Anodyne

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Short essay for the exhibition of Mina Totino watercolor drawings I organized for 69 Pender. Impressive opening-night turnout, especially so considering the ark-building weather that prevailed outside all evening.

Mina refers to this text as "a bunch of little thought bubbles," which seems dead-on to me.

Seven Thoughts About Reading Marx
by Christopher Brayshaw

I first saw the Reading Marx drawings near the end of a long studio visit, the table between us cluttered with cigarette butts and empty cups of honeyed tea. The drawings’ vast expanses of unmarked white rag paper and pale grey watercolor washes lacked the Gustonesque muscularity of the huge weather events stacked elsewhere in the studio, the Kilroy faces, and piles of books and clouds. Like the burning cars and Antonini explosions before them these big oil paintings foreground their status as images derived from photographic or filmic sources; they put their posterity to their sources into quotes. The Marx drawings, like the Rϋgen chalk canvases and the cloud studies shown at the Robson Street Gallery, drop the quotes. Almost all of Mina Totino’s images have a source in some other medium – I think this is an essential part of her practice, the recognition that the same image can occupy many different positions – high culture, low culture, utilitarian – like those quantum events that simultaneously exist in more than one state, particle and wave. In the Marx drawings, this recognition is unneccessary to the work the images perform. You don’t apprehend their sources as explicitly as you do, with, say, the Antonini explosions, or Keanu Reeves’ huge flapping coat.

The conceptual and appropriative art practices of the late 60s, 70s, and early 1980s put traditional guarantors of aesthetic quality like color, line, and composition into question. Only a rube would use the tonal qualities of, say, a Sherrie Levine Weston appropriation as a guarantee of its aesthetic worth or “quality.” The form of the work – its explicit dependence on an external source – signals its resistance to conventional modes of aesthetic classification and analysis. Many artists hoped this resistance might overload or short-circuit older representational forms all together, exposing them as vestigal to contemporary culture. This hope remains unfulfilled, and its legacy is twofold. On one hand, representational works that engage the older forms through techniques derived from the artists’ close study of conceptual and post-conceptual art (for example, Jenny Holzer’s glosses on Constructivist photomontage, or those aspects of lighting and staging that indicate James Coleman’s close study of Baroque portraiture). On the other hand, the dreary spectacle of post-, neo- & etc. conceptualism, still obstinately tilling fields thoroughly ploughed in the late 1960s.

The Marx drawings would be unthinkable without conceptual art’s example. Every choice that determined the project’s final form – its seriality; Mina’s use of two cameras, one loaded with slide film, the other an instant Polaroid, designed to capture two very different impressions of each sitter’s face -- are integral to it, if not foregrounded there. But the Marx project is not, strictly speaking, conceptualism or some post- or neo- variant thereof, for Mina’s final emphasis is on the particularity of her subjects, and not the process that makes the pictures.

Capital, the Marx text from which the series takes its title, never appears in the drawings. I remember Mina’s own copy, an oversize Penguin, well-thumbed, with little pieces of yellow Post-It stuck in the margins, which the used bookseller in me immediately started pulling out and then guiltily replacing.

The drawings don’t depend on a particular text or passage per se, but on the subjects’ engagement with a Marx passage of their own choosing. Reading and thinking don’t necessarily encourage grand gestures. The subjects’ downcast eyes and occasionally furrowed brows are symptoms of complex internal processes that mostly escape representation.

The drawings’ modesty in the face of the impossibility of representing just what is occurring in twenty-one different mental hemispheres is one of the project’s greatest strengths.

Watercolor drawing encourages abbreviation of gesture. The economy of means that initially renders some sitters almost spectral (eg., the early portrait of Michael Turner) evolves, over time, into a flickering language of its own, whose little dashes and curlicues are like the half-finished sentences old friends exchange in conversation. Friendship only infrequently appears in sophisticated art, and I admire Mina’s non-ironized representation of it here.

- posted by cjb @ 7:35 PM

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