Below are essays by;
Grant Vetter - Continental Style Painting as a Sign of the Times: On the New Works of Max Presneill (2021)
Jason Ramos - Pax Abstracta (2014)
Janet Owen Driggs - Are these the abstract paintings they appear to be? (2014)
Grant Vetter - Max Presneill - Paint Like An Egyptian (2012)
Grant Vetter - Continental Style Painting as a Sign of the Times: On the New Works of Max Presneill (2021)
Jason Ramos - Pax Abstracta (2014)
Janet Owen Driggs - Are these the abstract paintings they appear to be? (2014)
Grant Vetter - Max Presneill - Paint Like An Egyptian (2012)
Continental Style Painting as a Sign of the Times: On the New Works of Max Presneill
By Grant Vetter
Sign, sign
Everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery
Breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that
Can't you read the sign?
The Five Man Electric Band
Part I: Signs, Signals and Semiosis in Art.
When one first encounters the paintings of Max Presneill, they are met with nothing less than a field of inscriptions that are painterly and personal, political and poetic, performative and pleasurable. But before we can explore these dichotomies in the work, we have to know a little bit more about the history of signs and signifiers in order to understand the role they play in Presneill’s project as a whole. That is because there is something crucial to grasp about how Presneill’s work engages with a wide variety of signifying practices in the twenty-first century, not to mention how the semiotic interpretation of contemporary art has undergone multiple revolutions that have challenged how we think about the meaning of painterly inscriptions.
If we begin our inquiry about these questions with the beginning of semiotics as a modern enterprise, then we can say that the earliest of its practitioners was the American philosopher C.S. Pierce. Pierce analyzed every imaginable discipline using semiotics, including mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, men and women, wine, metrology and more. The mere breath of Pierce’s interests alone connects his work with Presneill’s prodigious output over the past few decades because they are both encyclopedic tombs of knowledge about the role that objects play in systems of signification, albeit from very different perspectives. That aside, there are a number of other ways that their projects are related, which shouldn’t be overlooked.
The first of these is that Pierce insisted on an existential theory of signification whereby a sign only takes on its meaning through the interpretation of an object, but this meaning is bounded in the sense of referring to a real object that is not necessarily reducible to just any meaning whatsoever.1 For Pierce, this is what allows for a degree of play in how we read one sign in relation to another, and it is also a great entre into how Presneill thinks about the practice of painting as a delimited object. Beyond that, there is a deep sense of resonance between Pierce and Presneill’s outlook on how we engage in meaning-making as species, especially with regard to privileging relationality over relativism, the materiality of the signifier over denatured descriptions of substance, and in the way that they both speak about the role that memory plays within any system of reference.2 One could draw further parallels here, but it is best to acknowledge how these three elements form the groundwork for further developments in semiology and as well as how they inform the evolving conversation around Presneill’s painting practice.
Following on these insights, we have to turn our attention to the outlook of that other early semiologist, Fernand Saussure, in order to pick up on a line of thinking that will carry us into the very heart of questions about the practice of semiology in the modern age. Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics would forever redefine how we describe different structures of meaning-making, and this revolution in the field allowed semiologists to examine the deep presuppositions behind our myths, religions and even modern systems of belief.3 What connects the outlook of Saussure and Presneill in this regard is their relationship with cultural anthropology, which is to say, that both have worked tirelessly to change how we think about the valances of cultural production in a widest possible sense.
As one of the major figures of the structuralist project, Saussure viewed society as part of an unfolding story about cultural development. By contrast, Presneill’s works tend to operate in this same refrain, but in the negative. Toward this end, we can say that his paintings are in conversation with ongoing developments about the discourse of painting, but by way of examining the catastrophes, the missteps and the recursive structure accorded to the history of the medium. In other words, his aesthetic plays with the dialectic between additive and subtractive elements, or really, a deeper sense of tension that Saussure would only entertain in his later writings.
Jumping from modernism to postmodernism, the next great semiotician that we need to consider when we think about Presneill’s art practice is the French philosopher Roland Barthes. This is because Barthes remained a structuralist who was deeply indebted to both Pierce and Saussure up until the publication of S/Z, which signaled the beginning of a post-modern “turn”, or post-structuralist “break”, in the field of both artistic and literary interpretation. The first point of connection between Barthes and Presneill is that both take the assumptions of postmodernism as an apriori condition for their work, but without adopting the perspective of self-knowing irony that was indicative of that era.
Thus, we can say that as Barthes work unfolded, the notion of sliding signification was let out to play – or put on parole – placing a new emphasis on the irreducible dimensions of meaning- making.4 This perspective also informs how we engage with Presneill’s practice as a painter because there are marks and moments in any given work that withhold themselves from being easily decoded, and sometimes there are certain passages that cannot be placed within a chain of signification at all. This often shows itself in Presneill’s art practice through the active embrace of erasure, the use of different framing devices and overpainted passages as well as through the display of any number of other elements that resist the appropriative role of language.
Today, in the post-Barthesian era, the field of semiotics has grown in two different directions simultaneously.5 First, it has become ever more diverse by birthing entirely new fields of inquiry like bio-semiotics, symbolic interactionism and even the wide set of practices associated with non-verbal communication. The other tendency in the current study of semiotics involves embracing larger and larger “meta” perspectives that bring semiology into conversation with the latest developments in communication theory, systems thinking and game theory. This tension between (1) seeing how more things than ever are in communication, and (2) trying to see how everything is in constant communication, has moved the field of semiotics into the register of real-time experience, where the tension around the temporal aspect of interpretation is evidenced through moments of parallax, paradox and contradiction.
Following these developments, it’s safe to say that Presneill’s paintings operate in very much the same way, with his most recent series of works being focused on the act of seeing and seeing otherwise, i.e., of adopting parallax effects and anamorphic operations. Of course, the critical function of taking a parallax view of any cultural or political phenomenon has also been thematized by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek to describe his own working method in his magnum opus, The Parallax View.6 This comes from the fact that Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian outlook is tied to analyzing the material effects of the signifier when it comes to how we think about, and see the world around us, absent the trappings of idealism or metaphysical assertions regarding the human condition. Parallax is an important notion for Žižek because it provides a means of investigating how the language that we use in the present conditions our view of both the past and the future, and at the very same time, it also requires shifting how we think about these perspectives in order to examine how our current problems would have appeared to prior generations and even from the imaginary point of a future anterior.
While these ideas touch on Presneill’s own concerns as an artist, it would have to be the philosopher who wrote For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign – one Jean Baudrillard – that provides us with the deepest sense of resonance between the concerns of continental philosophy and Presneill’s own “inter-continental” style of painting. Of course, people readily mistake Baudrillard as being one of the fathers of postmodernism, when in fact, he always rejected both the term and title, and really had little interest in the topic whatsoever. Baudrillard came from the school of Alfred Jarry and Pataphysics, which meant that he was interested in what lies at the limits of signifying practices and in their infinite reversibility.
This too, is another subtle form of parallax, or what Baudrillard referred to as the play of Paradoxysm, although I would call Presneill’s version of investigating the same limits in meaning-making the visual display of a kind of Paralogics. What I mean here is that there is a logics of the motif at play in Presneill’s paintings, a logics of sensation across the cut of his canvasses and a logics of framing devices throughout any given body of work, but they are not necessarily working in the field of equivalences, or towards the kind of adequation between subject and object that is strictly representational or even figurative for that matter. Instead, Presneill’s pieces often create new forms of visual friction and fission that point toward different ends, disparate means and contravening themes in one and the same work.
For our purposes here, it is important to understand how Baudrillard’s analysis of semiology has taken on a new sense of meaning for the pluralist generation, most of whom were introduced to the notion of simulacra and simulation(s) when Baudrillard’s book of the same name appeared in the opening sequence of the movie The Matrix. This first act in the film plays an important role because only moments after this text is flashed on screen, Trinity invites Neo to follow the little white rabbit – an obvious reference to Alice and Wonderland – that starts Neo on the journey to understand not only the place that he occupies as a subject in Matrix, but ultimately, in how the reappropriation of signifying practices, and specifically that of codes, can open up the doors of perception and even liberation.
Afterall, the idea of the pre-programmed world and a “real world” outside of it, is a metaphor for the function of ideology and the struggle for individuation. More importantly however, and perhaps what gave the film such widespread appeal, is that Neo is “The One” that can take a parallax or paralogical view between seeing the expression of life and the structure of code as a means of personal empowerment. This very same set of ideas evidences itself in Presneill’s work too, and that marks his art practice as being in dialog with the concerns of a generation whose lives are now increasingly dominated by predictive programming, computational analytics and the kind of reciprocal narrowing that is engendered by how technology creates a “reality tunnel” that is highly individualized and computationally bracketed.
PART II. Systems of Capture Versus the Escape of Syntagms.
It is good to remember that painting has also been subject to stultifying definitions in any period because of arguments over the type of “reality tunnel” that the medium should aim to create, be it totemic embodiment, a window-on-the-world, etc., etc. In retrospect, many of the definitions for what art should be throughout the ages have come to feel manipulated by greater interests, be they monarchical, governmental or simply market forces. Thus, the analysis of any system of thought, and especially the “system” of painting, almost always starts by addressing the supposed identity of the medium and its capabilities. This single topic has been argued over endlessly in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not to mention the last few millennia.
Perhaps the first time that this debate has really slowed down, or put aside for a bit, is during the early twenty-first century. This is because painting essentially broke free from the need for self-definitions like medium specificity and the truth to materials by the mid-sixties. Even the obsession with pastiche, parody and irony during postmodernism had become just another means of commenting on, engaging with, and subverting the kinds of debates that evolved around the claims of essentialism and purity during high modernism. It goes without saying that these ideas no longer have the critical import that they used to because self-reflexivity is assumed to be baked into the question of perception as well as our ability to understand how we know, what we know, especially with regard to artistic practice. Thus, what we are left with in the contemporary moment is the notion of painting as a series of structures which have the ability to increase their capacity to signify the more they are worked with, worked through and worked over.
With this definition in place, we have to ask, how do the signs in Presneill’s paintings purport to signify, i.e., how do they act as carries for meaning – and ultimately, towards what end? If we were to say that there is a visual method being evidenced here, it is that Presneill engages with bricolage and collage in a way that is reminiscent of Sigmar Polke, Albert Olen, Fiona Rae, Pia Fries and many others, all of whom have adopted an open working method where almost anything can enter into the composition. Some call this a post-historical perspective, others the final coming together of art and life, but most importantly, this development represents an open-source outlook, open-code participation and the opening up of the medium toward new horizons of inquiry. But with that said, there is still a great deal of specificity that separates Presneill’s work from his contemporaries, and an even more concrete set of concerns that define his project.
Toward this end, we can say that Presneill accepts the structures, idioms and genre-based discourses that allow painting to act as a signifying medium, but that he also has a vernacular that is all his own. Within his most recent works, motifs like the scribble, the zig-zag, discrete gestures and even blocks and fields of color all have a key role to play. For casual art lovers, these marks will serve as the principle signifiers in the work, but their meanings will prove to be less than stable. Instead, these different means-of-making will slide between being formal imprints of the kind that we have come to associate with the motifs of “high art”, and how the signature of the artist’s hand carries out these gestures in a way that has more to do with the aesthetics of graffiti, tagging or other forms of street-writing.
This sense of doubling in how we assess the act of inscription is what allows us to enter into our first moment of parallax with regard to how we read the work. The signs and symbols on the canvas oscillate between the legibility of high and low motifs, between being principle and secondary content, and between absolute intentionality and a kind of cavalierness that demonstrates the trappings of virtuosity in an entirely different register, namely, that of improvisation. In many ways, that tension defined the divide between high modern and postmodern painting, but the big difference with regard to how we encounter Presneill’s work is that the plurality of signs that he introduces into a single canvas falls beyond both of these historical registers.
This brings us to a second set of signifiers in the work, which are far more personal in nature. These may include words, colors and symbols that reference specific things in the life of the artist, like his affiliation with a biker club and growing up in England. Or, they may be phrases that often feel as if they are questions or queries for the viewer, such as “U Dig It”, “1%” and the symbol for money ($). What we want to note here, is that any of these signs could be said to signify otherwise as well. “U Dig It” carries the dual connotations of sixties counter-culture and abstraction’s connection with Jazz. The references to Great Britain are just as likely to point back to the politics of England and colonialism as they are to the newly minted surveillance society that not only dominates the UK, but which has increasingly spread throughout the whole of the western world. The 1% and the money sign ($) could be seen as both a critique of the fine art world and the rise financialization over the last few decades, not to mention how our K-shaped recovery created an economic boom for the richest one percent of the population and growing economic precarity for everyone else.
Incorporated alongside these first two regimes of signs, sits a third set of signifiers that is situated within the interstitial spaces of Presneill’s works that have to do with cameras and the idea of watching. In this way, the question of who watches who, of the politics of visibility and the act of the painter watching the canvas take shape all come together in Presneill’s works in new and unexpected ways. We see these ideas evidenced wherever CTTV signs, police lines, and other codes about judico-legal restrictions point to a notion of blocked access in the work – including the notion of access to interpretation.
Certainly, all of these ideas have played a decisive role in Presneill’s oeuvre, growing out of his Redacted series of paintings, the works labeled MiT (Moments in Time) and many projects. But what is important to note about all of these different bodies of work, included the most recent, is that redacted, restricted and reserved materials are intimately connected to the politics of visibility to the degree that what is politically egregious is also what often what ends up being hidden from view. Nothing proves this so much as the footage of George Floyd today, Rodney King three decades ago or the visibility that was insisted upon by the mother of Emmett Till more than a generation ago. Seeing is believing and believing can lead to radical change or revolution faster than perhaps, another other model of political persuasion.
This is why our wars are now held off camera, our drone bombings aren’t aired on TV and our secret prisons have become nothing more than a point of reference in the world of political sloganeering. From such a perspective, we could go so far as to say that any practice of real politics, or of speaking truth to power, includes making things visible in the public sphere that wouldn’t be known of otherwise. This is one of the major issues that Presneill’s paintings force us to confront too, namely, that the notion of seeing and concealing can be simultaneous operations, so much so in fact, that we should cultivate the practice of looking and then looking anew, not to mention the value of looking askew. In this way, his works thematize the use of paralogical motifs by way of placing the viewer before a series of signs that are often absent or missing links in the chain of signification – or by using abstraction as a means of making the experience of visibility about the play of invisibility – and ultimately, Presneill’s paintings operate by way of constructing a field of indices that join the push-pull of chromatic elements with the push-pull of conflicts in society at large.
The interaction of all of the above elements leads us to examine a fourth set of signifiers in Presneill’s works that seem to be meta-constant or meta-perspectival. This isn’t to say that they are always there in every canvas and every body of work, only that their influence is felt even when they are absent. I like to think of these as purely existential signifiers, but they are much more than that. These select elements tend to point to the place where the existential condition of painting collides with the metaphysical dimension of life. These trace elements, which include the use of a skull at various sizes and in different shapes, or texts that refer to both the identity and the identifications of the artist, or even what could be thought of as glowing suns and small rainbow gestures, all point to the notion of time passing, mortality, beauty and belonging.
Even the choice to inscribe MPF / FMP on a painting, which stands for Max Presneill Forever and Forever Max Presneill, refers to the practice of identifying one’s place within a biker gang like the Hells Angels. And yet, in much the same way that one joins any club, gang, or exclusive group, it is often a lifetime commitment, which is not unlike being a painter or having a life in the arts. Even the use of a doubly reversed signature, and the supposed weight that the authentic signature holds in the world of art, both act as guarantors of a kind in the quest for immortality. And yet, the transience of time and even a sense of levity emerges when Presneill counters these impulses when words like “LOL”, “Star” or “Caution” appear the canvas. In this way, the play of self-reflexivity is literally doubled by initials like MPF / FMP, which take on a second set of dual meanings in relationship to this particular body of work as well the signifying role that they play in the art world as a whole.
Part III: Painting and Semiology in the Age of the Saturated Self.
