ART PRESENCE -- April, May, June 2001 if this should be, i say if this should be – E.E. Cummings What I behold is doubtless not so much a painting as a painting of a painting, a sign of painting. Not so much a painting, then, presenting itself, as the representation, the enacting of painting. But a sign not only refers to something, it is also in itself a thing. In other words, what I am looking at is a thing and a sign of what wants not to be a thing, the pictorial screen – here a plastic entity, proud of its three dimensions, and which refers back to painting. What I am looking at is a work by James Hyde. Indeed, Hyde's work, as it has developed during the nineties, involves a deliberately do-it-yourself kind of experimentation, free of any aesthetic constraint, with painting's different ways of signifying; it involves issuing various signs of painting in various objectal contexts. In this, although in a category all his own, he is utterly a man of his time, one of at once post-Duchampian post-Warholian abstraction, instilled with the ever so tiny distance separating the thing from the sign of the thing, language from meta-language – an abstraction covering a vast, complex territory with landmark names as different as, to mention just a very few artists, Gerhard Richter, Olivier Mosset, Jonathan Lasker, John M Armleder, Ross Bleckner, Bernard Frize , Gerwald Rockenschaub, Peter Halley or Christopher Wool. In view of their formal introduction, a kind of proliferation of the pictorial effect, unsurprisingly Hyde's meta-paintings have taken on a wide variety of styles. Thus, among his numerous other plastic propositions, alla fresca paintings on blocks of expanded polystyrene, now of imposing dimensions, now broken up into tiny fragments; glass boxes, either empty or containing pictorial deposits, or even waste; painted handle-shaped artifacts in wood and cement; sets of painted leaves nailed to the wall ; pieces of cast glass on shelves, clumsily wrapped in sticky tape; chromatic compositions on objects that look like items of furniture; sometimes gigantic pillows, covered in colors; and so on and so forth. And as painting, at its different ages, has been embodied in numerous incarnations, through a multitude of styles, the signs used to refer to it are of necessity beings charged with history. Whether intentionally, or not, those delivered by Hyde's work indeed offer a generous range of historical references – Minimalism (that of someone like Donald Judd, notably), Abstract Expressionism, Geometric Abstraction, the Baroque constructions of Frank Stella, some aspects of Imi Knoebel's art, Supports/Surfaces (for the French eye), but no less the frescoes of the Trecento or Duchamp ... But what is specific to Hyde's work is not just this broad range of plastic solutions (which sees painting in a way that is reminiscent of the seminal gesture of Robert Rauschenberg or the strictly contemporary approach of Jessica Stockholder, capable of selecting any medium) nor this stylistic multi-directionality (whereby painting recalls a number of its different periods, both past and recent), it is first and foremost the tension that is built up between the work as a sign and the work as a thing. In other words, Hyde's art is concerned, not so much with producing the signs of painting rather than actual paintings, as with testing the capacity of certain things to represent painting, or more accurately, the capacity of such representation to be conveyed by this object or that device. What is the threshold, what are the thresholds beyond which the thing overshadows the sign, beyond which this thing that is the sign conjures away the thing to which the sign refers? More concretely, one piece (Divided Chain, 1996) raises the question thus: should one paint one, two, three or more links of a chain in one, two, three or more colors, for it to appear, when hung on the wall, as a credible support for a painting? Let us now take a closer look at how this tension, this testing, is made to work in one piece, Long Barrier (1999) . Given, therefore, one eponymous barrier. Long (3.6 m), low (45.5 cm) and relatively deep (75 cm), this metal barrier, standing on three legs on the floor, is arranged at the foot of a wall to which its two side sections are fastened, a wall that it appears intended to sanctuarize. Such a purpose is, however, extremely surprising inasmuch as the wall in question is bare. No precious picture has been hung on it such as might require distancing in this way, or need this security precaution. But while there is no painting, no picture, on the wall whose approach is thus protected, the artist has covered the barrier's steel with yellow paint decorated with a delicate and derisory black line underscored by the green of the lower section of the horizontal parts. In other words, a barrier, the subject of a discreet but visible pictorial investment, is being used as a security device for the absence of a painting. Before looking at how we are to understand such a piece, it may be worth going through Hyde's œuvre to see whether this barrier is a hapax or whether on the contrary, the artist has not already had recourse to this artifact, and if so in what circumstances. As it happens, the barrier turns up in the corpus on a number of occasions prior to the Long Barrier. These early occurrences, in Indemnity (1990) and Suit (1991), show it in a very different situation from the one it was subsequently to occupy. With Indemnity, the barrier is fixed high up on a wall, and it has one leg missing. Also, it acts as a support to a large copper plate between it and the wall; and there is a glass window resting on the outer edge of its right-hand side section. Whilst its material definition is incomplete and it serves more as a rest than as a protection, here the barrier is in its proper position. Not so with Suit, where what seems to be a piece of barrier is placed on the floor, leaning against the wall in a completely heterodox fashion, making it more of a threat than a security for the large panel painted alla fresca in front of which it stands. With Change (1992), things return closer to normal, as a half-barrier, placed on the ground in the correct way required to fulfill