Painting Meaning: Reflections on the Line inspired by Alessio Ancillai's artwork.
Mike Watson (2014)
There is in painting a profound sense of something being at stake, of a battle being fought for meaning, and yet at the same time it seems so superfluous to the central battles of our century, for freedom of communication versus censorship, for a secure environment in the face of climate change, for economic stability, for welfare, etc... And yet if all the paintings that had ever existed were removed from history – from the first cave painting to the Sistine Chapel, to the work of Rembrandt, Rubens, Velasquez, Delacroix, Manet , Cezanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picasso, Artaud, Dubuffet, Bacon, Pollock, Rothko, Baselitz, Lupertz, and so on – one feels that, just as if all the philosophical works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Sartre, Derrida, etc., were eradicated from memory, we would see an immediate descent into barbarity and slavery.
A reflection on the works of Alessio Ancillai provides an opportunity to consider the centrality of painting - and art in general - to being human.
Artists and Philosophers have in common the desire to answer a principle unanswered question which remains always at the root of their inquiries. This question has social consequences which tie these otherwise abstract disciplines to the societal whole. The question is over to what extent the individual human subject participates in reality. Is to be human to be able to shape reality? Or, rather, is the human being just one object amongst innumerable others, shaped by the laws of a chaotic universe? The question is of fundamental importance to both disciplines because it regards the very possibility of their existence. That is to say, if the human subject is to some degree capable of participating in reality, then both human thought and its creative application as art become credible on their own terms. Yet if the human is merely an object among objects then the practices of both thought and creative endeavour are reducible to objective chemical processes acting upon raw matter. Seen in this light it is the object which evokes thoughts in the philosopher as much as the materials which move the artist to action: The human is an unwitting player on a vast and null theatre set in which the philosopher and artist figure are just two object-actors among innumerable others, including oil, canvas, pigment, brushes of varying varieties, books, computers, cars, bank machines, printing presses, beeswax, plaster, ceramic tiles, gold leaf, urinals, the Complete Works of Marx, the Italian Constitution, an X-Ray machine, Mars, Jupiter, and so on.
In spiteof this, Art and Philosophy are in the position of breathing life into raw material, both the materials which the human comes into contact with daily – including those of the artist – and then human subject itself, as material being. This they must do by throwing themselves ahead of reality, by declaring an inherent purpose to life in its actual absence. And it is in this moment of declaration that the artistic or philosophical statement occurs, through the physical engagement of the body with space and with materiality, either via the written or spoken word or through the manipulation of materials.
The process of painting illustrates this process particularly well, as an artist such as Alessio Ancillai interacts, plays with, shapes, forces and is shaped by the raw natural material that is oil paint with its simultaneous visceral and plant like nature. Oil paint is a viscous material which with the addition of painting mediums becomes liquid before then becoming solidified as a ‘finished’ painting which remains subject to physical change over time. Yet this is all on the large part true of the painter, who whilst not fluctuating between liquid and solid is always simultaneously both liquid and solid, as much a part of the raw materials of the earth and Universe, and who undergoes changes with the painting. It is in that interaction with oil, pigment and canvas that the painter Ancillai – as he continually pours thinned paint over the painting’s sheer surface, moved by the materials with which he shares a moment in time – makes present his material being with that of the developing artwork. The results, seen in works such as Do You Remember (2014, 85x100cm Oil on Linen, Pins) and Just Before Falling Asleep (2013, 85x100cm Oil on Linen, Pins) – paintings which incorporate thin threads which appear cut through them as if outlining and bringing forth their material essence – present the concretization of a given moment lived by the human object in conjunction with the wider natural object of which it is part. Here the sense of materiality is crucial, because what art does is it makes human subjectivity possible in the objective realm, through a type of shuddering in front the artwork which momentarily transcends the deadly stillness of an objective Universe.