Even with all of these different levels of meaning at play in the work, this brief semiological analysis of Presneill’s most recent paintings cannot come close to representing a complete catalog of the iconography that he regularly engages with. Rather, this kind of reading of the work points to the multiplicity of idiomatic registers that represent the diversity of images and interests that comprise Presneill’s project as an artist. And much more could be said about the cartographic dimension of Presneill’s painting practice as well as the generation of painters that are currently working in a truly open-ended manner, but that kind of digression could go on ad infinitum while still missing the bigger, or rather, the much more holistic and evolutionary aspects of Presneill’s oeuvre.
This broader perspective consists of seeing how “Inter-continental painting” – or inter-cultural, inter-textual and inter-subjective motifs – allow greater connections to emerge in the work that help us to cultivate a more layered and rich understanding of the world around us. This sense of in-betweeness exists in both how we frame a set of references, and in how the frame of references through which we view any given phenomenon determines both what we see and how we see it.
Sometimes this will show itself when Presneill explicitly frames an image with colored bars or bands of a sort, almost like bracketing, containing or conscripting the more active elements of the composition to be viewed against a stabilizing device. At other times, Presneill will use the effect of creating a sidebar of sorts, often in the form of a black strip, that allows the information to slide-right, shift-left or wander across the surface of the canvas in bits and bytes. There are even times when these framing devices and interior elements interact, where Presneill seems to be sampling motifs from this restricted or neutral area of canvass and then dropping them into the heart of more active passages in much the same way that one would move different elements across the screen of any computer graphics program. All of these moments ask us to think about how we frame information, and/or, how information is framed for us in an age where pop-up screens, screen-in-screen functions and the explosion of viewing devices has become a naturalized element of surfing today’s media landscape.
All of this points not just to how our frames of reference have become oversaturated in the age of social media, but also to how the condition of painting has to contend with the process of substantive meaning-making in a period that is dominated by gotcha-headlines and click bait reportage. The critical function of taking a parallax view is to allow time for there to be an absence that might allow one to question, and ultimately, to seek out counter-narratives to those forms of enculturation that tend to foment political polarization. Thus, the critical use of parallax allows us to take another view of both cultural production and culture-at-large wherever bifurcated and hyperbolic positions are offered up as the only set of solutions to a given problem. Running contrary to such impulses, a parallax shift operates by adding contravening elements to any image or narrative, while addressing how the issue of erasure and censure is always already related to the act of perspective-taking.
Thus, even when a painting by Presneill is visually full, that fullness is typically comprised of more subtracted elements, edits and gestures cut-short than engaging with the pathos of a broad-handed expressionism – which is the “story” of modernism. From a second perspective, one can say that when Presneill’s works have very few elements in them, it means that the picture plane has been rigorous interrogated to produce a final effect – which is indicative of the “story” of painting during postmodernism. Most importantly however, is how Presneill adopts a third-way between these two registers that could be seen as response to the reigning ethos of information overload and the history of perspectives about aesthetic comportment. Thus, the compression between the long view of painting and the current obsession with real-time effects and affects– not to mention how Presneill plays these registers off against one another – is what allows his work to get us to think about other ways of seeing and thinking that reach beyond our current historical horizon.
What is at the center of all of these questions, both concerning the history of painting and the history of Presneill’s work as a painter, is none other than the idea that we need to spend just as much time revising and questioning our view of the world as we do putting new statements and creations into it. In this way, we can say that Presneill’s practice as an artist engages with the whole history of abstraction and figuration, sign and symbol, text and subtext, but in such a way as to get us to think about how the order of things can signify differently. Thus, what is truly unique about Presneill’s work in this regard is that he refers to the process of individuation – of how we discern between our deepest commitments and our superficial identifications – as part of a process of self-editing, self-reference and self-reflexivity that is always evolving.
As such, Presneill’s contribution to the discourse of twenty-first century painting is in the way that his works point back to thinking about how the contradictions of culture industry are always already tied to how we evolve as singular individuals. Afterall, the masses are only ever as enlightened as the number of persons in the crowd that have attained deeper levels of individuation, just as the evolution of the whole is always implicated in the achievements of each part. In this way, the supersession of modernism, postmodernism and pluralism mirrors the development of the rational self, the minimal self and the saturated self 8 – and we can see this span of time thematized, and even dramatized, in Presneill’s works during a period when many contemporary painters have stayed with the commitments of style over the questions of the age.
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Endnotes.
1 Pierce’s theory of the sign remained tied to the notion that symbols refer to an object by “virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operated to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to the object.” This separated Pierce’s project from later semiologists inasmuch as he thought there was an inherent connection between the constellation of ideas associated with a sign – often in a neo-platonic sense – and the history of the development of the sign, from its representational basis, up to and including, its more abstract elements. While neither of these claims could be substantiated in art, theorists of cognitive science, like Noam Chomsky, point to the fact that there may be inborn structures in the brain that allow us to develop and decode linguistic symbols which could bolster Pierce’s notions at the epigenetic level, even if they appear to be more relative in terms of providing a ground for the analysis of culture. C.S. Pierce: Philosophical Writings of Pierce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955) pg. 102.
2 Pierce highlighted the role that memory plays in relation to signs in the following way: “[An index is] a sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, not because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign on the other hand…” Ibid. 107.
3 Saussure’s work lead to the interpretations of culture provided by figures like Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung and many other structuralist scholars.
4 The book S/Z, by Roland Barthes, examined the text through 5 codes: the hermeneutic code, the proairetic code, the semic code, the symbolic code and the cultural code. The aim of this polyvalent analysis was to demystify the link between a sign and its (inherent) meaning. This new model of literary analysis upset the dominant models of structuralism which sought to fix meaning, determine authorial intent and provide the canonical interpretation of any given masterwork. In other words, the revolution provoked by S/Z was nothing less than a total rethinking of the field of literary and artistic meanings and the contexts in which they were situated. Thus, S/Z made the case for valuing the plurality of meanings that we can attribute to both sides of interpretation, which Barthes called the writerly and readerly.
5 Today, many semiologists have highlighted how a Post-Bathesian Semiotics has incorporated temporal, genetic and bio-semiotic perspectives about the play of sign and signifier. This is because the hermeneutic circle has widened and now has global implications beyond the literary. The proairetic code has become reversible in the era of digital information and bio-genetics, where copying, sequencing, editing and other terms have taken on a broader set of long-term implications. The semic code is obfuscated in a post-literate society, which increasingly trades in reading affect, bodily gestures and different ways of “coding” information as a principle processes in shared meaning-making. And finally, the symbolic code referenced by Barthes reaches a limit-event with the birth of the computer code just as the cultural code has been transformed into so many competing hyper-texts, ultimately initiating our entrance into a labyrinthine order without any original referent.
6 In much the same way that Pierce applied semiotics to nearly every discipline, we could say the same of Zizek with regard to the concept of parallax. Zizek has explored the gap that occurs between different levels of meaning with regard to quantum physics (wave-particle gap), neurobiology (grey matter and consciousness), ontological difference (ontic and transcendental-ontological), the Lacanian notion of the real (no positive substantive consistency, only the gap of multiple conflicting perspectives), the gap between Freud’s concept of desire and drive, the unconscious, the theory of the drives and so on and so forth. It is this play, or really “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral ground is possible”, that also defines how Presneill’s works play with both a literal gap between signifiers on the canvas, and the theoretical gap that happens between different levels of signification. Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (London: MIT Press, 2006) pg. 5.
7 Baudrillard’s own declarations about the relationship between sign value and the value of painting involve raising the art object to the objective position of functioning as a super-sign because for Baudrillard “What happens to the symbolic value in this whole operation, to the value particular to the ‘work of art’… [is that] it does not appear anyway. It is repudiated, absent. Parallel to the ascension of economic exchange value into sign value, there is a reduction of symbolic value into sign value. As the level of paintings, manipulated as supersigns, symbolic value is resolved in an aesthetic function, that is, it only operates inter linea, behind the operation of the sign, as a reference-alibi, as a sublime rationalization of the sumptuary operation.” For our purposes in this essay, it is the operation of the inter linea that defines much of inter-continental painting today. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sigh (New York: Telos Press, 1981) pg. 102.
8 This same transformation is described in the theories of homo-faber, or the modern maker; homo-ludens, or postmodern playfulness; and homo-videns, or how our knowledge-frames are shaped by the use of modern media.
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Dr. Grant Vetter is the Program Director of Fine Art Complex 1101, the author of The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses and an instructor in curatorial theory and art criticism at Arizona State University. He holds advanced degrees from the Art Center College of Design, the University of California, Irvine, the Critical Theory Institute, the European Graduate School (EGS) and the NODE Center for Curatorial Studies
By Grant Vetter
Sign, sign
Everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery
Breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that
Can't you read the sign?
The Five Man Electric Band
Part I: Signs, Signals and Semiosis in Art.
When one first encounters the paintings of Max Presneill, they are met with nothing less than a field of inscriptions that are painterly and personal, political and poetic, performative and pleasurable. But before we can explore these dichotomies in the work, we have to know a little bit more about the history of signs and signifiers in order to understand the role they play in Presneill’s project as a whole. That is because there is something crucial to grasp about how Presneill’s work engages with a wide variety of signifying practices in the twenty-first century, not to mention how the semiotic interpretation of contemporary art has undergone multiple revolutions that have challenged how we think about the meaning of painterly inscriptions.
If we begin our inquiry about these questions with the beginning of semiotics as a modern enterprise, then we can say that the earliest of its practitioners was the American philosopher C.S. Pierce. Pierce analyzed every imaginable discipline using semiotics, including mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, men and women, wine, metrology and more. The mere breath of Pierce’s interests alone connects his work with Presneill’s prodigious output over the past few decades because they are both encyclopedic tombs of knowledge about the role that objects play in systems of signification, albeit from very different perspectives. That aside, there are a number of other ways that their projects are related, which shouldn’t be overlooked.
The first of these is that Pierce insisted on an existential theory of signification whereby a sign only takes on its meaning through the interpretation of an object, but this meaning is bounded in the sense of referring to a real object that is not necessarily reducible to just any meaning whatsoever.1 For Pierce, this is what allows for a degree of play in how we read one sign in relation to another, and it is also a great entre into how Presneill thinks about the practice of painting as a delimited object. Beyond that, there is a deep sense of resonance between Pierce and Presneill’s outlook on how we engage in meaning-making as species, especially with regard to privileging relationality over relativism, the materiality of the signifier over denatured descriptions of substance, and in the way that they both speak about the role that memory plays within any system of reference.2 One could draw further parallels here, but it is best to acknowledge how these three elements form the groundwork for further developments in semiology and as well as how they inform the evolving conversation around Presneill’s painting practice.
Following on these insights, we have to turn our attention to the outlook of that other early semiologist, Fernand Saussure, in order to pick up on a line of thinking that will carry us into the very heart of questions about the practice of semiology in the modern age. Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics would forever redefine how we describe different structures of meaning-making, and this revolution in the field allowed semiologists to examine the deep presuppositions behind our myths, religions and even modern systems of belief.3 What connects the outlook of Saussure and Presneill in this regard is their relationship with cultural anthropology, which is to say, that both have worked tirelessly to change how we think about the valances of cultural production in a widest possible sense.
As one of the major figures of the structuralist project, Saussure viewed society as part of an unfolding story about cultural development. By contrast, Presneill’s works tend to operate in this same refrain, but in the negative. Toward this end, we can say that his paintings are in conversation with ongoing developments about the discourse of painting, but by way of examining the catastrophes, the missteps and the recursive structure accorded to the history of the medium. In other words, his aesthetic plays with the dialectic between additive and subtractive elements, or really, a deeper sense of tension that Saussure would only entertain in his later writings.
Jumping from modernism to postmodernism, the next great semiotician that we need to consider when we think about Presneill’s art practice is the French philosopher Roland Barthes. This is because Barthes remained a structuralist who was deeply indebted to both Pierce and Saussure up until the publication of S/Z, which signaled the beginning of a post-modern “turn”, or post-structuralist “break”, in the field of both artistic and literary interpretation. The first point of connection between Barthes and Presneill is that both take the assumptions of postmodernism as an apriori condition for their work, but without adopting the perspective of self-knowing irony that was indicative of that era.
Thus, we can say that as Barthes work unfolded, the notion of sliding signification was let out to play – or put on parole – placing a new emphasis on the irreducible dimensions of meaning- making.4 This perspective also informs how we engage with Presneill’s practice as a painter because there are marks and moments in any given work that withhold themselves from being easily decoded, and sometimes there are certain passages that cannot be placed within a chain of signification at all. This often shows itself in Presneill’s art practice through the active embrace of erasure, the use of different framing devices and overpainted passages as well as through the display of any number of other elements that resist the appropriative role of language.
Today, in the post-Barthesian era, the field of semiotics has grown in two different directions simultaneously.5 First, it has become ever more diverse by birthing entirely new fields of inquiry like bio-semiotics, symbolic interactionism and even the wide set of practices associated with non-verbal communication. The other tendency in the current study of semiotics involves embracing larger and larger “meta” perspectives that bring semiology into conversation with the latest developments in communication theory, systems thinking and game theory. This tension between (1) seeing how more things than ever are in communication, and (2) trying to see how everything is in constant communication, has moved the field of semiotics into the register of real-time experience, where the tension around the temporal aspect of interpretation is evidenced through moments of parallax, paradox and contradiction.
Following these developments, it’s safe to say that Presneill’s paintings operate in very much the same way, with his most recent series of works being focused on the act of seeing and seeing otherwise, i.e., of adopting parallax effects and anamorphic operations. Of course, the critical function of taking a parallax view of any cultural or political phenomenon has also been thematized by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek to describe his own working method in his magnum opus, The Parallax View.6 This comes from the fact that Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian outlook is tied to analyzing the material effects of the signifier when it comes to how we think about, and see the world around us, absent the trappings of idealism or metaphysical assertions regarding the human condition. Parallax is an important notion for Žižek because it provides a means of investigating how the language that we use in the present conditions our view of both the past and the future, and at the very same time, it also requires shifting how we think about these perspectives in order to examine how our current problems would have appeared to prior generations and even from the imaginary point of a future anterior.
While these ideas touch on Presneill’s own concerns as an artist, it would have to be the philosopher who wrote For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign – one Jean Baudrillard – that provides us with the deepest sense of resonance between the concerns of continental philosophy and Presneill’s own “inter-continental” style of painting. Of course, people readily mistake Baudrillard as being one of the fathers of postmodernism, when in fact, he always rejected both the term and title, and really had little interest in the topic whatsoever. Baudrillard came from the school of Alfred Jarry and Pataphysics, which meant that he was interested in what lies at the limits of signifying practices and in their infinite reversibility.
This too, is another subtle form of parallax, or what Baudrillard referred to as the play of Paradoxysm, although I would call Presneill’s version of investigating the same limits in meaning-making the visual display of a kind of Paralogics. What I mean here is that there is a logics of the motif at play in Presneill’s paintings, a logics of sensation across the cut of his canvasses and a logics of framing devices throughout any given body of work, but they are not necessarily working in the field of equivalences, or towards the kind of adequation between subject and object that is strictly representational or even figurative for that matter. Instead, Presneill’s pieces often create new forms of visual friction and fission that point toward different ends, disparate means and contravening themes in one and the same work.
For our purposes here, it is important to understand how Baudrillard’s analysis of semiology has taken on a new sense of meaning for the pluralist generation, most of whom were introduced to the notion of simulacra and simulation(s) when Baudrillard’s book of the same name appeared in the opening sequence of the movie The Matrix. This first act in the film plays an important role because only moments after this text is flashed on screen, Trinity invites Neo to follow the little white rabbit – an obvious reference to Alice and Wonderland – that starts Neo on the journey to understand not only the place that he occupies as a subject in Matrix, but ultimately, in how the reappropriation of signifying practices, and specifically that of codes, can open up the doors of perception and even liberation.
Afterall, the idea of the pre-programmed world and a “real world” outside of it, is a metaphor for the function of ideology and the struggle for individuation. More importantly however, and perhaps what gave the film such widespread appeal, is that Neo is “The One” that can take a parallax or paralogical view between seeing the expression of life and the structure of code as a means of personal empowerment. This very same set of ideas evidences itself in Presneill’s work too, and that marks his art practice as being in dialog with the concerns of a generation whose lives are now increasingly dominated by predictive programming, computational analytics and the kind of reciprocal narrowing that is engendered by how technology creates a “reality tunnel” that is highly individualized and computationally bracketed.
