RE:
FIGURING MEMORY – THE ART OF KRISTEN ALVANSON |
| “I look at you and think of the evening I first met you, and you’re not that person anymore. I mean, the elements are the same, but you’re different. Look at me right now.” Christy lifted her long arms right up in the air, still holding the dripping spoon, asking me to take in all of her. “I will never be this person again. When we walkout of here today – when tomorrow morning comes – I will be somebody else, not exactly the same as I am right now. Maybe that’s all dying is.” Ethan Hawke – Ash Wednesday |
Quirky, yes. Offbeat, certainly; but more than that, with its mixture of media and its oblique take on the very act of being an artwork, the paintings of Kristen Alvanson imply that their creator’s vision is wrested from the world rather than being at home within it. In an era when so much art strives for the ready-made statement – in reality provoked by the times but seeking nonetheless to be provocative of them – Alvanson’s work remains carefully stated. The working is always shown; an art of passion in which the terror of – and desire for – abandonment, is expressed with consummate cool. Alvanson’s art is an art of presences and resonances, acts and allusions. Perhaps it is viable to start with memory. With memories that are positioned before our eyes. What here has been remembered? How does the painting work to remember? It is not that these paintings simply turn around the interaction of memory, histories and representation, it is more accurately, that these themes present what comes to be framed within the paintings as their own apposite topos; and within that topos, their presence is intricate and complex. At work within the field of the painting they source the paintings with their work. What this means is that the paintings draw on and develop the resources that inhere in memory, history and representation. The specificity of their work, however, is connected to what occurs when these elements are themselves put to work. In this, their supposed determinations – the already given particularity of memory, history and representation – no longer control, and even though these elements need to be understood as encompassing, and enacting, the material presence of tradition, what is enacted takes the form of an active questioning rather than a painterly or interpretative “fait accompli”. It is that their movement into work is traversed by a questioning of memory, history and representation. This questioning comes to be at work in the frame and thereby forms an integral part of the work’s work. This questioning is no mere idle speculation; it is rather a questioning that, once acknowledged, forms a resolute part of the present. |
The represented – a capricious term – has a twofold presence, one which necessitates its own constitutive doubling or repetition. The occurrence will always involve an initial determination constructed by the relationship between representation within the frame and the frame as representation. These frames do not simply mediate presence, they sustain it, and in so doing comprise part of the event’s work, its productive presence as the event. Initially this concerns representation – the concept of what it is that comes to be represented and therefore is given to be the representation. What this means is that representation, far from being taken as an end in itself – an end governing and determining the place and space of presentation – will be, within the frame, subject to questioning and examination. Representation will become an object of investigation within the frame such that the investigation, that is its own presentation, will figure as a fundamental and to that extent an inexorable part of the work’s work. The complex presence of representation is enacted in a number of different ways. Here two different interrelated themes of painting are taken up. The first highlights the question of painting, and the second concerns the question of painting’s difficult relationship to representation. With both what comes to be questioned is the problematic of representation and memory. What essentially needs to be observed is the continuity of questioning – painting taking up the question of its own possibility by figuring the questioning of representation and memory – operating to maintain the work of the painting. What this means is that the object understood as the object-in-question plays a dynamic and affirmative role in the painting. The assumed finality, both temporal and interpretive, of the object gives way to a process in which activity is always in the process of being completed. The point of Alvanson’s paintings is to see how it is possible to construct things that are meaningful in new ways. That is why she is interested in using different kinds of languages, different paint marks. Rather like a computer, she is using her own code to break down symbols and re-assemble them in her work; and after that, it’s all up to the viewer. Her work explores the language of signs, always challenging our expectations of painting, of what