Charles Clough: Hot Paint and the Cold Shoulder
Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo
Scott Hanson Gallery, New York City (by the authors’ permission)
March 1990
(Tricia Collins curated exhibitions throughout the 1980s as half of the team: Collins & Milazzo and now
owns Tricia Collins·Grand Salon in New York City and Richard Milazzo curated exhibitions
throughout the 1980s as half of the team: Collins & Milazzo and currently curates exhibitions at 11,
Rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery.)

If you’re going to get Charlie’s work, ‘get’ in the sense of ‘understand’, then you’re going to have to
start with a few basics. (Charlie would ask, why not ‘get’ also in the sense of obtain?) It’s painting
with a ‘difference’. But don’t get us wrong. This difference does not belong to Derrida—although
Charlie would say “why not?” and then proceed to exhaustively deconstruct his own paintings.
Making too clear what is already clear: that deconstruction is a crucial part of Charlie’s
paintings—indeed, one might even argue that it is seminal to the paintings, if not their very soul.
Except, in the end, Charlie’s deconstruction would sound more like how Baba Ram Das’s maxim, “Be
Here Now,” gets converted (and rightfully so) to ‘Beer Now’ than how the ‘e’ in Derrida’s
‘differance’ gets changed to an ‘a’. (Do we hear in the margins of this ‘a’ the resonant sounds of ‘A+’,
the echo of approval, the inverted margins of approbation, the splendor that is the bureaucracy of
professional, academic criticism?) There is nothing in Charlie’s paintings that can speak to the cosmic,
the transcendental, or the sublime, without also addressing what makes perception itself infinitely
accessible, diurnal or commonplace, negotiable. In other words, this difference (and Charlie would
spell it with three ‘a’s’, just to be sure), this ‘diffaranca’ belongs to what is common rather than
marginal, in humankind, and therefore, it also belongs to Charlie—even if he gets a ‘C?’ for spelling
and for the work not fitting the status quo of the way things are and the way paintings should be
painted during this moment in History. That is, it plays to an ‘openness’ that is distilled not only
from the History of painting, and Abstract Expressionism in particular, but from the experience of
creativity in general, the will to symbolic expression, and the experience of perception itself as a
common denominator.
So, what precisely is this ‘diffaranca’, this ‘far-fetched’, disorderly painting with bad penmanship and
bad spelling habits? (Even as Charlie tries to comply, there emerge from the bowels of this structural
miasma of a word or a non-word, the letters ‘f a r’, which signify in abbreviated form the declamations
‘far-out’ and ‘out-of-sight’.) It is the distance necessary to what makes the symbolic order negotiable,
proximate to experience, approachable. In a word, this non-word, this non-painting, this false,
undogmatic, disloyal, unfaithful difference, constitutes itself simply as painting that gets you bad
grades, and expelled, ultimately from the academy of that’s-way-things-are. A school of thinking, in
general, that transacts a static, deracinated aesthetic (and social) experience, endemic to the rules of the
game, the established reality-quotient. It is painting that gets you into trouble with the ‘authorities’, if
you’re lucky, or just ignored, if you’re unlucky, simply because you acknowledge the demands of
structural closure, but fly in the face of stylistic closure. “Difference’, here, is distributed either
according to limits that are deeply felt and shared in human experience or rules that temporarily enforce
the limits of fashion. It is the shadow-reality of desire, the reality that literally shadows our day-to-day
impatience with the way-things-are. In cold, geometric, hard-edged times, a free-flowing, seemingly
undisciplined, ‘unconceptual’ looking, gestural painting, can land you in a world outside of
History—or, at least, outside the going rate. What is even worse is hot painting that gives you the cold
shoulder.
On the other hand, Charlie gives you the raw, hot, splashy ontology of paint, or, at least, its
semblance; but, on the other, he gives you the cold, indifferent, remote, impersonal epistemology, or
rather epistemological effect, of the photograph, or rather, of the photo-mechanical ‘cause’ and
causality of our Age, or at least, its semblance. Semblance upon semblance, expendable truth upon
expendable truth, competing semblances, inexpendable appearances, equate to false difference, and the
synthetic value of this false difference equates to a presiding groundlessness in Charlie’s work.
