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Process-Painting Manifesto Saturday, January 24, 2004
“Process-Painting”:
1.One is not merely designing an image and then painting it; one designs a set of treatments which one then applies.
2.The application of one treatment and the nature of each treatment depends on all others.
3.Process-painting is inherently multimedia work; it is multimedia but deserves the name of painting by its processes which are painterly and pictorial.
4.One forms images through processes not therefore building an image in an illustrative fashion Each process / treatment sketches an aspect of the image.
5.Process-painting is mechanical, but its effects are metaphysical (the transparency of layers).
In process-painting, the painter invents processes. An image is designed and formed of applied treatments which uncover aspects of the designed product. Hence, it often works negatively. Process-painting counters simple brushwork. It works by making the sequence of processes undetectable. This undetectability of Process is what makes process-painting initially ironic.
“La peinture procédurale”
One invents the steps as one goes along. In a very strong sense, process-painting is modal. The multiple processes form a type of chain, a modal chain like the powers in Spinozist ethical philosophy. It is up to the artist to invent processes.
Process-painting is a wellspring of new techniques. The many modes resemble the modes in Russian formalist montage (“Constructivist-propagandist film, 1920s”).
A limiting factor exists in process-painting: one is not playing; process-painting is real work, and is arduous labor. One works against the old painting, but keeps the old methods of imaging which have become semi-universal.
The main limit is the professional aesthetic: images ought to have the lustre or aura of value, i.e. monetary appeal. But the process-painting is disinterested. The process-painter is disinterested out of necessity: to remain technocratic and not fall prey to the desire for pure poeticness. Process-painting is more Atmospherical than poetic, i.e. the atmosphere of the room, not the cubby-hole. The treatments in process-painting are additive, if not multiplicative or exponential (geometric).
One composes a procedural encyclopedia as one goes along, each ‘chapter’ coinciding and working with, in contiguity with other ‘chapters’.
First chapter: “Leading gestural diagram”. One chooses a process closest to one’s pre-existing habitual-programmatic network. One draws from one’s preceding periodicity. If one was ‘telephonal’ in one’s habit-construct, one begins with a ‘telephonal’ treatment. It is up to the process-painter to choose an appropriate point of departure. It is never a matter of beginning, but of departure.
Process-painting is serial in its nature.
Second chapter: Images are a ‘piling-on’ of technical-procedural habits. Hence the modalities of process-painting. Square-habits and triangular habits; linear habits, circular habits; processes of pasting; processes of adaptive subtraction, i.e. of subtracting elements through masking, defacing, or erasure to submit to the Notion of the process-painting.
Process-painting can be conceptual. In this sense it distinguishes itself from older kinds of painting. Formal painting cannot attain the concept; it only presents affectual blocks and perceptions. Process-painting follows a technical line that converges on the conceptual. First it is a history-painting, then a technique-painting and becomes conceptual when the work-path reaches the process-painting via a technologized methodology which holds the concept in its technicity. Process-painting works in an abstract mode, but the product can be figurative.
Process-painting is not so artistic as it is scientific; this being by virtue of the fact that it is experimental. The process-painter invents a process that may not be fruitful. The process may be a disaster. As an inventor, the procedural-painter works as a technical agent for aesthesis, sensation. But, s/he has the end of the ‘beautiful object’ in mind.
The old painter did not need to be so inventive. A time has come whereby ‘inventiveness’ is a lucrative quality to have.
One can view modernist painting in light of the theory of process-painting, or any other painting, for that matter.
Only process-painting is truly metaphysical. It is metaphysical because its techniques (mechanical) are multiple and follow one another closely. There is geometric process-painting and digital process-painting, otherwise known as systems process-painting. Hence, its conceptual potential.
The techno-scientific bias does not exclude any artistry, but it so happens that process-painting is free of artifice, because it strangles itself with its own volition towards the Good in painting. That is to say that process-painting wills, in its processes, the ‘perfect product’, a product which, through its developmental stages, makes the best of itself. That it, in the end, can attain the figurative objectity, already proffers proof of process-painting’s genuineness as mode of picture-making.
The History-painting was a painting that knew it could never attain the concept of history in painting, but tried anyway. The Technique-painting thought it could attain the concept-in-general by figuring its own technique as it went along. The Process-painting circumvents any doubt and produces the concept via a superposition of treatments which in themselves, as parts of the product, hold the concepts of their technicity, and each technique, therefore, creates its own technologized subjectivity, for the process-painting is viewed as a unity of parts; a whole if you will.
Third chapter: Process-painting involves a certain intelligence. It plays upon a technical intelligence, but a technical intelligence which is hyper-aware of its technicity. Technicity is what comes of technical devices that are aware of being so. Process-painting, having passed through history-painting and technique-painting, is hyper-aware of its technicity as painting. This means that the ego which practises process-painting, is technologized. The theory of habit takes care of the technologization of the ego. When one is on the telephone, one’s habits steer towards the telephonal. Habits may have periodicities, but are always under the sway of habitats of technology.
