In terms of their style, these works may be described as a hybrid, even mongrel combination of two already venerated concepts of modern art.  When those close to Alexandr Rodchenko launched an attack on the idea of pictorial composition in the spring of 1921, in Soviet Russia, they were determined to get rid of artistic subjectivity and replace that concept with an idea of construction, in which the elements and forms of material could come to be seen as verifiable in relation to one another – ‘factual’ and even ‘true’ in a sense not seen before in art. Constructing material (and materialist) structures was to provide the perfect antidote to what the group saw as a redundant aesthetic of relationship, balance and (of course) legible subject-matter.  It became clear that giving up painting altogether might be necessary to achieve that end; and in practice most Constructivists renounced the use of paint and brushes in favour of prosaic matter in the form of wooden spars, wire and occasionally collage, that is, the cutting-up of mostly photographic material and sticking the pieces down in a given position relative both to the ground-plane and to each other. It is a nice fact that, almost simultaneously, an international Dada movement, programmatically opposed to everything (Dada included), also found in collage a congenial method of defamiliarising the material world to the point of making its familiar coherences look absurd. Was Constructivism also absurd?  In a way it was, and perhaps needed to be. My point is that veneration of the idea of construction in modern painting turns out to be consistent, at a nearly hidden level, with a practice of untidiness, experiment, and the apparently random use of paint as a viscous medium: sticky, expensive, and inherently unpredictable when allowed to melt, drip and coalesce with other types of material or to form an unstable pact with a given surface. That gives a clue to another of modern art’s venerated moments, a later one, to which Constructivism seems at first glance inevitably hostile. The poet Allen Ginsburg pointed out that the word ‘Beat’ – launched upon the public in an article in the New York Times in 1952 – came to mean not only penniless, exhausted, without a place to sleep or stay, but also wide-eyed, receptive to vision and perhaps illumination, hence ‘beat’, ‘beatific’. ‘Everything belongs to me because I am poor’ – the phrase comes from Jack Kerouac but is close enough to the working method of that exemplary Beat-Constructivist, Kurt Schwitters, who roamed the streets looking for remaindered fragments of existence, the banal and lowered objects that remain once the feast of consumption has ended and the people have gone home for a rest.  For Schwitters and now for us, the eye of the Beat-Constructivist turns away from the shining surfaces of the contemporary city to find in its gutters bits and pieces of detritus that sparkle with their own life and intensity, each of them formed by desire, competition and exchange. The impulses that form this group of wood reliefs and dripped paintings are both ‘Beat’ and ‘Constructivist’ at the same time. The group includes collage-objects made (we should perhaps say ‘formed’) of paper, wood and plastic dejecta accumulated over years of noticing, marvelling and scavenging. The paintings themselves also revel in the casual and the ecstatic, while paying dutiful homage to the squared-up grid of the canvas rectangle and the properties of the viscous medium dripped, vibrated or splashed upon its flat surface. For all Constructivist-type paintings, Beat or other, are in the end obliged to respect the material properties of the canvas rectangle, including its horizontal and vertical orientations that face the viewer and appeal for attention and maintain scrutiny. That said, most of their other visual effects can be traced to the laws of diffusion and dispersal that govern the behaviour of viscous matter when it comes into contact with a surface having qualities of its own. It is in this sense that these works are made the same way other things in the world are made: through a contest of regularity and accident, planning and disorder. In medieval Japan, the word ‘sabi’ meant chill, lean or withered, while a rhyming word ‘wabi’ meant the misery of living away from society in a superficially cheerless state – at least until the 14^th century when both words began to signify the spiritual richness to be derived from self-imposed poverty of means and of expression. Today, ‘wabi-sabi’ is understood to mean the imperfect and the variegated, the crude or the irregular; whatever can accommodate attrition or degradation; or can survive ambiguity and contradiction. It can mean incomplete, relative, dark, contaminated, corroded, or seasonal. It is also said to be a good thing if the creator of such things is of no distinction, invisible and anonymous; another reason why a blatant miscegenation of distinct (and distinctive) modernist traditions is worth a try. 