PART II. Systems of Capture Versus the Escape of Syntagms.
It is good to remember that painting has also been subject to stultifying definitions in any period because of arguments over the type of “reality tunnel” that the medium should aim to create, be it totemic embodiment, a window-on-the-world, etc., etc. In retrospect, many of the definitions for what art should be throughout the ages have come to feel manipulated by greater interests, be they monarchical, governmental or simply market forces. Thus, the analysis of any system of thought, and especially the “system” of painting, almost always starts by addressing the supposed identity of the medium and its capabilities. This single topic has been argued over endlessly in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not to mention the last few millennia.
Perhaps the first time that this debate has really slowed down, or put aside for a bit, is during the early twenty-first century. This is because painting essentially broke free from the need for self-definitions like medium specificity and the truth to materials by the mid-sixties. Even the obsession with pastiche, parody and irony during postmodernism had become just another means of commenting on, engaging with, and subverting the kinds of debates that evolved around the claims of essentialism and purity during high modernism. It goes without saying that these ideas no longer have the critical import that they used to because self-reflexivity is assumed to be baked into the question of perception as well as our ability to understand how we know, what we know, especially with regard to artistic practice. Thus, what we are left with in the contemporary moment is the notion of painting as a series of structures which have the ability to increase their capacity to signify the more they are worked with, worked through and worked over.
With this definition in place, we have to ask, how do the signs in Presneill’s paintings purport to signify, i.e., how do they act as carries for meaning – and ultimately, towards what end? If we were to say that there is a visual method being evidenced here, it is that Presneill engages with bricolage and collage in a way that is reminiscent of Sigmar Polke, Albert Olen, Fiona Rae, Pia Fries and many others, all of whom have adopted an open working method where almost anything can enter into the composition. Some call this a post-historical perspective, others the final coming together of art and life, but most importantly, this development represents an open-source outlook, open-code participation and the opening up of the medium toward new horizons of inquiry. But with that said, there is still a great deal of specificity that separates Presneill’s work from his contemporaries, and an even more concrete set of concerns that define his project.
Toward this end, we can say that Presneill accepts the structures, idioms and genre-based discourses that allow painting to act as a signifying medium, but that he also has a vernacular that is all his own. Within his most recent works, motifs like the scribble, the zig-zag, discrete gestures and even blocks and fields of color all have a key role to play. For casual art lovers, these marks will serve as the principle signifiers in the work, but their meanings will prove to be less than stable. Instead, these different means-of-making will slide between being formal imprints of the kind that we have come to associate with the motifs of “high art”, and how the signature of the artist’s hand carries out these gestures in a way that has more to do with the aesthetics of graffiti, tagging or other forms of street-writing.
This sense of doubling in how we assess the act of inscription is what allows us to enter into our first moment of parallax with regard to how we read the work. The signs and symbols on the canvas oscillate between the legibility of high and low motifs, between being principle and secondary content, and between absolute intentionality and a kind of cavalierness that demonstrates the trappings of virtuosity in an entirely different register, namely, that of improvisation. In many ways, that tension defined the divide between high modern and postmodern painting, but the big difference with regard to how we encounter Presneill’s work is that the plurality of signs that he introduces into a single canvas falls beyond both of these historical registers.
This brings us to a second set of signifiers in the work, which are far more personal in nature. These may include words, colors and symbols that reference specific things in the life of the artist, like his affiliation with a biker club and growing up in England. Or, they may be phrases that often feel as if they are questions or queries for the viewer, such as “U Dig It”, “1%” and the symbol for money ($). What we want to note here, is that any of these signs could be said to signify otherwise as well. “U Dig It” carries the dual connotations of sixties counter-culture and abstraction’s connection with Jazz. The references to Great Britain are just as likely to point back to the politics of England and colonialism as they are to the newly minted surveillance society that not only dominates the UK, but which has increasingly spread throughout the whole of the western world. The 1% and the money sign ($) could be seen as both a critique of the fine art world and the rise financialization over the last few decades, not to mention how our K-shaped recovery created an economic boom for the richest one percent of the population and growing economic precarity for everyone else.
Incorporated alongside these first two regimes of signs, sits a third set of signifiers that is situated within the interstitial spaces of Presneill’s works that have to do with cameras and the idea of watching. In this way, the question of who watches who, of the politics of visibility and the act of the painter watching the canvas take shape all come together in Presneill’s works in new and unexpected ways. We see these ideas evidenced wherever CTTV signs, police lines, and other codes about judico-legal restrictions point to a notion of blocked access in the work – including the notion of access to interpretation.
Certainly, all of these ideas have played a decisive role in Presneill’s oeuvre, growing out of his Redacted series of paintings, the works labeled MiT (Moments in Time) and many projects. But what is important to note about all of these different bodies of work, included the most recent, is that redacted, restricted and reserved materials are intimately connected to the politics of visibility to the degree that what is politically egregious is also what often what ends up being hidden from view. Nothing proves this so much as the footage of George Floyd today, Rodney King three decades ago or the visibility that was insisted upon by the mother of Emmett Till more than a generation ago. Seeing is believing and believing can lead to radical change or revolution faster than perhaps, another other model of political persuasion.
This is why our wars are now held off camera, our drone bombings aren’t aired on TV and our secret prisons have become nothing more than a point of reference in the world of political sloganeering. From such a perspective, we could go so far as to say that any practice of real politics, or of speaking truth to power, includes making things visible in the public sphere that wouldn’t be known of otherwise. This is one of the major issues that Presneill’s paintings force us to confront too, namely, that the notion of seeing and concealing can be simultaneous operations, so much so in fact, that we should cultivate the practice of looking and then looking anew, not to mention the value of looking askew. In this way, his works thematize the use of paralogical motifs by way of placing the viewer before a series of signs that are often absent or missing links in the chain of signification – or by using abstraction as a means of making the experience of visibility about the play of invisibility – and ultimately, Presneill’s paintings operate by way of constructing a field of indices that join the push-pull of chromatic elements with the push-pull of conflicts in society at large.
The interaction of all of the above elements leads us to examine a fourth set of signifiers in Presneill’s works that seem to be meta-constant or meta-perspectival. This isn’t to say that they are always there in every canvas and every body of work, only that their influence is felt even when they are absent. I like to think of these as purely existential signifiers, but they are much more than that. These select elements tend to point to the place where the existential condition of painting collides with the metaphysical dimension of life. These trace elements, which include the use of a skull at various sizes and in different shapes, or texts that refer to both the identity and the identifications of the artist, or even what could be thought of as glowing suns and small rainbow gestures, all point to the notion of time passing, mortality, beauty and belonging.
Even the choice to inscribe MPF / FMP on a painting, which stands for Max Presneill Forever and Forever Max Presneill, refers to the practice of identifying one’s place within a biker gang like the Hells Angels. And yet, in much the same way that one joins any club, gang, or exclusive group, it is often a lifetime commitment, which is not unlike being a painter or having a life in the arts. Even the use of a doubly reversed signature, and the supposed weight that the authentic signature holds in the world of art, both act as guarantors of a kind in the quest for immortality. And yet, the transience of time and even a sense of levity emerges when Presneill counters these impulses when words like “LOL”, “Star” or “Caution” appear the canvas. In this way, the play of self-reflexivity is literally doubled by initials like MPF / FMP, which take on a second set of dual meanings in relationship to this particular body of work as well the signifying role that they play in the art world as a whole.
Part III: Painting and Semiology in the Age of the Saturated Self.
Even with all of these different levels of meaning at play in the work, this brief semiological analysis of Presneill’s most recent paintings cannot come close to representing a complete catalog of the iconography that he regularly engages with. Rather, this kind of reading of the work points to the multiplicity of idiomatic registers that represent the diversity of images and interests that comprise Presneill’s project as an artist. And much more could be said about the cartographic dimension of Presneill’s painting practice as well as the generation of painters that are currently working in a truly open-ended manner, but that kind of digression could go on ad infinitum while still missing the bigger, or rather, the much more holistic and evolutionary aspects of Presneill’s oeuvre.
This broader perspective consists of seeing how “Inter-continental painting” – or inter-cultural, inter-textual and inter-subjective motifs – allow greater connections to emerge in the work that help us to cultivate a more layered and rich understanding of the world around us. This sense of in-betweeness exists in both how we frame a set of references, and in how the frame of references through which we view any given phenomenon determines both what we see and how we see it.
Sometimes this will show itself when Presneill explicitly frames an image with colored bars or bands of a sort, almost like bracketing, containing or conscripting the more active elements of the composition to be viewed against a stabilizing device. At other times, Presneill will use the effect of creating a sidebar of sorts, often in the form of a black strip, that allows the information to slide-right, shift-left or wander across the surface of the canvas in bits and bytes. There are even times when these framing devices and interior elements interact, where Presneill seems to be sampling motifs from this restricted or neutral area of canvass and then dropping them into the heart of more active passages in much the same way that one would move different elements across the screen of any computer graphics program. All of these moments ask us to think about how we frame information, and/or, how information is framed for us in an age where pop-up screens, screen-in-screen functions and the explosion of viewing devices has become a naturalized element of surfing today’s media landscape.
All of this points not just to how our frames of reference have become oversaturated in the age of social media, but also to how the condition of painting has to contend with the process of substantive meaning-making in a period that is dominated by gotcha-headlines and click bait reportage. The critical function of taking a parallax view is to allow time for there to be an absence that might allow one to question, and ultimately, to seek out counter-narratives to those forms of enculturation that tend to foment political polarization. Thus, the critical use of parallax allows us to take another view of both cultural production and culture-at-large wherever bifurcated and hyperbolic positions are offered up as the only set of solutions to a given problem. Running contrary to such impulses, a parallax shift operates by adding contravening elements to any image or narrative, while addressing how the issue of erasure and censure is always already related to the act of perspective-taking.
Thus, even when a painting by Presneill is visually full, that fullness is typically comprised of more subtracted elements, edits and gestures cut-short than engaging with the pathos of a broad-handed expressionism – which is the “story” of modernism. From a second perspective, one can say that when Presneill’s works have very few elements in them, it means that the picture plane has been rigorous interrogated to produce a final effect – which is indicative of the “story” of painting during postmodernism. Most importantly however, is how Presneill adopts a third-way between these two registers that could be seen as response to the reigning ethos of information overload and the history of perspectives about aesthetic comportment. Thus, the compression between the long view of painting and the current obsession with real-time effects and affects– not to mention how Presneill plays these registers off against one another – is what allows his work to get us to think about other ways of seeing and thinking that reach beyond our current historical horizon.
What is at the center of all of these questions, both concerning the history of painting and the history of Presneill’s work as a painter, is none other than the idea that we need to spend just as much time revising and questioning our view of the world as we do putting new statements and creations into it. In this way, we can say that Presneill’s practice as an artist engages with the whole history of abstraction and figuration, sign and symbol, text and subtext, but in such a way as to get us to think about how the order of things can signify differently. Thus, what is truly unique about Presneill’s work in this regard is that he refers to the process of individuation – of how we discern between our deepest commitments and our superficial identifications – as part of a process of self-editing, self-reference and self-reflexivity that is always evolving.
As such, Presneill’s contribution to the discourse of twenty-first century painting is in the way that his works point back to thinking about how the contradictions of culture industry are always already tied to how we evolve as singular individuals. Afterall, the masses are only ever as enlightened as the number of persons in the crowd that have attained deeper levels of individuation, just as the evolution of the whole is always implicated in the achievements of each part. In this way, the supersession of modernism, postmodernism and pluralism mirrors the development of the rational self, the minimal self and the saturated self 8 – and we can see this span of time thematized, and even dramatized, in Presneill’s works during a period when many contemporary painters have stayed with the commitments of style over the questions of the age.
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Endnotes.
1 Pierce’s theory of the sign remained tied to the notion that symbols refer to an object by “virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operated to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to the object.” This separated Pierce’s project from later semiologists inasmuch as he thought there was an inherent connection between the constellation of ideas associated with a sign – often in a neo-platonic sense – and the history of the development of the sign, from its representational basis, up to and including, its more abstract elements. While neither of these claims could be substantiated in art, theorists of cognitive science, like Noam Chomsky, point to the fact that there may be inborn structures in the brain that allow us to develop and decode linguistic symbols which could bolster Pierce’s notions at the epigenetic level, even if they appear to be more relative in terms of providing a ground for the analysis of culture. C.S. Pierce: Philosophical Writings of Pierce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955) pg. 102.
2 Pierce highlighted the role that memory plays in relation to signs in the following way: “[An index is] a sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, not because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign on the other hand…” Ibid. 107.
3 Saussure’s work lead to the interpretations of culture provided by figures like Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung and many other structuralist scholars.
4 The book S/Z, by Roland Barthes, examined the text through 5 codes: the hermeneutic code, the proairetic code, the semic code, the symbolic code and the cultural code. The aim of this polyvalent analysis was to demystify the link between a sign and its (inherent) meaning. This new model of literary analysis upset the dominant models of structuralism which sought to fix meaning, determine authorial intent and provide the canonical interpretation of any given masterwork. In other words, the revolution provoked by S/Z was nothing less than a total rethinking of the field of literary and artistic meanings and the contexts in which they were situated. Thus, S/Z made the case for valuing the plurality of meanings that we can attribute to both sides of interpretation, which Barthes called the writerly and readerly.
5 Today, many semiologists have highlighted how a Post-Bathesian Semiotics has incorporated temporal, genetic and bio-semiotic perspectives about the play of sign and signifier. This is because the hermeneutic circle has widened and now has global implications beyond the literary. The proairetic code has become reversible in the era of digital information and bio-genetics, where copying, sequencing, editing and other terms have taken on a broader set of long-term implications. The semic code is obfuscated in a post-literate society, which increasingly trades in reading affect, bodily gestures and different ways of “coding” information as a principle processes in shared meaning-making. And finally, the symbolic code referenced by Barthes reaches a limit-event with the birth of the computer code just as the cultural code has been transformed into so many competing hyper-texts, ultimately initiating our entrance into a labyrinthine order without any original referent.
6 In much the same way that Pierce applied semiotics to nearly every discipline, we could say the same of Zizek with regard to the concept of parallax. Zizek has explored the gap that occurs between different levels of meaning with regard to quantum physics (wave-particle gap), neurobiology (grey matter and consciousness), ontological difference (ontic and transcendental-ontological), the Lacanian notion of the real (no positive substantive consistency, only the gap of multiple conflicting perspectives), the gap between Freud’s concept of desire and drive, the unconscious, the theory of the drives and so on and so forth. It is this play, or really “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral ground is possible”, that also defines how Presneill’s works play with both a literal gap between signifiers on the canvas, and the theoretical gap that happens between different levels of signification. Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (London: MIT Press, 2006) pg. 5.
7 Baudrillard’s own declarations about the relationship between sign value and the value of painting involve raising the art object to the objective position of functioning as a super-sign because for Baudrillard “What happens to the symbolic value in this whole operation, to the value particular to the ‘work of art’… [is that] it does not appear anyway. It is repudiated, absent. Parallel to the ascension of economic exchange value into sign value, there is a reduction of symbolic value into sign value. As the level of paintings, manipulated as supersigns, symbolic value is resolved in an aesthetic function, that is, it only operates inter linea, behind the operation of the sign, as a reference-alibi, as a sublime rationalization of the sumptuary operation.” For our purposes in this essay, it is the operation of the inter linea that defines much of inter-continental painting today. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sigh (New York: Telos Press, 1981) pg. 102.
8 This same transformation is described in the theories of homo-faber, or the modern maker; homo-ludens, or postmodern playfulness; and homo-videns, or how our knowledge-frames are shaped by the use of modern media.
