Thinking in painting is thinking as paint.

James Elkins 1

It is a common enough experience to plausibly justify a claim of something like universality: perhaps intending to touch up a chip on trim molding around a door, or to complete a project laid aside a year before, one opens a can of old, half-used paint, finding it covered with a skin, dried leather covering the ooze below. One knows without being a painter of such skins of paint. Painters, too, know such skins. Such skins form on the paint left on the palette: overnight on raw umber, much more slowly on alizarin crimson. Such skins form on the painting, too, when a thick impasto dries more rapidly on its surface than the still wet paint below.

The paint of the painting is no less a skin: oil paint dries primarily by polymerization entailing oxidation (not as is commonly supposed merely by solvent evaporation, though that is a necessary precursor to polymerization). Since drying occurs more rapidly where the paint is in contact with the air, a surface skin forms over the still wet paint below. This is to speak of a skin of paint only in terms of material cause. To thus speak of paint as material is to fail to address everything that matters about painting. Though there is no painting without its material cause, the artwork entails a transcendence of the materiality of the material while maintaining the materiality of the material. This duality of assertion and transcendence of materiality is a sublation. It is in this sense of sublation of materiality that one must engage these paintings of Cindy Hurt as correlatives of the body.

One might well urge that any successful painting entails a duality of the painting's material cause, whatever else it may entail. Indeed, Richard Wollheim has made this thesis central to his notion of "seeing-in,"2 in which the surface is regarded both as "essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order"3 and a surface articulated to evoke depth, perceived depth being the consequent of the differentiation of the surface. Any differentiation, any intervention in the isotropy of an unarticulated surface, entails the twofoldedness of seeing-in: to see the surface qua surface, and to see the differentiated surface as having elements which appear to precede or recede from the plane of the surface.4

Cindy Hurt's paintings thematize 5 the paint film as skin, thereby instantiating the trope of the painting as body and thus a concomitant dialogue of exterior and interior, surface and depth. The figure is typically abstracted to a few mostly linear marks in Hurt's paintings, emphasizing the fundamental character of twofoldedness in viewer response to the painted surface.

The trope of painting as body entails an equivocation, in which the denotation of the terms shifts from material signifier to immaterial signified. Thus Surprise references the figure with a stack of circles evoking the volume and gesture of the figure in space; a small circle and two dots, more thinly painted in the top circle with transparent dark blue are sufficient to represent not only a face, but the expression of surprise. So also the gesture of the several figures, and the shifts of balance, volume and weight this entails. This is simple enough to seem immediate, unmediated, but it obtains within a context of some significance.

The trope of painting as body cannot but reference an aporia in the discursive field surrounding painting beginning in modernism and continuing in postmodernist and poststructuralist discourse. The Greenbergian reductionist turn, predicated on a strategic move of purifying painting of whatever is not regarded as being particular to painting as such, famously entailed an essentialist valorization of flatness. 6 Yet the abstract expressionist works with which Greenberg was particularly engaged observed this valorization of flatness largely in obviation of Greenberg's pronouncements, both for the perduring character of the metaphors enabled by the duality of surface and depth and for the strong tendency of any differentiation of a surface to enact that duality. 'Flatness' in Greenberg's usage stands as an oppositional term with depth, but 'flatness' for Greenberg is a perceptual phenomenon; it is far from clear that Greenberg urged a concomitant rejection of subjectivity. That notwithstanding, postmodernist and poststructuralist discourses typically extend the Greenbergian valorization of flatness to not only entail a concomitant denial of depth in the sense of perceived virtual space, but to also entail a rejection of the dialogue of surface and depth as a trope of a Cartesian dualism of exteriority and interiority, of material and spirit, correlative with a broader hostility to metaphysics. Thus it is a matter of consequence that one now deliberately invokes the trope of painting as body, for a consequence of the historicity of that invocation is to put into question the recent vitiation of the trope. 7

