Over the past decade James Hyde has pursued an analysis of the structural and linguistic properties of painting in an intensely "materialistic" manner. His project is an extended inquiry, relentless in its ingenuity, into the mechanics of the art -- how painting works, how it may yield significance. There is no doubt that what Hyde has been doing concerns the nature, and indeed the history, of painting, even if one might wonder (especially in a time of conveniently undialectical bourgeois materialism) whether or not his high-materialist production necessarily comprises the practice of a painter.

Agreed, whatever we consider "linguistic" here essentially concerns semiotic operations, especially of likening and differentiation, of which written language is but one manifestation, not usually the most lively. That language itself consists not of words as tags for things but of a system of triangulation between word, concept and thing, may have been understood earlier than we suppose, in the proto-modern development of the inductive "scientific" outlook: already in the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon writes, "words are the signs of notions." But what can the modern sense of language as a mechanics of signification, a working sign system in circuitry with concepts, mean for an artist who identifies himself as a painter but whose work, while indeed "abstract" in the sense of non-representational, is so materially concrete and object-ive as to be readily (mis)taken for sculptural construction? The point is not that that which is not painting might necessarily belong to "the other" art, in simplistic opposition, but just how so much bulk might manage to sail under the banner of painting. The painter Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has called a work by Hyde (TOSS, 1989) "an object [as] sign for a
James Hyde TOSS 1989
non-object." Hyde himself has said, "My works often involve materials and modes of making which are not traditionally of painting. What holds my work together, and I feel makes it painting, is the use of signs of painting, whether these are literalized (made real) or really painted." Still, it would be possible to carry on such experimentation from without, with its materials, procedures, resultant evidence never qualifying as play within the game; so it seems worth inquiring into Hyde's practice and its implications, including its possible historicity.

In terms of cultural history, there is a type of direct poetic delight in elemental materiality as a legacy of Reformation iconoclasm. The same Calvin who in his Institutes (1536; 1559) is unable to comprehend "what profit" images "can bring save only delectation," is excited to quasi-aesthetic delectation in the extreme by precious natural materials (as if even their value were a natural consequence of beauty): "What! hath he not made such a difference of colours for this end, that some may by more acceptable than another? What! hath he not given to gold, silver, ivory and marble, a special grace and beauty whereof they might be prized as more precious than other metals or stones? ...Hath he not made many things agreeable to us without any necessary use?" How different that is from the "spiritualistically materialistic" apostrophe of Boehme, the Protestant mystic, before the whole range of creation's materials: "the elements are counter-strokes [ein Gegenwurf, a counter-throwing] of Your wisdom, since Your spirit always plays with the counter-stroke before You, and all things praise You and rejoice and frolic in Your power."
Guilio Campagnola, Etching, An Astrologer with Dragon Making Measurements on a Disc Containing Numerals of the Sun, Moon, and Zodian Sign of Libra, 1569
Unmystically but detachedly, early modern science tended to play down its intimacy with the physical stuff of the world. Newton, who happens to have been interested in Boehme, was as proud of his new mathematical abstraction of science -- physics as "natural philosophy" -- from mundane, material things, as before him Renaissance artists had been of the intellectual distance of their enterprise from mere craft. Indeed, modern philosophy has seen fit to question the mathematical abstraction-idealization of nature from Galileo and Descartes to Newton and beyond. In "The Origin of Geometry" (1939) Husserl, while not mainly concerned with the historical "surrounding world of the first geometers," is nevertheless struck by the realization that in it "all things necessarily had to have a bodily character" and "that these pure bodies had spatio-temporal shapes and `material' [stoffliche] qualities (color, warmth, weight, hardness, etc.) related to them."

In later, nineteenth-century science, parallel with the emergence of modernism, the very literal elements of which all materials are constituted took their places as components of a linguistically continuous code of atomically quantified material qualities, in Mendeleev's "periodic table" (periodic in the sense of cyclically repeating). Mendeleev deserves the interest of modernists because the periodic table is essentially a grid of atomic quantities defining irreducible qualities, a grid, absolute if incompletely filled out, of "information" known and unknown (but implied as knowable), an algebraic matrix identifying by their inter-affiliated properties of molecular structure all fundamental materials. Mendeleev expected to be able to fill its gaps (as has occasionally come to pass) with as yet unknown elements, plotting in advance their inevitable properties by extrapolating from progressions in vertical "groups" and horizontal "series" to fill blanks in the data grid: thus he hypothesized "dvi-tellurium," specifying particular chemical properties for the hypothetical element. If by the time of his classic 1889 paper "The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements" he has to note that he no longer expects to be able to fill out the table evenly, the desire to do so still has its aesthetic aspect. Interestingly suggestive of the historyof modernist painting -- Impressionist empiricism codified, stylized, formalized in the Postimpressionism of the 1880s -- is the fact that here Mendeleev, recalling others who contributed to the formulation of the law as well as his own initial attempt to account for periodicity in 1869, sums up by saying, "The law of periodicity was thus a direct outcome of the stock of generalisations and established facts which had accumulated by the end of the decade 1860-1870: it is the embodiment of those data in a more or less systematic expression." (Afterward, in the time of Cubism, came Moseley's 1913 announced use of X-rays to establish a system of atomic numbers that was also expected to turn up missing elements.)

