Uncool thoughts
In between arguments and stopping periodically for tea and toast we are working and talking about how to get across what the paintings are about. Matt thinks people will find it hard to see why the paintings aren’t nostalgia for a moment in the early twentieth century when painting was interested in science and colour and surface. Painting now is about representation, he points out. It takes the modes of representation of the modern world — photography, film and photoshop — and turns them over in a distanced and playful way. Painting is dead, and you are liberated if you recognise it. But I think that very distance is alienation, and alienation can produce art that is pretty visually null. We are lucky to have other areas in which to explore ideas — Matt with broadcasting and writing and me with Made in England — areas in which meaning can be explored with more than irony, in a way that is liberating. We don’t have to advertise our awareness of the impossibility of painting because, unlike others, we both have a connection to an unbroken visual tradition. The results of this experiment are on their way.
Leave a Comment