war (Rose, 59). Morris focuses in his art, on the decline of industrial society in time of late capitalism, examining the dynamics of the industrial social order, re-creating instability to provoke the viewers’ sense of unpredictability and hostility. (Berger, 15)
I wonder if Michael Fried was simply provoked by Morris’s ‘new three dimensional work’ when he referred to it as being “a new genre of theater” (Fried, 153)? Maurice Berger also refers to theatre when writing about Morris and Minimalism: "Robert Morris's art is fundamentally theatrical. Yet, as 21.3 demonstrates, his theater is one of negation: negation of the avant-gardist concept of originality, negation of logic and reason, negation of the desire to assign uniform cultural meanings to diverse phenomena; negation of a worldview that distrusts the unfamiliar and the unconventional" (Berger, 3).

I think the difference with Fried’s observation is that Berger is hereby referring to Morris’s oeuvre, and to a performance work (21.3) of him in particular, justifiably illustrating Morris’s independency, unconventionality, and his sensitivity to greater social issues (Berger, 5). Morris’s writings and work have stimulated interest in the ‘new art’ because of similarities in surface and reductive style but on a deeper philosophical level he would not fit in with the Minimalist. Berger’s comments about theatricality make much more sense to me then Fried’s. Lastly I would like to state that the new three dimensional work is not only to be defined as art, but is even more relevant as art for me because of it’s innovative reflection of the culture at the time.

Bibliography

Berger, Maurice. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s” Introduction: Robert Morris outside art history, New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Print

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood” Art and Objecthood(1967). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 148-179. Print.

Rose, Barbara. “Monochromes From Malevich to the Present”. University of California Press, 2006. Print.

www.medienkunstnetz.de/.../biography/

Art and Objecthood

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood (1967).”, Art and Objecthood. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 148-179. Print.

The chapter “Art and Objecthood” in the book Art & Objecthood was written by Michael Fried in 1967. It was originally published in Artforum 5 (June 1967).
Fried was born in 1939 in New York City; he is a Modernist art critic and art historian defining the contours of late Modernism (1962-1977). Fried was involved and contributed to the discourse of the origins and development of Modernism, as did Clement Greenberg who was also his mentor.

Fried has been occupied with questions regarding “modernism, realism, theatricality, objecthood, self-portraiture, embodiedness, and the everyday”(web humctr). This essay relates to a debate around minimalism. What motivates Fried is driven by the concepts of literalism and theater. He addresses several key issues in this essay but I would like to find out what he means by theatricality and the relationship between the work and the beholder.

Fried brings up the question; “What is it about objecthood as projected and hypostatized by the literalist that makes it, if only from the perspective of recent modernist painting, antithetical to art?” The answer Fried proposed is as follows: “The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art” (Fried,153).

Fried is putting up the distinction between painting and theatre. He finds that the devolution of Minimalism in objecthood, nullifies art, and shifts the focus of the debate from the temporal to the spatial. Claiming the literalist are moving the attention from an artwork towards the context of its reception. Minimalism’s adaptation of objecthood offers an experience of theatricality rather than presentness. Leading to the realization that paintings are nothing more than things. Fried disagrees painting is exhausted unless we use shaped rather then rectangular supports. He claims Frank Stella is on the right track with his shaped supports and the minimalists are not. (Rose, 129)

The experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation that includes the beholder. Morris believes this is intensified by the gestalt and the large scale of much literalist work (i.e. the larger the object the more we are forced to keep our distance from it) (Fried,153). He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into some sort of drama that detracted the viewers’ ability to be present to the artwork itself. He writes: “Morris wants to achieve presence through objecthood, which requires a certain largeness of scale, rather than through size alone” (154). The “stage” presence is obtained by being distanced by the work, also crucial are repetition, order and hollowness or secret inner life (Fried, 155-156). Fried takes a staunch opposition to what he observed as the lack of differentiation between the work of art itself and the experience of viewing it, a phenomenon he described as "theatricality" (web, theartstory).