As Hyde is aware, Primo Levi's autobiographical The Periodic Table (1975), with its chapters named thematically by chemical elements, has encouraged me to extend speculations which he and I already shared concerning the great idealist-materialist "index" of pure materials. As a young man Levi realized (in "Iron"), "Mendeleev's Periodic Table ... was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!" Why so, he will recall: "Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy"; yet his materialism gains dialectical subtlety: "one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium...), the practically identical, ...all surrogates.... The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points..." Levi's account of making varnish by boiling linseed oil -- "an ancient art and therefore noble: its most remote ancestry is in Genesis 6:14, where it is told how, in conformity with a precise specification of the Almighty, Noah coated (probably with a brush) the Ark's interior and exterior with melted pitch" -- makes one think of traditional painting: "But it is also a subtly fraudulent art, like that which aims at concealing the substratum by conferring on it the color and appearance of what it is not: from this point of view it is related to cosmetics and adornment, which are equally ambiguous and almost equally ancient arts (Isaiah 3:16)." When, finally, under "Titanium," there occurs a topos of childhood wonder at a house-painter's practice, the new child, too, will have to learn by linguistic experience about matter and metaphor in painting.
VILLA OF MYSTERIES,
It is easy to forget that as a conventional format, painting on stretched canvas is recent even within the European tradition, in which vases, mosaic floors and walls (Roman to Byzantine), plaster mural surfaces (Roman "after" lost Greek, then Romanesque and again Renaissance "after" lost Roman), vellum pages, colored glass, wooden panels -- all have all supplied formats equally conventional.