the painting might be about or what it may contain. Her ambiguous marks encourage and yet at the same time frustrate attempts to construct narratives from the perceived subject-matter. Each viewer, it seems, can identify the imagery differently, so that a universally agreed meaning is impossible. “There exists a nomadic absolute, as a logical integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation. Here the absolute is local, precisely because place is not delimited.” (Deleuze and Guattari) [1] This passage appears to frame the intention and meaning of Alvanson’s painting. Each line and each idea from “A Thousand Plateaus” finds its way analogically into the paintings. The envisioned thoughts seem to narrate the painting’s motives. Nomad space – smooth space; close-range vision as opposed to long-range looking, haptic space distinguished from optical space. To trace the integration “part to part” displaying in the painting, its “process” of making must be retrieved. Stand near its surface, at about brush distance. Here the eye can seek the annexation of time, the segmented disparate time involved in its making. Process and time, painting and looking – each an interposing, mapping, mimicking. The paintings inscribe within their presence an affirmative break between painting and vision. Affirmation means the refusal of repetition and thus the subsequent re-thinking to which that refusal gives space. It is the generality of such a response that limits its force. If understanding what is intended by affirmation can be extended by looking at Alvanson’s paintings it is because of what is at play in “looking”. It is not just that the eye sees, it is also that sight forms a particular and significant part in philosophy – Cartesian Rationalism, Berkley’s Empiricism, and Hume’s resemblance between ideas and impressions. The interrelationship between the eye, sight, vision and logocentrism has been stated by both Barthes and Derrida. There is another element to be added and that is the interrelationship plays a pivotal role in establishing the telos of the painting. Painting is to be seen. Its own clarity – even the clarity of its obscurity – works to intertwine painting and vision; vision becoming the end of painting. All these elements can be combined in what could be termed a repressive rationality. It is in connection to this repression that Alvanson’s work appears disruptive. It can be read as breaking the interrelationship between, the eye, vision, sight and painting and in doing so it liberates painting from vision and it can be added, from vision as the telos of painting. The writing within Alvanson’s paintings and sketches, its resistance to what painting and representation would seem to demand – both of itself and in interpretation – serves to specify how liberation demands an interpretative strategy and terminology that is appropriate to the object itself. It must be an interpretation that can express this liberation without reducing it to a simple act of deviance or defiance. The innovations are demanded by the work. The development of interpretation enacts both the maintenance of heterogeneity and an announcement of the refusal of repetition. While the act of deconstruction always already taking place within the work of art, the heterogeneity of Alvanson is not masked by the pretence of presenting the culmination of painting’s telos. Their signs and languages are more demanding. In acknowledging its position in culture today abstract painting strongly presents itself only when the necessity of looking becomes paramount. The subjectivity involved in its making shuttles artist and viewer over diverse terrain. Seductively, sometimes erotically, it moves through topical paradigms of connotation, each expressed through a situating of how to look. All issues implode to intersect on the surface of the canvas, a subjective territory that welcomes analogy, yet continually denies any orthodoxy of interpretation. Alvanson has always been interested in bringing varied visual experiences to her paintings, treating graphical elements with the same thoughtfulness as expressionist marks. What matters in the end, is the intricately balanced structure and high-octane impact of the painting itself. In this sense she is quite a traditional painter, although the sources she uses are thoroughly contemporary. Alvanson abstracts her imagery, juxtaposing shapes so that they dance and interlock, revealing unlikely correlations between forms that while bearing traces of their origin, now carry new meanings. |
| Testing
the parameters of accepted notions, assemblages of strange resemblances,
disturbing and frivolous pictorial elements, systematically disjunctive
conjugations, abrupt delays, sudden departures refigure semiotic flow as
a translinguistic, quasi-narrative textual “thingness” whose
resonantly distinct materialism frames the image through a more distant,
legible and space of correspondence with the viewer. Engaging the viewer
rather than creating a sublime transcendent realm becomes the essential
generative motivation.