This moment of ‘Shudder’ felt via the artwork is central to the theory of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno:
‘[…] this shock [Schrecken] is the moment at which the recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible. This immediacy, in the fullest sense, of relation to artworks is a function of mediation, of penetrating and encompassing experience; It takes shape in the fraction of an instant, and for this the whole of consciousness is required, not isolated stimuli and responses. The experience of art as that of its truth or untruth is more than subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. The experience is mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense. [...] It [Beethoven's 9th Symphony] resonates like an overwhelming ‘Thus it is’. The Shudder[Schauder] is a response coloured by fear of the overwhelming. By its affirmation the music at the same time speaks its truth about untruth.’
Adorno T.W. Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, 1997, p244
And yet what is crucial in the moment of Shudder, as the viewer loses themselves and escapes the commodified realm of capitalist society is not only the bringing to life of the subject, who in a moment of contemplation becomes one with the artwork, it is also the coming into being of the art object itself. The art object and the subject create each other and themselves simultaneously. For Ancillai - who studied medicine – this physical coming into being of the subject as a materially construed phenomenon is crucial. A primary interest of the artist is the way in which lines are perceived by humans in their earliest of development, leading to their fundamental sense of togetherness with and separateness from the mother during weaning. Seen in this way, the delineating of form through painting and drawing - which the artist sees, alongside writing, as the tendency to define meaning through the manipulation of the line – is fundamental to bringing both the human subject and the horizons beyond their individual material bodies, into being.
As the artist explains:
‘Among those characteristics which are specifically human, there is one which fascinates me more, and that is the idea that lines don’t exist in nature and only humans have the capacity to imagine them. At birth, children have a nebulous and uncertain visual perception; it begins to define itself around weaning, which coincides with the development of the organic elements that permit visual perception (occipital lobe and ocular fundus) and with the child’s autonomy from the mother’s breast.’
Here we find that art, in its expression of beauty as a further manipulation of the line in order to evoke something in life worth reflecting upon has in common with philosophy – which through the line as written word delineates ‘truth’ – the ability to produce out of nothing a system of common values worth striving for and preserving. Beauty and truth, although arguably meaningless in an objective sense, become their own justification. The ‘line’ – itself a construct of the human material mind, which is but one object among countless others – is thrown out like a lifeline and used to demarcate and support human life as a living breathing phenomenon. In an advanced capitalist society where people become reducible to their monetary value, as mere workers in a machine, this tendency becomes crucial and must be constantly repeated so that life does not give way to an irreversible living death; slavery.
Moving on from the use of the line to cut through his paintings, Ancillai has produced another body of work which directly addresses the impact of capitalism on human life. If, on the one hand, his use of the line gives life, just as it is the line of the curvature of the mother’s breast which brings the human baby to a coherent sense of being in the world, on the other hand the line cuts, like a hangman’s noose. There is no line more final than death, which underscores all life, making it present. Yet what must be avoided is a total reversal of life through the limiting and categorizing action which reduces us all to meaningless lines depicting the rational numerical count. When we all becomes numbers in a finance machine the line which once gave life, takes it from us.
Alessio Ancillai explores these themes as a continuation of his wider work, incorporating the line as a reductive form which cuts humanity from the ethical basis which the delineation of beauty and truth otherwise gives to it. The ‘line’, which here represents the rationalist imperative to produce evermore products and, ultimately, money, entraps the human as a physical object with a value – X – which itself correlates to its ability to generate more value in conjunction with other objects. As such, the individual ‘worker object’ becomes superfluous in the wider quest for ‘capital’. A work death is seen as ‘collateral damage’.
This is made most clear in the works displayed at GarageZero, Rome in 2013 as part of Curriculuminvitae, curated by Mauro Piccinini, among which were displayed, notably, overpainted and otherwise manipulated health and safety test certificates. TUSL Nero (2013, page from the safety at work test, obscured with black paint) and TSL Bianco Nero (2013, page from the safety at work test, with cut corner). In this latter work, the cut to the top right hand corner of the safety test paper performs the same function of the line in Ancillai’s more conventional painting works, except it brings forth death and not life; a line which closes rather than opens experience.
