Jeff Perrott

A little while back I sent some images of the random walk paintings to a friend, who is curator, buyer, artworld guy, etc. and he replied, something to the effect of ‘they are perfectly fine as paintings, but what has abstraction to say now?’  The implication is that abstraction has nothing to say in the present situation, and my response to him was a knee-jerk, “that’s right, Nothing.  Abstraction can discuss – no be – the nothing we’re all trying to avoid.”

But reflecting more on his remark, and my reaction, I thought that abstraction actually does say something important now.  Part of it may be an ability to show ‘nothingness,’ but I am not convinced that abstraction deals with nothingness per se any more effectively than representation.  

Let’s get this out of the way first – the polemics about abstraction v. representation are useless to me and I think useless to the discourse of art now. The RW paintings, as all abstractions, represent something – an experience, sensations are there which are something, something I want to name and talk about.  So I reject the ineffability stance in abstraction – that it is ‘unknowable’, beyond talk, or – worse – that talk limits it.  

What limits the experience of all paintings is the stance that one or a set of privileged interpretations is the undoubtable meaning of the work.  Lots of reviews, wall texts, essays, and gallery press releases are written from this stance (a stance I think is underwritten largely by the sense that the need to know, once and for all, what the work means, to feel redeemed and identified wholly with the work, is key to the intellectual, experiential, and monetary value of the work – but this is a subject for another post).  So I don’t fault artists who are restrained in interpreting their own work or take a more allowing stance to interpretations; and this is very different than claiming the work has no meaning and is beyond talk.   

In fact the experience of all painting, ‘abstract’ and ‘representational,’ and the desire to interpret, at its most basic level - thoughts, feelings, associations, intuitions, reactions, etc - seems clearly the same.  But there is still a recognizable difference, which my friend noted.  And I think his question is a good one.  To be clear, the difference, to me, is one of degree and not kind.   And to me abstraction is good at considering inner processes, from two points of view.  First, from the view of making or looking at painting, it can present the (as mentioned above) thoughts, feelings, associations, intuitions, reactions, etc., in their most basic form, the building blocks of interpretation.  And second, related, it can represent the inner processes of life, the stuff beyond view – which to me includes the stuff of consciousness.  

To coarsely oversimplify, abstraction can work the way representations of quantum mechanics or string theory, and the equations that support them, help me inhabit (and not just have an idea about) an understanding of the basic material stuff and processes in my everyday experience – the basic stuff beyond the apparent reality of my experience.  

So the random walk paintings model a certain type of consciousness – a basic response to the contingency, unpredictability, and uncertainty of the random conditions of the process. That response seems alternately comical, haunting, vulnerable, desperate, free, doubtful, giddy, ecstatic, sullen, heavy, light, etc.. – adding up, in my experience of them, ultimately to a sense of irony, optimism, and possibility as a response to the absurdity and pointlessness of the random process.  

I might say it presents these conditions and possibilities of response as part and parcel of a viewing experience, as the process of looking, following the line, considering the quality of the line, noting differences and similarities, etc.  And I might say it represents the inner process of consciousness both in general – as the random quality of basic experience, that gathers data as sensory input before that data in sense – and specifically, as the unique situation, set of outcomes and sense of each painting.

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‘Chance’ is what I use, usually, to describe the other act – the act out of control. 

The word seems to point to the forces at work when, say, I drop a one-meter string from a height of one meter, and allow it to twist as it pleases until – via gravity, wind, and aim – until it comes to rest at an absolute spot.  The word seems to point to the absence of power; but it gets this signification (power) by pointing back at the power it claims is absent: the power I embrace when, say, I effort to place a tiny daub of titanium white to faithfully depict a highlight on a crown on the head of a royal. 

I could drop the string a thousand times to get the shape I want; I could swipe at the canvas blindly and leave the daub/highlight exactly as it wants to be.

 
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD. 2010. OIL ON PANEL. 32” X 44”. ON VIEW AT MORGAN LEHMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK.

Intention?  Intention seems to have the power too: the power of inevitability, of simultaneously being willed from ‘me’ and being sourced in the unconditioned.  It’s nice to be in control.  But where does it originate—the thought, intention, idea to drop a string or paint a daub?

So I have an idea to write.  It takes shape, form, in my head; words start to enter, and I am now typing, watching words manifest.  How did they get here? 

It seems to come from me, I am the source. I matched a word with a thought, and the thought came from a kind of synthesis of other thoughts or fragments of thoughts.  But is that it?  Where did the initial thought come from?  Generated spontaneously within me?  From what raw material?  Raw material from where? Outside me? 

