Thursday, November 6, 2008

Painters Beware


Issue number 83 of Parkett deals with the gesture and the mark by addressing the work of Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton. Both of these guys gesture and mark it up in very different, yet urgent ways.

This issue also tackles the issue of outright "dopeness" with the inclusion of Robert Frank. And let's face it, there is quite a lot of "mark making" going on there too.

4 comments:

tim said...

Warholian love-children, this bunch.
Both of these guys (Wool, Guyton) are real interesting to me because of how easily I can go from loving them, to having no confidence in them whatsoever. Both get away with murder. Kelley Walker fits a similar profile. At their worst, I think they take little bits of the painting vocabulary and turn them into empty signifiers, aka "it's only a painting because it behaves like one." At best, they can make "painting language" jump back to life in a world of reproducibility and commercialism. Still can't decide what to think of 'em.

MATTHEW said...

Yeah, I see Guyton as offering a provocation toward painting and it's gestures in the exact terms which you describe - emptying the "mark".

tim said...

Guyton & Co. seem to offer new tricks to young painters wanting to expand their work. I'm not sure they actually help anyone out, though-- you could just look at Warhol instead.

This young painter asks for a different direction in an article published by the Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/03/04/out_of_the_box/

MATTHEW said...

Thanks Tim! That was a good essay. I reposted the link.