Looking at one of Charlie’s paintings is like watching the struggle of first principles being played-out
on a huge cinemascope movie screen. Or it is like experiencing the ontological and epistemological
vectors of changing truths playing themselves out on a matrix of inexpendable falsehoods. (For
‘ontology’ read unruly desire, overwhelming sex, the unmitigated yearning of the Body, the boundless
flesh or surface of things, in general, and painting, in particular; for ‘epistemology’ read the facticity of
representation, the acute stillness of the mind, the endless closure of the knowing self, and the
transference, displacement, and “ultimate distance” in relation to the Other, in general, and through
photography, in particular.) It is hard to rely on anything in Charlie’s paintings, especially the
difference he posits or asserts, and then negates, only to reassert again, between means and ends,
proximity and distance, illusion and reality, pretension and grandiosity, code and experience, self and
Other, “figure and ground, past and present, the image from an art book and [his] intention.”
Everything is up for grabs.
“In a way, painting comes down to rhythm and color. That’s what draws the eye. And if I wanted just
the rhythm and color, I’d be an Abstract Expressionist. But I feel guilt or something. I feel I have to
acknowledge everything else. Do all the steps. The whole Greenbergian flatness thing, for instance. It
sustains me. I swallowed all the critical ideas hook, line and sinker. ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, for example. I was really taken by that essay. So Abstract Expressionism is terrific,
but I’d just as soon see my images transferred into print—into four-color reproduction.
“The cultural baggage I carry around gives me a foundation which I acknowledge by using images
from magazines and books. I paint on top of them. So I lose the distance—I bring the image up close
and touch it. Then I photograph it, so it becomes untouchable.It goes back into the distance. Next, I
touch it again, paint over it. And if the work gets reproduced, it of course has to be photographed all
over again. So I see myself as setting up these resonances—layers,showing the touch and denying the
touch. This idea of cover and recover. It ends up with the skinniness of the photograph. I like that. My
things look like they are about touch, but you can’t touch them.
...“I wanted to extend that to include anything that had ever been made flat, so everything became fair
game—old master painting, everything. Willem de Kooning. I went to his studio because I wanted to
touch the hand. I haven’t washed it since. Magritte. The Soutine touch, and of course there’s Manet.
And Sargent. I love the facile painters.
“What I like most about painting, all kinds of painting, is that it ain’t what it looks like. Not that it’s
simply an illusion. I like contradiction, that my things can have an old master look, the look of
Abstract Expressionism and a look of shiny smoothness. I like those paradoxes—flatness and its
opposite, the way the photo reveals and the paint conceals. Shuffling and reshuffling, then adding
another deck and reshuffling that. I try to condense all those layers into a single image, so that, for me,
what is describable by the printing process is the important part. It is really a struggle. I don’t know, I
guess it is—sort of a contingent struggle, in a way.
...“I think what I do is both. As I paint, I’m learning history in reverse. It’s like I’m doing my
schooling backwards, but it’s also my life—to get an image and examine it, suck it dry and throw it
away, then move on to the next victim. The result is all these layers of painting and photography,
which I set up to look grandiose. That’s ‘pretension’. I think it is grandiose, but it’s got all these
trimmings. Decoys. And there’s always the idea of blending. With ‘picturism’ the emphasis is on
distancing but, like I say, I’m more interested in bringing the image close. I have this personal,
Abstract Expressionist way of covering an image with paint, but everything else gets in between that
style and the final image. Relationships develop. So it’s not just me alone, painting. I have this
conversation with the outer world, which takes place in my imagination.
“The conversation blends everything, and the blend sets up a relationship between figure and ground,
past and present, the image from an art book and my intention. And so on. The blending convolutes
those relationships, confuses them. So I’m not trying to find an ultimate distance where I can put a
pristine, untouchable image. The point for me is the variety of the relationships. I see art as a metaphor
for many of the things we experience—for abruptness or smoothness or how one thing flows into the
next. I’d like to put all the pieces together. That’s not possible, but I imagine it—the inclusiveness and
busyness, this compacted, impacted, condensed quality, all adding up; a body of work, each piece
conditioning what follows, cumulatively, so that it contains my sense of experience. Something like
that.” 1
If they look like Abstract Expressionist paintings, then they are. Which is the going syllogism.
