CONCRETE REALISM (REDUX)
Notes on Concrete Realism and Process-Painting / 21 November, 2007 by A.G.
Concrete Realism
Part I: Anaesthetic Theory
1. Theory of Concrete Realism
- Concrete Realism is called concrete because it focuses on the physicality of the image;
- The image is not seen as a sign referring to some mental object, it is merely a painting;
- It is Realism because it depicts real abstractions;
- It is also called a form of “existentialist painting”, because of its thematic choices;
2. Writing-without-Writing
- Non-referentiality, no reference to words or things, a technical abstraction;
- Alphabetical and scriptural, without intended meaning or expression;
- Mathematical expressions more meaningful than word-constructions;
- Textuality of canvas only, not of language;
- The painting is just a painting;
3. The Artist as Real Individual
- The artist is not some automaton who merely displays his emotional states automatically;
- He does not express anything, he merely builds an image via the medium of paint;
- The spectator should not blame his subjective experience on the artist;
- The artist cannot truly be psychoanalyzed;
4. Serial Painting
- The series as abstract film or Tonal Cinema;
- The sequences are dialectical;
5. Process-Painting
- A specific set of treatments are applied;
- It is essentially multimedia;
- Each treatment sketches an aspect of the image;
- The painter invents new processes;
- It is a procedural form of image-design;
- It is more atmospherical than poetic
6. Process-Painting II
- It is a form of material memory;
- It is empirical;
- It diminishes the time of the formalization of the image by breaking the image into effects of procedural modes;
- The modes are tied together in a serial contiguity which is asymmetrical;
- Modes are relative to one another and imagistically autodeterminative;
7. Process-Painting III
- Process-painting neither establishes a firm axiomatic nor a table of first principles;
- The only law is the law of process;
- This is the conditional rule;
- All else is subject to procedural sequencing;
- It may attain the dialogical whereby time is a crushed time, a material memory of passing procedures solidified in the final picturation pro;
8. Process-Painting IV
- Process-painting works in a crushed space;
- A flat space, a space without iconography, an empty space;
- It is in a sense the painting of minerals, being a slow process of fossilization and calcification;
- It is emptied of meaning, it is essentially meaningless art
- It is also “fiscal”;
- It is a “field art”, an “art of atmospheres”;
9. Novelistic Phenomenology
- The Author inserts his subjective, creative experience into his work;
- It is Postcolonial Historiographic Metafiction;
- It is a novel made up of mental acts and mental contents, therefore phenomenological, i.e. a story of the process of forming the aesthetic object itself;
10. Critical Journalism
- [empty]
11. Tonal Cinema
- Tonal Cinema began as a style of poetry;
- Each line was as a frame or shot in a film;
- The cinema was “tonal” because the emphasis was put on the sound of the words, not their meaning;
- It eventually became a series/system of sixteen novellas called “The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema”;
12. English Textbook Aesthetic
- I dreamt of making an abstract rulebook;
- A “Surrealist Textbook” of sorts;
- I was fascinated by the look and feel of an old Physics textbook written in English;
- I wanted to write a Physics textbook that was also a mystical allegory;
- Certain experiments were made, but no major attempt was ever made to make a Textbook;
13. Constructivist Film Theory
- Part of the aesthetic of Concrete Realism comes from theories of Russian propagandistic and Constructivist films of the 1920s, i.e. the work of Dziga Vertov, a.k.a. “Database Arts” or “A Database-of-Images”.
To be continued…
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