...writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost...
Roland Barthes, from "Image, Music, Text" 1977
I discovered these two quotes the other day. And even though I am taking them out of their original context, I can't help but cherish the direction that they take. In one sense, they blend together quite well: they both reduce art to a primary nature. What isn't clear is whether they agree that pure beauty is absolutely neutral and, in the platonic sense, a state outside of the subject, or if the neutrality and beauty are oppositional to one another. I see this struggle profoundly at the heart of painting today, particularly in abstraction.
For a while now, beauty has been abandoned. Only it hasn't really, only prettiness has gone, replaced by the beauty of the conceptual and the intellectual. Yet, to speak of beauty, or even transcendence, has been taboo for a long time.
On the other hand, the reduction of art to such neutrality has become an arm's race toward the ultimate nothingness. Slowly the intention and ideology of the older conceptual underpinnings were stripped away. Now we have paintings based on the most mundane and ephemeral experiences, because not to have a conceptual base is a conceptual action on the part of the artist.
My solution has been to revert to a phenomenological sourcing of my memory and imagination of what I have seen in images from books, photos and things I see when I'm walking. In this way I might take a memory of brushstrokes in a painting by Twombly or Bonnard (any painter will do) and cover a canvas with those brushstrokes in the color of a house on my block. The productions of paintings in this manner serves my interest in both the experimental production of images. Yet, I am torn between conflict and sympathy for beauty and nothingness.