Begin by explaining a single contemporary painting (and the more apparently empty of content the better), and if you continue you will find yourself touching on more subjects to investigate-philosophical, social, political, historical, scientific, psychological-than are needed for an academic degree.
Harold Rosenberg 1
The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed.
Clement Greenberg 2
. . . what was at issue in the passage to abstraction was that painting would at last deserve its name, Malerei.
Thierry de Duve 3
This drive to perform a relay back to the base of the artistic medium, back to the support, back to the objective conditions of the enterprise, is a modernist obsession. Vision must never overlook this task. It must constantly reaffirm how even the physical givens of the picture support-the flatness of the sheet, the rectangularity of its frame-mirror the essential features of visuality itself; its reflexiveness.
Rosalind E. Krauss 4
The paintings of Stephen Arruda are positioned within the situation of the edge of painting. 'Edge' is a heavily freighted term in the discourses framing artworks, denoting works regarded to be at the farthest extension of the enterprise. Yet as Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarked, "the very first painting went to the farthest reach of the future."5 One might usefully invert this to suggest that the most advanced painting thematizes what is most fundamental to painting. This, I will suggest, Stephen Arruda's recent works do, though not precisely in the reductivist manner typifying the enterprise during modernism. 6 Rather, Arruda's works thematize 7 the operations of différance 8 inherent in the semiotics of painting. If use of this Derridean term suggests a disjunctive shift from the modern to the postmodern, it does so to disclose an underlying continuity, for as Jean-Françoise Lyotard suggests:
A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is modernism not at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant. 9To propose an analogy: as war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, as Clausewitz 10 suggested, so the postmodern is the continuation of the modern by other means. To repeat by other means is not a simple recurrence, but a recapitulation opening to a transcendence. 11
If these diachronic peregrinations of modern and postmodern, of first and last paintings seem problematic, it is only because the situation of painting and of the painter is at present problematic: the situation in which the enterprise of painting is presently conducted has been profoundly problematized. If this has made the matter complex and subtle for painters, perhaps especially for a painter at the point of entry into the enterprise, it has also and at once made it potentially very fruitful. In a situation without hegemony, the field of possibilities are constituted as isotropic potentialities, seemingly in contradiction to Heinrich Wölfflin's dictum: "Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development." 12 Seemingly in contradiction, for while any move may be possible as a latent potentiality at any given stage of the development of the enterprise, not every move which can be thought at all will within a given situation be regarded as viable. Rather, those moves are viable and fruitful which are performative, in Lyotard's sense as performativity: 13 the furthering of the conduct of the enterprise, even and especially when the furthering is not repetition as an eternal return, but a recapitulation which is never the same as its precursors. "Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow." 14 The operations of différance within the performance of painting consist in the enactments of possibilities framed within paired oppositional terms: vertical and horizontal, elevated and base, refined and waste, figure and ground. In his move from manifest subject matter and the differentiation of forms requisite to its manifestation evident in his earlier works, Arruda iterates the strategy of the informe, the formless. 15 The all-over organization of the surface of Arruda's paintings engage what Yve-Alain Bois terms the noncompositional strategy in 16 several of its aspects: collapse of the distinction of image and field and attendant isotropy, monochrome, repetition (here repetition of mark). Bois posits the noncompositional strategy as a game played four times: in 1920's abstraction, in monochrome painting, in abstract expressionism, in the reactions against abstract expressionism. Can the game be played again, and in a way that does not entail the invariable failure that Bois ascribes to the previous four rounds? The game, one supposes, can in principle always be played. Perhaps, at some moments of the development of the enterprise, its play or replay appears as necessary. One can play to the farthest extension of the enterprise, and then quit the enterprise: e.g., the move entailed in Alexander Rodchenko's Red, Yellow, Blue monochromes. 17 Thus the piquant character of the retort of Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue paintings, and their echo in the works of Jasper Johns, and of Gerhard Richter. 18 One finds a resonance in these works of Stephen Arruda as well: the chromatic colors are limited to red, yellow, and blue. Alternatively, Bois suggests, one can employ a full acceptance of the failure: e.g., Marcel Duchamp. Both of these turns entail, for Rodchenko and Duchamp, leaving the enterprise of painting. Thierry de Duve posits this as a move from the specific to the generic, from painting to art in general. But can one, having entered the situation of the edge of painting, yet remain in painting without moving to art in general?
