• ERIK WENZEL: BELIEF IN DOUBT IN PAINTING

  • February 20 - March 21, 2009
  • Opening Reception: Friday, February 20 (7-10PM)

  • ARTIST STATEMENT

  • I like ideas that are really stupid or really smart. That isn’t to say that is the only sort of idea I am interested in, but it is something that over time has come to the fore. It seems like a simple enough statement, but I could, and probably will, spend ages reworking the wording of it. Why “like?” How about “I am attracted to ideas…” or, “I am interested,” “intrigued by,” and on? And why, “really stupid or really smart?” It could be “clever” and “pretentious” or “good” and “bad” or “awesome” and “dumb” or “brilliant” and “dumb.” I realize in all those cases the positive and negatives have inverted. And there’s also then the implication that “stupid,” “pretentious” and “dumb” are all bad things. There’s also the question of style and flow. For instance the word “really” is important and using it twice is important, for the rhythm of the statement and for its emphasis on extremes. But for now, the way I am saying is the way that I mean it.

  • I like ideas that are really stupid or really smart.

  • I came to this realization over the past 5-7 years of occasional rumination on an instance that occurred in Paris in 1967. BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Paramentier & Niele Torini) displayed their systemic, reductive and repetitive paintings at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in January of 1967, “an annual exhibition given over to old-fashioned figurative and abstract gestural paintings.” At the opening, the four artists set about making their paintings before an audience of guests. The four worked in the gallery space while a sound piece announced over loudspeaker, “Buren, Mosset, Paramentier, Toroni advise you to become intelligent.” At the end of the opening day, they withdrew their work leaving behind a banner reading “Burren, Mosset, Paramentier, Toroni are not exhibiting.” My response has varied, perhaps depending on mood or the weather, when I have thought of it. This was idiotic, what a stupid prank and waste of time, no, this was a carefully enacted performance of refusal. It has been my inability to reconcile the situation that has given the “manifestation” as it was termed, its potency. It is something that refuses to go away.

  • I’m reluctant to invoke this as a guide or a maxim, but ideas that are really stupid or really smart and ideas that keep coming back tend to be ones worthy of investigation. So it is the case with The White Room.

  • Oftentimes ideas for a work spring from my head fully formed. An idea will then preoccupy more a time, either eventually fading away, or continually asserting itself. For The White Room, I am not even sure what the catalyst was, but for more than a year now I have been thinking about it, tweaking it but remaining relatively true to the initial concept that sprung forth. The idea may have popped into my head in an instance, but the elements were all there for a while, sometimes years. It was at some particular moment that they all came together. The idea was this: in the exhibition space present canvas board panels from Utrecht resting on anodized Aluminum shelves purchased from IKEA with two binder clips affixed to the top edges. In this space play the album The White Room by The KLF. It will be like the white room of Robert Ryman paintings the Art Institute of Chicago occasionally displays. It wasn’t even in that order, it was spontaneous, the concept appeared in totality.

  • All the elements mentioned had been floating around for various amounts of time in my conscious and subconscious. I am not sure if going in and explaining every reason for each decision is a good idea.

  • One thing I am thinking of while making these panels, which have resulted in a system, is the trouble of painting. Hence the title of the show. “I come from a painting and drawing background,” is something I say a lot lately when asked what my work is like. I think my discomfort in being “just a painter” is not only because that practice is just a portion of my interest in art, but what Joseph Kosuth points out in Art After Philosophy. That painting is not art; it is a kind of art. And that the job of the artist now is to define art, to examine its boundaries and so forth. Granted, but painting—a loaded and iconic symbol not only of art with a capital “A,” but of concepts like human achievement and culture—is an excellent field, or subject to operate in while trying to do the work of sorting out this art problem.

  • Of course with The White Room there is the immediate corollary with Ryman, and the inevitable invocations with Malevich’s “White on White” and Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings. For the record while it was Ryman and years of mediation of his work that provided the springboard for this, it is my feeling that the closest relative would be Rauschenberg’s whites. If there need be a next of kin at all. That is the condition of art, and painting in particular, that most weighed down and burdened of all the media, a consciousness of its own history and its need for, or habit of, self-criticality. So Modernist, but is that not what art after Modernism does too? It is almost exclusively engaged in self-criticality. And it seems there is a generalized trend brewing, not a return to the Modern, but an increasing interest in sifting through the trash heap and salvaging, repairing or reconsidering aspects of the Modernist project that have promise of a new relevancy.

  • In any case, I have this desire to paint. The act of doing it is important for some reason to me. I can’t give it up. With the White Room, there is of course the reference to Ryman and any other numbers of white painters [sic]. But it is also a meditation on the act of painting, the vestigial desire in the face of a certain futility. White is used for a number of reasons. Is it that the piece resulted from a long memory that mutated in my mind over time? (The memory of the super flat industrial panels in a particular installation of Ryman’s Elliot Room Charter Series many years ago where the size of the space in relation to the paintings resulted in a strange painting as white cube environment. The paintings weren’t part of the wall, but they receded into it, with a sort of depressed resignation. At the same time as manifesting the wall’s blank, confrontational, uh, wall-ness.)

  • OK the white. We have these canvas boards that come gessoed. Gesso, at least in the general sense, is a white acrylic substance, not much different than white acrylic paint. So it starts out covered white. I paint it white, it has the act of painting, but it is little changed, almost undetectably so. I have this desire to paint. But what? Is it the act of painting? Is that what abstraction and systemic painting is about, a focus on the process of painting? “The project” of painting? There are subtle differences in the white on plastic. The painting takes place up against the prophylactic substrate versus the ones where the painting takes place after the removal of the wrapping. Sometimes there is withdrawal, refusal, or giving up before one starts. The panel is left wrapped and painted only by the factory gesso and in the sense that a painting surface on the wall in an art context is enough. Then, the act is halted in the middle, the panel is unwrapped, the clothes are off, the cock is out, but then, “fuck it, I’m not in the mood.”

  • These white panels are white because that is taken as a neutral. White paper, blank paper, white walls, the white cube. It is standard. Canvases come blank pre-stretched, ready made, white. White has a cultural connotation; in this case, the association is blank, empty, neutral, flat, noncommittal. Gesso is white, when you gesso you are not painting, you are preparing to paint. Gessoing is like painting a wall, it is painting but it is not Painting. Preparing to paint, painting the act, is that ritual?

  • ERIK WENZEL