its purpose, protects (half protects) a large greenish monochrome fresco on a rectangular panel. This half-barrier is painted light blue. These three occurrences thus constitute a violation either of the physical integrity of the barrier (Indemnity, Change), or of its function (Indemnity, Suit). Furthermore, the barrier is used in conjunction with one or two other elements. In short, the barrier, more mimed as to its appearance than serving any effective purpose, plays a plastic rather than a protective role for the picture, pictorial or para-pictorial element which is clearly the center of gravity of the piece. It will be remembered how in 1992, Gerwald Rockenschaub exhibited at the Galerie Gilbert Brownstone (Paris) a piece in which a metal barrier painted white was placed right up against a wall turned into a vast green monochrome. Like Indemnity, Suit or Change, the Rockenschaub piece gave the barrier no effective role as a protection, rather playing on the ambiguous status of that artifact and hence on the relationship between it and the mural monochrome: which of the two was to be seen as dominating the other? With Special Barrier (1996), as with Long Barrier, the matter is presented in an entirely new light, as the barrier is shown in its proper form – complete and in a position for which it was designed – and, most of all, it is the sole element of the work. Likewise, Rockenschaub's œuvre offers other occurrences where one or more fully operational red cotton security ropes mark off a place for an objet d'art, whether pictorial or sculptural, that are in fact not there . Oddly enough, however, the chronology of these different pieces in Rockenschaub's work appear to be the reverse of what we find with Hyde, since the defunctionalization of the artifact here is a subsequent development. Yet, the displacement leading from Indemnity or Suit to Special Barrier or Long Barrier is a significant one. It is the one that takes us from the deliberate misappropriation of an object, from its plastic manipulation, designed to test the capacity of another object in the vicinity to continue to act like a painting, to a more singular situation where Hyde's artistry doubtless achieves one of his more assured successes. First of all I am struck at the delightfully amusing paradox involved in mobilizing an item of protective apparatus when there is nothing to protect. Hyde just loves this kind of tension. Thus the handle shape of some of his mural pieces speaks to the hand while the pictorial composition for which they are the support appeals to the eye. But this initial paradox soon makes way for a second, no less effective paradox. Certainly, the wall is bare. And yet it carries a powerful sign of painting. The barrier thus placed against the wall conjures up a virtual painting. It reveals as a sign of painting, as meta-painting, an absence of painting. Is not indeed a painting present as absent the ideal meta-painting? Of course, an alternative hypothesis might be put forward, whereby the paint on the building wall is the subject of the sanctuarization performed by the barrier. True, the history of the avant-garde has accustomed the contemporary eye to view painted walls of buildings as if they were monochromes. However, inasmuch as the barrier demarcates only one part of the wall surface it relates to and not the entire surface, it seems difficult to subscribe fully to this hypothesis. Which is why one prefers to take the view that Hyde's barrier protects a vacancy rather than the wall coating. This being so, we may explore further in two directions. Thus, we may see this as a piece of stage management manifesting the power of the museum administration, if not mediation, machinery. The peri-work (frame, base, lighting, display case, protective barrier, etc.) is what makes the work and, as a consequence, the peri-work may be the work itself. This in fact is something one often finds with Hyde : an element with an obvious peri-operal function is in its own right one of the components of the work. The shelf, for instance. The system for hanging the painting (or whatever is used instead) on the wall can, in what is basically very Brancusian fashion, be an integral part of the work, and although quite visible, without departing from its peri-operal role. This is what we get with a piece like Else (1994), which shows a glass box placed on a small black bracket screwed onto the wall. But the shelf can also make itself more spectacular than is required by its mere supporting role. First of all by its size, as with Rub (1993) where a small sheet of cast glass clumsily wrapped in yellow sticky tape rests on a bracket painted black whose vertical section is out of proportion with its horizontal section; the amusing veiled reference to certain paintings by Robert Ryman, like Resource (1984) or Accord (1985), displaying overexposed if not overdimensioned fasteners, is of course patent. The support can also be made to stand out by its color, as in Breach (1994), where a small sheet of glass with a piece of pink adhesive ribbon and a trace of purple paint is set on a bracket that is only a little smaller than the plate itself, and most of all, being red, stands out as the major element of the pictorial composition presented before the viewer's eye. Lastly, the shelf can come in for a plastic treatment that almost brings into question its bearing function. Thus, in True (1993), a small sheet of cast glass seems to manage only just to stand on a salient angle corner iron, painted in white and red and roughly folded in two. Another equally successful piece of similar type is Refrain (1993): a reddish re-entrant angle corner iron on which is placed a small sheet of cast glass, its central section wrapped in strips of white and blue adhesive ribbon, has its left side given a nasty twist that appears to threaten the stability of the upper element. However, it may be further noted that Hyde, while producing a painting where there is none, has also painted the barrier itself . Now, in a third paradox, the painting that is missing on the wall is more present as a painting than the one actually painted – and artistically too – on the barrier. The painting is therefore not a thing, not