Superficiality, in our culture, is the true test of a thing’s being, a thing’s ontology, a thing’s thingness
[sic]. But what if they aren’t. What if the complex of appearances or surfaces or semblances turns out
to be more complex than that, and it is stereotype-as-essence, or even essense-as-transcendental
monotype, or reality as (the outcome of) static or reified existential transactions, that delude us? What
if they are pretenders to the throne. We have certainly learned to look at Gerhard Richter’s series of
Abstract Paintings as something other than latter-day Abstract Expressionist exercises. If anything,
they seem to legislate the decline and fall of Ab Ex. We know somehow that they bracket, if not
actually, discontinue, the heroic, or even the anti-heroic, sentiment; that they do not, to say the least,
participate wholeheartedly in the gesture.
So perhaps, in Charlie’s case, as in Richter’s, it is not exactly a what-you-see-is-what-you-get
scenario. No more than the professional sexual experience is. Perhaps there is more to it than meets the
eye—or less. Either way, we’d be back to semblances. Semblances of what is there, or semblances of
what is not. A democracy of shadows and self-annihilating principles. Pleasure and reality,
superstructure and understructure, discourse and freedom, call each other’s bluff. Assertion and
negation run the gamut in Charlie’s world. What there isn’t (or what there is too much) intersects the
way things aren’t. Heidigger and Quine sipping martinis at Gatsby’s summer estate on Long Island.
Irony or denial and superfluity or excess participate as equals in an indiscriminate void called the
contemporary Social. A talented situation, at best.
In Richter, there is, indeed, a deep commitment to painting, to painting as such, to painting as a
material threshold—but ultimately, what is absolute in the venture is qualified. What is experienced by
the viewer is (constitutes itself as) what has been studied by Richter. There is, in other words, a
greater commitment to the relation between perception and judgment than to the void of painting as an
existential predicament. (No mean feat, by the way.) However, in Charlie’s scheme of things, he
would place a trace of this predicament equally at the behest of study and experience, perception and
judgment, the absolute and the qualified. In other words, the relation between the terms, the contract,
must itself sustain the ridicule of a phenomenological commitment to both truth or sincerity and deceit
or falsity. Nothing can escape the possibility that the relation itself between any given set of terms (hot
and cold, black and white, right and wrong, good and evil) or members of a social or aesthetical
contract is not stable, finalized, terminal. Everything, in Charlie’s view, including the risks we do not
take are up for grabs.
With regard to such risks, what if it turns out, irony on ironies, that Charlie’s paintings are, after all,
less mediated than all of that, or that the experience the paintings circumscribe is, indeed, somehow,
unmediated in character? This is putting aside how the paintings are actually generated (which is to use
a big mechanical thumb, rather than a brush), and then edited; and it is also to sidestep what Charlie’s
intentions are, at least in part (which is to free expression from the boundaries of the individual ego so
that it might radiate outward, beyond identity, beyond the identification process, and beyond the
identical itself in human discourse and desire, to achieve a grandeur of a disparate Self, a disparate
Other, and a disparate World). A big “thumb” that risks the lunatic antics of the cartoon world; a
process of editing that is not unrelated to Madison Ave.’s manipulation of images and signs; a set of
intentions that, rival the process of individuation itself. These are, nevertheless, the elements that
would necessarily have to factor into an unmediated state of things. But, what if, despite such factors
and considerations, it turns out at Charlie’s paintings refuse to enlist themselves among the austere
fashions of the rational mind? What if their parenthesis does move beyond the valley of the periodic
dolls? What if it is painting without a difference, without a sense of propriety, without a care in the
world? Charlie would say “why not”? Supreme overflow. Undeconstructed affection for the
way-things-are and the way-things-aren’t. Why not?
Clough, pronounced like ‘tough’. Clough, as in one cool guy. As in the syncopated soul of a
boundless, shadow-reality. as in the attempt to “acknowledge everything.” As in the “ultimate
distance.” Clough, as in one cool guy. Up for grabs and untouchable.
1 Charles Clough, quoted by Carter Ratcliff, in “Expressionism Today: An Artists’ Symposium,” in
Art in America, December 1982.