Luc Tuymans: Orchid and Der Diagnostische Blick IV.
Luc Tuymans interviews are cropping up (here, here, here) now that a mid-career retrospective of his work has started its 16 month trip around the US. Unfortunately, Peter Schjeldahl’s characteristically excellent review in the New Yorker isn’t available online. It’s worth the price of the magazine or a trip to the library if you like either him or Tuymans. Here are a couple of bits that I liked…
“…Tuymans discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a vitality as surprising as a rosebush on the moon. He does so with nothing-to-lose audacity, in terms of subject matter. If painting has nothing significant left to say, he seems to reason, it might as well say nothing about significant things.”
“”He told Artnet that in his initial hours of work, “until I get to the middle of the process - it’s horrific. It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Now, that - uncertain ends, confident means - is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know. It illuminates and justifies Tuymans’s eccentric work rule, with its distant redolence of Jackson Pollock’s odd decision to paint in the air above a canvas. The unities of form and feeling in Tuymans’s work may be shallow - as, under time pressure, he seizes upon whatever resolution of a picture first beckons. But the effect is thrillingly open-ended, as if the work were still in the act of coming to its point, dragooning the eyes and minds of viewers to that enterprise.”
Gold, Fingers.
Despite something throwaway about Tuymans paintings - each painted in a day and looking (just looking) haphazardly conceived, the imagery, drab and unfocused, culled from the multiplying stocks of the nearly unlooked-at - it’s surprising how many of his works are stealthily making their way into popular art iconography (the two at the top of this post are good examples; both pop up wherever there’s anything being said about the state of painting today). Maybe it’s something about the way his paintings slow imagery down to a pace where creation coincides with absorption that registers with people, or seems necessary. Maybe the air paranoia and distrust inscribed into them is recognizably our own. This is just the opposite of the big picture. Here, the excluded, the stuff outside the frame far outweighs the little we’re given. That imbalance against our favour accounts for at least some of the unease we feel looking at the paintings; (and, gluttons for punishment that we are, it also accounts for some of their magnetism: shrugging is the new enlightenment). In Tuymans, there is a paranoiac knot binding the opposed threads of utter triviality and looming significance, all appeals to reason interrupted by the dizzyingly banal, like jokes told at a crime scene.
The Secretary of State.
While I’m pooling links, here’s an audio interview with Tuymans by John Tusa of BBC 3 from, I think, a few years back. There are some other good interviews on that site, too.
Luc Tuymans: Orchid and Der Diagnostische Blick IV.
Luc Tuymans interviews are cropping up (here, here, here) now that a mid-career retrospective of his work has started its 16 month trip around the US. Unfortunately, Peter Schjeldahl’s characteristically excellent review in the New Yorker isn’t available online. It’s worth the price of the magazine or a trip to the library if you like either him or Tuymans. Here are a couple of bits that I liked…
“…Tuymans discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a vitality as surprising as a rosebush on the moon. He does so with nothing-to-lose audacity, in terms of subject matter. If painting has nothing significant left to say, he seems to reason, it might as well say nothing about significant things.”
“”He told Artnet that in his initial hours of work, “until I get to the middle of the process - it’s horrific. It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Now, that - uncertain ends, confident means - is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know. It illuminates and justifies Tuymans’s eccentric work rule, with its distant redolence of Jackson Pollock’s odd decision to paint in the air above a canvas. The unities of form and feeling in Tuymans’s work may be shallow - as, under time pressure, he seizes upon whatever resolution of a picture first beckons. But the effect is thrillingly open-ended, as if the work were still in the act of coming to its point, dragooning the eyes and minds of viewers to that enterprise.”
Gold, Fingers.
Despite something throwaway about Tuymans paintings - each painted in a day and looking (just looking) haphazardly conceived, the imagery, drab and unfocused, culled from the multiplying stocks of the nearly unlooked-at - it’s surprising how many of his works are stealthily making their way into popular art iconography (the two at the top of this post are good examples; both pop up wherever there’s anything being said about the state of painting today). Maybe it’s something about the way his paintings slow imagery down to a pace where creation coincides with absorption that registers with people, or seems necessary. Maybe the air paranoia and distrust inscribed into them is recognizably our own. This is just the opposite of the big picture. Here, the excluded, the stuff outside the frame far outweighs the little we’re given. That imbalance against our favour accounts for at least some of the unease we feel looking at the paintings; (and, gluttons for punishment that we are, it also accounts for some of their magnetism: shrugging is the new enlightenment). In Tuymans, there is a paranoiac knot binding the opposed threads of utter triviality and looming significance, all appeals to reason interrupted by the dizzyingly banal, like jokes told at a crime scene.
The Secretary of State.
While I’m pooling links, here’s an audio interview with Tuymans by John Tusa of BBC 3 from, I think, a few years back. There are some other good interviews on that site, too.
