The Periphery of Empires (In Progress)
or The South Pole Telescope
Oil on Panel
18 x 14 in.
2011-2012
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After six months my South Pole Telescope painting is rounding the corner. Still plenty to do of course, but it's certainly beginning to achieve illusionistic space. I'll be working on if for some time, little adjustments as I learn new things. But the days of marathon painting sessions on it are concluding.
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I spend a fair amount of time perusing artist blogs and there are a lot of them whose work I think is spectacular but never really explain anything about the work. Art is accessed through language and in an effort to not be one of those blogs I'm going to start to "unpack" these images. So I'll write a little about what the painting is doing, as follows for those who are interested. This begins with an excerpt from one of my statements. For sake of clarity I should point out that
The Very Large Array and
The South Pole Telescope are the names of specific paintings and
The End of the West is the name of the series of paintings to which they belong. These paintings also have proper titles but for the sake of clarity I will refer to them by the name of their sites.
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There is a great luxury to working with a subject relatively untouched by others. The referential nature of artistic discourse loads most subjects with meaning, referenced indefinitely in each re-use. For a painter who spent his entire career perfecting portraiture the act of abandoning it for the landscape is not short of liberating. The telescope is the opposite of the body; a clean slate never dragged through the dirt and blood of politics and history. A subject that could be discovered, manipulated and explored without a pantheon of associations destabilizing it elsewhere. When utilizing painting to look at these subjects a technology analyzes a technology and my own politics and feelings impress upon the symbols. Through my system they simultaneously reveal themselves and transform into the monuments of my choosing.
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Painting works largely by allegory; symbols mean multiple things and thus do not only represent what they are. I'm quick to point out in the studio that these paintings have two major echoes. The first is of technology and the second is of monument. Painting is a type of technology (it's just not a new one), it has had innovations, advancements, and technical improvements like all other technologies. This is more obvious in the telescope which is clearly associated with what we think of when we talk about technology. But if you start to think about painting as a technology than something more interesting happens to the telescope; a technology represents a technology, and both of these technologies are in the business of seeing, looking, and knowing. They both create new space, physically and mentally.
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The second echo is the monument. This one is probably more obvious in the painting; paintings commemorate events and memorialize people. Not as much in the 20th century but historically this is a strong theme. Thus, the painting is a type of monument. The telescope is as well, in it's physicality, purpose, presence and also in its embodiment of what it does; further knowledge. Thus the painting is a monument of a monument.
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Paintings and telescopes are also part of a specific chain of Western knowledge. In a more globalized world these two things become less location specific but historically they are rooted in Western technological advancement. This is especially true of the oil painting. Nothing embodies Western thinking as much as that specific device. This becomes really important when
The End of the West continues to the other paintings in the movement, like
The Very Large Array.
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Above, A very in progress Very Large Array
Below it, The preparatory drawing of same.
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The paintings can be used as a series of locators for boundaries and spaces.
The Very Large Array makes obvious allusions to the expansion of America Westward, and subsequently outward. But on a broader level I use them as markers to figure out what constitutes the edges of civilizations and the spaces that it throws in front of itself. By space I mean both physically space on land and
outer space but also the spaces that are created by restructuring thought. My reoccurring example of restructuring thought is Copernicus. His heliocentric model of the solar system was not only a scientific discovery but also one that restructures thinking. It changed the way people thought about everything, not just the solar system. Even the uneducated Germanic farmer knew that removing the Earth from the center of the universe would require him to totally restructure his conception of God. These kind of thought shattering discoveries happen often with telescopes, particle detectors, and neutrino observatories. The larger world seems to care less and less about such discoveries but hat is another topic entirely.
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If
The Very Large Array painting throws out the boundary for the expansion of the West, the
South Pole Telescope does this for the larger human "empire" (hence the title). The inhabitants of South Pole call it the "end of the world" for a reason. It is the periphery of all civilization, not just for the United States. It is
the astrophysics site for the Earth and therefore it is at the universe's feet. The South Pole Telescope is the transition between two spaces; the physical edge of civilization and the beginning of its expansion
beyond that.
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Hopefully that accesses the painting, even just a little. I'm certainly no writer. More soon, you know it.
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-warren
