Originality, Reproduction, and Separation of Opposites

In Originality of the Avant-Garde Rosalind Krauss dispels the myth of the modernist ‘originality’ associated with the figure of the grid. For Krauss, the grid has a pretence towards being the ‘origin of painting’, both as a pictorial ground zero and as an example of modernist artist’s revelatory ingenuity, but is in reality ‘a stereotype that is constantly being paradoxically rediscovered’, itself just a representation of the pictorial plane, ‘structurally, logically, axiomatically the grid can only be repeated’. She points out that as the concept of authenticity is praised, the other part of the originality/repetition doublet is repressed, but it is precisely that which is the real condition of the grid as a vehicle of modernist practice. She identifies the copy as ‘the underlying condition of the original’ and later goes on to praise the art located within the discourse of the copy like Sherrie Levine and Robert Rauschenberg, pointing out the importance of ‘deconstructing the […] notions of origin and originality’.

The piece has been published by the MIT Press alongside other essays by Krauss under the same title, with a reproduction of J.-A. Boiffard’s photograph for Georges Bataille’s ‘Le Gros Orteil’ on the cover. I have recently stumbled upon 7 copies of those in the library and was amazed by the odd colouring of the covers. Originally pink, they have faded into an acidic mint green in the areas exposed to sunlight, creating 7 unique (dare I say original) patterns on each copy. It only seemed fitting to reproduce them in painting. I am reproducing two copies, using the traditional medium of oil paint (on wooden board), trying to replicate them with the maximum amount of detail possible, but still retaining the texture of painting, clearly visible upon closer inspection.

Something that I have always paid a lot of attention to in my painting practice is the idea of painting as a copy, here I am exploring it through the relationship between concepts of copy and original – the work I’ve produced flickers between them in the chain of representations, mechanical, manual, and accidental, that it entails.

The work is also a (rather blunt, to be sure) kind of institutional critique - the well-regarded art theory book is turned into a wooden slab, a bad forgery, as if the original had gone missing in some mischievious act and had to be replaced ad-hoc to avoid trouble. To be completely honest, the paintings have come about as a crystallization of some of my own frustrations with the postmodern art education. It had been suggested to me that I should 'include more theory in my work'. And my slight backlash is certainly not one of quite wide-spread anti-intellectualism (which interestingly seems to go hand in hand with more and more non-sensical press releases). It's a protest against the widespread reification of theory, in the standard 'recipe' for undergraduate (but unfortunately not only undergraduate) art production - pick a concept from the recognized canon of 'critical theory' and continually produce banal reiterations of it, until they develop intio a so-called 'practice'. If a request can be made of someone to 'put more theory in their work' that means that theory is perceived as a separate, detached realm. Of course I am not protesting the actuality of that disconnected status - this is certainly the case. It may be symptomatic, but isn't necessarily the right way to approach theory, or a productive one in any case. I would argue that in fetishizing theory as some kind of separate realm of abstract existence, that can only be injected into the products of artistic production, one does the same thing as when one affirms 'pure action' of activism, devoid of any 'unnecessary theory' - one divides the means and ends. And as Adorno points out in Imaginative Excesses: 'Because means and ends are actually divided, the subjects of the breakthrough cannot be thought of as an unmediated unity of the two. No more, however, can the division be perpetuated in theory by the expectation that they might be either simply bearers of the end or else unmitigated means.'