“Artists are presenters of affects, inventors and
creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give
them to us, and make us become with them…whether through words,
colours, sounds, stone, art is the language of sensations.” (Deleuze
and Guattari) [2] Alvanson’s technique of inscribing signs and language within the painting, especially in the “Women - Menstruation series”, breaks with itself in becoming painting, breaking while remaining painting; apart and a part. It is thus that the painting can work as the questioning of representation – and the entailments of representation – while still holding to presentation and thus while simultaneously presenting. What returns is an object–in-question. You have to rely on your own immediate perception of the legitimate order. In her paintings, Alvanson seems to acknowledge this order by wrenching it out of shape, pitting against each, other different ways of organizing her material, as well as variations of rhythm and facture. So breaks are employed to offset thick, worked paint. And words are finger painted, so that they are not superimposed on the thick surface but become part of that surface, readable for their sense while simultaneously encouraging an abstract interpretation. More importantly, different routes can be negotiated through the paintings and the relationships between these routes vary as do the relationships between the readability of the words, perceptible in patches, and then distracting one’s attention from larger rhythms. The result is a confrontation with surfaces which resemble painting but which also and instead are engaged on a double task, offsetting one type of communication with another, matching one mode of reading - word for word - with what might be considered its polar extreme, interpretation. Through a visuality suspended in ambivalence, or in ellipses of eternal returns and departures, Alvanson proposes a kind of acutely conscious, but also incidental tourism, without a guide, across form. All these necessary chance meetings, crowdings and dispersals of effects suspensefully affront the identity or proper name of painting. Dramatically disturbed by an intense acceleration of effects, formal authority is no longer immanent in these paintings. Instead a transformational suspension, implicating diverse semantic, material and social flows, builds into and adventure of painterly forms. Repetitive, alliterative, tautological, Alvanson’s painterly forms resemble notes never quite jotted down correctly. These interrupted memos, continually exercising recall, give way to chain of reiterative and discrete differentiation that continually resists visual completeness, offering up the sense of a structured, somewhat rhetorical, sceptical pictorial consciousness that may hint at the presence of a subject. Despite its rhetorical, representational supplement, the unruly syntax punctuating these paintings drifts in and out of semantic control, plays differences against each other, favouring an unrestricted generosity of form rather than a tight economy of savings, a structure that reminds us that, in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing – despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits”.[3] Strange semblances kept at bay simultaneously become exteriorised as discrete invitations into a different realm. In an “intermezzo” relation between representation and articulation and its flight into semiotic seepage, a certain signifying excess withstands self-referentiality. The ghostly light and almost scripted figurative rhythms create a mixed context that disrupts any interpretative reducibility. Such multiple over-layering of processes aspires after the absolute that is local, precisely because place is not delimited. The painting is an intricate happening, an insistently subjectively governed eloquence that demands close-range scrutiny by virtue of its complexity. Overt or guised, elusive or definable the breakdown of signification allows identity to emerge. It takes on the master-trope of artistic incarnation, the trope of origins. The ethos of abstract expressionism, its sanctifying of a self-sufficient empowered creator, is now insurgently reinscribed by a contemporary woman-artist who reflects herself through the intention of her own gestures within an intrinsic paradigm. The majority of the paintings within Alvanson’s “three” main series – Work, Women, Dreams - present a worked surface where the application of paint – the method of application and the effect of that application – yields a complex surface. The complexity involves the work’s relation to its content. It is only over time that one comes to appreciate the unity of these paintings, their surprisingly consistent psychic texture – dreamscapes of the symbolic and hyper-real. The work itself seems to offer a surface indifferent to the specific presence of paint because it is concerned with the consequence of the paint’s application. Its having been applied and its instantiated application are effaced in favour of the effect of that application – the paint; the paint’s work gives way to the painting’s narrative. Yet, there is a further complexity; part of what has been created is that the works project a specific quality, a screen of paint. What is significant is the moment of fixity – with it a real exteriority and interiority are created. This state is itself a limit; a limit that is overcome – even though its content, the delimited is retained in its being reworked – in the move from the seen to the more than seen. The interiority, exteriority, fixity and material presence and real are not abandoned but take on different qualities inscribed within the interpretative; the contested field of interpretation. The infinite inhabits a place of finitude. |
| Once
interiority and exteriority are located within interpretation and no longer
simply identify material presence, then material presence – in being
maintained – will have been transformed. This transformation means
that the painting’s limit, what was just a border or the surface’s
end, is no longer just a physical boundary; rather the presence of the boundary
turns the painting into a part, a component of a more significant whole.
