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Notes on 'Volunteers'

Peter Venn

From the large number of works completed by Bob Billington during the past two or three years the paintings that are my main focus are the most recent, the 'Volunteers' . These paintings share a great deal with the artists earlier work and clearly involve a range of very similar procedures, yet to my mind they set themselves apart and are distinguished from that work. They are more fully objectified as paintings, and in what follows I aim to substantiate this claim and give thought to matters that surround it.

Looking at the paintings, several shared features of the working practice can be identified; discrete and similar elements, together with various simple protocols governing their assembly, are used and often reused in an ongoing process of painting and assembly, reassembly and repainting.

These assembly protocols are not intended as instructions for the paintings. That said, however, I think that this is how they function in some of Billington's earlier work; Time's Pretzel represents, perhaps, an extreme example. As compared with Volunteer 2 , I find that in the earlier works matters of their making are raised as foreground matters. They are instructions in the sense that they act to specify the painting and direct my reading of it. Such reading has for me the character of reading information. The painting is 'complete' and held meaningful to the extent that it is then taken as a resolution or integration of matters that originate essentially outside the work - in the range of initial concerns and matters brought to it - and to which the work refers me. I understand the painting as a set of informational cues that are made available for reading, and in reading them (i.e. in taking them as information) I lose sight of the work materially as an object - in the way that I lose sight of the printed word on the page when I read it for its meaning. In such circumstances I find that my looking is not held significantly by the work itself, but is directed by it to the information to which I take it to be referring. Effectively, the painting sets up and then answers its own questions, giving me the role of noticing and following what's happening. Once grasped in understanding, my attention quickly falls away to a kind of minor curiosity about the things I notice. Continued looking becomes an appreciative dwelling on the variety of local and detailed matters that I may seize on and that reflect largely my own preoccupations and preferences.

My sense, then, of this earlier painting ( Time's Pretzel ) is of something complete but not objectified in the sense that I want to get at. At the same time I think that it represents a level of engagement that is often highly valued precisely because of the way it makes itself available for reading. Often, for example, it's implied when people speak of their ability to 'relate' to a given painting when what's meant is that they are able to accommodate it within their own projected terms of reference or the more specific terms of reference that the painting sets up for them. Terms in either case essentially separable from the work as object. I'm proposing, then, a different relation towards the more recent work - work more fully objectified- and I'm suggesting that in this work such separating out of meaning from the painting is not invited, and indeed is actively resisted. Such work presents me with the experience of my own initial blankness in the face of my efforts to grasp it, since while highly specified materially, it lacks the specificity required for reading information. As a consequence, attention is held very closely to experiencing the work at the level of a material presence.

In the 'Volunteers', originating concerns and matters of their making (the working protocols) are not experienced as foreground matters, and my attention is not directed by them to specific readings of these paintings. They are a presence here but not explicitly a presence. I'm aware of them more as matters of a background practice than as featured aspects of the paintings proper.

In relation to the 'Volunteers' I do not think of the protocols as instructions that inform my reading, but see them as procedural rules relating to the practice - they are a set of minimal and unassertive givens that in the absence of a governing idea are needed to move things along within the practice. They involve nothing clever or unusual, nothing hidden, and I make the point that what matters is their neutrality and ordinariness. My immediate impression is of a strong sense of this work's matter-of-factness. These paintings present themselves straightforwardly as something given and as occasions for experience. In front of them what I find is that, against this sense of their straightforwardness, my experience of engaging with them is not a simple matter of accommodating them. They resist my attempts to place them in my understanding.

Their achievement as 'objectified' rests, I think, on their meeting two conditions that are not felt as compatible: while resisting efforts made to read them and render them transparent as ideas or information, they must at the same time present a strong sense of their identity and coherence as objects. One might say that while they are highly specified materially, as objects, at the level of information they are decidedly non-specific. Where 'resolution' in a painting points to the experience of closure and completion, my experience of these paintings is of work that's been brought to a condition where competing perceptual requirements made upon it are held together and in tension. This condition is, of course, unique in any given work, and as a consequence my experience when faced by such a work is of its real-time presence for me and of something that I can neither fully grasp nor turn away from.

