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A Painter of Post–Modern Life
Published inLeave Yourself Behind. Paintings and Special Projects 1967–2005.exh. cat. (Wichita, Kansas: Ulrich Museum of Art), 2005, pp 66–75.
John Yau
David Reed began showing his abstract paintings regularly in New York in 1975. Born a decade after Frank Stella (b.1936) and Brice Marden (b. 1938), he started defining the vocabulary of his abstract paintings in the wake of three epochal shifts, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism. The pressures that he and others of his generation of latecomers faced, and which emerging generation of abstract artists still faces, includes the belief that abstract painting is dead. The argument went something like this: The history of abstract art is marked by an unquenchable thirst for its own death. And, given the revelations of World War II, painting, particularly abstraction, is no longer capable of being relevant to contemporary society. In this hostile atmosphere, where many regarded exhaustion as an insurmountable barrier, Reed and others of his generation had few options. They could become epigones working within an approved of style, such as Post–Painterly abstraction. They could accept that painting was dead and try to make work that cannily reiterated this reading. They could give up painting altogether and work in another medium. They could revive and refine a historical style. They could paint as if Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock had sidetracked modernism, and thus taken no cues from them or others associated with geometric abstraction or Abstract Expressionism. Or they could make what I regard as the most challenging choice, which is to re–read the canonical history of abstraction through the decisions they made in and about their work. That Reed chose the last possibility is one of the central accomplishments of his inimitable work; and it is his reading of postwar abstraction, in both his statements and his work that is the subject of my essay.
Selected from over three decades (1967-2004), the paintings in this exhibition of David Reed can be divided into two periods, each of which can be further broken down distinct stages. These stages are largely defined by the series of works that preoccupied him. The first period begins in the mid 60s, when Reed makes his first trip to New Mexico and Arizona to paint the panoramic landscape. It culminates in 1979, around the time he moves away from the Brushstroke paintings that had preoccupied him during the latter half of the 70s. Thus, the first period includes Reed’s initial interest in the panoramic view, his use of different colored geometric forms and shapes to structure the field, and his articulation of the brushstroke as an infinitely reproducible tactile thing, action, and image. Also, it is in this first period that Reed begins juxtaposing unlikely colors. These concerns clue us into the fact that from the outset he was in opposition to the dominant critical narratives, their emphasis on timelessness and the obsolescence of the hand. By contrast, Reed wanted to find a way to put the hand back into painting. That he wanted to do so without conveying nostalgia is crucial to understanding the trajectory his work has taken.
In the second period, which starts in the early 1980s, Reed expands the vocabulary he developed in the 60s and 70s by incorporating aspects of Baroque art, Pop art, installation art, saturated light, film, photography, rapid shifts of light and color, and the corporeal and spectral. More importantly, he converts the paint plane from a solid two–dimensional surface to a transparent, film–like space, simultaneously vast and compressed. In making this formally innovative shift, he is able to transform his sources into an expanding, flexible lexicon that has served him well for more than twenty years. Thus, what this selection of paintings reveals is that before they first gained attention, Reed had pretty much defined for himself a set of preoccupations. Despite the many changes that have transpired in his work over the past three decades, his early and recent paintings are all of a piece. This is because the cornerstone of his complex, highly allusive visual lexicon consists of two elements that he focused on in the first decade of his career, the sweeping, panoramic view and a brushstroke that is stylized and repeatable.
One can read Reed’s oeuvre as both a singular accomplishment and as an ever deepening critique of the canonized accounts regarding Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism. Here, I want to emphasize that his approach is very different than making a critique of art that is in keeping with an established postmodern narrative such as the “death of originality.” While decidedly postmodern, Reed’s work does not neatly fit into any of the programmatic narratives that have dominated much of the critical discourse of the past three decades. At the same time, I do not want to appear to be suggesting that his work functions solely as a critique of modernist and postmodern positions because it does far more than that. But to ignore its alternative position is to disregard this artist’s consciously critical relationship to the widely accepted portrayals of postwar art history. Thus, for the purposes of this essay, I want to briefly touch upon Reed’s remarks about the received readings of postwar art. My reasoning is simple: I see his comments as amounting to a highly informed philosophical view regarding the problems that an abstract artist must address, as well as a key to his own paintings.