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Dr. Grant Vetter is the Program Director of Fine Art Complex 1101, the author of The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses and an instructor in curatorial theory and art criticism at Arizona State University. He holds advanced degrees from the Art Center College of Design, the University of California, Irvine, the Critical Theory Institute, the European Graduate School (EGS) and the NODE Center for Curatorial Studies
Pax Abstracta
Jason Ramos. 2014
A cursory viewing of Max Presneill's new paintings might lead one to believe they fit into a current trend of abstract painting which has garnered such pejorative terms such as "flip art", "zombie formalism", and "crapstraction". Such a classification would belie the context under which Presneill's paintings have evolved. This current body of work could be described as a sort of terminus point at the end of a long journey exploring complex themes of history, politics, class, power, and empire, among others. A common assertion within these themes is the notion that extremists on either side of an issue are indistinguishable on a superficial level. This idea neatly explains the possible resemblance of Presneill's work and methods to that of, say, Lucien Smith, Adam McEwen, Parker Ito, et al - and also how, at the same time, they couldn't be more different in their intentions. The impetus behind Presneill's new work is more closely aligned with some of the criticism of current trends in abstract painting, as opposed to a deeper link to any surface similarities. The final forms of the REDACTS series are originally distilled from the more specific and overtly figurative qualities of Presneill's immediately previous work, best represented in the exhibition Anarchy & Other Things To Think About, at the University Art Gallery of Cal State Stanislaus.
The work and methods of the Stanislaus exhibit reveal dense, clamorous imagery in a state of hyper-colored alert. George Washington, Joseph Goebbels, JFK, Robespierre, and Carlos the Jackal arise like fever-dream hallucinations among abstract elements caught in their becoming. Some of those intensely additive canvases were repeatedly layered into new compositions, entire passages owing their construction to deft manipulation of pentimento and self-conscious palimpsest. Within the flurry of this imagery, REDACTS' particular set of formal motifs began to emerge, inspired by the contemporary visual language of the politics and philosophy that prompted Presneill's initial inquiry. Rectangular blocks of color, or “redactions”, serve to block and obscure parts of the compositions, while the counterpoint elements of the zig-zag graffiti tags quickly establish a new binary logic and metaphor for paintings that read as non-mimetic in what they depict. In some, the back and forth of these twin symbols of oppression and resistance occupy pictorial layers above more or less flat grounds, implying battles yet to be fought. Other paintings have backgrounds built up of characteristic layers of history and texture, as if it were evidence of longer, bloodier slogs. A succinct visual logic unfolds across the works — a logic that shares aesthetic variables with Hans Hoffman, Günther Förg, Albert Oehlen, and others.
It is the identification of these intersections with painterly precedents that cement the advanced development of Presneill’s current canvases. Beyond a mere aesthetic co- option of redaction marks and graffiti tagging, the conceptual basis and syntax of those hand-done actions is carried over and paired with its painterly antecedent. The charged image of redactions in documents refers to a larger language family that include the Rothko-esque whitewashing of graffiti (one is reminded of Matt McCormic’s 2001 short film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal), pixelated digital censoring, censor bars, and ancient palimpsest techniques. In Presneill's work as in actual practice, redaction marks attempt to exist on the topmost, overseeing layer of a physical and conceptualspace that, in an ironic Orwellian twist, only draws more attention to the hidden layers below. Conversely, the back and forth graffiti tagging is the descendant of the kind of existential mark-making that remains as the immortal evidence of human action and life since prehistory (a simplified “MAXWASHERE”, perhaps?). It resides on a kind of public plane above the surface of the material world of private property that has rendered such primordial acts as criminal/subversive/radical. The canvases retain the anxious, urgent quality of the imagery from the Stanislaus exhibition and earlier work, as well as the rhythmic, chess-game-like exchange of marks that forge the history of the paintings' own coalescence. Far from arbitrary, the compositional plan each canvas creates for itself is a result of the confining of Presneill's experienced intuition within the arena of the canvas, and to the syntactical variations allowed by his established visual dyad. The twin signs of the redaction mark and the graffiti mark successfully carry both painterly and conceptual duties, as the potential for material based expression with such paint application is concurrent with a degree of quotation of these visual devices. This provides another kind of conceptual space within the paintings to complement the phenomenon of their Hoffman-esque pictorial space.
Modern abstraction’s links to radicalism and revolution are easily forgotten in our current age. At present, we find ourselves attempting to include works and artists into the dialog which appear to happily embrace a kind of commodification that seems intentionally engineered to illicit a knee-jerk, anti-capitalist reaction. In the first half of the last century, the most vocal opposition to abstract painting (and even abstract figurative work) came from arguably the most oppressive political regimes that emerged in the 20th century — Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Presneill’s REDACTS come full circle in terms of the aims of that early, European abstract painting. Transparency, accountability, democracy, liberty, equality, justice, humanity — by simply being something other than propaganda, early abstraction came to represent all of these ideas. A case could be made for the alleged co-option of these notions by an insidious 'collector class' intent on devolving abstract painting into some form of financial asset. Whether this is the case or not, to make non-mimetic pictures within the context of contemporary painting still retains the polarizing potential that defined its reception long ago. Presneill's painting, as well as his extra-studio practices, are defined in part by their eschewing of perceived art- establishment norms and fiercely independent, artist-initiated inquiries. The REDACTS are no different – they are indebted to the artist-led, iconoclast spirit of stances and declarations that shaped our ideas about the avant-garde more than they are to any current market infatuations with the work of process-oriented, recent MFA graduates. The cynical capitulation inherent in such work and its followers does not bode well for a transparent, accountable, and democratic future, as the trends of art portend the trends in society at large. REDACTS offers an alternative scenario for the future: one that recognizes that what we refer to as abstract painting is part of a tradition that challenged the abuse of power by not giving in to nihilistic capitalist pandering and/or idealogical propagandistic narrative. Rather, Presneill's work is that of a critically engaged artist awake with an urgency dictated by a history we may very well be in danger of repeating.
Jason Ramos. 2014
A cursory viewing of Max Presneill's new paintings might lead one to believe they fit into a current trend of abstract painting which has garnered such pejorative terms such as "flip art", "zombie formalism", and "crapstraction". Such a classification would belie the context under which Presneill's paintings have evolved. This current body of work could be described as a sort of terminus point at the end of a long journey exploring complex themes of history, politics, class, power, and empire, among others. A common assertion within these themes is the notion that extremists on either side of an issue are indistinguishable on a superficial level. This idea neatly explains the possible resemblance of Presneill's work and methods to that of, say, Lucien Smith, Adam McEwen, Parker Ito, et al - and also how, at the same time, they couldn't be more different in their intentions. The impetus behind Presneill's new work is more closely aligned with some of the criticism of current trends in abstract painting, as opposed to a deeper link to any surface similarities. The final forms of the REDACTS series are originally distilled from the more specific and overtly figurative qualities of Presneill's immediately previous work, best represented in the exhibition Anarchy & Other Things To Think About, at the University Art Gallery of Cal State Stanislaus.
The work and methods of the Stanislaus exhibit reveal dense, clamorous imagery in a state of hyper-colored alert. George Washington, Joseph Goebbels, JFK, Robespierre, and Carlos the Jackal arise like fever-dream hallucinations among abstract elements caught in their becoming. Some of those intensely additive canvases were repeatedly layered into new compositions, entire passages owing their construction to deft manipulation of pentimento and self-conscious palimpsest. Within the flurry of this imagery, REDACTS' particular set of formal motifs began to emerge, inspired by the contemporary visual language of the politics and philosophy that prompted Presneill's initial inquiry. Rectangular blocks of color, or “redactions”, serve to block and obscure parts of the compositions, while the counterpoint elements of the zig-zag graffiti tags quickly establish a new binary logic and metaphor for paintings that read as non-mimetic in what they depict. In some, the back and forth of these twin symbols of oppression and resistance occupy pictorial layers above more or less flat grounds, implying battles yet to be fought. Other paintings have backgrounds built up of characteristic layers of history and texture, as if it were evidence of longer, bloodier slogs. A succinct visual logic unfolds across the works — a logic that shares aesthetic variables with Hans Hoffman, Günther Förg, Albert Oehlen, and others.
It is the identification of these intersections with painterly precedents that cement the advanced development of Presneill’s current canvases. Beyond a mere aesthetic co- option of redaction marks and graffiti tagging, the conceptual basis and syntax of those hand-done actions is carried over and paired with its painterly antecedent. The charged image of redactions in documents refers to a larger language family that include the Rothko-esque whitewashing of graffiti (one is reminded of Matt McCormic’s 2001 short film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal), pixelated digital censoring, censor bars, and ancient palimpsest techniques. In Presneill's work as in actual practice, redaction marks attempt to exist on the topmost, overseeing layer of a physical and conceptualspace that, in an ironic Orwellian twist, only draws more attention to the hidden layers below. Conversely, the back and forth graffiti tagging is the descendant of the kind of existential mark-making that remains as the immortal evidence of human action and life since prehistory (a simplified “MAXWASHERE”, perhaps?). It resides on a kind of public plane above the surface of the material world of private property that has rendered such primordial acts as criminal/subversive/radical. The canvases retain the anxious, urgent quality of the imagery from the Stanislaus exhibition and earlier work, as well as the rhythmic, chess-game-like exchange of marks that forge the history of the paintings' own coalescence. Far from arbitrary, the compositional plan each canvas creates for itself is a result of the confining of Presneill's experienced intuition within the arena of the canvas, and to the syntactical variations allowed by his established visual dyad. The twin signs of the redaction mark and the graffiti mark successfully carry both painterly and conceptual duties, as the potential for material based expression with such paint application is concurrent with a degree of quotation of these visual devices. This provides another kind of conceptual space within the paintings to complement the phenomenon of their Hoffman-esque pictorial space.
Modern abstraction’s links to radicalism and revolution are easily forgotten in our current age. At present, we find ourselves attempting to include works and artists into the dialog which appear to happily embrace a kind of commodification that seems intentionally engineered to illicit a knee-jerk, anti-capitalist reaction. In the first half of the last century, the most vocal opposition to abstract painting (and even abstract figurative work) came from arguably the most oppressive political regimes that emerged in the 20th century — Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Presneill’s REDACTS come full circle in terms of the aims of that early, European abstract painting. Transparency, accountability, democracy, liberty, equality, justice, humanity — by simply being something other than propaganda, early abstraction came to represent all of these ideas. A case could be made for the alleged co-option of these notions by an insidious 'collector class' intent on devolving abstract painting into some form of financial asset. Whether this is the case or not, to make non-mimetic pictures within the context of contemporary painting still retains the polarizing potential that defined its reception long ago. Presneill's painting, as well as his extra-studio practices, are defined in part by their eschewing of perceived art- establishment norms and fiercely independent, artist-initiated inquiries. The REDACTS are no different – they are indebted to the artist-led, iconoclast spirit of stances and declarations that shaped our ideas about the avant-garde more than they are to any current market infatuations with the work of process-oriented, recent MFA graduates. The cynical capitulation inherent in such work and its followers does not bode well for a transparent, accountable, and democratic future, as the trends of art portend the trends in society at large. REDACTS offers an alternative scenario for the future: one that recognizes that what we refer to as abstract painting is part of a tradition that challenged the abuse of power by not giving in to nihilistic capitalist pandering and/or idealogical propagandistic narrative. Rather, Presneill's work is that of a critically engaged artist awake with an urgency dictated by a history we may very well be in danger of repeating.
Are these the abstract paintings they appear to be?
Janet Owen-Driggs. 2014
If abstract art is supposed to stand alone, independent of any analog to “real” objects, then, despite all elegant appearances to the contrary, Max Presneill’s new paintings are not abstract art. Instead, like nodes in a restless network, they pulsate with communications to, from, and about the world outside their frame.
True, the paintings’ concentrated rectangles and brushy zigzags declare the flatness of the picture plane and its canvas support. True, their sprayed and splatted marks reject illusionism to signpost the material nature of the paint. And true they implicate the grid, which, according to Rosalind Krauss, “announces…modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse."[i] But these powerful cues to a formalist evaluation are only the first thing to notice about the work.
Let’s remove for a moment, if we can, the spectacles of the “aesthetic regime,”[ii] and instead of assessing the paintings as though they’re autonomous objects, let’s open an eye to that formalist no no: ideational content. Beyond their quotation of geometric and lyrical abstraction, what do these paintings bring to mind? To what do their neon colors point? Where have we seen marks like this before?
Consider the squiggles. A recurring motif in Presneill’s new work, they are analogous to the physical actions that produced them: repetitive back-and-forth movements of the artist’s wrist and forearm. Routine, efficient, purposeful: the movements and their product speak to nothing so much as a desire to cover the territory. These are the marks that a custodian might make to cover up a weekend’s crop of tags. Viewed thus, their companion rectangles become more than colored geometry. Something is being systematically erased here, but what? And what does it mean to redact one’s own painting?
While the Oxford English Dictionary offers two distinct definitions for redaction that date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively – “the action of driving back” and the “process of preparing for publication” – contemporary usage has combined the two in order to describe what happens when a text is edited for public consumption[iii]. According to NY Times language buff William Safire, this meaning enjoyed limited judicial, governmental, and “spookspeak” use until around 2007, when increasing security agency activity and whistleblower response drove the word into common parlance.[iv] Stripped of its euphemism in this post-Manning, post-Snowden era, the word is now a popular synonym for censorship.
“I wanted my name all over the city,” wrote graffiti artist Glynn Judd (‘Noir’) in 2013, explaining his former double life as a train-writer[v]. Regardless of any other motivations that may be ascribed to graffiti writing – rebellion, adrenaline, the thrill of seeing how far one can go and still get away with it – surely tagging is, most fully, an assertion of existence (I am here, I am here, I am here); an announcement of individual selfhood, which civic uniformity redacts? In marking the visual and functional parallels between graffiti remediation and the systematic censorship of politically sensitive information, Presneill’s paintings are doing at least two things: first, they invoke the broadly existential notion that painting is an assertion of self, and second, they conflate the individual self and the collective body politic. “It’s mark making as presence, and erasure as power,” said the artist during a recent studio visit; “that simultaneous contradiction is inherent in the mark.” [vi]
When Presneill lists dichotomies in his sketchbook (“private/public, anonymous/individual, chaotic/ordered”), the intention is not so much to identify mutually exclusive polarities, as it is to grasp the simultaneity of “both one thing and its opposite.” A little like the rabbit-duck illusion (a drawing made famous by Wittgenstein in which a rabbit’s long ears become the beak of the duck and vice versa), Presneill’s squiggles and rectangles at once assert and negate the painter’s presence.
Akin to the action painters of the 1950s and ‘60s, who employed canvas “as an arena in which to act,”[vii] Max performs his “simultaneous contradiction” through the act of painting. Unlike the more impulsive sweeps and clotted surfaces of a De Kooning or a Pollock however, which are indexical of the painter’s sweeping physical gestures and, so the story goes, of his existential struggle, Presneill’s marks are contained, both within themselves and within the frame.
They are also rather more various than those of the older men. Perceiving the act of painting as a synthesis of paint and consciousness through which the artist reveals “his very own self as the kernel of his originality,”[viii] our High Modern forebears were committed to developing a definitive (self-defining) “signature” style. Their range of mark making was thus, inevitably, self-limited. In contrast, the contemporary artist selects from a menu of options. Within a grid-based vocabulary of shapes, he scumbles, sprays, masks, drags, stabs, daubs, combs, and cakes. Evidencing a debt to automatism, the splats that ghost behind a sherbet lemon glaze result from laying canvas on the studio floor and walking on it, Presneill explains, “for months.” The flat black columns that anchor an edge turn out to be duct tape, a Cubistic introduction of life into art. Painted wet-on-wet, a sky-blue rectangle simultaneously secures a purple swirl to the painting’s surface, and floats, like a hard-edged hole, above a field of pink.
And oh, that pink. “Rolled, rippled…bleeding, dripping, gestural knife, impasto smear,” though the methods are listed in Presneill’s sketchbook, the color itself can hardly be named. A meadow of vermilion, violet, orange, and crimson, it gives the throbbing impression of pink.
When a representational artist works, she is able to judge her progress in comparison to a real world antecedent. When Rothko painted his throbbing color fields, his model was “a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration – all of these at once.”[ix] In contrast, Presneill has neither an analog referent nor an inner compass for the sublime to guide his decision-making. “I can’t make abstract painting,” the artist tells me. “I need a guide to know whether it’s a good or a bad decision.”
