Andrew Grassie: Within and Beyond Painting BY RHYS EDWARDS: ‘The work of contemporary Scottish artist Andrew Grassie provokes a re-evaluation of painting's potential as a critical medium, His highly detailed, minutely realized paintings depict interstitial moments and spaces within the contemporary art environment: installations being set up, lecture halls, vacant business offices, and works in storage, among other subjects. However, although their superficial appearance connotes a transparently representational image, the significance of Grassie's paintings stems partly from the method that he has refined over the course of the past two decades. First, Grassie will visit the place he intends to show in, either for a solo or group exhibition, and take photos of the space; depending on the nature of the show, he may take the photographs several months before the opening, or several days. After printing the images in a standard 3 by 5 inch format, he will take them home, and, using carbon paper, transfer an outline of the print onto a piece of paper. He will then carefully replicate the original photograph using egg tempera paint; depending on the nature of the composition, he may warp the perspective of the final image as necessary. The final painting will often feature a facsimile of Grassie's own painting, displayed in the exhibition space it will shortly inhabit in sealit Phereafter, the painting is framed and hung as Grassie has depicted it, alongside any others featured in the original image. This technique, for example, was used, in Tabley [1], wherein Grassie's painting of a resplendent art collection at the Undergraduate Journal of Art History 1“Tabley estate house in England appears within and alongside the collection, in both ‘fiction’ and ‘reality.’ By breaking down the barrier between representation and immanent reality, Grassie's images the go beyond the historicized formalism of painting to create a self-aware interaction betwe various agents who contribute to their viewing experience. In doing so, Grassie's methodology galvanizes a theoretical model that fosters an intrinsic relationship between the viewer and the exhibition space, while remaining unique to the medium of painting, It is this model that constitutes Grassie's significance. Given the particular demands of egg tempera—its quick drying time and low miscibility— Grassie is required to work quickly and carefully, building up the illusion of depth through hundreds of minute brushstrokes. The rote hermeticism of such a technique results in paintings that seem entirely devoid of creative flourish; indeed, when shown in catalogues, Grassie's paintings are virtually indistinguishable from the photographs they are sourced from. Yet, the cleanliness of the painting also produces a certain sterility not found in the ocular perception of reality. The art critic Rachel Withers once observed that in Grassie's paintings, “Depicted objects require minute stylization ox, in the artist's words, ‘cleaning up.’ Solidified and frozen, they take on a hallucinatory, estranged quality!" ee rar itis hunt’ al scene ha sun Gas ins fhe aig the Plaing mei For the purpose of analyzing some of the theories that contribute to the development of 1 Rachel Withers, “Andrew Grassi,"in Vitamin P: Now Perspectives in Painting, a. Valérie Brewvart (London: Phaidon Pres, 2007), 84 UAL ;Grassie's model, a 2008 piece entitled Ingleby Gallery with Daniel Buren (2] is particularly suitable; as its title suggests, the work depicts a Daniel Buren wall painting at a gallery in Edinburgh. Buren hac installed the painting in the space some months prior to Grassi's painting. Grassie made his painting from a photo of the installation after it had been removed; once complete, Grass painting was then hung in the space opposite a meticulous recreation of the original Buren work, thus creating a visual paradox for the gallery visitor. Formally speaking, Buren's work is disenfranchised by Grassie's painting; although it occupies the centre of the painting, the bright sunshine coming in through the window casts it in shadow, as if to intentionally minimize its presence. However, although obfuscated, Buren's work appears to be the only item of interest in the space—the rest of the room is utterly mundane. This centering would suggest that Buren’s work is of compositional significance to Grassie; yet Grassie renders it with the same indifference as he does the floor, ceiling, and wall fittings. For visitors unfamiliar with Buren's work, the stripes may appear to be striking in some way—an unusual visual motif contaminating the otherwise pristine neutrality of the gallery space. But any potential for emphasis is undermined by the equanimity of Grassie's brush; the presence of the Buren installation, in Grassie's lens, comes off as little more than mild coincidence. In its passivity, Ingleby Gallery evokes a disinterested aesthetic. Of course, Grassie's