[2a] Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 1, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 12-285 (pp. 13-14, 75-76, 81-83).

These works are inside out. What is emphatically surface is the surface of the depicted landscape. This is most clearly the literal surface. This is odd since there is a lot of ‘literal’ (non-pictorial) paint spread across it. But this latter is read iconically or figurally. The iconic is rendered somehow literal, the literal somehow iconic. The band is caught oscillating between a pictorial device and a ‘literal’ surface. It is, as it were, out of control figurally and literally. This shifting instability of landscape as icon, ‘paint’ as icon, landscape as literal surface, and so on is not an immanent property of the painted surface(s). It seems in general that the disturbed paint integrates the ‘abstract’ band into the icon to a very considerable extent. So you don’t in fact get a mélange of a ‘modern’ (abstract) painting and an ‘old’ landscape painting. What results is a continuous pictorial entity. At the same time, that continuous pictorial entity is rendered literal by that which makes it a continuously pictorial entity. In other words, there is a twisting of literal and virtual almost to the point of a self- contradiction. The disturbed paint makes a continuous ‘icon’ of the landscape and the band, but that icon is, in turn, relatively more literal; it is the literal surface of the painting. The disturbed paint is relatively more of an iconic psychological presence than the landscape and the ‘wall’ itself – they are the ground for the figure. There is, if you like, a folding up or crumpling such that one’s sense of the iconicity of the landscape is hidden or folded within one’s sense of the iconicity of the disturbed paint.

Without the glass there wouldn’t be these possibilities at all. The glass renders the whole thing a sort of collage. All elements are made literal – made to be independently identified materials or things with independent significances and purposes. And in recovering a picture – an icon from the ‘collage’ – standardly pictorial items are materialised; they are rendered literal, the literal pictorial, and so on. Remember, however, that this ‘independence’ is virtual, not actual.

It also has to be remembered that there is an archaeological relationship between the ‘disturbed’ element (the smeared paint) and a small fragment of text. The mess under the glass is a deformation of four letters: S.U.R.F. Surf is an abbreviation, conceivably, for ‘surface’. It’s also an abbreviation for nothing.

You could more or less cogently argue that these paintings reinvent collage as it might be understood in relation to the papiers collés of Braque and Picasso. This is a sense distinct from the mere assembly of minor fetishes which undergo no transformation and are simply the props for deconstructive babble ...

The intellectual challenge of being a picture is something now drowned in the noise of cultural calculation. This is roughly what we mean when we talk of the reinvention of collage. A collage is mere fetish if it is not fundamentally iconic – however hard that icon is to recover.

There are three principal stages to the making of the landscape Hostages. Firstly the basic composition of landscape and vertical plane is transferred from a preparatory drawing onto canvas. Certain areas are marked out on the drawings by configurations of black lines. These are composed by graphic deformations of the letters S.U.R.F, signifying ‘surface’. In the process of enlargement onto canvas these areas are covered with masking tape. At a second stage, this tape is removed and the composition is continued and completed, but now using much thicker paint over the previously masked-out sections. The third stage occurs while this thick paint is still wet. The glass is applied over the painting and screwed down into the wooden support. The canvas is then loosened from the stretcher, a steel bar is inserted between the canvas and its plywood backing, and the wet paint is spread out behind the glass, forming runs and patterns which are relatively controlled but also relatively unpredictable. By this process an apparently complete or finished figurative scene is apparently blotted and smeared. Across much of the picture surface the material components of the illusion – the patches of coloured paint – are rendered literal and flat.

Or flat, at least, from the standpoint of that sophisticated culture within which the illusion of the poplar trees is perceived and its referential character understood. In fact, as their illusionistic surfaces are smeared and spoiled, the paintings also invoke a different culture, a differently positioned viewer. This is a viewer for whom the very smearing and spoiling establish representation. In the culture which this second viewer represents, illusion and reference are familiar properties of synthetic surfaces. They are to be found in the slippery effects of kitsch abstract art, in the laminated decor of up-market boutiques, or in the hygienic surfaces of expensive bathrooms. This is a viewer for whom decorativeness is a value at odds with the culture of high art. From his imaginary point of view, it is those few remnants of the original figurative scheme which remain undisturbed – the touches of paint which still signify branches, ground and sky – that read as literal, factitious and unfinished.

