The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-
“Anachromisms”
©Copyright Patrick Morrissey and Clive Hancock All rights reserved.
“Anachromisms” 26, 29, 30 & 31
“Anachromisms”, paintings 2007 – 2015 by G R Thomson, are excerpted from the treatise
of painting that has occupied the past thirty years of the artist’s anti-
All paintings are acrylic co-
All photographs of “Anachromisms” were taken in the exhibition space. No artificial illumination was used.
Now, I have no barney with the most recent phase of Peter Joseph’s work. At a time
in a long career when many a painter settles for a mannered revisiting of tried and
tested routines, his painting continues to break new ground. Cause for unqualified
celebration.
However, the phase in Joseph’s oeuvre that interests us here is that which lasted around thirty years, during which each painting entertains the same, formally reductive, pictorial device: a single, centrally placed rectangle, framed by another. These are among the finest colour paintings you are ever likely to encounter. Repetition draws attention to differences, within each painting and from one to the next. These differences, and the differences between them, are registered in exquisitely calibrated chromatic and tonal orders. Executed with ‘airy severity’, artless artfulness, each testifies to painstaking research, fine judgment, wit and learning.
Although Joseph ceased to work this seam around ten years ago, paintings from it continue to haunt me, remain with me, in me, always.
Another, more striking coincidence. By an entirely different path – in my case, through figuration – I had arrived at the same framed/framing pictorial device repetitively deployed, to striking effect, by Joseph. But if his and my pictorial means were once strikingly similar, they supported strikingly different outlooks.
And another. Just as he breaks out of the frame of the framed/framing, anti-
One thing is certain. Colour is difficult. Singularly and severally, “Anachromisms”
obstinately, repeatedly, beg the question of the conditions under which the study
of the work, or play, of colours, shades, tints . . . in reductive, formally ordered,
non-
Seldom seen. Seldom sighted. Seldom sited. Seldom cited.
“Anachromisms” featured in a number of solo and group shows in the context of “Exhibiting
Space”, London. This collective-
Since those days of intense interdisciplinary and social engagement, Thomson’s artistic
explorations have been studio-
Chromatology was never going to be the gayest of sciences. Yet, for any materialist
practice worthy of the name, rupturing decisively with the idealist outlook that
corrals colour as the province of purely subjective experience, remains necessary
work. Necessary, essential work, undertaken in the knowledge that there are no clean
breaks, no once-
The moment of each numbered “Anachromism” is thus two-
They are the material traces of events, findings, traces of traces, assembled in
a kind of formal notation, non-
But these texts in remembrance of things past are also a looking forward. They look
forward to being read by respondents other than their first respondent, their so-
Clearly, the reading strategies proposed by the re-
To return to our subject, the work, or play, of colour and impersonal form within
and between “Anachromisms” takes place within a restricted, highly regulated economy.
The laws or rules inscribed in the ‘legislating matrix’ by which the play of elements
making up the restricted economy in question is limited, are collectively, socially
elaborated, agreed and in the public domain. There are no inaccessible, privatised
symbolic orders here, linguistic, chromatic, tonal…ultimately arbitrated by the more
or less knowing or whimsical I-
In the last instance, the play of difference, linking and sundering each and every
painting framed as “Anachromisms” takes place within an economy regulated by non-
Abstraction figures, of course. Strict mathematical calculation of the area of one
chromatic-
In practice, all the claims advanced in the name of ‘scientific socialism’ proved bogus. The enlightened revolutionary rhetoric acted as cover for forms of reactionary political and social practices. Any hint of emancipatory dissent from the existing order of power was systematically choked off by the administration of narcotising doses of rational terror.
The ‘scientific socialist’ antidote turned out to be infinitely more enslaving than anything cooked up by the system of which it purported to be the most rigorous ‘critique’. The contribution the extreme left wing of SCAP’s establishment to class politics in the field of cultural production included robust attempts to wreck a learning project initiated by an unestablished novitiate. Genius.
The discourse of European Modernity continues to fall apart. The scientific, rational, political, legal, moral . . . legs, that once supported its claim to absolute legitimacy, no longer do so. Its stuttering progress has become a shadow of its once confident stride. Recognition of this does not imply any deviation on the royal road to ‘anything goes’, ‘relativistic’, ‘nihilistic’, ‘fascistic’, etc., oblivion.