In an interview with Stephen Ellis, the artist stated: “I don’t want to be the last painter, and I don’t want to be the first. I want to be part of a continuum. The image I have in mind is of a conversation with artists of the past. We agree to disagree, but carry on a dialogue.”1
In refusing to embrace both the critical paradigms and accepted painting models (monochrome, surrogate paintings, and copies of existing works, for example) based on endings, Reed challenges the narratives that proclaim the death of painting and the author. Rather than accommodating himself to these narratives by producing a painting that can be equated with timelessness, such as one finds in monochromatic painting, or the death of timelessness, such as one finds in a copy of a well–known abstract painting, the artist proposes an alternative: “I want to put back time back into abstract painting so that you have to go through a decoding process in order to understand what the painting is about.”2
In using the word “decoding,” Reed aligns himself with those whose works are often characterized as “hermetic,” Jasper Johns and Brice Marden, for example. Reed’s work needs to be deciphered is because it isn’t aligned with a critical narrative. As with Johns and Marden, there isn’t a pre–established key that can be used to unlock the meaning of the work. Rather, at the core of Reed�s “hermetic” art is a concern with time, not as a linear construction, but as a fractured, constantly mutating passage that has to be sorted through and deciphered. Elsewhere in his conversation with Ellis, he stated, “this desire for timelessness seems nostalgic.”3
In proposing a narrative of continuity, Reed rejects an art history predicated on the model of progress, and the belief that Jackson Pollock’s poured abstractions are the apotheosis of painting. He, in effect, refuses to seek sanctuary in someone else’s story. In addition, his belief in time goes against the Minimalist credo of timelessness, as exemplified by Frank Stella’s oft–quoted assertion, “what you see is what you see.” Finally, he underscores his desire to not be nostalgic, to not attach his work to a previous way of painting, which more often than not is an institutionally approved of style or process.
Although Reed never comes right and says so, his statements underscore his belief that neither Abstract Expressionism nor Minimalism marks the zenith of abstract painting. Rather, they are part of a continuum that includes Jackson Pollock’s historic breakthrough. For Reed, the key question is: How does one use Pollock’s breakthroughs without becoming derivative? How do you make the historical fresh? As I have tried to indicate, the continuum that Reed envisions is very different than the ones put forth by various modernist and postmodernist theorists, ranging from Clement Greenberg to Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yves–Alain Bois, and Hal Foster. Thus, in my discussion of his paintings, I feel it is necessary to briefly touch upon the philosophical positions taken by two artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. For it is Reinhardt and Newman who helped initiate two distinct narratives regarding the painter’s task. And it is Reinhardt’s vision of the end that comes to be regarded as emblematic of painting.
Ad Reinhardt stated unequivocally: “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” In separating art from the world, as well as proclaiming the historical necessity of the painter to arrive at a pure and a meaningfully empty presence, Reinhardt found it necessary to define the physical painting as a discrete aesthetic object. The ideal painting would contain no trace of brushwork, no evidence of the artist as author, no composition or design, and there would be no materiality to the paint. In retrospect, it is clear that Reinhardt’s statements anticipate the paradigm of the death of the artist and painting that lies at the core of much postmodernist theory. For Barnett Newman, the beginning meant, “to paint from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before.”4 Newman is suggesting that instead of going forward, one can recover a state of innocence, thus escaping all influences. The primary catalyst behind these two extreme positions is, of course, Jackson Pollock.
In his poured paintings (1947–1951), Pollock revolutionized painting in terms of both subject and process by utilizing a unique practice; he dripped paint onto a canvas that had been laid flat on the floor. One could say that he drew with his entire body rather than with his hand or arm. Both Pollock’s innovative painting practice (his jettisoning of the brush and easel) and radical results (what his earliest champion Clement Greenberg called “all–over painting”) proved to be a challenge to other artists. In the case of Reinhardt and Newman, who were Pollock’s contemporaries, it was a matter of developing a practice that was both for and against their innovative peer, who, as de Kooning said, “broke the ice.”