His chosen guides are word-based. To name a few: Sun Tzu’s Art of War; Ceasar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War; Che Guevarra’s Guerrilla Warfare; The Plague by Camus; and Percy Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy, “the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English.”[x]
Let’s take The Mask of Anarchy as an example. The poem was written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when a special police force of wealthy citizens charged a peaceful demonstration of more than 100,000 working people in Manchester, UK, injuring 400 and murdering 11, including a babe in arms. A poem about class war written by a minor aristocrat that glorifies passive resistance, The Mask of Anarchy is alive with “simultaneous contradiction.” Paul Foot sums up the ambiguity in Shelley’s work as follows:“On the one hand there is the understanding that the engine of tyranny is exploitation; on the other, the fear, deeply rooted in his class background, that the masses in revolt would generate violence and plunder; and that therefore the best way to proceed was by gradual reform.”
Unlike Presneill’s large body of figurative paintings, which bristle with (sometimes oblique) narrative references to historical struggle, there is no illustrative relationship between his new work and The Mask of Anarchy. Instead, the interminable push/pull of political and internal struggle is manifest in the repeat patterns of assertion and redaction. “I believe that revolution is necessary,” says Presneill, “but I’m equally a realist about what that might be.”
As a single hair is indexical of a human body, so abstract paintings have frequently been understood as traces of some ultimate truth. It is blindingly obvious that Presneill can make abstract painting, he just cannot – will not – make that kind of abstract painting: the essence-seeking kind which, despite having shaken off simulacrum, must still trace its provenance back to Goethe’s assertion that: “The highest problem of all art is to produce by illusion the semblance of a higher reality.”[xi]
In painterly terms at least, the notion that essence precedes existence, that there is indeed a “higher reality,” has been blown out of the water ever since Braque and Picasso extended the real world into a painting. “Cubism made it apparent that paintings were not the world, but a way of thinking about the world,” Max tells me. “When materials enter painting – collage – it’s an extension of the world into the painting. It says that this world and that world are the same thing.”
More index than indexical, Presneill’s self-conscious selection from a mark-making menu is neither an eclectic postmodern expression of "incredulity toward metanarratives,"[xii] nor an effort to advertise the artist’s familiarity with art history (although perhaps there is a little of that too). Instead, the act of selection is both an assertion of the artist’s existence and a product of his performance of self as a choice-making existence.
John-Paul Sartre famously asked: “What is meant…by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.”[xiii] “I have decided to believe that painting asserts my presence in the world,” Presneill tells me. Painting is a process of perpetual choice making – “left to right, brush, color, consistency, wet on wet” – and each mark made by the artist serves to render a moment of “self-defining” choice visible.
Which is not to say that these works are self-portraits. True, they have what Presneill calls “a recurring autobiographical layer,” which speaks to his own (“stimulating”) simultaneous contradiction, as a working class “kid destined for prison,” “a bull in a china shop…sneaking in with the humans in the art world.” But more than portraits of an individual, these are intended as portrait performances of the condition of being human: a man defining not only ‘myself’ but also ‘self’ on the canvas.
I am here, I am not. Here, not here. Here, not. “There is a constant cycle of establishment and erasure…a sense of teetering control – the balancing act we exist in – in the painting,” says Presneill. With the persistent flicker of faulty neon, the work invites us to consider ontology, both our own and, given the art history they so intentionally invoke, that of the paintings.
More than an open invitation though, in answer to the question: “what is a human being and what is our condition?” Presneill’s new paintings suggest, à la Sartre, “to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.”[xiv] Each work thus becomes both an artifact of a human existence that is repeatedly exercising its absolute freedom to act (within a situated context), and a (neon) arrow that highlights the absolute requirement to act.
The interpretation of “painting” that they suggest is rather more ambiguous however. Certainly each painting looks like a work of art-for-arts-sake: that special category of autonomous object that must be assessed without regard to its conditions of production, and through which the artist’s “very own self” is revealed. But at the same time, their ideational intent undermines the very idea of art as “an autonomous form of life,”[xv] while their mark making varieties (to say nothing of Max’s larger moves between figuration and abstraction) erode the very notion that authenticity can only arrive in a single package.
Then again…these paintings are luscious. Their juicy investigation of colored pigment on a two-dimensional surface, a seeming continuation of the aesthetic project, summons the transcendental separation of art from life while invoking the “sacred jargon of authenticity”.[xvi] At a time when, according to art dealer Ed Winkleman, “speculators are grossly favoring abstract painting,”[xvii] Presneill deals in beauty and produces desirable commodities. (I’ll have a pink one, please.)
Autonomy and authenticity: the twin presumptions that underpin the contemporary art market. Without them, how could artworks be so readily understood as ahistorical holders of precious meaning, and so profitably circulated as transportable and exchangeable commodities?
“What the fuck can you make before you’re caught?” asks the china shop bull. In simultaneously embracing and denying the grand narratives of the aesthetic regime, Max Presneill’s new body of work is full of paradox. But, to paraphrase Søren Kierkegaard, one must not think too ill of paradox, for paradox is the passion of art.”[xviii] Are these the abstract paintings they appear to be? No? Yes? Both simultaneously? One thing is certain: they are ardent examples of having one’s (pink) cake and eating it too.
[i] Rosalind E. Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, The MIT Press, 1986, p.9
[ii] Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, p.26
[iii] The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner
[iv] William Safire, The New York Times, “Redact This,” September 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09wwln-safire-t.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
Accessed December 9, 2014
[v] Glynn Judd: “My Life as a Graffiti Artist”, The Guardian, June 21, 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jun/21/my-secret-life-graffiti-artist. Accessed December 9, 2014
[vi] All spoken quotes from Max Presneill’s are from a November 2014 studio visit with the author
[vii] Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22
[viii] Hal Foster and others: Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, and Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, p. 350
[ix] Mark Rothko quoted in Seeing Rothko, edited by Glenn Phillips & Thomas E. Crowe, Getty Publications: Los Angeles, 2005, p.113
[x] Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 532
[xi] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Poetry and Truth" from My Own Life, Volume 2, p. 36
[xii] Jean-François Lyotard, 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984, p.xxiv
[xiii] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm. Accessed December 9, 2014
[xiv] ibid.
[xv] Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, p.26
[xvi] Ibid., p.ix
[xvii] From Edward Winkleman’s blog, February 7, 2014: “Just What Is It That Makes Today's Abstract Paintings so Different, so Lucrative?” http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2014/02/just-what-is-it-that-makes-todays.html. Accessed December 9, 2014
[xviii] Sören Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 3
MAX PRESNEILL - PAINT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN
E S S A Y B Y G R A N T V E T T E R. 2012
...the symbolic work of art is always more or less limitless.
Hegel
From Lectures on Fine Art
(c) Egyptian Temples
Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs.
Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology:
Part I: Writing before the Letter
_____________________________________________________________________________________
TABLE OF CONTENTS
__________________________________
Excavation
En(crypt)ians
Taxonomy
Lost World(s)
Tomb Raider
Dance Mummy... Dance!
Hieroglyphics and Hollography
Semiology and Sarcophagi
Endnotes
Exhibition
_________________________________________________________________________
All the old paintings on the tomb,
They do the sand dance, don'cha know?
If they move too quick (Oh-Wayo-Oh)
They're falling down like a domino.
The Bangles
'Walk like an Egyptian'
The present state of art cannot therefore be defined as neo-eclectic or as neo-romantic. What is happening is a much more radical and decisive shift, which I would define as 'the Egyptian effect'. The tendency to collapse the ancient and the new into a single temporal dimension, arranging them alongside one another and leaving the resulting contradiction wide open, was indeed typical of Egyptian civilization. Hence the impression of enigmatic synchronicity, and almost of a completion of time, that ancient Egyptian art inspires.1
Mario Perniola
Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art
Excavation.
Max Presneill makes art like an Egyptian, or rather, his works are those of a certain type which promotes an Egyptian effect. But what do we mean when we say Egyptian effect? Is it that his works have the status of being hieroglyphs — existing somewhere between the abstraction of linguistic characters and the rendering techniques of representational art? Or, is it that his paintings fall out of a properly 'readable' context by attempting to sign the thing-itself in an era obsessed with the discursive aspects of art? Or, is it that his paintings bring together a number of visual tropes that operate like a kind of impersonal iconography — or the allegorical language of western culture writ large — or sometimes, written quite small?
Could it even be that Presneill's pictures function like pictograms inasmuch as they rely on myth and narrative, everywhere colliding the symbols of modernity with their pre-modern and postmodern counterparts? Or, is it that his paintings present us with a field of graphic representations rather than reflections; that they treat style as a type of codex rather than a condition of expressivity; or that they everywhere evoke symbols of a double nature?
And is what we call the Egyptian effect really just a way of underscoring the gap between a thing and the formal language that enables its representation — the invention of a space measured by degrees rather than dichotomies? And does the dance of signification in Presneill's work issue from the multiplication of 'characters' that operate like figures in the twofold sense of the word, i.e., as partial objects?
En(crypt)ians.
While all of the above certainly play an important role in understanding how the Egyptian effect is at work in Presneill's art practice, it is probably best expressed by his activity as a scribe of sorts — everywhere juxtaposing one idiom against another, one figure against another, one way of making against another — add infinitum. In this regard, a trace of every modern pictorial language is at play in his oeuvre: Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Abstraction, etc. However, what is important about their appearance in Presneill's imagery is not that he adheres to the ethos behind any of these movements or 'schools', but that he selectively transforms their motifs into a hieroglyphic language of sorts. Invested in creating a space between semblance and resemblance, Presneill's unique form of modernist Egyptification revolves around the notion of art as ideogram, grapheme or even a certain morphological function. But we would be wrong to see his work as engaged in addressing a single period of artistic production, or enacting a single operation for that matter.
Afterall, the motif's that appear in Presneill's paintings reach far beyond dictatorial forms of modernism. Glimpses of Baroque chiaroscuro, Trans-Avant-Garde graffiti, Mannerist distortions, Neo-expressionist cartoons, Gothic line work and Simulationist affects also play a prominent role in Presneill's recombinant compositions. His is a picture of history in motion, played out through so many still frames, where each cut from the reel is presented as a discrete pictorial event in itself. And yet, because the motifs he selects have been so thoroughly deterritorialized — chronologically and synchronically — they appear as things to be deciphered, or as images that stand at a double remove from what they signify. Another way of saying the same thing is that all of these stylistic inflections never come to the surface in total. Instead, they only appear in Presneill's work in order to remain submerged, retreating into the construction of a secret language that is as much about the antimonies of the contemporary moment as the ciphers that make interpretation possible.
^^^
But here again, we must be a bit more concise in order to capture how the Egyptian effect is a central dispositif of Presneill's art practice. While he is certainly an adept scribe it is not because he can imitate different pictorial languages; and it is not because he plays with signs in a self-reflexive manner; and it is also not because he works with complex and sometimes monumental themes. All of this is readily apparent.
Rather, Presneill's work takes on an Egyptian register because it is comprised of an endless array of pictograms that are only readable from the end of history — or from a time that appears closed-in on itself through so many defunct teleologies, lost dynasties and errant systems of belief. The shear duplicity of mixed motifs in any one of Presneill's public exhibitions exceeds the ethos of exclusivity associated with all the little fiefdoms of modernism and postmodernism, where each school holds a position of prominence until such a time as their forcible abdication. Running counter to this turn-style logic, Presneill's art practice should be understood from a perspective that is eternal. But this is not an eternal that exists outside of space and time, but rather, a form of dwelling in the eternal present through the exacting work of cultural cryptology.
Taxonomy.
This is perhaps best exemplified by what Presneill refers to as the use of an 'indicated aesthetic', where painting operates more like a system of notations than a series of long-form expositions. Such an outlook is made manifest not only by the fact that Presneill's work is composed from an expansive glossary of visual languages, but also through the many ways in which his pictures highlight the enigmatic nature of all signification vis-à-vis discrete juxtapositions, dramatic transpositions, and jarring forms of bricollage. Using an array of sampled styles and oblique allusions, Presneill's projects act like a form of lucid dreaming — capturing impressions from a world caught in endless forms of transit.2 And yet, this form of hybrid pictorialism also offers us the opportunity for recognizing that all translation is interpretation, that every inscription draws its content from its context, and that behind every glyph resides a thing that resists being pictured.
As such, the particular problem that belies the Egyptian effect, and Presneill's work in particular, is not just the wild proliferation of pictorial systems that can be used to indicate objects, but a total absence of any qualitative system of value that might allow one way of working to be privileged over another. The renowned philosopher of aesthetics, Mario Perniola describes this 'Egyptian turn' in cultural production in the following way:
The Egyptian effect is not the consequence of any lack of newness, nor does it result from the realization of what was announced in the past. It is related to the impression that nothing is any longer allowed to take exclusive possession of time, or to establish with present time a relationship of mutual belonging. Time is completed because it no longer has either a clearly defined artistic will or a formal identity from which it cannot be separated. Completed time relativizes the entire artistic universe, transforming actuality into chance event and repertory into inventory.3
But one should note that Perniola is not saying that such an endeavor has anything to do with 'cultural relativism' or a lack of meaning. Instead, the Egyptian effect has to do with a pile up of meaning; of everything being all-too-meaningful; of every meaning being absolutely about its place within a system of signifiers rather than absolute embodiment, pure presence, or an internal logic. At best, the Egyptian turn might be described as a defacto transcendental condition, such that its crisis of conjecture is also its condition of possibility. At worst, it is an attempt to preserve fixed meanings over and against the electronic tower of Babel — or the cross-cultural effects of globalization and new media.
^^^
Embracing the deconstructive impulse, Presneill's work establishes a path that inverts these two tendencies by striving to preserve a panoply of artistic idioms while still lightening the ballast with regard to how they function as a system of signs. While his objects share a resonance with the art of ages past, their very contemporaniety depends on engaging with a form of history that is properly out of time — or of a kind of time out of joint — and perhaps even, a time that is itself, after time. This conflicted status shows itself not only in Presneill's use of a provisional aesthetic but also in the fact that his characters almost always sit on a ground rather than in a space; that they gather together a minimum of means in order to produce a maximal effect; and that the specificity of their arrangement is what allows for their readability. From such a position, Presneill's work can be seen as an encyclopedic approach to art making that permits any motif to appear in bas-relief — or as a sustained engagement with the post-historical condition and all that it permits.
But this is not to say that the collapse of postmodernism is something Presneill celebrates uncritically. Rather, his pictures reveal a great deal of trepidation about the contemporary state of culture. But here we should also stop to ask, where and how does this show itself in his production? What are the themes that Presneill's work seeks to problematize? And how do we place an art, which is itself, about trying to articulate an implacable condition?
Lost World(s).
If we consider that our globalized world is best characterized by the continued acceleration of time, of things passing in and out of existence too fast, and of a certain feeling of saturated subjectivity, then Presneill's pictures appear to be a crucial effort to deal with the problem of (dis)orientation. In an age where trends having been replaced by what is 'trending', where interactions have been superseded by transactions, and where all activity is now interactivity, multi-tasking, etc., it can begin to feel as if the whole of existence has begun to take on a verb tense attributable to the endless valorization of epiphenomena. In short, we are becoming a culture of hieroglyphic techniques, from text messaging and viral videos to hyperlinks and sound-bite entertainment. Culture is now a whirling dervish of imagistic production unlike anything the world has ever known — and it is in this regard that 'repertory' has become 'inventory'; that simulation has lead to cultural fragmentation; and that our grasp of totality has been obscured by the endless play of (glo)banality.
If we take this as the background that Presneill's works are inscribed upon, then we can begin to understand how his images, installations and tombs of cultural artifacts attempt to stay, and even resist, the fluid nature of the moving image. By holding these pictograms still for a moment, and transposing them into a new medium or mediums, Presneill's artistic production subjects the tumultuous flow of data-consciousness to the eternal perspective of a historical continuum subtracted from any cultural idiom in particular.