These paintings do not address or accommodate themselves to one viewer or the other, nor do they avail any moral grounds on which to distinguish between them. What they establish is that forms of conflict attend inexorably upon the aesthetic. If this is contingently true in the world we know, it is probably also true of any world we can now sensibly envisage. This is the intuition which is set in play as these paintings are worked over, changed and unfinished. By this process of unfinishing, Art & Language draws into the play of artistic genres and effects the dangerous and transforming substance of a culture with no regard for art. The apparent damage done to the figurative schemes – the atmospheric landscapes – is not simply a matter of avant-garde cancellation or iconoclasm, though it is significant that a tradition of artistic iconoclasm has persisted within the margins of the Modernist mainstream. Rather, what is involved is a purposeful refusal to the spectator of the possibility of certain normally accredited modes of experience and understanding. The semantic hiatus leaves you with work to do. To recognise the painting for what it is – to be able to represent it to yourself – is to look not simply through the iconic conventions of artistic culture, but rather to look in the face of those conventions into an unaesthetic world, or rather into a world unamenable to aesthetic ratification and control. This world is evoked in Art & Language’s Hostages by both the literal and the figurative components of their surfaces. It is also present as a form of visitation in those reflections of the viewer’s actual situation which are visually indissoluble from the artistic materials.

Hostage XXIV marks a moment of transition from one series of Hostages to another, or, rather it locates a hiatus which preceeds the commencement of the final series. It represents the interior of a now vacant museum. A sheet of glass has been fixed over the surface of the image. The glass stops short of the edge of the canvas, so that its literal presence registers in the process of registering the painting. Furthermore the paint adheres in places to the underside of the glass. A printed text is stuck to the surface of the glass. It’s clear that this is not a painting which has been glazed, but a painting which is partly composed of glass. It follows that what is seen in or on the glass will have to be included in our sense of the intentional scheme of the work, and not relegated to the status of visual accident, as reflections tend to be in the case of paintings which have been glazed. To the extent that the total image can be read figuratively, its various levels evoke an interior space, a window or transparent wall dividing us from that space, and a kind of broadsheet which has been fly-posted to the outside. As soon as we move to one side or the other, reflections of our own image and environment serve as it were to bring the picture home into a world of contingent effects. The kind of ‘merging’ involved is deceptively familiar from the world of still photography and film. Though the effect of reflection is not an effect of photography, it’s one which the camera has served to emphasize, to imitate through the technique of double exposure, and to thematize into a metaphor for the state of dreaming. (It’s not entirely irrelevant that though reflections have tended to re-enter painting in the twentieth century in response to the photograph [Paul Nash], classically [Titian, Ingres] reflections tended to serve painting as metaphorical devices by means of which to set the facticity of the contingent beside the insubstantial and immutable perfection of the eternal.)

The text offers a kind of description of the museum, or rather it refers to a conjectural picture of a conjectural museum; perhaps to this picture of this museum, an institution from that waking nightmare which is the disabused view of modem culture. It might be said that text and image compete in some categorical fashion, each striving to be the one doing the representing, like partners in a bad marriage, each working to include the other within its own sphere of operations and competences. If so the competition is not one which can be resolved; rather the experience of the work is the experience of a conceptual state of affairs which is irresolvable.

Why should this matter? Why should the tuning of this effect seem to be crucial to Art & Language’s self-critical process? The easy answer to that question is that the driving of a wedge between the visual and the literary has been a habitual tendency of artistic Modernism; that resistance to the habitual tendencies of culture is virtually obligatory in would-be avant-garde practices; and that it has been a historically specific requirement of putatively Postmodern practices that they oppose the Modernist separation of the literary and the visual. But that answer comes far too ready to hand. We should be heartily sick of it by now. In early Conceptual Art the suppression of the entranced beholder was never simply an avant-garde necessity. It was only within those forms of Postminimalist practice which were actually forms of Modernist apostasy that a Duchampian art-in-the-service-of-the-mind could plausibly be set up in opposition to a Greenbergian opticality. In Conceptual Art deserving of the name what was at stake was not the mere possibility of installing Art as Idea as a new anti-visual form of ready-made. The more substantial project was to dislodge the empiricistic gentleman – the symbolic guardian of the contemplative account of knowledge – from his position as arbiter of value in culture as a whole. He and his supposedly disinterested vision had to be disqualified so that a critical and social activity could be installed in their place. And what was needed if this was to be done was not the new hermeticism of Art as Idea, but a shareable practice of art as ideas; not pictures made of words, but an incursion of unruly readings into the immaculate surfaces of art. The task was to prevent the supposed iconic face of the work of art from any longer masking its causal and indexical character; in other words to prevent the authorized account of what art looks like from standing in for an account of its place in the world that makes it. Art & Language aimed – no doubt quixotically – to destroy the edges of artworks, to undo the authority and the autonomy of Vision.