“Anachromisms”, for better or worse, are the tracings of my stuttering, on and off,
stop-
‘Scientific socialism’ as a discourse of change, progress, predicated on what doesn’t change. Change, in the name of the eternal return of The Same, expressed in the pure and simple beautiful, terrible, abstract, universalising certainties of Mathematics. Change precipitated by immobility hardly stands to reason. Must be a contradiction. Well, yes and no. It’s what Althusser would have called a ‘symptomatic absence’; a blind spot or aporia that permits ‘system’ to become imbued with shades of chimerical coherence. ‘System’ becomes a symptom of what it purports to explain.
Where is Marx in all this? What about that scandalous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:
‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point
is to change it.’? Surely that’s a spur to change, to practice making things otherwise.
But the discourse in question here had, somewhat unscientifically and irrationally
it must be admitted, lost sight of this. Divine all-
Chromatology refuses the consensual union between idealist and materialist that colour is the Other of Structure. It refuses the move that names ‘system’ as the originating subject author occupant of the hole at the centre of structure vacated by God. Let us not forget that such a move is a betrayal of the Enlightenment’s systematic, rational, scientific, materialist displacement of God, indeed of all forms of religious superstition. While we’re at it, let’s not forget that mathematics is a black art, whose origins lie somewhere in the Great Rift Valley, sinking terrain of the birthplace of the next ocean.
A discourse in which ‘system’ is, purely and simply, another name for the originating subject author, allegedly the centrepiece of ‘bourgeois’ notions of artistic creation, reinforces what it purports to critique. Only the name of the core ordering principle is altered, leaving the idealist construct of expressive totality intact. In this model, ‘system’ performs the role of master code, under which all other codes are subsumed. It functions as the guarantor of watertight structural coherence, in which colour has little part to play.
“Anachromisms” 25 & 26 (Salmon Leap)
The origins of the 2008 financial crisis are traceable to the so-
The invitation by “Anachromism” to ‘read otherwise’ is hence not an invitation to
slouch into some kind of abject chromophilia in which all sense of propriety is sacrificed
to ‘anything goes’ textual nihilism. “Anachromisms” do not announce the abandonment
of legislating order. Any suggestion that they do is, strictly speaking, unthinkable.
They fully subscribe to the radical anti-
Rather, they represent an attempt, however stuttering, to construct a mathematically-
Writing-
photo-
Further reading . . .
saturationpoint.org.uk/K_R-
saturationpoint.org.uk/Peter_Joseph.html
Acknowledgments & Dedication
In addition to the writings of Louis Althusser, my scribblings above are heavily indebted to those of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004).
Note well, however, that I am self-
I am also indebted to the English constructive artist, teacher, writer and egalitarian
feminist Jean Spencer (1942 – 1998) for the concept of ‘legislative matrix’. For
me, it economically cross-
I am honoured that one of Jean’s paintings accepted the invitation of mine to put in a guest appearance.
Finally, I dedicate the reflections above to Martine Lignon, partner of 35 summers, who has supported my labours through thin and thin, guided me out of dependency on spectrum colours into browns and greys and, most importantly, the teaching of adults.
“Anachromisms” – qu’est-
By some coincidences, warps in the texture of separate histories, the body of work
executed in my barn over the past ten years shows up in a barn just vacated by that
of a much-
“Anachromisms” have, on occasion, featured in the odd solo and group outing in continental Europe. Some have enjoyed a modicum of critical acclaim. More rarely, some have met with a degree of commercial success. In the UK, the hand of recognition has not been extended.
Hardly surprising. From the outlook of the culture in power, the unruly work, or
play, of colour in painting remains the last refuge of idealist, anti-
For the above, the scientific study of the conditions under which chromatic and tonal
relationships might be formally ordered, mathematicised, systematised, in the construction
of non-
“Anachromisms” 24, 2004-
In the globalised economy of late capitalism, much cultural production in the metropolitan
north is underwritten by the anonymous labour of perhaps billions of black, brown
and yellow hands. This fact struck me with the force of the blindingly obvious in
the current exhibition of paintings by Agnes Martin, not a few of which are gleaming
white. (Tate Modern, London, until 11 October.) Obviously, it applies with equal
force to those cultural artefacts designated as knowledge. The reading we are attempting
to circumscribe here re-
“Anachromisms”26 (Saute Saumon), 1984 -
Politics? Once upon a time in the early ’80s, I briefly enrolled in the ‘scientific socialist’ school of systematic constructive art practice (SCAP). Articulated by the odd established practice elder, it claimed to be founded on rational principles, forged during the Enlightenment and underlying the discourse of European Modernity. It claimed that the scientific knowledge underlying such principles would sweep away the myths of ‘bourgeois ideology’. It claimed that this debunking would pave the way for revolutionary, emancipatory social change. It claimed that because systematic constructive art was ‘scientific’ and opposed ‘bourgeois ideology’ in the field of the visual arts, it was in solidarity with such emancipatory movements.