But much like Egyptian sarcophagi, Presneill also introduces some personal effects into the mix which are meant to upend the parodic aspects of postmodernism by extracting the authentic from the iconographic. In other words, his way of arranging motifs is as personal as it is ceremonial — or rather, it is a ceremony that attempts to wrest a sense of the autobiographical from the flux of meaning attributed to the signifiers from which it is composed. By attempting to work self-reflexivity backwards, Presneill images imbue cultural art-i-facts with a trace element of meaning that is typically absent. Freely appropriating every type of cultural meme through an active process of subjective detournment is Presneill's way of providing a countersignature to the manufactured 'sign' value of the image. In this way, the entombment effect of spectacularized subjectivity isn't revealed to be a personage wholly covered over, but one that is only partially wrapped in the image-texts of mass culture, preserved by the ubiquitous values of the consumer age, and above all else, by a certain drive toward agelessness.
^^^
As such, we can say that Presneill's oeuvre is something like an attempt to grasp the present through the pre-sent, or that it is a reaction formation to the naturalization of remediated existence. At every turn in his work we see an endless negotiation with the invariable lightness of cultural signs and their infinite mutability; a concerted effort to channel the persistence of symbols and myths in a culture of unending recyclability; and a dedicated practice of reading history from the moment in which it takes shape. But in order to get a little closer to the Egyptian aspect of Presneill's paintings, it is better to look at the different trajectories his work has taken over the last decade or more, remembering all the while that the systemicity of Egyptian art is defined as much by its procedural presuppositions as the anonymity of its characters — two elements that are central to Presneill's art practice.
Tomb Raiders.
Although it may surprise those new to his work, Presneill's early paintings were largely abstract in nature. They were typically the outcome of a system of marking the canvas that always started with making a gesture, and then rotating the canvas ninety degrees, repeating the same action and so on, until the picture was finished. This continued until the canvas was entirely full, sometimes quite layered, sometimes less so. Existing somewhere between the early works of David Reed and the sensibility of Sean Scully, these process-based series tended to focus almost exclusively on the act of inscription, the effects it engendered, and the notion of engaging with the mark as a kind of personal artifact. This initial approach to painting, which married sign and geometry through the rigors of deliberate execution, can be considered wholly (neo)Egyptian in both its means and measure.
^^^
Over time however, Presneill began applying this same approach to figurative motifs and pop imagery — forcing found images into fixed orientations and structural organizations. This claustrophobic method of filling up the picture plane with different types of characters, was perhaps, Presneill's second great Egyptian operation. During this period myth and symbolism began to creep back into Presneill's work as well. Caught up in an explosion of new themes, this second shift welcomed the Golden Calf, the Jabberwocky, and the Minotaur in what can only be described as an allegorical parade of fractured fictions.
^^^
By contrast, Presneill's third act of Egyptification, and the turn which best defines his work today, is the result of having introduced a greater degree of play between the personal and the impersonal, process and improvisation, editing and intractability. In short, he has been developing a more occasional art — or a process that is much more dependent on engaging with images that resonate with the time of their production. Not only that, but Presneill sometimes makes use of a type of recursive gesture that keeps his work open to ongoing revisions and even last minute interventions — many of which take place right before the moment of an exhibition.
With this recent change of direction, the sense of systemicity that dominated his previous works wasn't at all lost. In fact, it was incorporated to an even greater degree by becoming subordinate to the motif. This new outlook ultimately allowed Presneill's pictographic aesthetic to become a time-based and site specific practice, where the issue of display is an ongoing negotiation between space, sign and time. In retrospect, these three transformations in Presneill's artistic production involved a journey from the architecture of inscription to the semantics of situatedness — or a move from the conscription of signs to the trans-crypt-ions of the scribe.
^^^
From this new point of departure, the occasion of production can be considered a rather exceptional state, and for the scribe, even an ecstatic one. As Perniola has noted, it is not that "of the improviser who in different situations always adopts the same scheme and the same formulas", but rather, "the moment in which the artist realizes that he is not at all the master of his own language. Occasion does not imply interchangeability and indistinction of situations, 'adapting equally well to all times,' but rather grasping the unrepeatable uniqueness of time."4 Certainly, this is the type of occasion which Presneill seeks in his work, one which relishes in the riddles of pictorial language, admitting the unmasterability of all pictography, but striving for an articulation which holds its promise nonetheless. In other words, the occasion is here marked by the paradox of a scribe without master or a manifestation without manifesto. As such, Presneill's imagery is not only composed of sampled languages, handed down through the ages, but rather, the becoming-other of dictation, inscription, expression or program vis-à-vis, their mutual interpenetration.
Dance Mummy... Dance!
Out of all of the aforementioned changes, it is important to recognize that this last transformation in Presneill's modus operandi is, by far, the most radical. First, because autobiographical references have been incorporated into the work, and second, because there is a consistent effort placed on coordinating them within a complex cartography of images that threaten to erase any sense of groundedness. To put it in deconstructive terms, his pictures play with the doublebind of stasis/becoming, intentionality/ephemerality, and automatism/selectivity. As such, an occasional art will always have a varied ontology — and in Presneill's work we might call it a vari-ontology — that operates through a principle of irreducibility. Mario Perniola has described this new outlook with regard to the Egyptian effect in the following way:
If the notion of occasion introduces a static, synchronic element into the experience of the present, the notion of inventory introduced a dynamic, diachronic element into the possession of the past. If the occasion severs the relation between present time and form, showing that a different way of ordering materials can shatter traditional unities (my emphasis). In this case too an Egyptian effect is produced...5
Much like Freud's description of the dream-work, we might even say that the valorization of an occassionist perspective makes Presneill's image-work into an allegory about the severed relation between time and (proper) form.
In much the same way that the Egyptian's viewed art as a "vast combinatory system in which high and low, male and female, light and dark, life and death, organic and inorganic never cease(d) to trade place(s) and to merge", so too do Presneill's compositions welcome the same principle of open access and internal conflict.6 In the last decade alone we can find appearances by characters as different as the Sphinx and Madonna, the Raven and Rasputin, Cleopatra and Medusa, Dinosaurs and Darwin, Turok and Billy the Kid, Valkerie's and Prometheus, and even Winston Churchill and Captain Kirk! It is this phenomena of retuning doubles and duplicitous source material that allows us to see how Presneill's art is circumscribed by the themes of resurrection and reanimation. As such, his pictures can be thought of as a virtual platform that mirrors the recent return of Tupac Shakur to the concert stage as a 'living' hologram. This polyvalent use of doppelganger forms allows for any figure or theme to be conjured up as the occasional subject of an eternally performative afterlife — creating the uncanny mummy dance of an underworld that only exists to entertain the over-world. In so many ways, the Egyptian effect is this opening of tombs that mixes the (post-)modern with the ancient, the living with the dead, and the hollowed with the spectacular.
Hieroglyphics and Hollography.
As such, the enigmatic quality of the hologram is not only a key to understanding how Presneill's works function, but the emerging art of hollography also allows us to take stock of the ontological status of his project. Afterall, it is important to note that in Presneill's art practice all of the past becomes mixed up with the present — skate culture, baby pictures, marathon runners, historical figures, ancient lands, myths from centuries past — all co-exist in various states of dematerialization and re-materialization. Paintings like Triad, Glitter in the Dark, and Pandom show us ghostly images of the artist and his siblings lost in an abstract local. Part Garden of Eden, part fairytale land, part psychotropic hallucination, these images evoke a space between worlds, or an effect of virtuality that issues from a quality of fluctuating finish. We can see this gap between the thing pictured and the work of 'picturing' in the contours of paintings like Earp, Cody, and The Kid — images that phase in and out of a painterly reality that owes as much to the works of Giuseppe Archimboldo as the Abstract Expressionists. One might even call them painterly holograms of a future antérieur, or images that operate without the substrate of a closed world or a secure horizon of meaning. Even the persistence of boats of passage in Presneill's paintings seem to point to the endless process of transitioning between worlds — past and present, geographic and imaginary, symbolic and personal. (see Monkeyboat, Untitled (boat), Drawing (boat), Enkidu (House), Raft Study 2 & 3, Ghost ship, Mirage, etc.).
And yet, Presneill's greatest Egyptian hollography, (outside of Carry on Cleo and Pale Rider), would have to be Raft — a macabre reworking of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa that gathers together a group of pictorial archetypes that are confronted with the catastrophe of their own co-existence set adrift under an apocalyptic sky. At sixteen by twenty-four feet it is a painting on par with the monumental works of Sandro Chia, Albert Olhen and Francesco Clemente — only where Chia focuses on historical themes, Olhen on the intersection of abstraction and technology, and Clemente on the development of a personal iconography — Presneill collapses all three of these dimensions into one and the same project.
While these postmodern forerunners only hinted at the appearance of a full-blown Egyptian effect, we can say, quite unabashedly, that with Presneill's work it comes into sharp focus:
The Egyptian effect implies the shift from a European Aesthetics of Greek derivation to an aesthetics modeled on pre-classical and non-European civilizations. This involves a melting away of many oppositions, as for example, those between original and copy, authentic and spurious, function and ornament. Confronted with the dizzying multiplication of imitations that are indistinguishable from their originals, with the extreme variety of syncretisms that stake their claim to consideration in their own right, and with the expansion of the notion of function to cover even the psychological and emotional aspects of experience, the mooring of European aesthetics begin to work loose, exacerbating both disorientation and confusion. The notions of purity and authenticity seem to be submerged in boundless formal and conceptual promiscuity... This implies a profound overhaul of the very concept of art, the starting point of which might be provided for by a reappraisal of the art forms Hegel described as 'symbolic' (from the art of the Egyptians to the non-figurative art of the Jewish and Muslim sublime). Two apparently opposed critical outlooks can be seen to hybridize and blend: one focusing on the very latest developments in technology, the technical reproducibility of works of art, video technology and electronics; the other focusing on more emotional dimensions of experience and states of possession and rapture. Neo-eclecticism and neo-romanticism are basically rather inadequate formulations for these critical trends, the first of which seems to look to the present, the other to the past. For what we are really seeking... is the variety of experience and joy of a certain past, while what we look for in the anthropological past is a copy and a repetition of the present.7
In no uncertain terms, the Egyptian effect represents the final horizon of the post-historical drive — the deconstruction not just of a single genre or tradition, but the deconstruction of Tradition(s) with a capital T. As such, the critical function of Presneill's works would first seem to be a rather impossible one, or at least, it would appear to us as something we haven't really seen before. But what makes such a claim justifiable, especially in an age that continuously repeats the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything has been done before, and that all is simulacra?
^^^
In order to answer such a question, it is necessary not only to look at a longer trajectory of art production but also the a priori conditions of 'critique'. If one thinks of impressionism as the deconstruction of academic finishing techniques; of cubism as the deconstruction of perspectival systems; of Fauvism as the deconstruction of naturalistic coloration; of Surrealism as the deconstruction of rationality; of Abstraction as the deconstruction of every representational bias; of Op-art as the deconstruction of stable subject-object relations; of Happenings as the deconstruction of art and life; of Conceptual art as the deconstruction of objecthood; of Minimalism as the deconstruction of expressivity; of Institutional Critique as the deconstruction of systems of valorization; of Feminist art as the deconstruction of phallocentric forms of domination; of Photorealism as the deconstruction of photography's supposed naturalism; of Neo-geo as the deconstruction of 'pure' geometries; and of Pluralism as the deconstruction of the avant-garde ideal tout court —— then, with Presneill's works, we are certainly encountering something altogether different. In fact, if Pluralism opens onto the first meta-deconstructive act, one aimed at a tradition internal to the Western canon (avant-gardism), then with the Egyptian effect we are experiencing the deconstruction of two meta-discursive categories8 — Western and Egyptian — as well as the systems of privilege and hierarchy that adhere to both. In this way we move from the either/or logic of avant-gardism to the or, or, or... of Pluralism to the Both/And of the Egyptian effect — something that is clearly present in Presneill's work.9
Semiology and Sarcophagi.
As part of this (meta)deconstructive dialog, we can better understand Presneill's project as an effort to render that which is immanently familiar uncanny; as a means of making western art and art history a thing unknown to us; and as a concerted effort at denying every form of confidence about what is constitutive of 'presence' in the present. In this regard, Presneill's work is a balancing act unlike any other, one which operates by "the confidence that anything can find its chance... that late and early are tactical rather than strategic notions."10 Indeed, his work might even be characterized as an art of utility — grabbing what is necessary in the moment in order to upend the fictions of the past. This rotary motion between displaced images and unmoored symbols might even be described as a practice of counter-archivization, or at least, as a retroversive impulse that haunts the supposed stability of every semiological and/or sarcophograpic order.
We could even go to the end, and say that this kind of neo-Egyptian operation comes very close to mirroring "the Egyptian myth, (where) there will always be an Isis to piece together the scattered limbs of Osiris."11 But much like the labor of Isis, Presneill's imagery also shows us that a metaphysical body can never be properly reassembled, i.e., that Osiris will forever be haunted by a primal lack, an unassailable impotency, and an improbable form of reincarnation. In other words, art after the Egyptian effect will partake of a wholly deconstructed nature, having been cut into a million little pieces, first by modernism, then by postmodernism.
And yet, only negativity and dissemblance can continue to provide a challenge to the logic of supersession and transcendence accorded to 'historical' cannonization. In our day, this challenge goes by the name of Pluralism, the post-historical condition, and even by the Egyptian effect, but this latest moniker includes one new twist. Rather than simply undermining the metaphysics of presence, the Egyptian operation becomes the sign of a profane act that everywhere attempts to return the metaphysics of pictorial grammar to the common vernacular of 'culture'.12 Or, to put it somewhat differently, the Egyptian effect submits the infinity of representational acts to the conditions of finitude.
^^^
But finally, how is all of these achieved? How is a negative or deconstructive function attributed to a work of art in a post-avant-garde, post-critique era? Or, what is still left to be challenged, i.e., what does the Egyptian effect aim for? In Presneill's works it consists of a Herculean effort to stack up representations at the same time that they threaten to come tumbling down; to challenge the last boundaries between cultural divisions; and to aim at cultural defamiliarization, decontextualization and defetishization in a global sense.
In other words, when it comes to the issue of aesthetic purity, good taste and pictorial mores of a given 'kind' or 'type', Presneill throws caution to the wind chasing after the hope of a kind of perverse inclusivity — an inclusivity implicated in every kind of difference — material, cultural, discursive, whatever. And this is a particularly difficult gesture in an era where the anti-aesthetic impulse has been all but naturalized. In fact, Presneill's works walk a very fine line between what we might accept as fine art or illustration, being both a bit too rough and unfinished to be mistaken for a commercial endeavor while also resisting the types of choices associated with the So Cal school of bad painting, the idiosyncratic figuration of the Bay area or even the Neo-expressionists. This too, is part of their enigmatic character, where we expect to find another infant terrible or a pictorial auteur, we are instead confronted with the problem of an Egyptian order(ing), where the writing on the wall is thrown back at us to be decoded.
^^^
Consequently, Presneill's paintings not only force us to question our own bias's about culture and taste, but they do this by moving between kitsch and coquettishness; an intimacy of reference and thematic dissonance; a tacit disrespect for formal constraints and an irreverent indulgence in pictorial pleasures. Yes, Presneill is still a provocateur in an age that has fewer and fewer such individuals, but he is also a very specific type of provocateur — one who relishes in the anonymity and the agency of the scribe. Alongside Peter Sloterdijk's recent reading of Deconstruction as the Egyptian moment par excellence, we can see how Presneill's oeuvre consists of "a radical semiology that would show us how the signs of being never provide the wealth of meaning they promise..." but also, that we may have no way beyond this doublebind.13
In fact, his images show us "how Egypt works in us: 'Egyptian is the term for all the constructs that can be subjected to deconstruction — except the pyramid, the most Egyptian of edifices. It stands in its place for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructable remainder of a construction that, following the plan of the architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse."14 Max Presneill's work is also one such pyramid, a pyramid which challenges us to question the last undeconstructable remainder of Western metaphysics, or a cultural construct that is increasing built to look as it would after its own collapse.
Grant Vetter
2012
Grant Vetter is the author of The Architecture of Control. He is also the gallery director of Autonomie and a board member of FAR (Foundation for Art Resources), a non-profit organization which has put on critical art exhibitions since 1977.
Endnotes.