Since his death in 1956, Pollock’s legacy has largely been subsumed into the model of the end that Reinhardt was one of the first of his generation to first articulate. Pollock’s poured abstractions are said to mark both a rupture and the beginning of the end. His breakthrough paintings are a dividing line in history; and they are regarded as pure abstract art, after which nothing else can be done. In Pollock’s work, paint had become paint causing painting to arrive at it essence. It is this narrative, and all the presumptions it carries, that Reed consciously disputes both in his statements and, more importantly, in his work.
Earlier in the interview with Ellis, Reed made another telling point: “I want my paintings not to be nostalgic or sentimental — that means they have to be about this moment. A corollary of that is they should be an integral part of life, not separated in museums or galleries. Paintings belong where they can be a part of normal life, seen in private moments of reverie.”5
Thus, in contrast to Reinhardt’s separation of art and life, Reed believes everything else must become part of the painting. Art, he is arguing, is neither pure nor separate from life.
Let us consider the implications of Reed’s philosophical position. By electing to be part of a continuum, he (and here his work bears me out, as I will demonstrate later in this essay) underscores his belief that Pollock’s project remained incomplete at his death. Thus, his work hints at territories that he had not been able to explore. In order to both define and explore these territories, one has to resist becoming nostalgic and sentimental. In addition, one has to be committed to reinventing aspects of Pollock’s achievement.
Another challenge that Reed mounts is in the destination he imagines for his paintings. While Minimalism, particularly as it was embodied by Frank Stella, shifted Pollock’s and Newman’s large–scale, post–easel paintings into the public and corporate realm, Reed rejects that tale of postwar painting’s so–called progress. His “ambition in life” is to become “a bedroom painter.”6 In contrast to the contemporary abstract artist who believes that the ideal objective for an abstract painting is the museum and gallery, highly mediated sanctuaries, the destination Reed seeks for his paintings is the bedroom, the place of intimacy and dreams, birth and death. Reed’s “private moments of reverie” doesn’t just subvert the assumption that art is made solely for public spaces; it reminds us that privacy is one of the gifts bequeathed to a democratic society. And, in doing so, he challenges the repressive, authoritarian discourses surrounding both Minimalism and painting.
The fundamental difference between Reed’s narrative and those who believe in the death of painting can be summed up as follows. Both Reed’s narrative and his paintings are syncretic rather than essentialist; they are inclusive rather than exclusive. Coming after the epochal shifts of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism, he recognized that to further refine what previous generations had already established would be to work in a fatigued mode, as well as attach one’s art to the past. In his paintings, he could either supply an ending to a narrative about endings or he could transform the past and make it go on.
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Reed did not start out as an abstract artist. His work from the late 1960s, much of it done on site, is rooted in the desert landscape of the Southwest. At the outset, he was interested in the unobstructed view inherent to both the American west and panorama. But, as his paintings from the late 60s make evident, he understood that the unobstructed view was an aesthetic ideal, rather than an actual fact. Instead of privileging one position over the other, abstract versus the pictorial, actual versus artificial, he attempted to negotiate these incommensurable possibilities without resorting to realism. Thus, color, particularly the juxtaposition of warm (desert and its foliage) and cool (sky), and dark and light, is used to evoke space. At the same time, he introduced formal, often geometric and brushstroke–like elements that were not found in the landscape.
In a small, rather squarish painting (Oil on canvas, 22’ x 24’, 1967) from his series, Lordsburg, there are two tonally close vertical rectangles floating in what we read as sky. Are they evocations of a mountain? Are they a sly allusion to Hans Hoffman? Or are they visual obstructions placed within the landscape, at once necessary and imagined? Because they are so close in value to the colors (sky) around them, we cannot detach them from their circumstances. They are both part of the state of affairs and indecipherable, something to look at and a barrier. On a formal level, the vertical rectangles disrupt any sense the viewer might have that the view is unobstructed and therefore transcendent. Since Reed began painting the panoramic landscape, visual conundrums of one kind or another have been a constant feature of his work.