In the white on white monochromes, Arruda utilizes both the difference in color and the difference in physical texture and surface reflectance between white figure and white ground to instantiate the distinction of mark and surface while reducing the distinction to its minimal limit case. The visual subtlety of the white on white monochromes elicit a Rezeptionästhetik, 19 placing considerable emphasis on the physical location of the viewer relative to the picture plane. As John Lunsford notes:
In any painting where surface nuance and general gestural similarity are major features, dynamism is greatly enhanced by the viewer's physically active interaction. Movement while looking is not just important here, but it is really a natural result of wanting to see everything there is to see. This is not just movement nearer or farther, but from side to side as well: the multiple oblique views differ radically from one another and from the head-on. 20The "wanting to see everything there is to see" is an index of scopic desire, a hypertrophy of scopophilia in a regime of ocularcentrism. 21 It is to posit vision as constituted within the biological, carnal, ground of embodiedness, and at the same time within the domain of activity of the unconscious, "visibility invisible to itself." 22 The movement of the viewer qua flâneur 23 in the physical space in front of the virtual space 24 of the picture plane may be contrasted, first, with the location of the viewer (and artist as first viewer) in space in viewing paintings utilizing Renaissance perspective, 25 and second, with the presumptive movement of the artist about the motif in cubist painting, 26 so that multiple planes not ordinarily simultaneously visible are made simultaneously viewable in the painting. In the first instance, the position of the artist's and the viewer's eye is presumed to be fixed; in the second instance, the position of the artist's eye is presumed to move while the viewer's eye position is relatively fixed. Thus in both Renaissance perspective and cubist painting, a fixed viewing position of the viewer relative to the work is sufficient to reveal "everything there is to see." In the case of non-objective paintings such as Arruda's white on white monochromes, the viewer's physical change of viewpoint is required to "see everything there is to see." In the white on white monochromes, both the physical movement and the concentrated attention of the viewer are demanded: the hue, value, and intensity of the pigment of the acrylic polymer primer is sufficiently close to the hue, value, and intensity of the support that the richness of their relation is revealed only with scrutiny. So also in Untitled, consisting of a white on white square installed above a yellow square: one must look long enough, while appropriately shifting the gaze for the subtleties of the afterimages to be disclosed.
It is of consequence that Arruda begins the white on white monochromes with the picture plane horizontal on the floor, and not vertical on an easel or wall. Already in this beginning the conceit of the picture plane qua window 27 is obviated. The horizontal is to the vertical as writing is to painting-qua-window. The gesture performed on the flatbed 28 of the horizontal support during the facture of the work is an inscription of culture, in opposition to "the 'natural' upright field of vision." 29 Further, the horizontality of the picture plane and the large scale of the works conduces to a generosity of gesture in the application of the paint, an application that has the artist as efficient cause over the surface rather than in front of the surface. In working from above, the gesture of painting is that of sowing of skeins of paint as material might be distributed in a scatter piece. 30 That the paint is acrylic polymer primer literally transposes the material of the medium from underpainting to painting, from preliminary base beneath to final structure above. The two works utilizing oil paint sludge--the collected residue of waste oil paint, palette scrapings from countless painting classes--is an analogous inscription of base, waste material transposed to the customary position of paint itself. Inherent in the use of sludge is the character of the material: chromatic grays produced by the random mixture of discarded refined, intense pigments neutralizing each other by combination with their complementary hues. In itself this neutralization of hues is a figure of entropy, the erosion of the order of pure pigment into the disorder of the sludge. 31 This use or reuse of waste in place of refined paint partakes of Georges Bataille's notion of "double use," of the exchange of the elevated and the low. 32 This exchange of elevated and low is another transposition of the horizontal and the vertical, having a common ground of horizontal and vertical in the domain of representation.
