Paint Throw
1991/1992
365 canvases, each 300mm x 300mm. 100mt tape measure, metal marking
pin, glass jar, paint brushes, acrylic paint.
VHS tape and Monitor
365 canvases were made (one for each day of the
year). The canvases were identical in proportion, representing a form
of hand
made mass production and multiples of the same thing.
“
At the time I was finding all aspects of painting very repetitious and
limited in terms of content and representation. I wanted to break the
combinations and the very system of it. ‘Do something else’ – just
kept running through my mind. It became a sort of art of quantifying
as well as destruction. At the same time I was doing this, I was also
painting
panels of colour and taking them into the outside environment to reveal
the difference and absurdity of trying to represent natural situations
with paint from a tube or a tin”
At the time of performing/documenting
this action, the desire was to do something ‘more’ with a
painting. Following the Duchampian notion of readymades ‘using
a Rembrandt perhaps as an ironing board’.
The process of making
the work became tiring, shadowing my own feelings of what I was seeing
and feeling when looking at yet more and more paintings
in galleries with always the same techniques and similar ideas. The
throwing of the canvases became extremely physically taxing, yet also
very entertaining,
as well as somewhat absurd and profound.
The paintings were thrown as
far as I could pitch them, in a field, sometimes individually, sometimes
in great clusters. Where they landed - they were
marked and measured, painted with the number equalling the meters that
they had travelled. The whole work was for me a project that worked
in a number of directions with varied meanings.
Once all 365 paintings
were
all thrown and measured they were installed as an installation and
the film of their flights and journeys. They were exhibited with mud
and
grass stains, in a perpetual looping line, indicating a never ended
confusing mass, lines of flight and endless computations. |