Reed’s landscapes are unsettled and dissonant, as well as controlled and cool. Based on the recognition that perception is complex and constantly adjusting to its environment, he animates his work through a series of interlocking, visual conundrums. In the Lordsburg and Oljato series, Reed achieves a dynamic tension between the painting’s physical surface and the implied deep space of his subject matter. As matter–of–fact as cake frosting, a tactile layer of paint hugs the plane’s surface, even as the juxtaposition of colors and planar divisions evokes deep space. At the same time, geometric shapes, the central placement of an allusive form, and the use of paint as paint impedes our view of deep space.
In painting the landscape, Reed was conscious of being a viewer, someone who stood outside what he was depicting. His relationship to both the painting’s surface and subject matter changed radically in 1972, when he started the Door paintings. By 1974, when he started the Brushstroke paintings, he had redefined his physical relationship to the painting’s surface. In his interview with Ellis, he observed:
When I first started working abstractly, part of me would identify with the painting, as if I were inside it working through the forms. Another part of me would stay outside and watch what was happening. I felt split in two. I was afraid that I couldn’t come back together again. In some of my Stroke paintings, the idea was to work so quickly that I knew I could get the two parts together. Finally, I decided that this experience of being split apart was necessary to make a painting.7
The precedents for Reed’s description of being “inside” or “outside” his painting are Pollock and Newman. It is Pollock who first spoke about being “inside” his paintings. And it is Newman who, in 1948, studied one of his own paintings for eight months before moving on, extremely conscious of the direction his work would take.8
By acknowledging that his body can inhabit and move around in one place and his mind move in another, and that this relationship is constantly shifting, Reed faces the dilemma of the subjec–object relationship. Is it possible to stop the dance between the subject and object? Can one make form and content achieve unity? Historically, Pollock is regarded as the first painter to have achieved this unity. Reinhardt tried to synthesize the two by listing the strict requirements a painting had to fulfill, while Willem de Kooning recognized the split and spoke of content as a “slipping glimpse.“ Understood in the terms set forth by Reinhardt and de Kooning, a painting falls into one of two perceptual categories; it is either a self–contained aesthetic presence or a partial or slipping glimpse, a presence that acknowledge its own contingency and incompleteness. From his remarks to Ellis, it is clear that Reed favors contingency and incompleteness over the static and complete, that he believes a slipping glimpse is still relevant.
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For the Door paintings, Reed stretched canvas over a support whose dimensions were based on that of a standard door. Thus, in contrast to abstract artists who worked on pure geometric formats such as a square, he selected a found format that is based on human dimensions. The panoramic view, another found format, is analogous to the gaze of a figure in a landscape, while the door is analogous to the figure before (or outside) the landscape. And in terms of its orientation, the door can be read as a panoramic view made vertical. Moreover, in connecting abstraction to the human, specifically the body, Reed’s announces a keynote to his work. Without employing aggressive gestural marks, particularly as manifestations of the artist’s inner state, he will make paintings that allude to the physical body.
The Door paintings are painted in oil, and are often layered, with one thin wash over another. The paint ranges from viscous to transparent. The vocabulary consists of different ways of applying paint, including drips, wet–into–wet brushstrokes, impasto, and semi–transparent veils. Here, I want to interject that at this early point in his career, Reed is already interested in an indexical approach, in juxtaposing and overlapping different ways of applying paint to a surface. Although in any single painting the space shifts from one area to another, it is for the most part shallow and ambiguous, a matter of layers and wet–into–wet rather than illusionism. The palette stretches from hot reds and bright oranges to lime greens, lilac, and dark blues.