I gather that Fried claims the Minimalists are creating an engagement outside the artwork and therefore the experience itself is of importance and becomes essentially a genre of theatre rather than Minimal Art. This is caused by the involvement of the viewer’s whole body rather then the encounter being a merely optical experience. The corporeality is distracting from the aesthetic engagement and therefore the experience becomes an event outside of the artwork itself, which Fried claims to be a form of theatre hence artistically self-defeating (Fried,163).

Michael Fried jumped on Tony Smith’s insistence that ‘you just have to experience it’ as a clear sign that Minimal Art in general increases an untrue instant involvement (Fried,158). But Robert Smithson pointed out in 1968 that Smith’s epiphany did not replace the work of art, but rather anticipated it - through a process of delimitation, of ‘de-differentiation’ (Fried, 103). Fried’s opinion was immediately challenged by Smithson in Artforum, who wrote; “What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing—namely being himself theatrical. He dreads "distance" because that would force him to become aware of the role he is playing”. (Artforum, oct ‘67).

At the end of this chapter Fried writes: ”we are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace” (168).

My understanding is that by calling attention to the unwelcome influence of sensitivity or mode of being, that Fried characterizes as theatrical, he means that art, will leave the viewer in his/hers everyday world. Fried finds the presence of the artworks of certain minimalists merely of a phenomenological nature and therefore they are theatrical (corrupted by drama) rather then authentic art. Fried claims that by being present ourselves, our feelings and emotions will be engaged and the eye enthralled. Barbara Rose writes: “Different temporal registers are precisely what concerns Michael Fried in his “Art and objecthood” a spirited defence of Modernist painting against theatricality” (Fried, 126). Fried is oriented towards the continuation of modernist (post painterly) abstraction as in Jules Olitski’s, as well as Kenneth Noland’s and Anthony Caro’s work, rather than Minimalism.

In my view he might have been overly absorbed by his own corporeality, which prevented him being able to be present to the artwork itself. With this I mean that with objecthood the literalists are sharpening the awareness of the viewer, and draw attention to the viewer’s own physical reactions even more so then the merely optical presentations of i.e. Pop art, Op art and post painterly abstractionists. If Fried could have been able to be really present to “the new three dimensional work”(Morris 833), meaning not being distracted by his inner dialogue trying to resist meaning, he might not have condemned the literalist or minimalists by calling it a negation of art and therefore artistically self-defeating. Nothing can be seen without having an effect on the subject, I think his classification is based on looking at just formal qualities instead of deeper philosophical. (Berger, 4)

Thanks to researching further into what others have written about Fried’s conclusions, I can at last appreciate this densely written essay, he reveals distinctions in art and the pitfalls of our engagement with authentic art, concepts of literalism and theatre.

Bibliography

de Antonio, Emile, “Painters Painting”1972. Arthouse Films, New York, NY, Distributed by Arts Alliance America, 2009. Documentary. Video.

Berger, Maurice. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s” Introduction: Robert Morris outside art history, New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Print

http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/roseb.htm

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood” Art and Objecthood(1967). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 148-179. Print.

Greenberg, Clement “Post Painterly Abstraction”. An exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and sponsored by the Contemporary Art Council Los Angeles County Museum of Art: April 23-June 7, 1964 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: July 13-August 16, 1964 The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: November 20-December 20, 1964. Print.

http://humctr.jhu.edu/Faculty_Bio/michaelfried.html

http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/ehtml/ewelcome00.htm?aus_serra.htm

Morris, Robert. “Notes on Sculpture 1-3, Art in theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas”, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 828-835

Rose, Barbara. “Monochromes From Malevich to the Present”. University of California Press, 2006. Print.

Smithson, Robert. Letter to the Editor, Artform, October, 1967.

http://www.theartstory.org/critic-fried-michael.htm

Wilkin, Karen and Carl Belz. Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975.
New Haven and London, American Federation of Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2007. Print.