The part refers beyond itself because it refers to a more that is the same
as itself. The more – that which is beyond the physical limit established
by the frame – is neither identical with nor completely different
from what is presented within the work. What is confusing then is that we
cannot easily separate what is this or that…”then one must erase
those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task.” (Deleuze
and Guattari)[4]
Presentation taken as the interrelated presence of surface and depth attests in the first place to the plurality of the event. The event becomes the site over which interpretative supremacy can never be declared in any absolute sense. Secondly it is the a part - a part presence of surface and depth that serves not as a preface to interpretation but as part of the interpretative act itself. In Alvanson’s paintings what becomes important is not the brushstroke as the mark of a process nor the imaginary power of chance over design – a point in which chance would be no more than design’s other and therefore not really chance at all – but the more fundamental, and yet more vital, overlayering of paint. It is this which constitutes a site who’s potential, and whose depth, appears to be infinite. The surfaces while present break down. They generate neither an unending surface nor an undifferentiated complexity. Surfaces play onto other surfaces. The relationship between them is established by an overlayering of paint which has the corollary of opening different and unpredictable surfaces within the frame. It is the process of overlayering that resists simple analysis. Rather than being a clear-cut multiplicity in unity or unity arising from multiplicity, the frame contains the affirmed presence of an event; an event with depth. The recovery of the event is an act that becomes possible within the temporality of interpretation. What is created within the process of interpretation is the already present irreducibility that is constant and performed within the substance of the painting. It is the work’s material presence that is the essential work of the work. Alvanson shows what cannot be shown. For the symbols and language are not linked to any context because they are not signs; it is rather, the condition of possibility of a context. The words and symbols are produced immediately in circumstances which are absolutely specific; and yet as such, all these are bound by no particular context. This therefore is the abstract in a material instant. This then, resists interpretation, but is the basis for every interpretation. Practically then, there is an aspect of the painting which unequivocally defies interpretation. This is an aspect of chance and indeterminacy brought into view, the aspect which both calls for and defies interpretation. The positioning of an event whose plurality is marked
by irreducibility becomes part of the work and of the re-working of repetition.
Additionally the process of this irreducibility suggests, even invokes,
the risk that was always inherent in the inter-articulation of image and
mimesis. Within many of the paintings there are signs and language. They
are symbols drawn over the field of the painting and they are part of
this field. And yet while they are obviously part of this field, to the
extent that the paintings are understood as involving a complex part-whole
relationship, they are also apart from that relationship. The introduction
of words and symbols demands, both within and as the act of interpretation,
that the question of identity and within that the threat of repetition
can be renewed. They can no longer be taken as given. The disruptive feature
arises from the location of the language within and as part of the painting.
As a beginning it is part of the painting while being, at the same time,
because of its generic place, apart from it. The words, in being a part
yet apart, open the possibility of a presence that eschews the distinction
between the literal and the figural, and thus displaces by re-incorporating
– re-working as re-incorporation – the strategies of representation
and mimesis. What is at stake therefore, in these paintings, is the image
beyond the image; painted words. |
| Here,
on Alvanson’s canvases, specifically exemplified in the “Commute
to Work” series, there is a field of painting that enacts different
times; they are of course enacted, on one level at the same time. The break-up
enacted on the surface of these works bring forth the question of memory.
Memory figures because it is the conduit within a temporal divide. The presence
of memory is doubled by the addition of language. Not only does it take
on a twofold presence, but it is as though there is a transferral within
memory itself. Memory is firstly part of the work’s structure and
the presence of additions and developments indicates the movement of time.
A vital move in the process of painting – the works effectuation as
work – takes place. Instead of categorizing these developments and
presenting them as if it were no more than a simple alteration of the topes,
the movement is being considered fundamentally as movement. Once this occurs
what is taken up is the relation to memory – memory regarding the
part/whole relation. Within this context an element – language –
has been added. This addition moderates the consequence of an initial temporal
aspect by altering this aspect into a surface that is given at once and
at the same time. The specific of language turns the surface into a literal
surface, the literal taking place within the sphere of interpretation –
and as an after-effect of production. What is kept is also the nascent presence
of the field of painting. The field moves between on one hand the presentation
of memory as initiated by its own construction, while on the other hand
it enacts what amounts to the effacing of that site of memory. Both operate
at one and the same time. The “one” here is therefore already
more than one while at the same time a constitutive of irreducibility. The
dynamism of this irreducibility resides in its being productive.
