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
Markings of surface. Agglutinative accumulations of paint. One can say that of these paintings, but what can one say of painting, simplicitur?
Painting is, most often, conducted alone as a solitary enterprise, but never as an enterprise conducted in isolation: the practices of painting constitute a synchronic and diachronic field that obviates isolation of practice, however solitary the practitioner. Painting is at once contemplative and active. Painting is one of the ways the "thought-things" 2 which are artworks come to be, at once material and conceptual. Painting is predicated on such systems of difference; there is nothing systematic about painting. If painting were systematic, it would be predictable, at least in principle. Because painting qua enterprise is not systematic, it is not predictable: the options for the enterprise are open, even when they might seem closed. Clement Greenberg remarked that:
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. 3
It probably always looks to a lot of artists (and others) as if would be next to impossible to paint great pictures anymore: how else is one to explain the incessant proclamation of painting's obituary? If Greenberg errs in this assertion, it is in implying that making predictions about art are avoidable. Every new work-"the really new work of art", T. S. Eliot suggested 4-is always already a prediction about art. The enterprise of painting is always already a positing of what painting is, which is to say of what is yet possible in painting. If Heinrich Wölfllin is correct in urging that "Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development." 5 then within this radical historicity the question is opened (if rarely expressed): "What does it mean for a painter to think?" 6
Don Taylor's recent paintings engage the enterprise of painting simultaneously on two fronts. One aspect of Taylor's work contends with the representation in painting of the artist's lived experience, and thus ultimately with the external referents of the works. The other aspect contends with the representation of painting as an object in itself, and thus with the ultimate internal referent of the works. That this is so problematizes the simplistic notion that a painting has a single referent, and that the regard of a painting employs a single framework. That painting engages this and that is to say that painting in itself has undergone a shift from the specific to the generic-painting as already its own alterity, which nevertheless remains within painting-analogous to the shift that Thierry de Duve urges has obtained from painting to an alterity beyond itself, namely to art as such, which precisely does not remain within painting. 7 This, in turn, necessarily problematizes the notion of style as a singularity to which an individual's propensities conduce. Style, and medium as well, can no longer be thought as a singularity to which an individual's propensities conduce. In the case of Taylor's works, the question should perhaps be restated: "What does it mean for a printmaker to think in paint?" Part of the answer has to be: to engage an alterity of color and mark as it can exist in a print: however textured a passage of color can be in an intaglio print or a collagraph, it never completely attains to the level of tactility manifested in these paintings.
In Taylor's works, marking of surface is thematized. 8 Marking a surface entails at once mark and the emptiness which is the alterity of mark: mark as trace and the un-marked are equiprimordial. Marks as such entail distinction between and choosing within oppositions of thinness and thickness, density and ethereality, opacity and translucency, lightness and darkness, slowness and quickness, proximal and distal, and all the rich relationships of color-notoriously the most relative medium in art 9-too numerous to conveniently catalog and too contextual in their signification to reduce to a taxonomy without perpetrating a farce. Intrinsic to marking of surface in the facture of the works is the selection of color qua retention in relation to antecedent areas of color and in anticipation qua projection of subsequent areas of color, and indeed in relation to the entire work as it discloses itself in its coming to be. That having been stipulated, one may distinguish the paradigmatic and syntagmatic 10 conditions of the use of color. The paradigmatic plane entails an operation of classification, and is a function of metaphor. The syntagmatic plane entails an operation of division of signs, and is a function of metonymy. The paradigmatic selection of a color is situated within the domain of the range of a hue. The syntagmatic selection of a color is situated within the domain of all hues. The choice among possible colors, continually reiterated in the facture of the work, thus can be analyzed into a twofold selection: what color, of what characteristics, in relation to the other areas of color forming the field of an image. Obviously, for all its richness, color is not the only element constituting a mark. The distinction of paradigmatic and syntagmatic likewise subsumes figure and ground (or mark and not-mark) under perceptuality, rough and smooth under texture, slow and fast under speed, opaque and translucent under density, proximal and distal under space, dry and wet under flow, and vertical and horizontal under directionality. All of that at once, and of course more, is entailed in the inflection of mark. Enough, in short, to make a world in the work that equiprimordially references lifeworld and the worlds of painting.
Don Taylor is a charter member of the Brookhaven College Art faculty, teaching at Brookhaven College since 1978. He received the Master of Fine Arts from Washington University, St. Louis, and the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Louisville School of Art, Louisville, Kentucky.