Painting as Document:
Reflections on Critical Practice
By looking to the painting as a document of class, my practice envelops the use of photographic imagery and materials as assisted readymades to inject specified information of an entangled characteristic. The materials that I acquire through various channels contain information; they hold the energy to become advocates for the production of knowledge. Materials arise from the ecology of entanglement when one decides to experience what is offered from this ecology. This experience is a form of criticality. One has to look through an operational lens to siphon through a color, a sound, an image, or a document. There is an overabundance of narrative to nearly any material and consumption of these narratives is a lens to an act of analysis that undoubtedly holds baggage. The audience is a curious and inspiring thing. It is impossible to consume an object without some level of biased formulations, making an act of analysis potentially clouded in comparison to the object’s intent. These biased leanings can’t possibly be uniquely formulated by the individual, as human learning is founded upon imitation and observation as infants. Perhaps, because of this strong analytical bias abundant within any social environment, let alone the colorful and rich cultures and societies worldwide, individualization is, properly speaking, impossible. Can we truly proclaim the individual self when multiple levels of our lives are entangled with others? Concerning myself with the entanglements of my personal experience compared to the larger social environment, I paint with materials as entry points into this entanglement, which in turn expands outwards back into the larger social environment. This is a centripetal and centrifugal force within the studio.
Administrator: 9473, 2020
Bedsheets, throw blanket, printed flannel, treated canvas, Romex, wire, work shirt, rag, treated cotton, acrylic paint.
126” x 73” x 2”
Administrator: 9147, 2020
Bedsheets, polar fleece, treated cotton, printed cotton, wood, poly fill, inkjet print, grommets, latex acrylic paint.
114” x 84” x 2”
By looking to the painting as a document of class, my practice envelops the use of photographic imagery and materials as assisted readymades to inject specified information of an entangled characteristic. The materials that I acquire through various channels contain information; they hold the energy to become advocates for the production of knowledge. Materials arise from the ecology of entanglement when one decides to experience what is offered from this ecology. This experience is a form of criticality. One has to look through an operational lens to siphon through a color, a sound, an image, or a document. There is an overabundance of narrative to nearly any material and consumption of these narratives is a lens to an act of analysis that undoubtedly holds baggage. The audience is a curious and inspiring thing. It is impossible to consume an object without some level of biased formulations, making an act of analysis potentially clouded in comparison to the object’s intent. These biased leanings can’t possibly be uniquely formulated by the individual, as human learning is founded upon imitation and observation as infants. Perhaps, because of this strong analytical bias abundant within any social environment, let alone the colorful and rich cultures and societies worldwide, individualization is, properly speaking, impossible. Can we truly proclaim the individual self when multiple levels of our lives are entangled with others? Concerning myself with the entanglements of my personal experience compared to the larger social environment, I paint with materials as entry points into this entanglement, which in turn expands outwards back into the larger social environment. This is a centripetal and centrifugal force within the studio.
Administrator: 9473, 2020
Bedsheets, throw blanket, printed flannel, treated canvas, Romex, wire, work shirt, rag, treated cotton, acrylic paint.
126” x 73” x 2”
Administrator: 9147, 2020
Bedsheets, polar fleece, treated cotton, printed cotton, wood, poly fill, inkjet print, grommets, latex acrylic paint.
114” x 84” x 2”
Administrator: 0296, 2020
Bedsheets, treated canvas, denim, polyester fleece, cotton, foam, grommet, wire, latex acrylic paint.
132” x114” x 5”
Administrator: 2589, 2020
Work shirts, bedsheet, cotton, dye, latex acrylic paint, grommets.
73” x 62” x 1”
Exploring materiality anchors my practice in the familiarity of my personal experience. I understand process itself is a material, and as materials are entangled with the larger social ecology, my process and practice are also entangled with the larger social ecology. Any material or object is rich with historical experience no matter whose body chooses to embody the working properties of that material. Rope, for example, has been made and used by cultures the world over for centuries and for many reasons. The consumption and meaning of rope are not only dependent on how it is used, but also who uses it and for what. This is the complex process and entanglement of material and body, and within this complexity simple individualization, a kind of appropriation of uniqueness, cannot occur. The body that chooses to practice with material will examine the material in process, and in turn, will develop an orchestra of information out of the entanglement of material and body. With this in mind, I prefer to see a painting as a document.