impact does not lie strictly in the formal features of his paintings; one must also take into account his situational awareness. Since Buren's own work meditates heavily on the subject of viewing experience, the “frame” of the gallery, and the state of painting within the postmodern era, its representation within a Grassie painting is fortuitous; it invites an examination, UAH ee .of how Grassie's practice both evolves, and distinguishes itself from, the critique with which Buren’s work engages In his 1971 essay The Function of the Studio, Buren concludes with the following: “The art of xcday and today is not only marked by the studio as an essential, often unique, place of production; it proceeds from it. All my work proceeds from its extinction.” In this and other writings, Buren explicitly states that his stripe paintings are devoid of any ideal habitat; they exist only to supplement the hermeneutic structures of different sites. Douglas Crimp later elaborated the function of Buren's famous stripe paintings in his 1981 essay, The End of Painting Buren has always insisted specifically on the visibility of his work, the necessity for it to be seen. For he knows only too well that when his stripes are seen as painting, painting will be understood as the ‘pure idiocy” that itis. At the moment when Buren's work becomes visible, the code of painting will have been abolished and Buren’s repetitions can stop: the end of painting will have finally been acknowledged? In Crimp's opinion, Buren's paintings distinguish themselves from the antimodern efforts of other painters in virtue of their express evacuation of formal and symbolic content. They are not se reflexive, but they do not accede to the predetermined cultural conditions of the exhibition space Daniel Buren, "The Function of the Staio,"in Justittional Critique: An Antbolgy of Ata’ Writing. by Alexander Alber and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 117 > Douglas Crimp, "The Death of Painting," aber 102 (1981) 85 UALeither. Instead, Buren's paintings are a non-entity; they are the antithesis of the materiak-specular relationship which has conventionally defined the viewer's assumed relationship with art objects. Buren sees his work as the “extinction” of the dichotomy between studio and gallery, and Crimp believes that the acknowledged visibility of Buren's work would mark the “end! of painting Grassie's own representation of a Buren painting, then, seems ironic if not altogether incendiary. “The mechanical monotony of Buren's stripes refer to anything but themselves, and as such, have no tangible “internal meaning,” in Crimp's words. Yet, one could make the argument that the very insubstantiality of Buren’s work is undermined by Grassie's painting, In rendering it via the medium of figurative painting, Grassie makes visible what was once invisible; he has transformed the Buren painting from a hermeneutic supplement into the subject of hermeneutics itself. In virtue of the historicized connotations of painterliness which Buren was attempting to evade—connotations such as ocular spectacle, the self-enclosed frame, and even beauty—Grassie aestheticizes Buren. In other words, Grassie uses the very “code of painting” that Buren had previously attempted to subvert in order to situate and expose Buren's work to the eyes of the viewer. However, Grassie's invocation of this code may not be enough to actually subjectify Buren’s ‘work in this way. Indeed, when asked during a 2008 interview if there was any significance to the fact that he uses the “outmoded” medium of egg tempera, Grassie replied: “It's more by-the-by than a deliberate link. I like that it bypasses modern work of any description. I haven't consciously set out to make that point, though it's something that I welcome.” Although he went on to cite Vermeer as, Andrew Grassi, interview by Ben Luke, “Andrew Grassi, Are World, August 2008, 84 UAH ee .an influence on his own work, Grassie's method is not a means of invoking the connotations of painterly figuration; this is clearly illustrated by the photorealism of his work, which, like Buren's own paintings, strive to evade their own materiality and “bypass description.” Furthermore, in virtue of the immaterial flexibility with which Buren’s stripes act to constantly “frame” their exhibition spaces, one could also argue that their simulacral appearance within another layer of painting serves merely to reiterate their immateriality. In this sense, Grassie's painting is simply another instantiation of a Buren work, rather than a transfiguration of it. In the same 2008 interview, Grassie himself implied that this would have been the case had Buren accepted his original proposal for the installation, which was to exhibit the painting without the simultaneous presence of the “actual” Buren painting. In Grassie's words, “He would make a new Daniel Buren work, but it would only exist within my virtual response.”