“Exhibiting Space”, to whose work I devoted six years of my life, was in some respects an attempt by younger, unestablished practitioners, to acquire the skills to put some of the above claims into practice. It was systematically attacked for its pains, most strenuously by the very ‘scientific socialists’ who’d most powerfully advanced those claims.
“Anachromisms” 28 & 27, 2009 -
“Anachromisms” 29, 2009 -
Those, like myself, who continued to believe in some kind of rational ‘scientific socialist’ model of practice, were left to ponder whether our reading of it was simply a gross misreading. The stark choice was to abandon the whole field ‘tout court’ or comb the wreckage in the hope of finding anything that might be salvageable in constructing a different practice of reading, a materialist practice of ‘reading otherwise’.
Such a reading would have to rupture with models of theoretical, political and social
practice that had clearly fallen into pre-
“Anachromisms” 31, (Portrush),1989 -
Events or processes that change a subject for the better are sometimes spoken of as the ‘making of’ that subject. In this sense, the teaching of and by my students was the ‘making of’ me as a subject. More learned, better equipped to bear the responsibility of restoring my virtually abandoned practice as a painter.
Science remains the model and mathematics the model of science. Not therefore the
mathematical model to which I immodestly declined to sign up. This model had nothing
to do with science. This was mathematics systematically purged of the radical scientific
moment it opens. Mathematics ab-
“Anachromisms” 32 (Portrush -
The absence of colour aids the reduction of the practice of reading to a form of
tunnel vision, directed to cracking the master code, the one-
Beautiful? Certainly can be. Austerity, in the construction of pictorial space, is
not without aesthetic attraction, even for those who dissent from the scary politics
of a certain enframing verbal discourse. Marketable? In a word, yes. Funny thing.
After the shock and awe of capitalism’s near-
“Anachromisms” 33 & 34
“Anachromisms” 36, 2014
In 1984, “Exhibiting Space” opened its doors just the other side of a cobbled street
that marked the boundary of London’s old East End and the City, with its brave new
world of de-
The backward-
“Anachromisms” 37, 2013 -
The most recent “Anachromisms” represent another step in the process of restoring
to the practice of formally ordered colour painting some of the radical, scientific
purport of non-
This process, necessarily, is in solidarity with the emancipation of colour, in its materiality, from its subordination to the achromatic, or even chromophobic, exigencies of some abstract order. Despite the privileges bestowed upon it by various norms of idealism, the model of reading from abstraction is not a universal panacea. Nor is it a pathological aberration. It is a necessary reading but not the whole nine yards.
“Anachromisms” 38 (Titanium), 2015
Photo and other credits
All “Anachromisms” were digitally photographed in The Mercus Barn by Justin Jones, who also lightly LightRoomed the files. The guest work by Jean Spencer was photographed by David Saunders.
Version two of the calculating engine used to determine the dimensions of the framed element in “Anachromisms” was built to the artist’s specifications in MS Excel, by Winston Scotland. Version one, in ClarisWorks, an application long abandoned by Apple, was the work of Adam Cichon.
G R Thomson, London, Mercus, Fraïssé-
Jean Spencer
Peter Joseph, 1998
This reading is also a kind of writing, a making, a scouring, a scoring, as in a music score. Maybe even a scoring through, as the notes in a musical score stave off sonorous presence, a kind of effacement, in, through, by the materiality of the sign, a cut, a wound, a scarring of the legislating matrix that assigns it its place.
Strictly regulated deployment of tonal keys, tuned luminosity of chromatic signatures, dominant and modulating hues, saturations, secondary, tertiary, quaternary subtractive mixing regimes, concentrations, dispersions, migrations, shades, tints . . .
The formal constraints of the legislative matrix (‘system’, if we must) can certainly be understood as inscribed in the making and application of colour – mixing, matching, swatching. Brushing it on.
The more rigorous role now played by such constraints in the making of colours may
be down to the making, or re-
Whatever, the present subject of colour no longer uses colour in the service of some achromatic other of colour. As the legislating matrix of “Anachromisms” has evolved, it has taken more and more cognisance of the material instititution of painting, in, by and through the making of colour.