These works signal the danger of the line and of the rationalist tendency to categorise nature and thereby to categorise humanity itself under the numerical count, a side effect of the Enlightenment Project, which aimed to show humanity in its true relation with nature, unfiltered by mythic and religious forms. Whilst being a positive aspiration, the tendency to categorise objects by their measurement serves to separate humanity further from nature. In contrast the delineating action that art and philosophy seek is intended as an outlining of a nature which man can co-exist with, honouring the principles of beauty and truth.
Ancillai’s most recent works, which present a departure from the practice of painting whilst reflecting upon it use the components of the line – light, the object and the viewer – , bringing together the basic elements of pecpetion. Inside the Shadow (2014, White LED strip on aluminium, with hessian, silk and lino drapes) features a wall mounted aluminium sheet draped with three sheets of material – hessian, lino and silk) which, when lit from beneath by an Led strip create a shadow, echoing the natural forms of a mountain, shore line or canyon. The piece signals the connection of the human viewer to the object as the perceived element of light creates the division from and unification with the wider natural objective realm of which the subject is part. This line as divider and unifier both brings the viewer in immediate contact with the dead objective realm of things and separates him from it so far as to allow reflection, and it from this reflection that humanity is born as beings with a notion of beauty and of an ethical responsibility to preserve and protect it. In this sense, to address the question which was raised at the beginning of this text, to be human is both to be shaped by reality and to shape it with the line as the mediating boundary which permits this contradiction to exist. The painter, and the artist in general, give a special value to this process, drawing attention to the value of the line in creating an intrinsic aesthetic and ethical value for human life.It is tribute to the strength of philosophical reflection in the works of Alessio Ancillai that these questions are raised.
Mike Watson
PhD in Philosphy Freelance Writer and Arts Writer for Frieze, Art Review, Flash Art International, Editor and Proofreader, Cura Magazine
Mike Watson (2014)
There is in painting a profound sense of something being at stake, of a battle being fought for meaning, and yet at the same time it seems so superfluous to the central battles of our century, for freedom of communication versus censorship, for a secure environment in the face of climate change, for economic stability, for welfare, etc... And yet if all the paintings that had ever existed were removed from history – from the first cave painting to the Sistine Chapel, to the work of Rembrandt, Rubens, Velasquez, Delacroix, Manet , Cezanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picasso, Artaud, Dubuffet, Bacon, Pollock, Rothko, Baselitz, Lupertz, and so on – one feels that, just as if all the philosophical works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Sartre, Derrida, etc., were eradicated from memory, we would see an immediate descent into barbarity and slavery.
A reflection on the works of Alessio Ancillai provides an opportunity to consider the centrality of painting - and art in general - to being human.
Artists and Philosophers have in common the desire to answer a principle unanswered question which remains always at the root of their inquiries. This question has social consequences which tie these otherwise abstract disciplines to the societal whole. The question is over to what extent the individual human subject participates in reality. Is to be human to be able to shape reality? Or, rather, is the human being just one object amongst innumerable others, shaped by the laws of a chaotic universe? The question is of fundamental importance to both disciplines because it regards the very possibility of their existence. That is to say, if the human subject is to some degree capable of participating in reality, then both human thought and its creative application as art become credible on their own terms. Yet if the human is merely an object among objects then the practices of both thought and creative endeavour are reducible to objective chemical processes acting upon raw matter. Seen in this light it is the object which evokes thoughts in the philosopher as much as the materials which move the artist to action: The human is an unwitting player on a vast and null theatre set in which the philosopher and artist figure are just two object-actors among innumerable others, including oil, canvas, pigment, brushes of varying varieties, books, computers, cars, bank machines, printing presses, beeswax, plaster, ceramic tiles, gold leaf, urinals, the Complete Works of Marx, the Italian Constitution, an X-Ray machine, Mars, Jupiter, and so on.