In my own conception of art, the notion of a painting, and the notion of the self, and the notion of the self making a painting exceeds the popular image of art as self-expression. Perhaps, if I even tried to create an expression, that expression would in fact be inadequate bordering on false due to the inherent complexities of my entanglement within the larger social ecology. Cause and effect cannot begin with an idea, and end with a painting. The idea, and the painting, are not empirically important for my practice. Perhaps what is most important is action and effect. Primary action is seemingly stimulated from the momentum of previous actions, those of which can go back as far as one cares to examine. The effect is maybe not a sum but another action as well. Though the effect can perhaps germinate knowledge that moves forward, a kind of ripple. Not forward as in linear, but, perhaps outward, in all directions.
The paintings that emerge from my practice are rich with a materiality that holds embedded information. This information is a documented entry point into life outside of the painting. It is showing us the importance of these things, materials, and objects, as they are entangled with one another. As the information is both interior and exterior, the materials are a working document, or the effect of action, which is an action that is liquid. A liquid movement that only a painting can register.
As my practice is concerned with process as entangled action, a large part of this process culminates in a painting form that is foundational to the attempts of rewriting context in material. I think of rewriting as a similar concept to that of the layered effects of rehabilitation in a socio-economic structuring. The most potent example of this for me in my personal experience is the State confusing the masses of the prison-industrial complex as a means for individualized rehabilitation, the idea of rehabilitation here to be understood in a biopolitical sense where within the terms of life and liberty an individual is incarcerated not as punishment per se, but as a means to restructure and train the life of the individual to become a valuable constituent member of the society of the State. These accused individuals and their histories are placed into a process which attempts to rewrite their person, their life, into a context palatable for the State to move forward with them. This attempt by the State fails as it does not recognize the inmate being entangled and fundamental to State practice on a larger scale. This can be seen most notably in the United States by the rate of recidivism. As with the complex entanglement of material and body, the complex entanglement of inmate and State allows no room for not only rewriting an individual, but also no room to produce an individual within the practice of rehabilitation.
My studio practice is a painting process that works with commercial paint as a coating material, fundamental in form as this material is produced to function as an applicable protective film in what is referred to as the coatings industry. This base ingredient is available to contractors and homeowners, a latex acrylic paint designed to coat and protect as a surface application. Here, I am most concerned with the paint as liquid solid material rather than a means of color or expression. All of these paint colors are designed and sold to the masses as ideal colors to use for architectural spaces. This color design rooted in capitalism is an important element in the combination of material entanglement. The paint material is applied in amounts far exceeding the manufacturer’s application rate. The paint no longer operates as a surface protection or ideal color, rather it works its way through and saturates the surface material, creating a skin of synthetic pigmentation, a skin opposing its commercial design. This oppositional skin is attempting to rewrite the context of the surface it is applied to by unsuccessfully saturating and overcoming said surface.
This original surface is one of textiles that most commonly exist as standardized forms and images found within the lower- and middle-class structures of White America. I’m concerned here with these class structures as operative forms, and how these forms are administered culturally. This administered structure seems to be so much a part of how socioeconomic systems function, that the fundamental effect of class systems is perhaps repressive tolerance. Those who tolerate this repression are the products of this structuring, a structuring that produces both repression and the waste of people’s lives. Within this painting process the synthetic structure of paint material administers itself as a new form by attempting a full saturation and fossilization of the textiles. The sewn seams of these textiles reject the attempted full saturation. Because of this, the process leaves hints of the original context, enhancing the realization of repression. This process mimics biopolitical structuring in values of order for the power over life such as within the idea of life and liberty. If order in this way exists as a scale of values, then classism is fundamental to this ordering.
I am concerning myself here with the lower and middle classes, not only through material, but also as a means to reminisce as a practitioner in these classes, a means to critically analyze the tolerant classes who are taxed with the by-product of social repression and waste. This taxation is a cost the working classes must provide in physical time, ultimately leading to an alienation in one’s life, the form of which is a dedication to one’s work and what it provides, rather than to one’s life and experiences. This dedication to work is tolerated as what work can provide is held with esteem in the broader social context. This taxation or cost is ultimately a repression of limited choice on how to live.
Czuj’s Studio at Yale University, 2021