> Ironically, Buren's rejection of the alternative proposal implies that he is more invested in the autonomous value of his work than his career of institutional critique would otherwise suggest. Regardless, whether the “real” Buren piece was exhibited or not is a moot point. Since most people are probably familiarized with Buren's work through the medium of photography, and since Grassie's latest works, such as Ingleby Gallery, are superficially indistinguishable from photographs, the argument that the symbolic code of painting could dramatically subjectivize Buren's stripes is a weak one. Crimp would likely maintain that his argument remains intact: Grassie's efforts to subjectivize Buren’s works do not detract from Buren's immateriality, and even if they did, Grassie Tid LAH Undergraduate Journal of Mt istry 6would only be catalyzing the allegedly immanent demise of painting by rupturing its own codes and strictures. Indeed, Grassie reveals how the alleged ‘aura’ of a painting is largely constructed by its own historical framing devices, as well as institutional dissemination. By depicting works of art within exhibition spaces, Grassie illustrates how these spaces mediate the content of the work. Similar practices are found, for instance, in Louise Lawler’s photographs of private art collections, or Roy Arden’s photographs of the Totem poles on display at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. Unlike Lawler and Arden, however, Grassie's works are both literally and figuratively self-representative. His paintings allude, if only quietly, to their own ineluctable situation within display spaces, thereby detracting from the conventional conception of painting as self- enclosed. This facet of Grassie's practice illustrates how Ingleby Gallery could be construed as an homage to Buren's ideas, rather than as an effacement of them. Given its interconnectivity with the theories and work of another artist, as well as its site- specificity, the art historian David Joselit might identify Ingleby Gallery as an instance of the new genre he terms “transitive painting,’ According to Joselit, a transitive painting “sutures a virtual world of images onto an actual network of human actors, allowing neither aspect to eclipse the other.” In this manner, artists such as Jutta Koether and Stephen Prina avoid the temptation to extricate themselves from the conditions of reality. Although transitive painters use traditional mediums, they evade “orthodox modernist criticism” by directly engaging with their exhibition environments. Ingleby Galleryillustrates this engagement quite literally. © ii Joining Bede el” car (2000125, 7 bid LAH Undergraduate Journal of Mt istry 7However, Joselit also notes that transitive paintings avoid the “modernist trap of negation! that paintings are usually subject to, that is, the materialistic stasis caused by market speculation and disinterested contemplation. Such acts contribute to the stagnation of the medium to which Buren, and Crimp alluded, In regards to this facet of transitive painting, Grassie's paintings are less exemplary. While the way in which they situate the work of other artists is strikingly reflective, the paintings themselves certainly do not transgress the format of the salon style exhibition, nor is there anything preventing the work from being displayed in a space ulterior to the one for which it was originally designed (as demonstrated by Ingleby Gallery's recent exhibition at the Rennie Collection, a gallery owned by a powerful Vancouver real estate mogul). In re-locating the work, Grassie's paintings lose their reflective power, and become static documents. Furthermore, Joselit’s definition fails to explain how the specific qualities of the paint medium are intrinsically related to transitive painting as a category. There is no reason why other ‘mediums can't perform the same functions as transitive painting, or fall into the same traps that it does, which renders the idea of “transitive painting’ a non-starter. This leaves Grassie's work in a poor state, for we are still left without any quality that exempts it from appealing to the photographic medium, or from succumbing to purely ironic interpretation; interpreted in this way, Grassie's paintings amount to little more than a sort of sophomoric parlour trick, oscillating between mockery and self-indulgence. Psychoanalytic theory presents an alternative to the potential debasement of Grassie's . Ibid, 129, UAH ee‘work—an alternative which incorporates painting's intrinsic qualities. Freud, in particular, was among the first to develop a rigorous, scholarly account of how this distinction can impact aesthetic experience via the notion of the “uncanny"—a disquieting sensation wherein something that was once repressed or alienated by our consciousness returns in a brief moment of recollection. The stimulus for such recollection often takes the form of a