In Alvanson’s paintings then, the visual field becomes a complex, densely worked site of simultaneous overlay and excavation. What is significant is that her paintings affirm the presence of memory by holding and presenting memory within timed space; the twofold presence of memory within the paintings forms part of the timing of space. Timed space is part of the way in which the work works and as such it is an integral part of the continuity of the becoming-object. Painting works to remember in the abeyance of obliteration and by figuring complex relations. Within the generalized field of painting this relation may be generic, or it may involve the specific subject of the work. Here, with Alvanson’s paintings, there is a dual work of memory; two interrelated forms of memory are present. The first emerges as part of the work itself. The work allows time and memory to figure as an essential part of the works’ work. Both the language and symbolic elements, working to create the surface, enact different takes on the question of memory. It is thus that memory is already implicated in the work. It is this enactment that brings another aspect of memory into play. Here what is remembered and then worked through is the particular concern of representation that is linked to the autonomy of the painting. The complex presence of the part and whole relation presents a fracture in any hold of autonomy. Autonomy, immediacy and the negative are no longer subject to negation; they are no longer apposite to the ways in which these paintings work. The fracture that results in their abeyance is effectuated by timed space. Timed space becomes the enactment of other possibilities. With Alvanson’s paintings the place of memory, rather
than having been deployed as either a given or refused as impossible,
is presented as an already ineliminable present concern. The nature of
the concern is neither abstract nor complacent. Representation, its conditions
of possibility, becomes the site of an investigation and a thinking –
a painterly thinking – that takes place from within the process
of presentation itself. This needs to be understood as a claim that takes
as central the re-positioning of the object in terms of the becoming-object,
and thus with the object being maintained as the object-in-question. |
| Initially
I was impressed with Alvanson’s paintings, but I didn’t altogether
understand them. She described her paintings as “collected feelings”
a fittingly evanescent description for a body of work whose central, unifying
characteristic is its difficulty to define. The figurative elements or symbols
ripped out of context, suggested naïve surrealism - surrealism of affect
rather than intellect. The heavy brush-strokes produced a workmanlike feel
to the canvases, which was at odds with their juxtaposing of irreconcilable
elements. Only over time have I come to appreciate the unity of these paintings,
their surprising psychic texture. “Commute to Work 9.11.2003”
was the first of her works that fascinated me. This painting with its dreamscape
of the symbolic and the hyper-real reminded me of the way I encountered
paintings as a small child. In my grandmothers’ house, a reproduction
of a Van Gogh painting (Starry Night with Cypresses) hung on a wall of the
upstairs landing opposite my bedroom door. As I fell to sleep, it was this
that I focused upon, and such was the obscurity of the forms, that coming
to perceive it as a depiction of any kind became synonymous with perceiving
the external world itself. It is this wondrous phase of childhood –
between four and five – that Alvanson’s painting evokes every
time I look at it.
Alvanson’s most recent paintings have been inspired by sources as diverse as Abstract Expressionism and graffiti artist, sci-fi and fantasy fiction, Eastern philosophy, Native American mythology, graphics and computer imagery. She expresses the desire to make paintings that reflect what’s happening now. By starting to play with the idea of the paint marks almost being object-like with the shadows then introducing new graphic type-shapes – the incorporated symbols can be interpreted a little like dreamscapes. It may seem outrageous, but she likes the idea that if there are painting rules it’s good to ignore them. She wants to open up what imagery can be, to make a sense of place or something vaguely mysterious and seductive even perhaps erotic. The boundaries of what is possible in painting are blurring, and Alvanson has taken full advantage of this move, stating that for her, the wonderful thing about painting now is that it has a multiple index of possibilities. No matter what your intentions are, the act of painting leads you somewhere else, some place which you didn’t know. This is the reason for her continued affection for painting. Alvanson is a painter whose eclectic sensibilities were forged in the postmodern 1980s, when the history of art appeared as a fossil-field of different painting styles. The careful recombination of styles it seemed, could throw previous notions of originality into doubt. But Alvanson is a rare talent; an artist who has developed from theory-based beginnings to create a style inimically her own, one brimming with painterly invention and verve. Kristen Alvanson has conducted her discourse in painting with the traditional tools of the craft and has done so confined to the single canvas. Alvanson’s is a brush-made world, one that the hand alone produces. Within these limitations, painting necessarily focuses intention. In compliance with the canvas, that inveterate surface of subjectivity and template of defined absolutes, we turn outwards to the world, to ourselves. Her successive re-elaborations, like stories within stories that never fully end or resolve, are reminiscent of the alluring and inexhaustive space-time ambiguities elaborated in Lewis Carroll. Strange and unreliable promissory notes, they are fulfilled inasmuch as her finely tuned signing remains conflicted and in resistance of systematic categorization. They are signed from within the paradox of mercurial and indivisible relations, and are liable to an uncertain outline of otherness. Notes: |