Many of Hyde's works of the turn of the `80s consist of pairs of panels of substantial, and sharply contrasting, materials abutting almost electrolytically in diptych form (insofar as each half is "elemental," the brace might be considered "molecular"). Art-historically, these ultimately recall the twin-leaved ivory "consular diptychs" of late Roman art (IV-VI centuries) which, though unpainted reliefs, have essentially "optic" interest and concern the development of painting in Eastern as well as Western Europe as prototypes of paired icons and hinged altarpieces. While the twinned, book-pagelike wings of the ancient diptychs carry images -- official portraits -- these can be so nearly identical across the hinge that figurative specifics give way to subtle, as it were binocular, differentiation of panels in forcefully frontal conjunction, so that, as with Hyde's dual reliefs, one is only the more structurally alerted to whatever differences obtain within the comprehensive whole. In one case, that entirety embraces a panel of "true" classical fresco painting on plaster, equated with and opposed to a slab of steel different in every way except for seemingly more accidentally inflected nuances of surface; here one has to think about symmetry and reversibility, for unless the steel (itself a by no means crudely "natural" material) is invited into dialogue with the fresco on painting's terms, Hyde would risk taking his own refinement of fresco for granted as merely additional bulk of matter.
Diagram of a Church Iconostasis
Consider, too, that early Renaissance fresco painting saw the articulation of "cycle" formats in which panels in equivalent positions in different registers carry similar meaning. Hence, diagrammatically the periodic table itself could be likened to a mural system dividing the wall into image grids of horizontal ranks or rows with possible "periodic" cross relations, narrative or formal, between the vertical files or columns. Stimulated by Leonardo da Vinci's naturalistic criticism of what he called "stupid" discontinuities between the framed scenes of such gridded narratives (he thought that multiple horizons made the images resemble compartments holding merchandise in a shop), Gombrich observes that in an Early Christian mural a "pictograph" image of Noah "generates" a minimum of "fictitious space" and remarks, "Once the image has ... been reduced to a sign, Leonardo's problem of inconsistent spaces disappears by itself"; tellingly, before a drawing of the mural grid of Old Saint Peter's he takes no interest in the blank units, like missing elements in the periodic table, and proceeds to toast Giotto as "the narrative genius who knew how to transform the traditional pictograph into a living presence." Here Gombrich, with his usual evolutionary-naturalistic bias, ignores a classic study (published in Russian in 1939 and in English in 1947 and 1974) in which Michel Alpatov demonstrates up-and-down formal as well as narrative "parallelisms" between images of the childhood and the Passion of Christ in Giotto's Arena Chapel murals. Yet it is no more strange that it should have been a scholar of old Russian art who gained such "iconic" insight into Giotto's structural-symbolic periodicity than that all such image grids should have taken on interest contemporaneously with a proliferation of grid formats in the Minimal Art of the 1970s, of which Gombrich was no doubt unaware.
Piet Modrian, Composition with Gray and Light Brown 1918
Most of Hyde's earlier works, not just the diptychs, consist of more than one physical element, though the components may be placed far enough apart to oblige one to decide if they do relate as fully "relational" parts of wholes, or even if they remain, as it were, within one another's gravitational fields. Whether conventionally painted or of unconventional interest as to substance, or substance's "facture," the markedly non-contiguous yet actively co-present components implicate intervening contextual space. It is specifically wall space that is so claimed, by components that hang, lean or stand free in at-ease uprightness, as if in some accomodatingly elastic "picture plane." It turns out that structural affiliation, orthogonal or not, is more generally to the point than anything like a (uniform) "grid" -- as, too, in the work of Mondrian, that pure painter who painted hardly any completely regular grids and who also liked to make wall arrangements. That spaces installed with such otherwise thingly-looking works seem mentally bracing, has to be more than an effect of tasteful underhanging. One confronts the heavy on par with the light, the rigid together with the pliant, the solid along with the porous (examples of increasing subtlety along one possible axis); or that which is painted in the sense of color-surfaced with that which is distinctly unpainted yet of interest as innately colored, violently altered (e. g. charred), or otherwise linguistically marked.
James Hyde BOLT 1993
In Hyde's production of the current year (1993), BOLT, a large fresco panel that leans against the wall with an equally large pane of glass tipped outward from the bottom (supported by a steel stanchion), might even be said to make a witty point of the idea that, most properly, the "picture plane" is not the physical, usually canvas, surface of a painting, but a (virtual) plane, in modern painting often somewhat "in front" of the literal face; and related pieces employing frontal glass include the rather pseudo-formalistic REFRAIN, of glass, blue and white duct tape and painted steel bracket, and the small but heavy-duty RUB, in which, baled together roughly with yellow tape, a piece of chunky glass overlays a mirror and sits precariously on a steel shelf-bracket.

But the space in which all this artist's pieces really come into their own as painting, post-Cubist painting at that, is the mental space of the thinking spectator -- a notion whose latterday exposition is of interest here. On the poster for "The Fetish of Knowledge," an exhibition which Hyde organized for Real Art Ways, Hartford, in 1991, a text by the polymath Thomas Zummer reads, "There is a `virtual space' common to both reading and seeing: it is the space within which a text or artifact `takes place' as such. It is the fundamental ground of apprehension, where reading and recognition, texts and objects are constructed within registers and territorialities of language and interest, use, conventions, protocols and habits." Zummer is onto something generally important for modern literature as well as art, and helpful in the question of how the hardware, so to speak, of Hyde's own installations becomes, at work (in the works), a vitally "linguistic" and aesthetic matériel. Joseph Frank's analytic of textual "spatial form," announced in the 1945 essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" -- which celebrates Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) in revising Lessing's doctrine (Laocoön, 1766) of the literary as temporal versus the plastic as spatial -- has been described as "a measure of transgression, a measure of the particular author's attempt to overcome the inherent limits of his or her medium and to make language a function of the image and of spatial form, in effect, to make language approach the visual arts."

Significantly, "spatial form" does not connote architecture (it is not about literary architectonics in the classical sense), let alone sculpture, as one might have supposed. The irreducibly metaphorical term refers to mental space, the imaginative space in which room is made for the vivid engendering, by conceptual provocation, of mental images that are not really representational because they are not secondarily "of" anything (else), but firsthand each time they are detonated in consciousness by apt conjunction of normally disjunct terms. Here it cannot be overlooked that there is prominent in modern culture a definite "Imagist" literary tendency (with its own relations, surprisingly early on, to structuralist anthropology) in which a clash of concepts (or Baconian "notions") precipitates a perhaps quasi-pictorial but innately conceptual mental image. The "space" of "spatial form" may seem metaphoric in connoting three dimensions; it would be better to say that, like the space of painting, it could be considered the anything-but literally spatial site of metaphor's very occurrence.