Shortly after Reed started the Door paintings, he developed a wide, loaded brushstroke as a distinct element. Often, they are stacked along the painting’s right side from top to bottom. For all their horizontality, the wet–into–wet brushstrokes don’t extend across the entire, somewhat narrow surface. On the left, there may be another stack of shorter strokes in a different color or a vertical veil of color over a set of shorter, thinner strokes. The color relationships are dissonant and decidedly non–naturalistic. Often, the large brushstrokes stop short of the painting’s right edge. In addition, they drip and disintegrate along their bottom edges. In this regard, they are reminiscent of the ways the emulsion in a filmstrip changes when it undergoes heat. The disintegration of the matter–of–fact brushstrokes suggests that the painting itself is in a state of transition, that nothing in the work is fixed or frozen. It is synonymous with a state of steady movement, erosion, and disintegration. The emotional overtones one associates with these changes are absent in the Door paintings because Reed achieves his effects through his recognition of paint’s inherent properties; it drips, among other things.
One could say that in addition to being records of similarly repeated actions, the Door paintings are also “slipping glimpses.” By stacking the wide, wet–into–wet brushstrokes along the right side, and not having them extend past the painting’s actual edge, Reed arrives at an asymmetrical composition that acknowledges that there is more beyond the painting’s edge, and that the present becomes the future. This awareness of time passing is reinforced by the brushstrokes that look as if they are melting, as if they are in a state of irreversible change.
It is well known that Greenberg felt that Pollock didn’t adequately deal with the edges, and that Color Field artists such as Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski corrected this problem in their non–relational, non–illusionistic paintings. The effect of their correction was to underscore that a painting is a discrete, self–contained object, something that stands apart from the world. Reed reads Pollock’s paintings differently. Rather than aligning his work with Greenberg’s proscriptions about the edge, and his belief in the self–contained object, Reed explores the connotations of Pollock’s poured paintings as partial views of a constantly changing pattern that cannot be deduced from what is visible. The “door” contains a glimpse. The implications are, to my way of thinking, profound. For one thing, it suggests that Reed is conscious that a painting is always part of something larger, and that that relationship is neither fixed nor stable. This, I would further add, is what separates the self–contained paintings of Frank Stella from the open-sided paintings of Robert Ryman.
In 1974, two years after he started the Door paintings, Reed began the Brushstroke paintings. Like the Door paintings, the first Brushstroke paintings were done in oil. In 1975, he switched to acrylic and worked on the Brushstroke paintings until 1979. In the Brushstroke paintings, Reed reduced his palette to black and white and red and white, and usually worked on formats that measured seventy–six inches by eleven inches. It is as if the door had been cut into thirds. The narrowness of the format suggests that Reed wanted to get into and out of the painting quickly and efficiently, that he wanted to be intimately connected to what he was doing, and be conscious of working within a constricting format.
The panels are either presented singly or bolted together in increments of up to five. The procedure is always the same; a wide brushstroke of either black or red acrylic paint is applied to a wet, white acrylic ground. The brushstrokes always stop just short of the right edge, and are done from top to bottom. The acrylic’s creamy thickness endowed the surface with a visual and palpable unity. Reed’s brushstrokes are a record of both a repeated process and the hand’s progress in paint; they are tactile marks that, paradoxically, become images.
Reed also worked in even more extreme formats, including #95 (oil on canvas, 1975), which is eight inches high and nearly twenty feet in length. Within this format, he made four distinct brushstrokes, going from one end of the painting to the other. As in all the Brushstroke paintings, each gesture is irreversible; it cannot be corrected or changed. At the same time, through repetition, the brushstroke is an infinitely repeatable unit, rather than a signature mark. By draining away the aura associated with the brushstroke, but not jettisoning it, as did so many artists working in the 1970s, Reed stood apart from the Minimalists and Color Field painters, as well as from his peers. In contrast to those artists who either effaced the brushstroke because they thought it was obsolete or parodied it, Reed made it a central element of his work.
Reed’s brushstrokes are very different than Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon image of an oversized brushstroke. For one thing, his brushstroke is an intimate record of a hand’s movement across a wet, viscous surface. And yet, for all the repetition one sees in a five–section painting, the brushstrokes never become mechanical. In fact, each is unique, at once similar and different from the other brushstrokes in the painting. This constantly changing visual relationship between a single brushstroke and a field of them lifts Reed’s paintings out the visual stasis associated with Minimalism and Pop art. Because the grid of brushstrokes is continually ruptured, the painting’s field shifts between the tactile and the optical. It is clear from the direction his work subsequently took that Reed was able to seize upon the implications of this shift between the palpable and the visual, and make it a central feature of his work.
