New Painting

At the end of my previous post, I mentioned that I would like to discuss a little bit in detail the artistic process of Wade Guyton, one of the six contemporary artists who were a part of the Oranges and Sardines exhibition at the Hammer Museum. To be honest, I had never seen any of Guyton’s works (even through reproductions) previous to seeing one of his pieces in the exhibition, although I had heard about his unique artistic practice. Thus, I will admit that I am no Wade Guyton expert. However, I think that I know enough to discuss his artistic process in relation to the main issues raised in this blog.

To reiterate from the end of the previous post, Wade Guyton makes paintings. Yet, he doesn’t use paints. Instead, he creates his works by jamming linen, canvas, and other material through commercial inkjet printers. Specifically, his works explore aspects of mechanical reproduction and error by using these inkjet printers to make abstractions, as the printers create various drips, smears, and skips on the linen as they are pushed to their physical limits, causing them to literally break in some instances. The sources of the imagery that are printed onto the linen, of course, are digital—a mixture of scanned drawings and printed material are abstracted and made into single images as the printers struggle to print the imagery onto the material that are not meant to be running through them.

Wade Guyton, Untitlied, 2005, inkjet on linen, 65 X 38 in

In the Oranges and Sardines exhibition pamphlet, Guyton says about his artistic process: “I make paintings, but I don’t think of myself as a painter…. It came from being interested in everything else in a way—sculpture, conceptual art, photography, and then drawing. In the beginning, when I started making art, all the artists I was interested in were involved with the manipulation of language or the malleability of the categories of art. There was a freedom in this way of thinking. There was a space where objects could be speculative.” Here Guyton talks about the “malleability of the categories of art.” It is of notable significance that, particularly over the last few decades, the categories of art have become much less distinct and clear-cut. It is arguable that art as a whole as grown into an experimental genre of sorts, with many of the subgenres overlapping more and more over time. Undeniably the advent of new digital technologies, among other developments, has had a notable impact on this.

People who are not all too familiar with the contemporary art world (and perhaps even some of those who are) would probably hesitate to consider Wade Guyton’s works as “paintings.” After all, even the dictionary defines painting as a “graphic art consisting of an artistic composition made by applying paints to a surface”—and everybody is inclined to believe the dictionary. However, we must acknowledge that in the past, definitions and parameters pertaining to an assortment of practices have changed in accordance to new developments. For instance, the dictionary defines the classic definition of photography as “the art or process of producing images of objects on photosensitive surfaces”—and similar definitions come up as the first-listed definition for photography in various dictionaries. Yet how many people would actually deny that the process of capturing images through a digital camera and printing them through an inkjet printer qualifies as photography? In digital photography, neither film nor photosensitive papers are used, yet it is universally accepted as photography. Essentially, with paintings such as those of Wade Guyton, things are no different. We must simply realize that new technologies have brought with them new methods of painting, and we must accept them for what they are, whether we like them or not. And in this sense, new technologies have certainly opened up the doors for much more exploration and experimentation within the fine and/or traditional arts, proving that such media are still extremely relevant in today’s culture.