Recent exhibitions of Hyde's work have actively constituted expositions of more or less systematic experiments in the mechanics painting, not merely "exhibitions" of a cultural producer's latest wares.
James Hyde RUB 1993
TIP and CALL at Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University 1993
Prominent, even awesome, are some huge and bulky -- though not literally hefty -- blocks of Styrofoam faced with monochrome fresco painting. Two such works were mounted one above the other (not unlike two elements, distinct but akin, in Mendeleev's table) in a bay of the Zilkha Gallery of Wesleyan University, at Middletown, Connecticut, in the spring of 1993: TIP, its face painted red, above CALL, from the end of the previous year, painted yellow. Styrofoam, of course, is hardly a natural element; one might even argue that frescoes on chunks of it partake of the peculiarly pragmatic artifice of stage properties --balsawood trees and such, here as prop (short for "property") in the sense of armature or painting support. Hyde's recourse to Styrofoam would be anti-Minimalist even if he didn't hack into the sides of his blocks with a blade, because it does not abide by the discrimination of "pure" volume as against space-occupying mass (not to mention the funky tinge of Styrofoam as such a cheap, even "cheesy," material for fine art). But all the more against something so straightforwardly artificial that we cannot decide of what it might be the synthetic version, the archaizing fresco projects a kind of luminous opacity, like something revealed as glowingly fundamental after all the old machinery of illusion has been hauled way. A small, practically diminutive, fresco painting on two little chunks of Styrofoam inconspicuously but firmly joined, BOTH, associates the Styrofoam pieces with Hyde's earlier diptychs by a subtler near-similarity.
James Hyde CIRCUIT 1993
Another category of current work consists of shallow, rectangular glass boxes with ordinary water vapor inside, leaning against the wall. More like empty bell jars (or Duchamp's ampule of Air de Paris, 1919), vessels simply preserving some evanescent specimen content as-is, than anything like vacuum chambers, these are simple voids -- "brainy" things, to be sure, though not physically self-abnegating like works of Conceptual Art (i. e. sculptures). VIEW and CIRCUIT both consist of three basic rectangular-prismatic boxes of the same size containing only some stray airy moisture; they offer no substantial encasing of H20, courting instability of physical state, by comparison with Hans Haacke's famous sculpture Condensation Cube, of 1965.
James Hyde RELAY 1993
Hans Haacke CONDENSATION CUBE 1965
The quaint pre-modern title of PICTURE, consisting of two units, points up an old-fashioned notion of painted image that can even evoke the aqueous and vaporous qualities of watercolor painting, in the "empty" boxes especially. RELAY is one of several single-box pieces, medium-sized, with its inside bottom smeared, Richter-like, with gorgeously painterly oil paints mixed with axle grease, never to dry. Duchamp's famous wisecrack ending the talk "Apropos of `Readymades'" (1961), "Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are `readymades aided' and also works of assemblage," has perhaps never found such a literalistic counterpart (or negation?) as these ever wet-look works of oleo-bravura handwork. Differently, the three-element piece VIEW, a set of smaller boxes, each the same in size but leaning in turn lower against the one behind it, might evoke the Minimalist incremental sequence of, for example, Smithson's white-painted steel Leaning Strata (1968); yet, especially with a thin layer of concrete troweled onto the back of the smallest and frontmost box, what confronts one might as well be a literalization of the three conventional zones of old-time pictorial space, "foreground, middle ground, background," as emptied of specific pictorial contents as, perhaps, some three-dimensional form of diagram.

