THE ZODIAC CONCLUSION
“The painter Charles Clough is best known for high-gloss expressionist paintings that elevate bravura brushstrokes to technicolor heights.”-Max Henry, Artnet, 2/2/99
The painterly, as a symbolic mode of great metaphoric breadth, is the
basis for my continuing commitment to paint, however, other materials
and processes also compel my attention.
I have been making photographs since 1967 and in 1976 I completed The
Sketch for the Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film or a Ghost, a
linear composite of a hundred twenty-three photos of my studio containing
the works which engaged me at that time and ending with a self-portrait.
This pointed to my desire to make a work as a “great container”
of all my works and impulses. Of course, like all artists, I maintain
a photographic record of my work and as I became familiar with digital
imaging processes in the 1990s, a solution to my intention emerged: digitize
all of my images and publish them as electronic books using Adobe Acrobat
Portable Document Format (PDF) on CD-ROMs.
Although I combined painting and photography in various bodies of works
in the 1970s and early 1980s, since 1985 my modus operandi has been, to
put it most simply, to extend Hofmann. A sense of personal crisis in 1999
resulted in my priority of beauty yielding to a greater concern for symbolic
density. And so after painting continuously since 1971, I stopped, from
May, 1999 until March, 2000, and moved my studio from New York City to
the Atlantic coast of Rhode Island and renovated my procedures.
And so it was that I came to paint where the earth meets the sky, on
twelve of my worn, inside-out, “disarmed” T-shirts, arranged
in a circle, suggesting the compass, the clock and the calendar, on the
lawn, over the course of the growing season and titled after the signs
of the zodiac. Layers of enamel and acrylic were added and knives and
grinders effected selective removal. The unevenness of the underlying
ground gave shape as the paint dried, and was subsequently “disciplined”
or “repressed” out by mallets, clamps and staples to become
a kind of “personal geology” replete with psychological metaphor.
The soft cotton was petrified by the slow accretion of pigmented sediment
and its surface intricately figured by metamorphic caresses, battery and
abrasion. D. W. Winnicott’s “transitional object” and
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s Creativity and Perversion are germane
to this work.
Each painted T-shirt is mounted in a frame hinged to a cabinet (Zodiac
Picture Box) holding 12 CD-ROMs with fifty PDFs containing more than four
thousand stereo images, which constitute my Photo Journal for 2000.
The tradition and direction of the lineage: Titian, Rubens, Delacroix,
Cézanne, Picasso, Pollock, is essential in my approach to painting.
Duchamp’s modified readymades underlie my T-shirts and his Box in
the Valise, my Picture Box. My new method reflects a critical affirmation
of what I believe are developmental advances evident in body art, (my
T-shirts) conceptual art (the photo journal) and earth art (made on the
ground). Brutish, abject aspects of Dubuffet, Fontana, Kiefer and Basquiat
are affirmed. And very specifically, Pollock’s last painting, Scent,
and what I interpret as it’s progeny: diverse 2D/3D manifestations
over that past thirty years in Richard Pousette-Dart, Lynda Benglis, Terence
La Noue, Frank Owen, Joe Zucker’s wads, Rodney Ripps of the late
1970s, Schnabel’s plate paintings, thick Olitskis, Poons’s
reliefs of the 1990s, Eugéne Leroy, Mark Milloff, James Hyde and
recent Nabil Nahas contextualize this approach. The complex and highly
particular surface necessitates direct experience for complete effect
while the accompanying CD-ROMs access a detailed visual journal of my
year, contrasting actual and virtual states.
In the course of producing the Zodiac T-shirts, paintskins (the dried film at the top of paint cans) were gathered on the ground. Upon completion of the project, the resulting object came to be known to me as The Terminal Painting, insofar as all-over had been realized, however, more completely: sans-support and all-around. Within a developmental progression, I believe this singular work constitutes a certain ultimatum and my subsequent painting, such as some recent watercolors, will function not as the object of the epic but rather as anecdotal fulfillment of previously visited scenarios.
The Photo Journal
Beyond documenting my artwork, I photograph that which interests me.
This loosely correlates to traditional categories of painting: portraiture,
landscape and still-life. For me, painting has become a ritual that results
in an object of much deeper symbolic dimension and emblematic power than
a photo, however photography serves greater illustrational effect and
specificity. I want to have the range and condensation of an “all-over”
Pollock painting, but also to bring to light the quality of my relations
and richness of material encounters. The ellipsis effected by abstraction
is restituted by the “pictures behind the painting”.
My photography provides for me what snapshots did for my parents, as
well as how the sketchbook served my artistic predecessors. The lives
of my children, the progress of studio projects, the work of other artists,
views seen while walking in all sorts of urban, rural and wilderness environments
are my subject. I’m especially fond of rocks and wood, from the
scale of the landscape to that of the pebble and twig; as found, and as
worked, referencing the broadest historical context. Volume, shape, texture
and light seduce me as it was for Blossfeldt, Weston and Brancusi, whose
studio photographs are especially significant to me. I have become a sculptor
of the holdable.
In the early 1970s, while I was looking at my contact sheets, my eyes
inadvertently crossed and superimposed two similar images and the effect
and process of stereo photography became obvious. I am of the opinion
that the additional information provided by the “second” photo
is essential for a representation to be complete. Notions of gesture,
cinema, time and space are inherent in this two-frame practice.
The recent acquisition of my Rhode Island studio and garden provides me
with a subject in which the change of seasons and botanical detail offers
endless inspiration. As this experience has increased my productivity,
I was struck by its journalistic nature and the special text constituted
by any individual’s total imagery. We are familiar with collections
of up to a few hundred photos published in book form and with catalogue
raisonnés of artists’ oeuvres, but a collection of thousands
of photos intended to be read as a complete and singular work adds a fresh
challenge to the field of photography.