1 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 74.
2 As Perniola notes in "The Erotics of Transit", "The passage guaranteed by art is from the same to the same." While Perniola is here speaking about the transformation of Amor from a "savage passion" to a "peaceful art", how much greater is this description for describing our transition from avant-gardism to pluralism? This taming of the passions, "where the reader of the poem becomes and expert, (only to) find new loves" is also an apt description of the rotary motion that occurs in Presneill's work. Mario Perniola. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 67, 67, 67, 67.
3 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 75.
4 Mario Perniola. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 214.
5 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.
6 Ibid. 76.
7 Ibid. 77-78.
8 The use of the term 'meta-discursive category' here refers to the Western culture, which could be further broken down into premodern, modern and postmodern periods, and then further into specific eras, movements, etc. Of course, the history of the West could just as easily be broken up into the Ancient world, the Dark ages, Modernity and Postmodernity, or any other number of divisions. In this sense, meta-discursive is always a generic demarcation or an arborescent concept.
9 Or, to place it in Hegelian terms, the avant-garde is the negation of tradition, pluralism, the negation of the negation (the return of all tradition as equivalent), which is followed by a properly synthetic moment where all traditions are seen as equally deconstructable.
10 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.
11 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.
12 With regard to Presneill's work this could refer either to Agamben's use of profanation as making "a new use possible", or Patrick O'Conner's reading of Deconstruction as a phenomenology of the extra-mundane. Or, one could really combine these two readings in positing the idea that Presneill's art practice returns culture to a "common use" in the form of pictograms composed of a phenomenology of the extra-mundane. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007) 87. 87. Also, see Patrick O'Conner, Derrida: Profanations (New York: Continuum, 2010).
13 Peter Sloterdijk. Derrida, An Egyptian: On the problem of the Jewish Pyramid. (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 27.
14 Ibid. 28.
_________________________________________________________________________
The Egyptian pharaoh was surely the first to give the human individual the structure of the measureless will to be that set him upright above the surface of the earth as a kind of luminous and living edifice. When individuals — long after the era of the great pyramids — have wanted to acquire immortality, they have had to appropriate the Osirian myths and the funeral rites that formerly had been the privilege of the sovereign... The existing pyramids still bear witness to this calm triumph of unwavering and hallucinating resolve: they are not only the most ancient and vastest monuments man has ever constructed, but they are still, even today, the most enduring... In their imperishable unity, the pyramids — endlessly — continue to crystallize the mobile succession of various ages; alongside the Nile, they rise up like the totality of centuries, taking on the immobility of stone and watching all men die, one after another: they transcend the intolerable void that time opens under men's feet, for all possible movement is halted in their geometric surfaces: IT SEEMS THAT THEY MAINTIAN WHAT ESCAPES FROM THE DYING MAN.
George Bataille
Visions of Excess
Obelisks Respond to the Pyramids
In the symbolist model of ancient Egypt, at least two concurrent, simultaneous levels are at work in any given instance. One is the study of Egypt as a civilization that existed in a factual geographic place and time, its peoples, mythology, social forms, its chronological unfolding, its monuments and artifacts, but this is only a backdrop, or support, for another Egypt, which might be called a quality of intelligence. This Egypt is outside of chronological consideration; it is rather, both an ever present and recurring possibility of consciousness.
Robert Lawlor
Sacred Geometry:
Philosophy & Practice
E S S A Y B Y G R A N T V E T T E R. 2012
...the symbolic work of art is always more or less limitless.
Hegel
From Lectures on Fine Art
(c) Egyptian Temples
Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs.
Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology:
Part I: Writing before the Letter
_____________________________________________________________________________________
TABLE OF CONTENTS
__________________________________
Excavation
En(crypt)ians
Taxonomy
Lost World(s)
Tomb Raider
Dance Mummy... Dance!
Hieroglyphics and Hollography
Semiology and Sarcophagi
Endnotes
Exhibition
_________________________________________________________________________
All the old paintings on the tomb,
They do the sand dance, don'cha know?
If they move too quick (Oh-Wayo-Oh)
They're falling down like a domino.
The Bangles
'Walk like an Egyptian'
The present state of art cannot therefore be defined as neo-eclectic or as neo-romantic. What is happening is a much more radical and decisive shift, which I would define as 'the Egyptian effect'. The tendency to collapse the ancient and the new into a single temporal dimension, arranging them alongside one another and leaving the resulting contradiction wide open, was indeed typical of Egyptian civilization. Hence the impression of enigmatic synchronicity, and almost of a completion of time, that ancient Egyptian art inspires.1
Mario Perniola
Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art
Excavation.
Max Presneill makes art like an Egyptian, or rather, his works are those of a certain type which promotes an Egyptian effect. But what do we mean when we say Egyptian effect? Is it that his works have the status of being hieroglyphs — existing somewhere between the abstraction of linguistic characters and the rendering techniques of representational art? Or, is it that his paintings fall out of a properly 'readable' context by attempting to sign the thing-itself in an era obsessed with the discursive aspects of art? Or, is it that his paintings bring together a number of visual tropes that operate like a kind of impersonal iconography — or the allegorical language of western culture writ large — or sometimes, written quite small?
Could it even be that Presneill's pictures function like pictograms inasmuch as they rely on myth and narrative, everywhere colliding the symbols of modernity with their pre-modern and postmodern counterparts? Or, is it that his paintings present us with a field of graphic representations rather than reflections; that they treat style as a type of codex rather than a condition of expressivity; or that they everywhere evoke symbols of a double nature?
And is what we call the Egyptian effect really just a way of underscoring the gap between a thing and the formal language that enables its representation — the invention of a space measured by degrees rather than dichotomies? And does the dance of signification in Presneill's work issue from the multiplication of 'characters' that operate like figures in the twofold sense of the word, i.e., as partial objects?
En(crypt)ians.
While all of the above certainly play an important role in understanding how the Egyptian effect is at work in Presneill's art practice, it is probably best expressed by his activity as a scribe of sorts — everywhere juxtaposing one idiom against another, one figure against another, one way of making against another — add infinitum. In this regard, a trace of every modern pictorial language is at play in his oeuvre: Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Abstraction, etc. However, what is important about their appearance in Presneill's imagery is not that he adheres to the ethos behind any of these movements or 'schools', but that he selectively transforms their motifs into a hieroglyphic language of sorts. Invested in creating a space between semblance and resemblance, Presneill's unique form of modernist Egyptification revolves around the notion of art as ideogram, grapheme or even a certain morphological function. But we would be wrong to see his work as engaged in addressing a single period of artistic production, or enacting a single operation for that matter.
Afterall, the motif's that appear in Presneill's paintings reach far beyond dictatorial forms of modernism. Glimpses of Baroque chiaroscuro, Trans-Avant-Garde graffiti, Mannerist distortions, Neo-expressionist cartoons, Gothic line work and Simulationist affects also play a prominent role in Presneill's recombinant compositions. His is a picture of history in motion, played out through so many still frames, where each cut from the reel is presented as a discrete pictorial event in itself. And yet, because the motifs he selects have been so thoroughly deterritorialized — chronologically and synchronically — they appear as things to be deciphered, or as images that stand at a double remove from what they signify. Another way of saying the same thing is that all of these stylistic inflections never come to the surface in total. Instead, they only appear in Presneill's work in order to remain submerged, retreating into the construction of a secret language that is as much about the antimonies of the contemporary moment as the ciphers that make interpretation possible.
^^^
But here again, we must be a bit more concise in order to capture how the Egyptian effect is a central dispositif of Presneill's art practice. While he is certainly an adept scribe it is not because he can imitate different pictorial languages; and it is not because he plays with signs in a self-reflexive manner; and it is also not because he works with complex and sometimes monumental themes. All of this is readily apparent.
Rather, Presneill's work takes on an Egyptian register because it is comprised of an endless array of pictograms that are only readable from the end of history — or from a time that appears closed-in on itself through so many defunct teleologies, lost dynasties and errant systems of belief. The shear duplicity of mixed motifs in any one of Presneill's public exhibitions exceeds the ethos of exclusivity associated with all the little fiefdoms of modernism and postmodernism, where each school holds a position of prominence until such a time as their forcible abdication. Running counter to this turn-style logic, Presneill's art practice should be understood from a perspective that is eternal. But this is not an eternal that exists outside of space and time, but rather, a form of dwelling in the eternal present through the exacting work of cultural cryptology.
Taxonomy.
This is perhaps best exemplified by what Presneill refers to as the use of an 'indicated aesthetic', where painting operates more like a system of notations than a series of long-form expositions. Such an outlook is made manifest not only by the fact that Presneill's work is composed from an expansive glossary of visual languages, but also through the many ways in which his pictures highlight the enigmatic nature of all signification vis-à-vis discrete juxtapositions, dramatic transpositions, and jarring forms of bricollage. Using an array of sampled styles and oblique allusions, Presneill's projects act like a form of lucid dreaming — capturing impressions from a world caught in endless forms of transit.2 And yet, this form of hybrid pictorialism also offers us the opportunity for recognizing that all translation is interpretation, that every inscription draws its content from its context, and that behind every glyph resides a thing that resists being pictured.
As such, the particular problem that belies the Egyptian effect, and Presneill's work in particular, is not just the wild proliferation of pictorial systems that can be used to indicate objects, but a total absence of any qualitative system of value that might allow one way of working to be privileged over another. The renowned philosopher of aesthetics, Mario Perniola describes this 'Egyptian turn' in cultural production in the following way:
The Egyptian effect is not the consequence of any lack of newness, nor does it result from the realization of what was announced in the past. It is related to the impression that nothing is any longer allowed to take exclusive possession of time, or to establish with present time a relationship of mutual belonging. Time is completed because it no longer has either a clearly defined artistic will or a formal identity from which it cannot be separated. Completed time relativizes the entire artistic universe, transforming actuality into chance event and repertory into inventory.3
But one should note that Perniola is not saying that such an endeavor has anything to do with 'cultural relativism' or a lack of meaning. Instead, the Egyptian effect has to do with a pile up of meaning; of everything being all-too-meaningful; of every meaning being absolutely about its place within a system of signifiers rather than absolute embodiment, pure presence, or an internal logic. At best, the Egyptian turn might be described as a defacto transcendental condition, such that its crisis of conjecture is also its condition of possibility. At worst, it is an attempt to preserve fixed meanings over and against the electronic tower of Babel — or the cross-cultural effects of globalization and new media.
^^^
Embracing the deconstructive impulse, Presneill's work establishes a path that inverts these two tendencies by striving to preserve a panoply of artistic idioms while still lightening the ballast with regard to how they function as a system of signs. While his objects share a resonance with the art of ages past, their very contemporaniety depends on engaging with a form of history that is properly out of time — or of a kind of time out of joint — and perhaps even, a time that is itself, after time. This conflicted status shows itself not only in Presneill's use of a provisional aesthetic but also in the fact that his characters almost always sit on a ground rather than in a space; that they gather together a minimum of means in order to produce a maximal effect; and that the specificity of their arrangement is what allows for their readability. From such a position, Presneill's work can be seen as an encyclopedic approach to art making that permits any motif to appear in bas-relief — or as a sustained engagement with the post-historical condition and all that it permits.
But this is not to say that the collapse of postmodernism is something Presneill celebrates uncritically. Rather, his pictures reveal a great deal of trepidation about the contemporary state of culture. But here we should also stop to ask, where and how does this show itself in his production? What are the themes that Presneill's work seeks to problematize? And how do we place an art, which is itself, about trying to articulate an implacable condition?
Lost World(s).
If we consider that our globalized world is best characterized by the continued acceleration of time, of things passing in and out of existence too fast, and of a certain feeling of saturated subjectivity, then Presneill's pictures appear to be a crucial effort to deal with the problem of (dis)orientation. In an age where trends having been replaced by what is 'trending', where interactions have been superseded by transactions, and where all activity is now interactivity, multi-tasking, etc., it can begin to feel as if the whole of existence has begun to take on a verb tense attributable to the endless valorization of epiphenomena. In short, we are becoming a culture of hieroglyphic techniques, from text messaging and viral videos to hyperlinks and sound-bite entertainment. Culture is now a whirling dervish of imagistic production unlike anything the world has ever known — and it is in this regard that 'repertory' has become 'inventory'; that simulation has lead to cultural fragmentation; and that our grasp of totality has been obscured by the endless play of (glo)banality.
If we take this as the background that Presneill's works are inscribed upon, then we can begin to understand how his images, installations and tombs of cultural artifacts attempt to stay, and even resist, the fluid nature of the moving image. By holding these pictograms still for a moment, and transposing them into a new medium or mediums, Presneill's artistic production subjects the tumultuous flow of data-consciousness to the eternal perspective of a historical continuum subtracted from any cultural idiom in particular.
But much like Egyptian sarcophagi, Presneill also introduces some personal effects into the mix which are meant to upend the parodic aspects of postmodernism by extracting the authentic from the iconographic. In other words, his way of arranging motifs is as personal as it is ceremonial — or rather, it is a ceremony that attempts to wrest a sense of the autobiographical from the flux of meaning attributed to the signifiers from which it is composed. By attempting to work self-reflexivity backwards, Presneill images imbue cultural art-i-facts with a trace element of meaning that is typically absent. Freely appropriating every type of cultural meme through an active process of subjective detournment is Presneill's way of providing a countersignature to the manufactured 'sign' value of the image. In this way, the entombment effect of spectacularized subjectivity isn't revealed to be a personage wholly covered over, but one that is only partially wrapped in the image-texts of mass culture, preserved by the ubiquitous values of the consumer age, and above all else, by a certain drive toward agelessness.
^^^
As such, we can say that Presneill's oeuvre is something like an attempt to grasp the present through the pre-sent, or that it is a reaction formation to the naturalization of remediated existence. At every turn in his work we see an endless negotiation with the invariable lightness of cultural signs and their infinite mutability; a concerted effort to channel the persistence of symbols and myths in a culture of unending recyclability; and a dedicated practice of reading history from the moment in which it takes shape. But in order to get a little closer to the Egyptian aspect of Presneill's paintings, it is better to look at the different trajectories his work has taken over the last decade or more, remembering all the while that the systemicity of Egyptian art is defined as much by its procedural presuppositions as the anonymity of its characters — two elements that are central to Presneill's art practice.
Tomb Raiders.
Although it may surprise those new to his work, Presneill's early paintings were largely abstract in nature. They were typically the outcome of a system of marking the canvas that always started with making a gesture, and then rotating the canvas ninety degrees, repeating the same action and so on, until the picture was finished. This continued until the canvas was entirely full, sometimes quite layered, sometimes less so. Existing somewhere between the early works of David Reed and the sensibility of Sean Scully, these process-based series tended to focus almost exclusively on the act of inscription, the effects it engendered, and the notion of engaging with the mark as a kind of personal artifact. This initial approach to painting, which married sign and geometry through the rigors of deliberate execution, can be considered wholly (neo)Egyptian in both its means and measure.
^^^
Over time however, Presneill began applying this same approach to figurative motifs and pop imagery — forcing found images into fixed orientations and structural organizations. This claustrophobic method of filling up the picture plane with different types of characters, was perhaps, Presneill's second great Egyptian operation. During this period myth and symbolism began to creep back into Presneill's work as well. Caught up in an explosion of new themes, this second shift welcomed the Golden Calf, the Jabberwocky, and the Minotaur in what can only be described as an allegorical parade of fractured fictions.
^^^
By contrast, Presneill's third act of Egyptification, and the turn which best defines his work today, is the result of having introduced a greater degree of play between the personal and the impersonal, process and improvisation, editing and intractability. In short, he has been developing a more occasional art — or a process that is much more dependent on engaging with images that resonate with the time of their production. Not only that, but Presneill sometimes makes use of a type of recursive gesture that keeps his work open to ongoing revisions and even last minute interventions — many of which take place right before the moment of an exhibition.
With this recent change of direction, the sense of systemicity that dominated his previous works wasn't at all lost. In fact, it was incorporated to an even greater degree by becoming subordinate to the motif. This new outlook ultimately allowed Presneill's pictographic aesthetic to become a time-based and site specific practice, where the issue of display is an ongoing negotiation between space, sign and time. In retrospect, these three transformations in Presneill's artistic production involved a journey from the architecture of inscription to the semantics of situatedness — or a move from the conscription of signs to the trans-crypt-ions of the scribe.