This shift of emphasis and reading regarding protocols and practice (i.e. from instruction to procedural rule) does not reflect a choice made in the making of the work. It is not a change of emphasis that's been decided on and cannot therefore be said to reflect the artist's (or our own) capacity to determine meaning in the work. It reflects, rather, I think, a different possibility for meaning that belongs to work itself. This is the possibility that - through work and working - meaning may be arrived at and established. This is an important part of what I understand 'objectified' to mean, and I am claiming that such a possibility for meaning is distinct from our capacity to use work as a vehicle to carry and make evident our intentions or pre-existing plans. When successful, it is as if the work manages to effectively disconnect itself from all partial matters that have in-formed it and to arrive as it were 'unannounced' - cut off from them - an object, a thing. Artists themselves may sometimes speak of their own surprise at what they have produced.

If it is true that transparency to understanding provides the model and ideal for much that is produced in painting and in art generally, perhaps, then, this is so because of the way we habitually talk about it and represent the work as understanding to ourselves. The best of these paintings speak to me of an opposite concern. The working process might be said to aim away from transparency towards a state of increased opacity and resistance in the work. These paintings, I think, are opaque with meaning.

In my view the effort made in the practice of these recent paintings is in part, at least, an effort to resist the temptation to bring work to completion or conceptual 'closure' through the imposition of ideas upon it. In the absence of the signposts we rely on to provide conceptual steerage through a work, it is the practice itself as a material activity that becomes the central focus. What's expressed concretely in the practice is a confidence that through activity we can engender purposes and may come to know them - the sense of 'only when we find it will we know what we were searching for'. When the practice 'holds', when closure is resisted, then our customary view of practice as a means driven by specific purposes and ends, gives way to a view of it as something else, something that cannot know itself except (sometimes) in retrospect.

All that's extraordinary about the 'Volunteers' is found, I believe, in the fact that they arrive as objects from a most concrete practice and participation in this possibility for meaning and for purpose found in retrospect. As I've suggested, all else (the means) are very ordinary. My sense of matter-of-factness reflects this ordinariness and the emphasis the practice lays on the need to stay close to the most immediate and 'to hand' matters of a determinedly material engagement. Concerns are the immediate concerns raised in doing things, and matters that arise are maintained in a condition that invites their use and reuse as part of an ongoing activity.

Directed less by too specific thoughts of 'making a painting', the activity seems to me to be more an activity geared to keeping things in motion in the practice - in this case more akin perhaps to an activity of 'making material' - and aimed at establishing involvement at this practical level. The relationship towards material is distinct from that of a relationship towards material-as-medium for use as vehicle - i.e. to carry something else . The protocols I've described already as procedural rules operate in a way that is analogous to the way in which rules function in a game, as constraints needed to bring focus to activity but not in themselves intended to determine what takes place, nor to be the focus of what's seen. As constraints, the rules (the protocols) are not prescriptions.

How such matters of a working practice stand in relation to these paintings is a question I've raised in terms of different works and my experience of their specific or non-specific meaning. I've indicated that this bears importantly on the distinction I make regarding the differing status of these works as more or less objectified, and I would like now to pursue this thought a little further.

Broadly speaking, we imagine that paintings emerge through a more or less mysterious process and are brought into the light of day. This is to say that we imagine them being brought to a state of increasing specificity through the working process. The model is pervasive and colours many aspects of our thinking about art generally. But is it what we find? Clearly I'm suggesting that at least in the more recent works of Billington the model is confusing, and I belief the confusion lies in our habit of mistaking meaning for the specificity of information. The distinction to be made is between information that's specific, and work's necessarily specific character materially. I've already suggested how as information carriers the 'Volunteers' are highly non-specific: as information I cannot grasp them as meaningful at all.

On the other hand, when thought of as material objects, I make the point that they are necessarily specific. It does not follow from this that work has established itself materially - I'm suggesting only that it can, and pointing to the fact that work is more than simply incidentally a material activity.

 

 



Time's Pretzel, 102 x 107 cms, acrylic, paper, grp, 2005

Volunteer 2, 115 x 78 cms, acrylic, paper, grp, 2005

What is a material practice if not a series of specific moves, often very small moves, and often repeated? Such moves may look or feel decisive because they are specific, and as such they may lend the illusion of a purposeful activity. Perhaps a necessary illusion to help the artist move work along, but essentially an illusion to support the working practice and not the work itself. There is a strangeness to the thought that one works through a series of such small and materially specific moves to arrive at something which turns out to be in terms of information - highly non-specific, an opposite progression from the one described.