The Brushstroke paintings are governed by a bedrock idea that extends out of Pollock. Whereas Pollock freed the line from the burden of description, it can be said that Reed freed the brushstroke from the burden of two competing histories, modernism (Abstract Expressionism) and postmodernism (the death of painting). He did so by loosening the brushstroke from the modernist assertion that it is a unique record of spontaneity. Robert Rauschenberg had addressed this idealization in Factum I and Factum II (both 1957), paintings that appear to be exact doubles of each other. In these paintings, Rauschenberg combined collage and brushstrokes that mimicked and echoed Abstract Expressionist brushwork. Taken together, Rauschenberg’s paintings are a conceptually rigorous critique of the painting as a site of pure improvisation. Thus, in an early indication of his interest in Pop art, Reed’s “brushstroke” paintings can be read as widening out of Rauschenberg. For by taking the irony out of Rauschenberg’s doubling, Reed finds his way out of a cul–de–sac.
Reed also shares something with the older artist, Robert Ryman. Both define the painting as the site where they can analyze as well as break down the brushstroke. According to Yves–Alain Bois, Ryman’s “paintings get closer and closer to the condition of the photograph or of the readymade, yet remain at the threshold of simple negation. His position is difficult to maintain, and yet, it is perhaps, historically, the most cogent one.”9 Reed’s relationship to photography and to film is very different. For one thing, even as Reed’s extended, stylized brushstroke, which in many instances is applied by a squeegee, becomes more and more photographic, he, like Ryman, never severs its connection to its subjective origin, the pressure of the hand. Thus, Ryman approaches photography and the readymade in his work, while Reed absorbs photography and the readymade without dissolving the connection to the hand. One could say that Reed wants to discover how far he can go into the realm of the photographic without employing it. His territory is the brushstroke as an image, sign, thing, gesture, repeatable unit, and container all at once.
In terms, of Reed’s own work, the brushstroke can be read as both a destination and a beginning. Instead of trying to refine what he had achieved into a style, and play it out in different variations, in the early 1980s Reed began to embrace an ever–widening range of disparate influences, ranging from art to pop culture, and the from the painterly to the photographic and filmic. The primary reason that Reed was able to successfully transform these influences into an imaginative amalgamation is because he completely redefined his process and, in so doing, transformed the picture plane. In contrast to the Brushstroke paintings (1974–79), where the surface is treated rather conventionally as a solid, palpable plane to which the paint holds and down which it drips, in the early ’80s, Reed began defining the painting as a transparent skin through which light passes. And within this film–like skin he began compressing two or more layers of representation, thus achieving the photographic effect of a double exposure or what in film is called a “dye sandwich.”
In the tall, vertical #264 (1988), the furling waves of white paint move from a red ground to an adjacent black ground, causing the contrast to change. It’s as if two different colored filters have been abutted. Rupture and continuity dance around each with neither gaining the upper hand At the same time, there is a vertical on the painting’s upper right side where the waves of white paint are transformed into a darker red whose edges are tinged with blue. Shadows seem to be inflecting the surface of the folds. It’s as if waves of white paint have been transformed into a photographic negative. It’s as if in his treatise on color, Joseph Albers decided that he could get at the problem more efficiently in film than in painting.
Recalling his earlier interest in the Southwest landscape, #266 (1987–88) is two feet high and nearly ten feet wide. The format is situated between the panoramic view common to many westerns of the 1950s and an enlarged strip of film. Reinforcing the filmic aspects of the painting is Reed’s use of superimposition as a structuring device. Four distinct images appear as five separate different–sized areas in the painting. Each area is largely made up of two colors. Its hothouse palette includes salmon pink, purple, and different blues, including turquoise and midnight. The vocabulary consists of different sized, ribbon–like folds of paint that are so smooth that the viewer initially sees them as images. Although they never lose their identity as paint, as something made by hand, the folds are representations. Except for the pink clouds edged in blue, the vocabulary consists of unfurling ribbons whose surfaces correspond to interplay of light and dark. Because of the superimposition, the viewer can imagine the arrangement of the horizontal rectangles of the painting as following a very straightforward logic.
