Seeking, thinking and citing through paint

Abstract

Paint and canvas are simply materials, utilized by humans to interact with the social world for a variety of reasons, yet paint still has the ability to incite notions around its use based on a long Western history of who is and who isn’t supposed to wield the brush. This essay explores one among many of these historical notions of omission, that of gender. The essay is divided into three sections with the first looking at what it means to paint as a woman, particularly within abstract painting. The section starts with an account of what gender means as seen by Judith Butler, before examining the work of past women who have used differing tactics to navigate the masculine worlds of paint they occupied. Linda Nochlin’s famous critique of the feminine within art is then utilized to argue my own beliefs before looking to recent theories of feminist materialisms as a way to think through a contemporary position around the conflation of bodies and paint. The second section shifts from form to content as the archive is discussed, seeing this as having a kind of materiality of it’s own that has been put to use within art throughout time. Henri Bergson’s philosophy where the past acts as an infinite ground to the present is followed by Hal Foster’s description of artists who employ the archive as material. The work of Sherrie Levine is then touched on to think through the differences between how the recent artistic turn to history differs from that of appropriation artists of postmodernism. Returning to paint, the work of Marlene Dumas is then offered as a possible way forward to bridge the gaps between painting and its critique. Finally painting is seen within the context of politics. Jacques Rancière’s ‘Distribution of the Sensible’ is discussed in terms of the meta-­‐politics of art in relation to gender inequalities within art galleries and museums. Against continuing inequalities my own tactic is introduced as one that cites small moments within the work of women artists such as Lavinia Fontana. This tactic is one that proposes a painting method that sits between abstraction and figuration, arguing for the possibility to obliquely layer an active response via a conceptual painting practice, thus calling out to the past, leaning back to assist the present in order to help imagine a new future.