On Systems

Robert Ryman, No Title Required, 2006

Every thought, method, or artwork exists inside of system.

At the base of any system is a set of premises that defines the system’s boundaries and methods. These cannot be questioned from within that system because the system needs them to remain coherent. (A dog chasing his own tail.)*

No system can ever capture the entire truth of a thing because it (the system) is necessarily restricted by its premises.

Systems are like windows. You may need to gaze through a number of them to understand exactly what is on the other side. 

A system comprised of a network of different systems is still a system. Such a system offers a wider view of things, but may lack the internal coherence of its constituents.

The validity of system can be determined by a number of different criteria: correspondence to external reality, aesthetic pleasure, life affirmation, and so on. We adopt different systems based on the criteria of the task at hand. (It is better to be a problem thinker than a system thinker.)

Art exists in a system with different criteria than regular life. A urinal in an art gallery thereby takes on different significance.

*Even Kant, who sought to rigorously critique of a system by using its own terms, left implicit premises unquestioned, namely the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori. (His problem was only how such judgments were possible.)

Are We In Control of Our Lives?

Amor Fati (detail), 2011, Oil and synthetic polymer resin on canvas.

Are we in control of our lives? There are two ways to look at this.* Whenever I burn myself with coffee while running to catch a train I ultimately miss, I understand that I am part of a malevolent universe both larger and more complex than myself, and that no matter how hard I try, I and everyone else will never be anything but unwitting recipients of its blind and oppressive patterns. But that same night, when I plug my iPod into the stereo and suddenly everyone at the party seems to be having the same conversation, I can’t help but adopt the other approach: that we really can shape the events of our own lives. Freedom exists. Genuine connections are possible. In and of itself, either approach is too extreme to be right, but something between them needs to be. I make paintings to figure out what that is.

Like thunderstorms and subway schedules, there’s not much I can do to control the way a half-gallon of wet paint falls onto a canvas. I can push and pull at it, but gravity is doing most of the work. What I do control, rather, are the conditions in which this process occurs: the paint’s color, its texture, the proportion and size of the canvas it falls on. By creating a context, the content creates itself. There are thousands of paintings that could happen, but only one that ever does. Everything is possible in the future, but only one thing exists in the present. Do we control that? Maybe.

* Actually, there are probably thousands of ways to look at this. My mind, however, tends to dwell on two of them.

What is the job of a painting?

Tall Blue, 2011. 58 x 18 in. Oil and Synthetic Polymer Resin on Belgian linen

What is the job of a painting? Does pigment on canvas serve a larger function in the way we look at and understand the world around us, or is it simply another form of gratuitous decoration? Evidently ideas are involved: the bookshelves tremble under the weight of so many artists statements, comparative essays, and all manner of postmodern pontification. Yet so much of this veritable body of literature feels insular and derivative: a game of musical chairs where concepts are changed and interchanged from one text to another, taken apart and reconstituted in such a way that though they take the form of originality, they remain a patchwork of recapitulation. Consider the Arty Bollocks Generator, something of a meme among art school types, with a single click it generates artist statements that are as convincing as they are sardonic. Like all successful satire, the Arty Bollocks Generator is funny because it is based in truth. What it appear to be saying is that much of the language surrounding art is interchangeable and therefore meaningless; that despite the grandiose verbiage involved, artwork itself does not carry enough conceptual specificity to mean or relate to anything in particular. The seemingly good-intentioned humor of the meme betrays what is actually a very serious and complex question: to what extent does art engage in conceptual and intellectual dialog? There are certainly meaningful concepts within art: abstraction, representation, color, the blurred line between the real and mediated, to name a few. But if these concepts are strictly internal, that is to say if they operate only behind the hermetic seal of the arts, then they are not meaningful ideas but industry jargon. The real question is, does art mean anything outside of art? Could art help us to understand a world where art does not exist?

The biggest problem we encounter in trying to answer a question like this is one of range and restriction. Art and language operate in different sorts of contexts with different sorts of boundaries, rules, and conditions. Consider a similar difference between language and math. Both are methods we use make sense of the world around us but both pick out different features of that world. Certainly we can use language to talk about math (and indeed math too can talk about language) but ultimately words cannot sufficiently capture the range, specificity, and function of numbers. Any verbal explanation of a complex mathematic proposition will eventually reach a point where the words begin to fall short. So too with art. When we try to put art into a philosophical or linguistic context, we invariably lose much of that we are trying to describe.

Like language and math, art is a means by which the world around us is made sensible. It lacks the precision of the other two approaches, but of course the world around us (at least from our vantage point) is not always precise. For artistic content to be meaningful it must correlate to reality/experience in a way that is significant and relevant outside of the artwork itself. This is to say it needs to provide a means by which we can understand our lives. Great art needs to do so in a way that does not overlap with other forms of expression (math, language, music, dance, regular visual phenomena, and so on). What this means is that after looking at an artwork we should have a decidedly new approach to something, and, often frustratingly, an approach that should evade our attempts at linguistic expression. Language and art are both tools we use to get at truth, but truth in and of itself is neither linguistic nor artistic. Though art allows us to get at truth, it restricts the range of all possible truth into a smaller range of artistically expressible truth. Language and math restrict (or frame) truth in their own ways as well. Applying language to art is a further restriction still, giving us the putative range of the linguistically expressible truths inside the set of artistically expressible truths. What the Art Bollocks Generator demonstrates then is not only how few linguistic concepts art can describe, but also the reflexive: how few artistic concepts language can describe. The job of a painting is to engage with truth, but in a way outside of other forms of expression.

Tall Blue (detail)

Amor Fati

Amor Fati, 2011. 64 x 42 in. Oil and Synthetic Polymer Resin on Canvas.

This is the first painting I've made in my new studio in Brooklyn. This fact in and of itself seems to bestow a certain significance onto the painting. But what?

The first painting in a new space establishes a frame or a context for subsequent paintings made in that space. Frames are important: they provide the necessary boundaries for content to exist. Kant reminds us that without certain basic frames, say time or space, experience itself cannot exist. Not all frames carry this epistemic significance, but no matter how trivial a frame is, it provides some vantage point into unframed immensity of the universe. One frame this painting makes possible is that of a point of comparison, both stylistic and temporal, for those which are yet to come.

Open Studio Poster

Open Studios In Long Island City

Chris Willcox, Untitled, 2010. Oil and Synthetic Resin on Canvas.

This weekend Reis Studios, in Long Island City, Queens, is hosting their yearly open studio event. From noon to six this Saturday and Sunday (May 21st and 22nd) you can visit the studios of the nearly 150 artists who work in the building, including myself. I've got ten paintings up for display about about sixty works on paper. You can find me in on the third floor in Studio 344. The building is down the block from MoMA PS1, near the E,M,G,F,7,N and Q subways lines (Google Map). I would love to see all of you there.

Sketching

Chris Wilcox. Sketch, 2011. Paint and Digital.

More and more I find myself using my laptop as a sketchbook. Ideas often begin as paintings, then become more thought out in photoshop, only to resurface as other paintings. Here, photo editing software isn't necessarily a means to an end as much as it is a means of thinking.