SEM IN PAINTING AND RELATED MEDIA

Paintings unfold only at the speed of your participation and like a body demand that you be there simply by being there, and like a body hold time. To build a sympathetic, critical, open practice, it is necessary to interrogate the status of your painting as an object in syntax: its individual material and gestural operations, how it means without you and within and against the architectures that hold it, its relationship to disciplinary history and to contemporary art, and extrapolating out to address systemic historical restrictions in access to discourse, markets, critical contexts, academic training, and sites of display (entrance and exhibition) constructed and enforced on economic, geographic, racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist and many other lines. If painting is to be entangled with the world and to be art it must be, a question for us is inside or outside. For whom, how. The object does not end unless it is destroyed, but to be art it must be in the light and who holds the light, how is the roof kept over the light, who might come. An object is not an image. An image is simply the surface of an event, like a lid. Infinitely reproducible, circulable, partial. For what. 

Painting is your big dead ardent self-loathing sign, but also a verb. The act of painting’s procedural foci of touch, response, immediacy, attention, scale, structure, care, and the pitting of wet materiality against hard-edged photographic image are otherwise useful for life. We will look at the act, at the space of the studio and the capacity to be alone with a public roaring on outside, at the metaphorical staging of griefs, furies, indigestions, inertias, habits, and rehearsals from their seedlings as desire to their efflorescence onto the plane of expression, with help from patron saints Yoko Ono, Georges Perec, Martin Buber, Yvonne Rainer, Emma Hauck, Kara Walker, Amy Sillman, Corita Kent, Martine Syms, TJ Clark, Herbert Marcuse (thesis advisor to Angela Davis!), Pope L., Jen Bervin, June Jordan, Kippenberger, Agnes Varda, Rilke, Vuillard, Norman Bryson, Judith Butler, Sontag, Barthes, Benjamin, Flusser, and many others who we either will read or not read but who will guide our feelings against flat, authenticating authority in hopes of some serious play, if not actual freedom. The act of painting takes place in time, and ends. It can and should be done without buying paint. All are welcome in this course. It is an expanded field.

In this course we will have white-wall crits, a weekly discussion of readi