Though it may do so, the trope of painting as body need not entail a dualism in the sense of Cartesian res extensa and res intensa; there is a distinction between Descartes' mind-body dualism and the duality of twofoldedness. Perhaps painting as body is more likely to be regarded as entailing a dualism if the trope of painting as body is extended to entail the oppositional pair of surface and depth. Painting as body might as readily entail a regard of paint as metaphor for the materiality of the biological ground of being in which the interiority of consciousness is regarded as merely epiphenomenal and thus as an extension of the materiality of the body, or it may entail a rejection of assertions of any transcendence of materiality altogether, or it may entail an assertion of such a claim. However that may be, the trope of painting as body underlies the sense of the painting as unity; as Mikel Dufrenne asserts:

The body is the always already established system of equivalences and intersensory transpositions. It is for the body that unity is given before diversity. 8

This ur-unity of "equivalences and intersensory transpositions" founds the experience of the painting as a quasi-subject. 9 It is a founding in one's lived experience, reflexively of one's self and intersubjectively of other selves. This ur-unity underlies and is engaged in the encounter with the artwork.

The thickly worked surfaces of Hurt's paintings, with chromatic passages layered with thick white impasto, are a trace of the duration of their facture, a duration which for the period of facture is indexical to the lived experience of the artist. In their aspect of temporal duration, too, Hurt's paintings reference the body as ground of consciousness.

The recent reintroduction of reference to the figure in Hurt's paintings, as in these works, positions the works as overtly figurative, but just. Signification of the figure is reduced to the minimal conditions requisite to its evocation: a single line in Suspended, an almost snowman-like stack of circles in Surprise, Girl With Boat, and Best Friend. There is a playful, whimsical character to these figures, perhaps most evident in Hole in One and Turtle Dove, where the figure most strong references stuffed toys. The figures in Ancestors Brought Forward and Homer Traveled are more 'conventional' in the sense of more overtly employing reference to the human form. The linear elements signifying the figure are themselves highly abstracted, remaining line qua line even as they reference the figure. As line, the linear elements are in the surface of the ground of thickly worked paint, rendering the field anisomorphic. As figure, the linear elements of the works are not of the ground, but emergent from the ground.

The figures, with the exception of the figure in Suspended, avoid the edge. The central placement of the figural element is correlative to asserting the centrality of the subject, a move which, along with the assertion of interiority, is counter to the postmodern turn. 10 The ground surrounds the figures, and is articulated by the figures. The field is completely employed without being filled to the edges. Thus treating the placement of the figure relative to the edges obviates three conditions: the introduction of heightened tension that approaching the edge entails, the feeling-potentially of claustrophobia-that filling the field to the edges produces, and the implication of indefinite extension that crossing the edge of the field with a line or shape suggests. Rather, Hurt's paintings utilize the containment of the figure within the field to emphasize the articulatory function of the emergent figure on the ground and the equiprimordial constructive function of the ground on the emergent figure. That the ground is of a substantial layered impasto in contrast to the more thinly painted lines signifying the figure, as well as entailing a value contrast between the dark linear elements of the figure and the white, though sometimes light valued colored ground, emphasizes the development of the painting as a differentiation of field into oppositional terms of figure and ground.

The vocabulary of Hurt's paintings is drawn from the tradition of painting. There is no outside of that tradition, of that vocabulary: every new move extends the tradition and vocabulary of the medium. The seemingly perennial problematic of painting subsists in finding one's way to work within and on that vocabulary and tradition. One way, recently much employed, is a matter of quotation, as Donald Kuspit notes:

The postmodern artist is a kind of clever animal, able to juggle quotations-an ingenious but hardly innovative act. What used to be jungle cunning now consists in the artist turning somersaults in his linguistic cage, or biting his own linguistic tail-which is what irony is-because he can't bite the keeper of his own language, the mysterious keeper who taught him the language from which he can't escape.11