From the conditioned, environmental pressures stretching back ad infinitum: arbitrary signifiers, language, history, the consequences of powerful choices and dominations over centuries; natural selection driven by genetic mechanics, honed by competition for scarce resources?

Or from nowhere in particular, some kind of deeper raw-thought material, some vast vat of potential, to-be-formed stuff?

What’s the difference?  For who can account for all of the factors? Who can count the forces of gravity, wind, and aim at any moment, given evolutionary vastness.

Words are as conditioned and arbitrary, as formed by evolutionary pressures, as mechanically selected, as anything ‘natural’ – why should it be different here and now, with this idea?  What is it that makes me think this is special?  Why do certain words stand out at this moment, stand out enough to get typed here?  There are other, better words perhaps – according to what?  Should I double back and make it ‘right’, or hesitate, or let if flow.  What is flow? 

Is one more ‘natural’ than the other? 

No.  All is nature.  What else can anything be derived from?  The shapes of dust swirling on the surface of Saturn are the same as the random walking sugar crystals in my coffee.  No hole opens up in my consciousness, opening onto a truly ‘other’ experience; the Law of Conservation seems to hold in consciousness. 

So what?  Now I spin a spinner, now I make a mark, now I spin a spinner, now I make a mark, just moving stuff around – now a glop from a tube, now what we call a ‘mark.’  Things move in the direction aimed for or they don’t.  Every one is conditioned by chance, the unfolding of evolutionary creativity in all directions, in all dimensions, simultaneously.

This is what we call ‘chance.’  Chance is useful, in that it challenges control, our sense that we are what we do, and that we do what we want.  But chance is more determined than chance would suggest, and intention is more beyond control than intention suggests.  At best, degree not kind. 

It’s true that I want, and direct energy to an end, but where does the energy emerge, where does the end and wanting come from?  I can’t locate the origin or cause: I don’t know what there was before the bang.  Did my parents decide which sperm?  Did they choose their parents?  How far back do we need to go?  It took me winning a 50 billion chance lottery, 50 billion times in a row, just to get here.

I telescope into oblivion.  Still, here I am.  I am spinning a spinner, making a mark, choosing this and that; and I am an amoeba in the mud, crystal friction along a clay riverbed.  Beautiful, and nothing.

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It’s great to be an artist today! Anything goes, and anything can mean anything, too! It’s wonderful to know that whatever you make can mean something important and valuable to someone, and sometimes to everyone! The artist has perfect freedom and power. And so do collectors, curators, museum directors, galleries, gallery directors…everyone!

We all get to decide what we want, and we get to make it happen. It’s good to know that art, because of its perfectly arbitrary nature, is perfectly suited to all of us getting what we want. Thank heaven we’re in an environment where we don’t have to worry about a thing’s use value, where we exploit ourselves freely because we know exploitation doesn’t exist! It can’t exist in a place where the objects of exchange are perfectly free to be what they want, where their consciousness is as free as ours!

It’s no wonder poor Karl Marx and Plato had such a hard time with art!

That’s OK, we value their opinions for what they are, and we can play with them as easily as we play with the other intellectual blocks in our environment, like Ranciere or Bataille or de Sade, etc. These things, after all, are just as arbitrary as art — that rogue Derrida could do an awfully good job of deconstructing this: the way art is reveals the way things really are. And not just some things but all things. All things are arbitrary and free and all-powerful in their own right, unbounded by language or convention and anything!

It’s nice to know that just by thinking about what they can be, we can make them so, we can give them over to their absolute potential. Let them be all they can be. We no longer need to pretend that anything has any relationship to anything! So many have done such wonderful work pointing out how inessential the relationship of things to things ever was (wow, too many negatives, see?) but they have stopped short often of just letting it go and be perfectly free. Nothing reins (reigns?) it in. The parts are the parts of the hole. Languages emerge daily. New things burst out of their shells daily. People invent new words daily.

The question is really: what’s stopping it, what’s keeping it from just being the perfectly free, amorphous, undifferentiated mass of joy that it is? Why do we still want to stop it?

I heard a gallery owner yesterday talking to a collector and saying what a ‘good wrist’ the artist has – meaning the quality of his drawing or something. But the works on the wall are already perfect in every way, and need no justification! And the collector already knows what he wants, and so doesn’t need his wanting justified! No one needs an excuse to do, say, feel, think, buy, sell anything. We just need to accept the perfect freedom of pure beautiful art environment, and then dive in, swim around, copulate freely, give birth to new artists, ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc. and then RELAX.

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