Certainly with all the glass boxes one can think of Duchamp's "glass" paintings, whose absurd perspectivalism, showing up the defunct academicized "window" notion of Renaissance perspective, may itself entail a curiously pre-Renaissance aspect of "stained glass" painting even if (forgivably) unremarked as such. Duchamp's "glasses" and related pieces call witty attention to the pictorial mechanics of conventional representational painting, especially its most disposably conventional conventions. The glass-box pieces do recall Duchamp, but perhaps also, and wryly, the doctrinal "shallow, late Cubist space" of official modernism, and maybe even (why not?) the old, one-piece plastic "box" frames fashionable until the first oil crisis (maybe even the "shadow boxes" of quasi-artistic display, popular from the 1950s?). Nevertheless, Hyde's boxes manage to look analytically cool and not sarcastic.
Marcel Duchamp LAUNDRESS' APRONS 1959
Some recent pieces are principally of cloth and -- to resort, for once, to a haberdashery term other than "ready-made" -- more or less "unconstructed." SPELL, of plastic and knit polyester, silver and red, and mounted like a tarpaulin all folded up and hung by (blue) tabs from the wall, looks like a readymade (compare Duchamp's Underwood typewriter cover entitled Traveller's Folding Item, of 1917), but is really a "custom" work. Relatedly, BET has canvas "stretched," raw side out,
James Hyde SPELL 1993
over a horizontal steel armature, with a seam joining to it a "framing" skirt of red rayon. More ambiguous, for the type, is SERVICE, standing about the size of a coat rack, its strips of various fabrics stitched into stripes (blue, brown, yellow)
James Hyde BET 1993
and "stretched" like a painting as (post-Cubist "flatbed"?) tabletop (and must we invoke Duchamp's idea for reverse readymade, using a Rembrandt as an ironing board?), with steel rack painted yellow in chrome oxide primer (the only literal paint-ing to this "painting"). Hyde is interested in testing a limit of "painting as décor," but like the other cloth works this piece can also be read as a reflection of the critical rhetoric of painting's "support." In the materialist art theory of Gottfried Semper, in the later nineteenth century, the textile seam was a deeply fundamental structure; but this sort of thing has by now something of a marginal tradition just within the pale of painting, with other productions of the ilk from Buren to Holt Quentel.
James Hyde KEEP 1993
But Hyde has also been concentrating lately on formats that, emphatically material matériel notwithstanding, make a point of more closely approximating the condition of traditional painting. KEEP is a beautifully intuited constellation of overlapping paper rectangles, pre-painted, cut and nailed onto board using two different sorts of finishing nails (not driven home, as if fixed in tentativeness), with the papers left flapping: one is reminded of early Reinhardt compositions as well as of the strange flexibility-inflexibility of those impressive old Andean (?) feathered ritual mantles -- at once textile-like and painting-like, flexible "with" the "grain" and inflexible across it. SIFT, not so unconventional in its white fresco and fresco plaster on board, is also more "internally" equivocal than most of Hyde's works, with a "linguistic" of painting still articulated as a play of material properties, but by the painting out of what is already materially white by troweling white fresco plaster over, as well as under, white fresco (not unlike a "self-effacing" use of white on white in recent paintings by Guy Corriero).

One thing should be certain: that Hyde does not paint conventional "oil paintings" by no means disqualifies his project as being "of" painting, or from being a contribution to painting. At the least, his intimate workmanly enthusiasm for the materials and technique of fresco, in which he has even instructed other abstract painters, connects him with Western painting's most orthodox practice even if fresco is for him only one of an open range of practicable painting media. Consider the legendary lamentation of fresco relayed by Pacheco in 1649: "I have been told by men who knew Michelangelo well that this blessed master wept seeing that the tempera manner was dropped and that painting in oil was
Michelangelo TEMPTATION, Sistine Chapel
embraced by all; he said, `Indeed, painting is over and finished.' I would venture to say that had painting in oil not been introduced, perhaps there would have been fewer bad painters." That, however, was the position of a man who preferred to identify himself as a sculptor; and to follow Pacheco any further is to come up against a famous paragone in which Michelangelo favors fresco as (sculpturesque) painting: "In my view, the cause of this just sentiment was that the worthy and valiant manner of painting and drawing with resolve declined with the ease of removing and reapplying paint by the oil method. Painting in tempera is like sculpture in stone, which does not permit corrections if you err."

Usually painters are no more concerned with the physical-chemical properties of their materials than are, say, writers with computer programming; not that there aren't curious exceptions: Polke's chemical paintings, Warhol's urinary-patina paintings. On the other hand, Hyde's works are quite unlike the Minimalist sculptures of Carl Andre, in which industrial metal plates, often of two different metals in alternation, abut in a neutral grid on the floor, and also unlike all those Conceptualist propositions in which differently-sized samples of materials were equated in respect to mass or weight. Hyde has sometimes seemed to be making things too material(istical)ly thingly to qualify as painting, as though he were too much of a Tatlin and not enough of a Malevich. No doubt historical precedent can only carry so far. Doesn't even a work as ostensibly "materialist" and uncolorful as SIFT still vitally partake of that "subtly fraudulent art ... which aims at concealing the substratum by conferring on it the color and appearance of what it is not" (Levi)?
James Hyde Installation View of SIFT and VIEW 1993
Perhaps we can say that what Hyde is now (still) engaging with the commitment of a zealous adept -- oblivious to, when not annoyed by, a "reification of genres" that can only be enforced by the antithesis painting / sculpture -- is painting in its special materiality. Otherwise, his very concrete-material production seems to dare imply, why bother. Since Hyde has not seemed to be trying to "make paintings" in the simplistic materialist sense of many artists of the 1970s into the `80s, it might be better to say that he has been seeking to make painting, to (re)constitute it out of its elements and mechanics. 1994
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