the epiphany of some material quality, but an effect of meaning. This tension between the one painting, spectacularly missing and yet all so present, on the wall, and the other painting, objectively present, and yet ever so absent, on the barrier, is assuredly the mainspring of such a work. The pictorial investment of transitional objects (i.e. objects whose function is to ensure the transition between non-artistic reality and an element with full artistic status) is in fact a favorite strategy of Hyde's. It is the one used in a piece like Pool (2000), comprising a parallelepipedal dust cover in transparent plastic, in a word, a container containing nothing, apart from its cloth edges bearing a colored composition. We may view this tension between the pictorial material and the sign of painting as being a further step towards this disassociation of the sign and the thing that characterizes Hyde's art. With those veritable visual anachronisms offered by pieces like the frescoes on extra-large blocks of expanded polystyrene, there is a tension between the perfectly two-dimensional sign of painting, such as alla fresca is, and the resolutely sculptural relief of the support, in a word between the flatness of the signified and the volume of the signifier. With Long Barrier, the terms of the polarization taking place are, on the one hand, a sign of painting that no longer even needs any pictorial material in order to occur and, on the other, an actual painting that is not perceived as such, for being deposited on the very object through which the sign of painting without painting contrives to come about. In the one case, it is a matter of asserting that a painting can exist as such, even with a sculpture as its support. In the other, the relativistic notion to be conveyed is that a painting cannot exist as such with a utensil as its support if a pure sign of painting, with no recourse to pictorial material, is active in the vicinity. In short, the pictorial effect can proliferate, it can adapt to any type of support and even to the absence of painting. However, it is not impossible to take a different view of this barrier in front of a wall occupied by no picture. Is this not indeed a kind of allegory of a disappearance, of a death of painting? Certainly, the direction actually taken by Hyde's work does not logically lead us to such an interpretation inasmuch as the course it appears to take is to assert all-out pictoriality, a capacity for infinite expansion of painting rather than an end to, a passing of, that painting. And yet, glancing at a piece like Number (1996), a large glass box (200 x 60 x 25 cm) propped up against the wall in the great tradition of the prop pieces of Richard Serra or John McCracken, the contents of which, a parodical quintessence of one branch of Abstract Expressionism, is made of pieces of paper and plastic coated in paint, one cannot help feeling there is a necrophilous dimension to it . Indeed, the piece has a parallelepipedal structure, measurements and contents all of which evoke a coffin containing the corpse of painting already in an advanced stage of decomposition. And, once the process of decomposition has reached completion, once therefore the tomb is empty, there is nothing left but to decorate it by painting it – the colors on the barrier. On this point, moreover, such pieces might be linked with the work of an artist of the same generation as Hyde, Steven Parrino. Parrino's "monochrome crashes", crumpled canvases on frames or canvases rolled up in a ball on the floor, belong to this pictorial age for which the monochrome is a point of departure, i.e. an age whose threshold is an end, a death, a corpse. By doing violence to this monochrome which, for one kind of history, signals the end of painting, Parrino's art is a necrophilous enterprise. But, in the vast exploration of the possible signs of painting as undertaken by Hyde, the dead body is perhaps precisely nothing if not a sign. Is the cadaverous strangeness not, at bottom, that of a body that has become the image of itself? Is it not in the last analysis – by some semiological extravagance – that which sees a thing turned in an instant into the sign of itself, into the sign of what it was prior to becoming a sign? To put it another way, Hyde certainly owed it to himself, at some stage of his enterprise, to encounter the cadaverous image. Did he likewise owe it to himself to encounter the void, the radical absence of the objet d'art where the viewer's gaze is drawn to look for it? Probably, inasmuch as nothingness is one of the possibilities open in the universal expansion of the pictorial. However, this possibility is not quite the same as the others. With it, it is as if Hyde's art has crossed over to the other side of the barrier: the work is no longer what is to be looked at, but the place from where to look at what it is not and which, in a singular relationship of pure negativity, can be nothing else than its own absence. What I see from this side of the barrier is no longer the positivity of a work, but neither is it the positivity of a substitute for the work. What I see is the pure defection of the work. The art of the last ten years has provided a few fine opportunities for such a situation to emerge. We have already mentioned certain of Rockenschaub's propositions. We must also of course mention Elisabeth Ballet's fences and among them, those of Delta (1996) or Wedge (1996). Certainly, Hyde was probably not the most likely candidate to produce such a turn of events. Nevertheless, it is exemplary that this pandemic of pictorial effect, liable to hit any being here below, should, in one of the moments of the game Hyde has made of it, come across the temptation of operal vacancy. But it remains no more than a temptation, and a fleeting one at that. As we have seen, Hyde's barrier can very well be understood differently, as the assertion of painting's ability to produce its effect even in its absence. All the same... And since Hyde's art is one of those that best teach us cheerfully to jump over barriers be they historical, stylistic or generic, why not, with reference to him, jump over the barrier of univocality? go to top (c) 2001 design by www.kyung.com