If metaphor is the being of painting, what, in painting, is the being of metaphor? Its name as painting. If the name transmits the being of color, what is the being of the name of color? Its name, once again. The revelation of the Symbolic comes when the "word does not say anything except that it is a word" - when the signifier has no other signification than its own being as a signifier, when naming names only its naming function.
Thierry de Duve 1
David Frazer's paintings juxtapose and layer motifs with shifting syntax. Compendiums of modes of facture, a mode d' emploi of 'painting' as a verb, Frazer's paintings confound any simplistic expectation of what painting is, refusing a reduction of painting to a single possibility of facture.
Along with multiple means of facture, each varying in syntax, Frazer deploys several recurring motifs, commonplace objects, among them the roots, bulbs, leaves and flowering stalks of tulips, eggs, grids of dots, representation of wood grain, wooden fences, ladders, apples. What is salient is the syntax of marking in the facture of the work composed from these motifs. The ground often appears to be applied by a not-too-loaded paint roller, and often entails multiple layers of different hue and opacity. The grids of dots suggesting halftone reproduction on an enlarged scale appear to have been stenciled through perforated paper tape or sheet metal. The tulips are rendered as if by pochoir, or by screenprinting, or printed by woodcut. The eggs and apples are painted with passages suggesting the spattering of rather liquid paint, as if flicked from a toothbrush. Seeming runs and drips of paint are rendered with controlled application of paint.
The handling of material with inherent physical properties conditions but does not exhaustively determine pictorial syntax-otherwise, there would be but one possible syntax in the employment of a given medium. Simple inspection of these works reveals the possibilities of syntax to be multiple. The surface of the works ranges from smooth passages devoid of discernible brushstrokes to juicy impasto with substantial physical texture. This is something more than merely the multiplicity of effects possible in the medium of oil paint. Rather, it engages and problematizes the notion of 'medium' itself. The notion of medium is never exhausted by an exhaustive description of a medium's material cause. A surplus always already escapes any reduction of a medium to its material cause, and it is precisely this surplus, this remainder, that constitutes a medium as such. This surplus subsumes, but is not correlative with, the "differential, self-differing, and thus a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support."2 If reduction of medium to material cause is not proper, the proper sense of medium consists in the constellation of sedimented conventions as problematized in practices extending the medium.
Shifting between modalities of syntax in the same work does at least three things: rendering syntax as such visible, engaging issues of innate singularity of an individual's marking, notions of unity of work and unity of self. First, difference of syntax within the single work makes visible and thinkable what is commonly not seen as such and passes without thought: the syntax of visual representation per se. Second, the shifting of syntax obviates the notions of touche and écriture, of an intrinsic marking peculiar to the individual artist forming style in a subjective sense, and to objective elements of style, respectively.3 Third, shifting of syntax within a single work subverts the notion that the unity of the work is founded on and is exhausted by a unity of syntax, correlative with the presupposition of the presumed unity of an authorial self. That the singularity of self was once a desideratum, however problematical, is suggested by Charles Olson:
that we grow up many
And the single
is not easily
known4
With the structuralist problematization of the notion of the authorial self, and its poststructuralist extension in the problematization of the self qua Rousseau's transcendental pretence,5 to question the unity of the self has become something of a commonplace, perhaps the current doxa, as has the observation that the experience of contemporary life is frequently fragmented.
Thus Frazer's compositions, comprised of discrete motifs and fragments of motifs, articulate an anisotropic space, an obviation of isotropy manifested as the operation of a painterly différence. To layer, to juxtapose, different syntactical modes as an operation of différence is at once both to differ, and to defer: it is a making other, and a deferment of closure. Closure obtains, of course, within the particular work, though the deferment of closure opens the seriality of Frazer's works. The process is akin to collage, but without the literal cutting and pasting of traditional collage; it is akin to collage regard in terms of its effects, rather than its manner of operation.
Presupposed in the thematization of the languages of painting manifested in the shifting from one syntax of facture to another is the notion of the painting as an autonomous entity, the result of a self-referential, reflexive practice which, for all of that, maintains an engagement of opticality. That it another way of saying the Frazer's works are painting as painting, and in painting all worlds are possible, as observers as various as Empedocles and Clement Greenberg noted some while ago.6 Possible, that is, if one "paints as if no one had ever painted before."7 To do which, of course, presupposes that one has assimilated everything that has been painted before, to its very foundation of syntax.
David Frazer is Professor of Painting at Rhode Island School of Design. He received the BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and the MA from the University of New Mexico. Frazer served as Graduate Painting Coordinator, and Head of Painting and Printmaking, and as Chief Critic and Director of the RISD European Honors Program in Rome. Frazer's honors include numerous grants and sponsored research at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangziou, China, with exhibitions including solo exhibitions at Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI; Arno Maris Gallery, Westfield State College; Full Circle Gallery, Providence; Bromfield Gallery, Boston; RISD Palazzo Cenci, Rome.
So even as artists - persons knowing their craft
Through wits of cunning - paint with streak and hue
Bright panels, and will seize in hand
The oozy poisons pied and red and gold
Mixing harmonious, now more, now less,
From which they fashion forms innumerable,
And like to all things, peopling a fresh world
With trees, and men and women, beasts and birds, and fishes
And gods long-lived in excellent honors:
Just so, and let no guile deceive your heart
Even so the spring of mortal things, leastwise
Of all the host born visible to man.
O guard well this knowledge, for you have heard
In this my song the goddess and her tale.
In the early forties in New York it looked to a lot of artists as if it would be next to impossible to paint great pictures anymore. That feeling was wrong, it was a delusion, but it seemed then that the options were closed. And maybe once you begin asking about what options are open to art in any given moment -- in this given moment -- you run the danger of making predictions about art, and as I said, that's the one thing you should never do when it comes to art.