Arruda's later group of paintings in the exhibition figure a conjunction of opposites: volcanic fire and oceanic water, the latter itself as a confluence of opposing currents. It is difficult not to read this as a Jungian coniunctio oppositorum: "It is the age-old drama of opposites, no matter what they are called, which is fought out in every human life."33 It is all the more difficult not to so read these paintings as water is a venerable trope for the unconscious. In the blue monochromes, the density of the paint emphasizes the surface in opposition to the depth induced by the hue. The scale of mark in the blue monochromes is smaller than in the white on white works while retaining some of the same character of gesture, though the more dense application of paint results in the surface becoming all figure, denying the ground, or rather conflating figure and ground, or obviating the distinction of figure from ground. As the figure-ground distinction is fundamental to perception, this would seem to obviate perception; rather, it shifts the frame of perception from within the work to the work within its environment of installation. This is to say that the objectness of the work is asserted (as it is also by the thickness of the stretcher, and the installation as a series of units. (Compare Donald Judd's Untitled, 1966, with its series of eight 9 x 40 x 30 galvanized iron modules installed vertically on the wall with Arruda's Untitled blue monochrome, with four 24 x 24 modules installed vertically on the wall.) Since the units are uniform in size and shape, the repetition of the modules is in itself neutralizing but at the same time gives emphasis to the variation within each of the modules and between them. This too is a resolution of opposites, or rather a supplanting of opposition. The resolution of opposites is imaged as a uniform field: entropy as an isotropic distribution of energy within a field. Notwithstanding the unifying effect of the repetition of mark across the surface of Arruda's paintings, notwithstanding the unifying effect of the monochromatic or near-monochromatic palette of these works, notwithstanding the neutralizing effect of seriality in the two four-canvas blue works, nevertheless there are perturbations and inflections of the field. A term for the unity prior to the separation of opposites and the advent of consciousness is chaos. 34 In the subsequent red monochromes and green monochromes, the field of marks is inflected to suggest the potentiality of figure emergent from ground, while yet not being developed as figure.
In the later works in the exhibition, while increasingly inflecting the field of the works with variations of mark and of hue, Arruda diminishes the écriture and touche of la patte 35 to a smaller scale, giving emphasis to the mark as a proprioceptive kinesthetic tropism. At once an emphasis and a diminution role of the hand in painting, Arruda's marking of the surface thematizes the problematic of painting as handmade in an age of mechanical and postmechanical production, a matter not only of the invention of photographic processes and photomechanical reproduction of images, but also of the industrial manufacture of artist's paints and their packaging in tubes. The impact of photography on painting is so frequently adverted to as to be a commonplace, yet the availability of paint in tubes, contemporaneous with the inception of photography, is no less responsible for "the demise of painting as craft and its rebirth as idea."36 The mark is the trace of and metaphor for the artist's hand, synecdoche for the embodied artist as efficient cause. The metaphor perdures even if the mark is a postmortem reflex, if painting is dead, as Paul Delaroche may, or may not, have said in 1839, after the disclosure of Daguerre's photographic process. Certainly its demise has been proclaimed since, with a regularity (and often rhetorical vehemence) that undermines any cogency of the claim. Perhaps painting was never dead, but was always already alive in the refuge of the embodiedness of the painter's hand. The empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that, however problematic the situation of painting may be regarded, proclamations of its demise are premature: painting continues, paintings proliferate, new beings brought to being. Indeed, the claims of the end of painting (or of the end of art, to shift from the specific tot he general) may be symptomatic and metaphoric of the perception of an assumption of crisis ("crisis is the most widely held assumption of twentieth century thought") 37 within cultural production or within the social formation regarded more broadly. To continue to paint in the face of a situation of crisis might be an act of nostalgia, but it might well also be an act of hope, and of faith in the enterprise.
A good entry into the enterprise, as Kubler uses the term, obtains when more than sequential position is felicitous, entailing a fit between individual predisposition and the latent possibilities of the situation in its historicity. 38 And this obtains even, indeed especially, when the entry engages the moves at the end of painting, which is the situation of the edge of the enterprise, always already the site of conjunction of arche and telos.
| Untitled | acrylic polymer primer on paper | 96 x 72 |
| Untitled | acrylic polymer primer on canvas | 96 x 32 |
| Untitled | oil paint sludge on canvas | 30 x 30 |
| Untitled | oil paint sludge on canvas | 72 x 72 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 2 parts, each 48 x 48 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 48 x 36 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 84 x 60 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | four panels, each 71 x 23.5 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | four panels, each 24 x 24 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 13 x 13 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 24 x 24 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 36 x 24 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 48 x 32 |
| Untitled | oil on canvas | 28 x 18 |