^^^
From this new point of departure, the occasion of production can be considered a rather exceptional state, and for the scribe, even an ecstatic one. As Perniola has noted, it is not that "of the improviser who in different situations always adopts the same scheme and the same formulas", but rather, "the moment in which the artist realizes that he is not at all the master of his own language. Occasion does not imply interchangeability and indistinction of situations, 'adapting equally well to all times,' but rather grasping the unrepeatable uniqueness of time."4 Certainly, this is the type of occasion which Presneill seeks in his work, one which relishes in the riddles of pictorial language, admitting the unmasterability of all pictography, but striving for an articulation which holds its promise nonetheless. In other words, the occasion is here marked by the paradox of a scribe without master or a manifestation without manifesto. As such, Presneill's imagery is not only composed of sampled languages, handed down through the ages, but rather, the becoming-other of dictation, inscription, expression or program vis-à-vis, their mutual interpenetration.
Dance Mummy... Dance!
Out of all of the aforementioned changes, it is important to recognize that this last transformation in Presneill's modus operandi is, by far, the most radical. First, because autobiographical references have been incorporated into the work, and second, because there is a consistent effort placed on coordinating them within a complex cartography of images that threaten to erase any sense of groundedness. To put it in deconstructive terms, his pictures play with the doublebind of stasis/becoming, intentionality/ephemerality, and automatism/selectivity. As such, an occasional art will always have a varied ontology — and in Presneill's work we might call it a vari-ontology — that operates through a principle of irreducibility. Mario Perniola has described this new outlook with regard to the Egyptian effect in the following way:
If the notion of occasion introduces a static, synchronic element into the experience of the present, the notion of inventory introduced a dynamic, diachronic element into the possession of the past. If the occasion severs the relation between present time and form, showing that a different way of ordering materials can shatter traditional unities (my emphasis). In this case too an Egyptian effect is produced...5
Much like Freud's description of the dream-work, we might even say that the valorization of an occassionist perspective makes Presneill's image-work into an allegory about the severed relation between time and (proper) form.
In much the same way that the Egyptian's viewed art as a "vast combinatory system in which high and low, male and female, light and dark, life and death, organic and inorganic never cease(d) to trade place(s) and to merge", so too do Presneill's compositions welcome the same principle of open access and internal conflict.6 In the last decade alone we can find appearances by characters as different as the Sphinx and Madonna, the Raven and Rasputin, Cleopatra and Medusa, Dinosaurs and Darwin, Turok and Billy the Kid, Valkerie's and Prometheus, and even Winston Churchill and Captain Kirk! It is this phenomena of retuning doubles and duplicitous source material that allows us to see how Presneill's art is circumscribed by the themes of resurrection and reanimation. As such, his pictures can be thought of as a virtual platform that mirrors the recent return of Tupac Shakur to the concert stage as a 'living' hologram. This polyvalent use of doppelganger forms allows for any figure or theme to be conjured up as the occasional subject of an eternally performative afterlife — creating the uncanny mummy dance of an underworld that only exists to entertain the over-world. In so many ways, the Egyptian effect is this opening of tombs that mixes the (post-)modern with the ancient, the living with the dead, and the hollowed with the spectacular.
Hieroglyphics and Hollography.
As such, the enigmatic quality of the hologram is not only a key to understanding how Presneill's works function, but the emerging art of hollography also allows us to take stock of the ontological status of his project. Afterall, it is important to note that in Presneill's art practice all of the past becomes mixed up with the present — skate culture, baby pictures, marathon runners, historical figures, ancient lands, myths from centuries past — all co-exist in various states of dematerialization and re-materialization. Paintings like Triad, Glitter in the Dark, and Pandom show us ghostly images of the artist and his siblings lost in an abstract local. Part Garden of Eden, part fairytale land, part psychotropic hallucination, these images evoke a space between worlds, or an effect of virtuality that issues from a quality of fluctuating finish. We can see this gap between the thing pictured and the work of 'picturing' in the contours of paintings like Earp, Cody, and The Kid — images that phase in and out of a painterly reality that owes as much to the works of Giuseppe Archimboldo as the Abstract Expressionists. One might even call them painterly holograms of a future antérieur, or images that operate without the substrate of a closed world or a secure horizon of meaning. Even the persistence of boats of passage in Presneill's paintings seem to point to the endless process of transitioning between worlds — past and present, geographic and imaginary, symbolic and personal. (see Monkeyboat, Untitled (boat), Drawing (boat), Enkidu (House), Raft Study 2 & 3, Ghost ship, Mirage, etc.).
And yet, Presneill's greatest Egyptian hollography, (outside of Carry on Cleo and Pale Rider), would have to be Raft — a macabre reworking of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa that gathers together a group of pictorial archetypes that are confronted with the catastrophe of their own co-existence set adrift under an apocalyptic sky. At sixteen by twenty-four feet it is a painting on par with the monumental works of Sandro Chia, Albert Olhen and Francesco Clemente — only where Chia focuses on historical themes, Olhen on the intersection of abstraction and technology, and Clemente on the development of a personal iconography — Presneill collapses all three of these dimensions into one and the same project.
While these postmodern forerunners only hinted at the appearance of a full-blown Egyptian effect, we can say, quite unabashedly, that with Presneill's work it comes into sharp focus:
The Egyptian effect implies the shift from a European Aesthetics of Greek derivation to an aesthetics modeled on pre-classical and non-European civilizations. This involves a melting away of many oppositions, as for example, those between original and copy, authentic and spurious, function and ornament. Confronted with the dizzying multiplication of imitations that are indistinguishable from their originals, with the extreme variety of syncretisms that stake their claim to consideration in their own right, and with the expansion of the notion of function to cover even the psychological and emotional aspects of experience, the mooring of European aesthetics begin to work loose, exacerbating both disorientation and confusion. The notions of purity and authenticity seem to be submerged in boundless formal and conceptual promiscuity... This implies a profound overhaul of the very concept of art, the starting point of which might be provided for by a reappraisal of the art forms Hegel described as 'symbolic' (from the art of the Egyptians to the non-figurative art of the Jewish and Muslim sublime). Two apparently opposed critical outlooks can be seen to hybridize and blend: one focusing on the very latest developments in technology, the technical reproducibility of works of art, video technology and electronics; the other focusing on more emotional dimensions of experience and states of possession and rapture. Neo-eclecticism and neo-romanticism are basically rather inadequate formulations for these critical trends, the first of which seems to look to the present, the other to the past. For what we are really seeking... is the variety of experience and joy of a certain past, while what we look for in the anthropological past is a copy and a repetition of the present.7
In no uncertain terms, the Egyptian effect represents the final horizon of the post-historical drive — the deconstruction not just of a single genre or tradition, but the deconstruction of Tradition(s) with a capital T. As such, the critical function of Presneill's works would first seem to be a rather impossible one, or at least, it would appear to us as something we haven't really seen before. But what makes such a claim justifiable, especially in an age that continuously repeats the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything has been done before, and that all is simulacra?
^^^
In order to answer such a question, it is necessary not only to look at a longer trajectory of art production but also the a priori conditions of 'critique'. If one thinks of impressionism as the deconstruction of academic finishing techniques; of cubism as the deconstruction of perspectival systems; of Fauvism as the deconstruction of naturalistic coloration; of Surrealism as the deconstruction of rationality; of Abstraction as the deconstruction of every representational bias; of Op-art as the deconstruction of stable subject-object relations; of Happenings as the deconstruction of art and life; of Conceptual art as the deconstruction of objecthood; of Minimalism as the deconstruction of expressivity; of Institutional Critique as the deconstruction of systems of valorization; of Feminist art as the deconstruction of phallocentric forms of domination; of Photorealism as the deconstruction of photography's supposed naturalism; of Neo-geo as the deconstruction of 'pure' geometries; and of Pluralism as the deconstruction of the avant-garde ideal tout court —— then, with Presneill's works, we are certainly encountering something altogether different. In fact, if Pluralism opens onto the first meta-deconstructive act, one aimed at a tradition internal to the Western canon (avant-gardism), then with the Egyptian effect we are experiencing the deconstruction of two meta-discursive categories8 — Western and Egyptian — as well as the systems of privilege and hierarchy that adhere to both. In this way we move from the either/or logic of avant-gardism to the or, or, or... of Pluralism to the Both/And of the Egyptian effect — something that is clearly present in Presneill's work.9
Semiology and Sarcophagi.
As part of this (meta)deconstructive dialog, we can better understand Presneill's project as an effort to render that which is immanently familiar uncanny; as a means of making western art and art history a thing unknown to us; and as a concerted effort at denying every form of confidence about what is constitutive of 'presence' in the present. In this regard, Presneill's work is a balancing act unlike any other, one which operates by "the confidence that anything can find its chance... that late and early are tactical rather than strategic notions."10 Indeed, his work might even be characterized as an art of utility — grabbing what is necessary in the moment in order to upend the fictions of the past. This rotary motion between displaced images and unmoored symbols might even be described as a practice of counter-archivization, or at least, as a retroversive impulse that haunts the supposed stability of every semiological and/or sarcophograpic order.
We could even go to the end, and say that this kind of neo-Egyptian operation comes very close to mirroring "the Egyptian myth, (where) there will always be an Isis to piece together the scattered limbs of Osiris."11 But much like the labor of Isis, Presneill's imagery also shows us that a metaphysical body can never be properly reassembled, i.e., that Osiris will forever be haunted by a primal lack, an unassailable impotency, and an improbable form of reincarnation. In other words, art after the Egyptian effect will partake of a wholly deconstructed nature, having been cut into a million little pieces, first by modernism, then by postmodernism.
And yet, only negativity and dissemblance can continue to provide a challenge to the logic of supersession and transcendence accorded to 'historical' cannonization. In our day, this challenge goes by the name of Pluralism, the post-historical condition, and even by the Egyptian effect, but this latest moniker includes one new twist. Rather than simply undermining the metaphysics of presence, the Egyptian operation becomes the sign of a profane act that everywhere attempts to return the metaphysics of pictorial grammar to the common vernacular of 'culture'.12 Or, to put it somewhat differently, the Egyptian effect submits the infinity of representational acts to the conditions of finitude.
^^^
But finally, how is all of these achieved? How is a negative or deconstructive function attributed to a work of art in a post-avant-garde, post-critique era? Or, what is still left to be challenged, i.e., what does the Egyptian effect aim for? In Presneill's works it consists of a Herculean effort to stack up representations at the same time that they threaten to come tumbling down; to challenge the last boundaries between cultural divisions; and to aim at cultural defamiliarization, decontextualization and defetishization in a global sense.
In other words, when it comes to the issue of aesthetic purity, good taste and pictorial mores of a given 'kind' or 'type', Presneill throws caution to the wind chasing after the hope of a kind of perverse inclusivity — an inclusivity implicated in every kind of difference — material, cultural, discursive, whatever. And this is a particularly difficult gesture in an era where the anti-aesthetic impulse has been all but naturalized. In fact, Presneill's works walk a very fine line between what we might accept as fine art or illustration, being both a bit too rough and unfinished to be mistaken for a commercial endeavor while also resisting the types of choices associated with the So Cal school of bad painting, the idiosyncratic figuration of the Bay area or even the Neo-expressionists. This too, is part of their enigmatic character, where we expect to find another infant terrible or a pictorial auteur, we are instead confronted with the problem of an Egyptian order(ing), where the writing on the wall is thrown back at us to be decoded.
^^^
Consequently, Presneill's paintings not only force us to question our own bias's about culture and taste, but they do this by moving between kitsch and coquettishness; an intimacy of reference and thematic dissonance; a tacit disrespect for formal constraints and an irreverent indulgence in pictorial pleasures. Yes, Presneill is still a provocateur in an age that has fewer and fewer such individuals, but he is also a very specific type of provocateur — one who relishes in the anonymity and the agency of the scribe. Alongside Peter Sloterdijk's recent reading of Deconstruction as the Egyptian moment par excellence, we can see how Presneill's oeuvre consists of "a radical semiology that would show us how the signs of being never provide the wealth of meaning they promise..." but also, that we may have no way beyond this doublebind.13
In fact, his images show us "how Egypt works in us: 'Egyptian is the term for all the constructs that can be subjected to deconstruction — except the pyramid, the most Egyptian of edifices. It stands in its place for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructable remainder of a construction that, following the plan of the architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse."14 Max Presneill's work is also one such pyramid, a pyramid which challenges us to question the last undeconstructable remainder of Western metaphysics, or a cultural construct that is increasing built to look as it would after its own collapse.
Grant Vetter
2012
Grant Vetter is the author of The Architecture of Control. He is also the gallery director of Autonomie and a board member of FAR (Foundation for Art Resources), a non-profit organization which has put on critical art exhibitions since 1977.
Endnotes.
1 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 74.
2 As Perniola notes in "The Erotics of Transit", "The passage guaranteed by art is from the same to the same." While Perniola is here speaking about the transformation of Amor from a "savage passion" to a "peaceful art", how much greater is this description for describing our transition from avant-gardism to pluralism? This taming of the passions, "where the reader of the poem becomes and expert, (only to) find new loves" is also an apt description of the rotary motion that occurs in Presneill's work. Mario Perniola. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 67, 67, 67, 67.
3 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 75.
4 Mario Perniola. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 214.
5 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.
6 Ibid. 76.
7 Ibid. 77-78.
8 The use of the term 'meta-discursive category' here refers to the Western culture, which could be further broken down into premodern, modern and postmodern periods, and then further into specific eras, movements, etc. Of course, the history of the West could just as easily be broken up into the Ancient world, the Dark ages, Modernity and Postmodernity, or any other number of divisions. In this sense, meta-discursive is always a generic demarcation or an arborescent concept.
9 Or, to place it in Hegelian terms, the avant-garde is the negation of tradition, pluralism, the negation of the negation (the return of all tradition as equivalent), which is followed by a properly synthetic moment where all traditions are seen as equally deconstructable.
10 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.
11 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.
12 With regard to Presneill's work this could refer either to Agamben's use of profanation as making "a new use possible", or Patrick O'Conner's reading of Deconstruction as a phenomenology of the extra-mundane. Or, one could really combine these two readings in positing the idea that Presneill's art practice returns culture to a "common use" in the form of pictograms composed of a phenomenology of the extra-mundane. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007) 87. 87. Also, see Patrick O'Conner, Derrida: Profanations (New York: Continuum, 2010).
13 Peter Sloterdijk. Derrida, An Egyptian: On the problem of the Jewish Pyramid. (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 27.
14 Ibid. 28.
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The Egyptian pharaoh was surely the first to give the human individual the structure of the measureless will to be that set him upright above the surface of the earth as a kind of luminous and living edifice. When individuals — long after the era of the great pyramids — have wanted to acquire immortality, they have had to appropriate the Osirian myths and the funeral rites that formerly had been the privilege of the sovereign... The existing pyramids still bear witness to this calm triumph of unwavering and hallucinating resolve: they are not only the most ancient and vastest monuments man has ever constructed, but they are still, even today, the most enduring... In their imperishable unity, the pyramids — endlessly — continue to crystallize the mobile succession of various ages; alongside the Nile, they rise up like the totality of centuries, taking on the immobility of stone and watching all men die, one after another: they transcend the intolerable void that time opens under men's feet, for all possible movement is halted in their geometric surfaces: IT SEEMS THAT THEY MAINTIAN WHAT ESCAPES FROM THE DYING MAN.
George Bataille
Visions of Excess
Obelisks Respond to the Pyramids
In the symbolist model of ancient Egypt, at least two concurrent, simultaneous levels are at work in any given instance. One is the study of Egypt as a civilization that existed in a factual geographic place and time, its peoples, mythology, social forms, its chronological unfolding, its monuments and artifacts, but this is only a backdrop, or support, for another Egypt, which might be called a quality of intelligence. This Egypt is outside of chronological consideration; it is rather, both an ever present and recurring possibility of consciousness.
Robert Lawlor
Sacred Geometry:
Philosophy & Practice