2010

Painting in the long shadow Constructivism encounters obstacles and  opportunities today; foremost among them the status of ‘the organic’ when seen against the backdrop of modernism’s infatuation – for good and ill – with the geometry of the plane. Though the dominant early strain of Constructivism, that of Rodchenko and Popova and the First Working Group of 1920-1, was fixated upon the organising possibilities of the straight line, another tendency, represented by Mikhail Matiushin, Pyotr Miturich and the later Tatlin, preferred to examine the curved, the granular and the cell-like in relation to the properties of matter and the processes of the physical world. In subsequent mainstream modernism, the line and the plane enjoyed easy relations with the picture surface, from at least Art Concret to Minimalism; whereas the facts and language of organic form were mercilessly hijacked, if we look back, by romantics, expressionists and others, who made extravagant claims for spontaneity, randomness and so forth, but were receptive only to how nature ‘looks’ or ‘feels’ in some familiar visual settings.  But how does nature ‘look’ and ‘feel’ today? Thanks largely to the power of computing, the culture is awash with images of how the flow of liquids and temperature gradients interact; how formerly inscrutable systems such as microscopic and cosmic fluctuations work¹. And constructive painting can learn some lessons here. The present group of paintings might even be called Convections, on the strength of their correspondence – within approximate limits of fidelity – to what physicists tell us about heat-transfer within a container; those patterns of dynamic regularity that underlie all of nature and might even to said to shape the world. For instance, we know that convection cells form in accordance with the viscosity, speed of heating or cooling (etc) of the liquid in question; and in ways that seem oddly analogous to process of construction in painting. To be more precise, the development of cell-patterning within a shaped container can be compared with pictorial organisation inside the four sides of a rectangular canvas. As the Polish modernist Strzeminski liked to point out in his theory of Unism, the antithesis of non-hierarchical construction in art – which is social construction as well as formal – is the Baroque, that is, the spilling out and multiplying of form beyond the confines of its physical frame². To take a further example: hexagonal convection cells come out roughly the same size as each other, a size which is roughly equal to the depth of the liquid in question. Roll-cells, those that form between hotter and cooler planes, seem to bend at their endpoints to meet their container at 90°, apparently to maximise physical stability.  Other roll cells ‘adopt themselves to the shape of their environment by curling up into concentric circles, thus avoiding meeting any boundaries at all’, to cite a recent account by the science writer Philip Ball. And it is surely remarkable that cellular organisation that functions to maximise physical stability matches the codes of visual construction quite exactly, in as much as we seem able to recognise stability purely from a structure’s visual form. Now, scientists even believe that nature’s forms may be conscious of their own history. The same writer might well have been describing cultural change, when he says of the possible alternative patterns in a convecting fluid, ‘it is not easy to predict which will be produced in any given experiment.  When several alternative patterns are possible in principle for a particular set of conditions, which one is selected may depend upon how the system is prepared, that is, on the initial conditions [but also] … on the past history of the system’³. For all that, correlations between the studio and the laboratory are by no means exact. For the very visibility of cellular natural patterns depends upon sophisticated new technologies of visualisation, in which data remote in time or space is converted into an image on an electronic screen via enhancement through the addition of colour, shading, and adjustments in orientation and scale, showing the relative positions of particles, but fictionalising most of their other qualities. Colour, which forms the painter’s lexicon, lies at the centre of this paradox, for colours are visual properties that from a scientific viewpoint have virtually no reality at all on the basis of which reliable inductions can be made. As the Harvard empiricist W.V.Quine said in a pleasing alliteration, ‘cosmically, colours would not qualify as kinds’⁴. Yet for the artist, colours are the kinds that count; such that, in forming cells inside the work of art, he can articulate relations of intensity and proximity that are not to be found articulated elsewhere. In the language of the organic, colours, and with them shapes, can be considered the convection-cells of the self-organising work of art. Formed with the hand and brush, they offer a kind of ‘rough’ organic geometry that stands somewhere between Euclid and the forces acting inside a saucepan of boiling milk, or soap bubbles associating in a dish. It may be an ancient question whether the pattern-languages of nature are completely coincident with the codings of human sight; but as so often in modernism it would seem to be a question that is always new.

2012

 ¹ See my title essay for the exhibition Against Grids, RIBA Gallery, Liverpool 2010.

² W.Strzeminski, Unism in Painting, Łodz 1927-8.

³ P.Ball,  Nature’s Patterns: Flow, Oxford 2009, pp 56, 57.

⁴ W.V.Quine, ‘Natural Kinds’, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York 1969, p 127.