Grayson Perry/portraits/Walter Benjamin/when this is all over
The takeaway from the first episode of Grayson Perry’s art club was a good one. He was reflecting on what he’d learnt from filming the programme, and concluded that it’s not the likeness that’s important, but the spirit of the painting, or more specifically “the relationship between the artist and the sitter”. He says “we’ve all got a smartphone” referring to the apparent redundancy of exactitude of likeness.
Grayson Perry will have reflected on this point before. I would be surprised were a Turner Prize winner not familiar with the ideas in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which discussed the decentralising effect of printing on an artwork and the auric loss that occurs in reproduction, where the reproduction is lifeless compared to the original. Of course, we are in a new silicon age where artworks are repeatedly reproduced in pixels of varying degrees of fidelity and available in a spread of pantone variations on any google image search when looking for your 10 paintings in 10 days on facebook. Everyone’s specific screen calibration will display the image differently. So it’s even more special when we get to experience paintings in the flesh. A gallery visit is certainly due when this is all over. I’d love to see a Rothko again, the reproductions just don’t have it, there’s a loss of vibrancy, they are fixed, dead.
Another aspect to Benjamin’s book are reflections on the effect the invention of photography had on art. It is said to have been pivotal in the dawn of Modernity. This is oft repeated in art schools and probably photography’s influence hasn’t been overstated. Still, a small minority of hyperrealist painters attempt to reproduce reality with faithful literalism. But non-literal takes on reality go back over a hundred years to the work of the Fauves, which if quaint now, were quite shocking in 1904, as the broad brushed impressionist paintings before shocked, and this tradition was continued in German Expressionism in particular where intense colour was a signifier for potent emotion.
So much for literalism in representation. What about painting as a relationship? I touched on this in my MA thesis, when I wrote about my art practice and painting in particular as performative, in the sense the work was the whole process of painting as much as the end result, which remains a document of a quiet exchange of attention. All my paintings (not untypically) were of people I liked and got on with. Sitting for a painting requires patience and a degree of trust and is generous of the sitter more than the artist. It was with a sense of play that I tried to hold a fairground mirror to my friends. Sometimes I think I succeeded in capturing something essential of the sitter. When I paint, I reinforce my identity as an artist. This conscious act of bad faith is preferable to the reality of myself as someone fragmentary, conflicted, wounded and perhaps even lost. It’s a grisly admission that part of the reason for creating is to improve self-esteem, but maybe more of us would agree if we thought about it.
(You can see more of my paintings on my website)