Quotation is a special case of reference, in which the reference is direct and exact, so as to preclude originality and creativity. That is not what is occurring in Hurt's paintings. More generally, reference is an allusion, an evocation or an alterity. Inasmuch as allusion or evocation is of an alterity, an other, a differentiation-a making new-is entailed. That is the case in Hurt's paint handling, which would seem to allude to predecessors as diverse as Wayne Thiebaud, Willem de Kooning, and Susan Rothenberg among others. While reference, like quotation, entails a tacit acknowledgement of one's situatedness within a vocabulary that precedes one, however much one may expand and extend that vocabulary, unlike quotation reference does not entail irony. Rather, reference entails at least a tacit knowing of the genealogy of a vocabulary, and a utilization of that vocabulary without irony.

Hurt's paintings entails valorizing the function of art as the symbolization of subjective states. This may be a part of "a revival of romantic creativity in the form of a search or perhaps just a wish for beauty in art." 12 If this is surprising, after its repression in the endgame of modernism and postmodernism, after the putative end of art and of history, it should not be. We are, after all of that, human, with lived experience of our embodied subjective states. 13 After the repression of subjectivity, of interiority and depth in postmodern practice and discourse, regarding the function of art as the symbolization of subjective states may seem surprising. It should not seem so: the repressed-that which we absent from consciousness-returns, as Freud noted some while ago.14

Cindy Hurt is Adjunct Professor of Art at Brookhaven College. Ms. Hurt received the Bachelor of Fine Arts cum laude from the University of North Texas in 1975, and the Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas in 1977. Recent exhibition include Odyssey, 829 Exposition, Dallas, 2001; House and Gardens, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas 1995; Showing Off the DCCCD, Dallas Visual Arts Center, 1995; Made in Texas, Arlington Museum of Art, 1993; Forty Views, Arlington Museum of Art, 1992; Intrinsic Views, University of Dallas, 1992; Profiles I: The Land, Arlington Museum of Art, 1991; Currents in the Underground Stream, Longview Art Museum, Longview, Texas, 1990; The Vessel, 501 2nd Avenue, Dallas, 1990; Final Show, DW Gallery, Dallas, 1988; Texas Visions, Museum of Art of the American West, Houston, and traveling.

1. 1 James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 113. Return
2. 2 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).Return
3. 3 Maurice Denis, Théories: 1890-1910, 3rd ed. (Paris: Bibliothèque de l'Occident, 1912), p. 1. [Initial publication under the pseudonym "Pierre Louis" in Art et Critique, August, 1890.] Reprinted in translation in Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874-1904: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 187. Return
4. 4 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 46. Return
5. 5 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 25. By 'thematization' Wollheim refers to the recognition and conscious utilization of features of the work in progress so as to enable meaning. Return
6. 6 Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), pp. 193-201. Return
7. 7 That the vitiation of the duality of surface and depth as trope for exteriority and interiority is relatively recent is evident from considering early modernist abstraction; see the author's "Abstract Matters: Recapitulation and Transcendence," curator's essay for the exhibition Abstract Matters: Recapitulation and Transcendence, Forum Gallery, Brookhaven College, February 3-25, 1994, online at http://rampages.onramp.net/~dnewman/abstmatr.htm. Return
8. 8 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 334. Return
9. 9 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 146. Return
10. 10 Inter alia, see Hal Foster, "(Post)modern Polemics," Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), pp. 121-137. Return
11. 11 Donald Kuspit, "The Semiotic Anti-Subject," the third of three Getty lecture at the School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, April 10, 2000. Return
12. 12 Donald Kuspit, "The Semiotic Anti-Subject," the third of three Getty lecture at the School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, April 10, 2000, ad fin. Return
13. 13 See Robert E. Wood, A Path Into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 1-80; Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), pp. 1-33. Return
14. 14 "The essence of repression," Freud notes, "lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance from consciousness." Sigmund Freud, "Repression" (1915), Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), vol. 14, p. 147. Return