double, which, according to Freud, represents the possibility of fulfilling uninhibited (and forbidden) phantasies—for we can project phantasies onto the double of an internalized body, thereby permitting us to vicariously live a phantasy that the conscience finds repulsive. Freud also notes that the sensation of uncanniness is often produced by “effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions and italics). significance of the thing it symbolizes, and so on” (ony Looking back to Ingledy Gallery, we can identify this very mechanism of doubling, and the resultant blurring between symbol and symbolized. Buren's installation is doubled in Grassi painting, allowing us to perceive it as a mediated body. But this is not merely a mechanical reproduction; as Rachel Withers observed, Grassie's deliberate use of egg tempera enforces a purity in the image that cannot be observed in conventional photographs. Note, too, that Grassie is not a total automaton; for instance, a minor error in perspective can be observed at the top of the window shutter, and the central bar in the window frame is not entirely straight. These errors, as well as the sterility of the painting itself, simulate the uncanny; the subject of the painting is both familiar and Sigmund Freud,"The Uncanny,” in Writings on Art and Literature Stanford: Stanford Univesity Press, 1997), 221, UALalien to the gallery visitor (this alienation is also exacerbated by the consistent absence of human beings within Grassie's images). The blurring between symbol and symbolized is consequently effected via the process of painting itself For as we have noted, Grassie does not appropriate or invoke the symbolic code of painting in his work; rather, he reflects the subject back onto itself. This reflection, however, is mediated by tempera's properties of sterilizing, or “estrangement.” Thus, it is impossible for Buren's work to retain its flexibility during the transcription—it must emerge as a subject, if only a marginal one, and thereby come to symbolize itself rather than the space around it, Hal Foster later develops the aesthetic relationship between reality and illusion, via Lacanian psychoanalysis,in The Return of the Real. In discussing the works of several photorealist painters, such as Richard Estes and Audrey Flack, Foster proposes that their repetition “serves to screen the real as traumatic.” In other words, superrealism is an effort to evade the trauma of reality (the Lacanian “gaze”) by “screening” it through the medium of painting, ’This screen is the historical reserve of codes that paintings use to convey meaning. However, Foster concludes that the slickness of superrealist techniques only serves to emphasize the superficiality of the screen, thereby reinforcing the immanence of the real. Foster calls this self-effacement “traumatic illusionism.” If like Freud and the Surrealists, we take unconscious desire to compose a fundamental part of reality, then the relationship between the uncanny and traumatic illusionism becomes apparent. When one experiences a sense of the uncanny in front of a Grassie painting, this may be because the painting is more real than the real itself, in virtue of the purity ofits artifice, it cannot help but 8 Hal Foster, The Return ofthe Real{Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 132. UAL .allude back to its own situational reality. Unlike the other superrealists, however, Grassie is self aware; by avoiding composition, signification, and painterly emphasis, Grassie is able to demonstrate to the gallery visitor how his own work emerges from the conditions that mediate architectural spaces and artworks (like Buren's). As Withers puts it Grassie “punches a hole in the mimetic screen of both painting and source photograph.” By manipulating temporal and spatial disjunctions, Grassie is able to evoke the real without merely reiterating it in photographic form or painterly code. In way, Grassie performs the destruction that Crimp had predicted: he makes the symbolic code of painting tangible. But this exposition does not mark the death of painting. On the contrary, it reinvigorates it as the unique working model which Grassie has developed: for, although Gr: ‘e's images lose their impact when removed from their originating site, they nevertheless continue to subjectivize this site and its properties. In this subjectification, the site and the property (the artwork, the furniture, the architecture, etc.) are recreated as equal bodies within the frame of the painting, often itself'a subject of the site. This recreation, effected by the cleaning qualities of tempera, mimics the censorship, or screening, of the symbolic order; but by referencing this very order, Grassie exposes it to the gallery visitor. The transitivity of Grassie's paintings is thus maintained through the means of traumatic illusionism—a property that only a painting medium can possess, Y Withers, 84 UAL .