This is how one might imagine the painting coming into existence. The entire format is covered with pink clouds edged in blue. In the upper half, Reed has superimposed a horizontal band picturing a wide, unfurling, ribbon–like swath of purple. Above this purple swath is a thin strip of the pink clouds, while below is a wider strip of them. On the right hand of the painting, mostly in the pink strip, Reed has superimposed two rectangles, whose formats echo the painting’s extreme horizontality. Thus, a rectangle containing a turquoise ribbon has been superimposed on the pink, with its upper edge extending into the purple swath. Over this, and both to the right and extending higher than the rectangle with the turquoise ribbon is a rectangle containing a midnight blue ribbon’like form.
Reed uses superimposition in various ways. He can place a hard–edge rectangle over a splashy, dripping pool of paint, making it seem as if a solid plane is being pressed against a pool of liquid, causing to spread beyond the rectangle’s edges. Here, his playfulness evokes a cartoon view of cause’and’effect. There is something comic about a puddle of paint that is seemingly being flattened by a rectangle of paint. We know of course that it is an optical effect rather than the record of an actual event.
The viscous folds of paint evoke film and chemical emulsions, mutating biological matter, worlds seen through a microscope, bolts of cloth, waves found in cyberspace, cake frosting, melting wax, repeated gestures, close–up photographs, something that is made of light and is, paradoxically, between solid and liquid. The scale of the ribbon–like folds suggests that one might be looking through a microscope or telescope, that what one sees is a close–up view that denies the viewer any vantage point. It’s as if our attention has zoomed in so close that we aren’t quite sure what we are looking at. Finally, the combination of the large–scale, ribbon–like folds, the rapidly shifting, dissonant, transparent planes of color, and the extreme horizontality of his formats suggest that the painting is comparable to a section of film strip blown–up big, that what we are looking at is a section of a fractured narrative whose beginning and ending can neither be seen nor deduced from what is visible.
* * *
Reed’s expansive, coiling forms are both images and paint. From a distance, they can appear to be textured, full of light, reflection, and shadow. It�s as if we are scrutinizing a piece of flocked wallpaper, crushed velvet, a dyed smear beneath a microscope, an abstract cartoony form. The color ranges from coolly seductive to jarring and garish, from dark to light. Sometimes a gesture seems to have slithered out from under a patchwork of plaster–like smears and swipes. Through the use of cropping devices that remind the viewer of cross–sections, close–ups, and superimpositions, Reed both structures and disrupts the gaze.
At the same time, no matter how much tactility the forms convey, they also strike us as being images, vivid yet bodiless presences. The interplay of perception and artifice leads us into a deeper awareness of just how complex the phenomenal world always is. In patiently exploring surface textures and the interplay of light and shadow, Reed is comparable to a still–life painter and to Watteau. Instead of continuing to drive allusion out of painting, and stressing the literal, he explores the erotic nature of paint. And one aspect of the erotic is its ability to adapt to, as well as absorb, whatever it encounters. Might it be that Reed has transformed the masculinity of Pollock’s painting process into the feminine?
Notes
1. David Reed (Los Angeles: A.R.T. Press, 1990), p. 12
2. ibid. p. 17–18
3. Ibid. p. 18
4. “Jackson Pollock: An Artist’s Symposium; Part 1,” Art News, April 1967, p. 29
5. Op. cit. p. 6
6. Dave Hickey, “David Reed’s Coming Attractions,” David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), ex. cat., with essays by Elizabeth Armstrong, Paul Auster, Dave Hickey, Mieke Bal. p. 30.
7. Op. cit. p. 5
8. Yves-Alain Bois, “Perceiving Newman” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990) p. 187.
9. Yves-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). p. 232.