In order to reinforce such thoughts, I make reference to the idea of a map. A map is something functional and clearly designed to carry specific information. One can imagine an indefinite number of maps, all different but all carrying essentially the same information without loss of meaning. What is important is the information carried, and to the extent that the map is read as information, the map as a material object is irrelevant and disappears. The map materially is 'used up' in our reading of it as information. This seems to me the opposite of what happens when looking at a painting such as Volunteer 2, and I would argue an opposite ambition for painting generally. The painting does not have a single or particular function, but at the level that it's worked and presented it is nonetheless very highly specified. For a painting to establish itself and make itself available as an object, it must resist our effort to render it transparent to our understanding and insist as a material presence in the face of our tendency to want to read it as information. It must on the one hand present itself as something meaningful and coherent, and on the other not allow itself to be 'used up' in the effort we make as part of our own effort to understand, to accommodate it as specific meaning.

I'd like to turn now to a notion of practice as 'rehearsal', and more particularly to an idea of the earlier work as standing in a relation of 'rehearsal' in respect to the more recent work. It is important to say that I intend neither to dismiss the work done earlier (as mere rehearsals), nor to suggest that they were made as such. I want to propose a sense of rehearsal through which more interesting thoughts connecting earlier and later work may emerge. This is to say more interesting than simply noticing their obvious similarities.

The sense of 'rehearsal' that I want to get at is not a specialist sense of it, it's just not the usual one. It's the sense that we refer to when we speak, for example, of young children playing and 'rehearsing' things in play. What is meant is that in some way play prepares a child for something else - the child for later life - and this it does at the level of experiences gained rather than by instruction.

There are several aspects of this idea of rehearsal that I want to note, and I note them with an eye to their relevance to the thoughts on practice I've been developing. The first is that although this sense of 'rehearsal' as preparation may be true, it is not at all what the child understands him- or herself to be doing when playing. It is only later and from the vantage point of a position gained through the activity (of play or work) that it becomes possible to look back and see earlier involvements within a wider behavioural context of 'rehearsal'.

Secondly, rehearsal as seen as an important aspect of our process of growth and developing understanding implies some sense of acting and behaving in the world.Such growth and understanding may not mean an explicit or an intellectual grasp of things. An important part of learning through experience is that it involves repetition. Repetition matters as part of our ability to generalise from experience by developing some sense that differing and particular instances may be usefully brought together and some sense of underlying similarity and meaningfulness discovered.

Finally, we must note, of course, that rehearsal is a behaviour not confined to childhood.

I want to say that 'rehearsal' signifies that aspect of a working practice which is as much perhaps a some where as a some thing - a place, a rehearsal space where moves are made and things are given air. A space intended to admit a much broader range of behaviours than those associated with our normal purposeful activity. In an important shift away from the view of practice as a means aimed towards an end, a rehearsal space represents a kind of holding space that lends both place - (a some where ) - and importance to behaviours that would otherwise have none. Rehearsal rehearses things - holds them and keeps them live outside our usual need to give them an immediate place and meaning. The idea of rehearsal acknowledges and picks up the fact that much goes at the level of experience that is not immediately available to us, and it allows us to make contact with this aspect of experience. Practice as rehearsal represents a level of involvement, 'but which cannot know itself except in retrospect', it's where things are able to be handled without a full perspective on them and it's only later, when looking back, that we might come to see what could not be seen before. In terms of painting, such a position is in my view represented by work that is objectified.

Billington's 'Volunteers' are related to the practice and to past work, so much is obvious, and we may say that they come out of it. Past work in-forms them. At the same time they   have a sense of disconnection. The best work stands without need of support from prior knowledge. The earlier work does not predict the later work, better perhaps to say that it makes room for it, prepares in some way for its possibility.

It occurs to me to note how little my thoughts about these paintings prepare me for looking at the work itself. An account of experience is no substitute for experience itself. I referred earlier to the experience of an initial blankness in front of them; a result, perhaps, of my habitual support systems for understanding failing me and dropping away. The painting, through its own sense of coherence and meaningfulness, invites me and at the same time denies all access to it that would appropriate it in understanding, and I'm brought into the immediacy of the present moment that the painting both sponsors and completely occupies. This immediacy, which is belied by all that has been done in fact to bring it about, is part of my experience of the painting's 'disconnection' that I've spoken of, and I feel the blankness and immediacy together as a shock. A shock but not dramatic: more perhaps like being emptied or at a loss - without obvious resources to draw on.

The shock is like the small shock of recognition - like recognizing a face in the street, but without knowing who it is. We both know and at the same time don't know something, and it's reality and being there is what presses most upon us. Unable to refer elsewhere or to 'look things up', we cannot turn away from what is in front of us in an effort to translate experience into a more handleable knowing, and we are held by what's there in the real-time of our own experiencing.

2006