In spiteof this, Art and Philosophy are in the position of breathing life into raw material, both the materials which the human comes into contact with daily – including those of the artist – and then human subject itself, as material being. This they must do by throwing themselves ahead of reality, by declaring an inherent purpose to life in its actual absence. And it is in this moment of declaration that the artistic or philosophical statement occurs, through the physical engagement of the body with space and with materiality, either via the written or spoken word or through the manipulation of materials.
The process of painting illustrates this process particularly well, as an artist such as Alessio Ancillai interacts, plays with, shapes, forces and is shaped by the raw natural material that is oil paint with its simultaneous visceral and plant like nature. Oil paint is a viscous material which with the addition of painting mediums becomes liquid before then becoming solidified as a ‘finished’ painting which remains subject to physical change over time. Yet this is all on the large part true of the painter, who whilst not fluctuating between liquid and solid is always simultaneously both liquid and solid, as much a part of the raw materials of the earth and Universe, and who undergoes changes with the painting. It is in that interaction with oil, pigment and canvas that the painter Ancillai – as he continually pours thinned paint over the painting’s sheer surface, moved by the materials with which he shares a moment in time – makes present his material being with that of the developing artwork. The results, seen in works such as Do You Remember (2014, 85x100cm Oil on Linen, Pins) and Just Before Falling Asleep (2013, 85x100cm Oil on Linen, Pins) – paintings which incorporate thin threads which appear cut through them as if outlining and bringing forth their material essence – present the concretization of a given moment lived by the human object in conjunction with the wider natural object of which it is part. Here the sense of materiality is crucial, because what art does is it makes human subjectivity possible in the objective realm, through a type of shuddering in front the artwork which momentarily transcends the deadly stillness of an objective Universe.
This moment of ‘Shudder’ felt via the artwork is central to the theory of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno:
‘[…] this shock [Schrecken] is the moment at which the recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible. This immediacy, in the fullest sense, of relation to artworks is a function of mediation, of penetrating and encompassing experience; It takes shape in the fraction of an instant, and for this the whole of consciousness is required, not isolated stimuli and responses. The experience of art as that of its truth or untruth is more than subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. The experience is mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense. [...] It [Beethoven's 9th Symphony] resonates like an overwhelming ‘Thus it is’. The Shudder[Schauder] is a response coloured by fear of the overwhelming. By its affirmation the music at the same time speaks its truth about untruth.’
Adorno T.W. Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, 1997, p244
And yet what is crucial in the moment of Shudder, as the viewer loses themselves and escapes the commodified realm of capitalist society is not only the bringing to life of the subject, who in a moment of contemplation becomes one with the artwork, it is also the coming into being of the art object itself. The art object and the subject create each other and themselves simultaneously. For Ancillai - who studied medicine – this physical coming into being of the subject as a materially construed phenomenon is crucial. A primary interest of the artist is the way in which lines are perceived by humans in their earliest of development, leading to their fundamental sense of togetherness with and separateness from the mother during weaning. Seen in this way, the delineating of form through painting and drawing - which the artist sees, alongside writing, as the tendency to define meaning through the manipulation of the line – is fundamental to bringing both the human subject and the horizons beyond their individual material bodies, into being.
As the artist explains:
‘Among those characteristics which are specifically human, there is one which fascinates me more, and that is the idea that lines don’t exist in nature and only humans have the capacity to imagine them. At birth, children have a nebulous and uncertain visual perception; it begins to define itself around weaning, which coincides with the development of the organic elements that permit visual perception (occipital lobe and ocular fundus) and with the child’s autonomy from the mother’s breast.’