Process-painting overestimates its own technical mastery. The treatments that make up the process-painting itself take all techniques used and multiplies them. This means that the product of this technique, i.e. process-painting, being experimental, produces an object which is the sum of multiple applications and therefore stems from the multiplicity of actions and creates an object of hyper-technicity: That is, an object results from process-painting which is more than the sum of its parts. What happens in the event of process-painting is a serial sum of acted technicities that circumambulates the point of technique itself: To embody technique as a conceptual motherboard of sense, of digital sense, of cybernetic, system-apprehended sensory localization of computer-technical furthering of the point of experiment itself in the technical sense.
Let us define the hyper-technicity of process-painting. One sets up the materials for a session of process-painting. This means that there is canvas involved, or cardboard, or paper. Process-painting necessitates a flat medium such as paper or canvas or cardboard. Plastic is to be avoided. One then commences with a swipe of some watery substance with pigment. Let it be a swipe of off-white acrylic paint. One flows the ivory-white paint onto the canvas, with a side-swipe of gold spray-paint. This is the first treatment. At this point, one studies the product, for a moment, for a week, or for a month. Every treatment needs a careful scrutinization of the product. One cannot act too quickly; one needs to overlook the product carefully, and this can take months.
Forming the Image diametrically, tranversally.. The image becomes a horizon: The process-painter moves toward the horizon of the image (the image horizon), but never fully meets up with it. The image is kept in mind, and the work functions to derive possible solutions to attaining the image in a roundabout manner (roundness of method; the round method).
January 25th, 2004 / 3:47 PM
1.The circular-geometric habit’s periodicity can easily generate multiple scenarios but these remain, by virtue of the circular geometricity, purely ideal.
2.A real construction of technical superiority to the geometric method or model will exact its production in an abstract-formulaic and thus roundabout manner.
3.The abstract manner in artistic method is not to be confused with ‘abstraction’, for the pure abstraction is still figurative (technically figurative). Real abstract art is abstract in its methodology, not its pictorial product.
4.The technique-painting was a painting which traced its own technique, was hyper-aware modalistically of its technique. In this way, the technique used was painted, but the content was therefore lacking. The process-painting brought content back and a purified or exorcized content.
5.Process-painting is contextual so far as its solidified or material memory function is concerned. This material memory fits into the historiotherapeutic scenario.
6.Process-painting utilizes the theory of physio-imaging as the presentation of history. Process-painting is therefore empirical.
7.Process-painting is a combination of pure artistic process and scientific research. The condition of being both artistic and scientific exists in the process itself: Process is the home of both practises, and process-painting is both artistic and scientific by virtue of its experimental-technical methodology.
8.Process-painting produces results. Even when its object fails, it still produces a result, both physical and mathematical.
9.Process-painting has a mathematical result; that is, it deliberates techno-figuratively an abstract production, where number and limit secure always a tentative imagal scene or pictorial event-scenario; that is, a technical-productive and contextual iconology.
10.The iconology of process-painting can be both devotional and secular. The procedure remains the same in both cases.
“Process-painting”
Process-painting diminishes the time of the formalization of the image by breaking the image into effects of procedural modes. The procedural modes are closely tied together in serial contiguity. The serial contiguity is asymmetrical in process-painting. Modes are relative to one another and imagistically autodeterminative. Familiarity does not exist between procedural modes. They are not merely powers. Subsequent harmony exists between modes as levels of sympathetic participation. The geometric is annulled by techno-harmonization schedules which control technical output. Process-painting is itself a work. Occupationally, it revs itself into a horizontal play of jittering boxes, so to speak. The ‘box’ can be seen as a unit of pictorial representation. The boxes can be historical presentations. 3.The cellar is full of boxes.
Monday, January 26th, 2004
Process-painting neither establishes a firm axiomatic nor a table of first principles. The only law is the law of process; this is its conditional rule. All else is subject to procedural sequencing.
Process-painting may attain the dialogical. Time is a crushed time, a material memory of passing procedures solidified in the final picturation.
“The Supermodal Process”
Beyond the subjectivity question arises a philosophical basis for process-painting which surpasses the simple modes into a hypermodality; this hypermodality is none other than a product of the Supermodal process. This process is an event and occurs beyond the regressive-ironical mode, the modes of Absurdity and Paradox: it purifies its own irony through exact existence of the procedural set-up or program, which is historical. There is no program of reference; it has passed over self-reference and alloreferential modes.
Process-painting ‘skips’ to its ends. Its means are abstract and often irretrievable. One hardly gets a second chance.
Process is always first.