Here we find that art, in its expression of beauty as a further manipulation of the line in order to evoke something in life worth reflecting upon has in common with philosophy – which through the line as written word delineates ‘truth’ – the ability to produce out of nothing a system of common values worth striving for and preserving. Beauty and truth, although arguably meaningless in an objective sense, become their own justification. The ‘line’ – itself a construct of the human material mind, which is but one object among countless others – is thrown out like a lifeline and used to demarcate and support human life as a living breathing phenomenon. In an advanced capitalist society where people become reducible to their monetary value, as mere workers in a machine, this tendency becomes crucial and must be constantly repeated so that life does not give way to an irreversible living death; slavery.
Moving on from the use of the line to cut through his paintings, Ancillai has produced another body of work which directly addresses the impact of capitalism on human life. If, on the one hand, his use of the line gives life, just as it is the line of the curvature of the mother’s breast which brings the human baby to a coherent sense of being in the world, on the other hand the line cuts, like a hangman’s noose. There is no line more final than death, which underscores all life, making it present. Yet what must be avoided is a total reversal of life through the limiting and categorizing action which reduces us all to meaningless lines depicting the rational numerical count. When we all becomes numbers in a finance machine the line which once gave life, takes it from us.
Alessio Ancillai explores these themes as a continuation of his wider work, incorporating the line as a reductive form which cuts humanity from the ethical basis which the delineation of beauty and truth otherwise gives to it. The ‘line’, which here represents the rationalist imperative to produce evermore products and, ultimately, money, entraps the human as a physical object with a value – X – which itself correlates to its ability to generate more value in conjunction with other objects. As such, the individual ‘worker object’ becomes superfluous in the wider quest for ‘capital’. A work death is seen as ‘collateral damage’.
This is made most clear in the works displayed at GarageZero, Rome in 2013 as part of Curriculuminvitae, curated by Mauro Piccinini, among which were displayed, notably, overpainted and otherwise manipulated health and safety test certificates. TUSL Nero (2013, page from the safety at work test, obscured with black paint) and TSL Bianco Nero (2013, page from the safety at work test, with cut corner). In this latter work, the cut to the top right hand corner of the safety test paper performs the same function of the line in Ancillai’s more conventional painting works, except it brings forth death and not life; a line which closes rather than opens experience.
These works signal the danger of the line and of the rationalist tendency to categorise nature and thereby to categorise humanity itself under the numerical count, a side effect of the Enlightenment Project, which aimed to show humanity in its true relation with nature, unfiltered by mythic and religious forms. Whilst being a positive aspiration, the tendency to categorise objects by their measurement serves to separate humanity further from nature. In contrast the delineating action that art and philosophy seek is intended as an outlining of a nature which man can co-exist with, honouring the principles of beauty and truth.
Ancillai’s most recent works, which present a departure from the practice of painting whilst reflecting upon it use the components of the line – light, the object and the viewer – , bringing together the basic elements of pecpetion. Inside the Shadow (2014, White LED strip on aluminium, with hessian, silk and lino drapes) features a wall mounted aluminium sheet draped with three sheets of material – hessian, lino and silk) which, when lit from beneath by an Led strip create a shadow, echoing the natural forms of a mountain, shore line or canyon. The piece signals the connection of the human viewer to the object as the perceived element of light creates the division from and unification with the wider natural objective realm of which the subject is part. This line as divider and unifier both brings the viewer in immediate contact with the dead objective realm of things and separates him from it so far as to allow reflection, and it from this reflection that humanity is born as beings with a notion of beauty and of an ethical responsibility to preserve and protect it. In this sense, to address the question which was raised at the beginning of this text, to be human is both to be shaped by reality and to shape it with the line as the mediating boundary which permits this contradiction to exist. The painter, and the artist in general, give a special value to this process, drawing attention to the value of the line in creating an intrinsic aesthetic and ethical value for human life.It is tribute to the strength of philosophical reflection in the works of Alessio Ancillai that these questions are raised.
Mike Watson
PhD in Philosphy Freelance Writer and Arts Writer for Frieze, Art Review, Flash Art International, Editor and Proofreader, Cura Magazine
