ART WRITING
ARTICLES
Stranger Tools
Art in America, March 2018
The sometimes odd devices painters use can alter both their art and their consciousness.
by Raphael Rubinstein
LAST FALL I VISITED the studio of Houston painter Paul Kremer. Although it had been two or three years since I stopped by to see what he was up to, the delay wasn’t from any lack of interest. On the contrary, I’ve become increasingly impressed by Kremer’s large-scale work: bold compositions whose hard-edge, single-color shapes (generally red-orange, black, or white) oscillate between flat abstraction and illusionistic geometry, evoking monumental architecture as well as broken-off glacier sections. Kremer’s uninflected surfaces and smooth contours mark him as an heir of Ellsworth Kelly, while his historicism (he is well aware that his paintings recall not only Kelly but a large swath of 1960s art and design) and his visual humor (using spatial illusion to gently mock formalist austerity) bear the imprint of postmodernism. Kremer’s subversive wit, along with his passion for art history, is even more evident in Great Art in Ugly Rooms, his widely viewed Tumblr blog featuring famous paintings digitally inserted into unlikely interiors.
During my visit, which I made in the company of another Houston painter, my partner, Heather Bause, I encountered several surprises. First, the motifs dominating many of the new paintings depart from the rectilinear shapes of Kremer’s previous work. Featuring multiple biomorphic, automatist forms that suggest everything from jellyfish to armchairs to falling human bodies, the recent paintings favor a figure-ground structure rather than relying on expanses of color. How did Kremer make these forms? There are no visible traces of a paintbrush; paint flow appears to have determined the shapes, but apart from changes in orientation or color, every shape on a given canvas is nearly identical, which seems impossible unless the artist were using some kind of reproduction technique like silkscreening. But that was not the case: each shape was clearly made from paint poured directly onto white canvas.
It was only when Kremer directed our attention to a large apparatus in the middle of the studio that his new process became clear. Built from wood and standing about ten feet high and six feet wide, the elaborate easel allows Kremer to rotate his canvases a full 360 degrees while also tilting them as much as 180 degrees. Once attached to this device, a canvas becomes a plane that can swivel in nearly every direction, and this mobility makes possible the repeating automatist forms: the shapes are identical (or nearly so) because they have been created simultaneously in response to the same physical conditions. To make these works, Kremer deposits globs of acrylic paint at various spots on the canvas and then, while the paint is still fluid, rotates and tilts the canvas to direct the color where he wants it to go. He controls the paint without ever touching it.
An unorthodox tool forces you to pay attention, to ask yourself why you are doing what you do, to experiment.
Of course, Kremer is hardly the first artist to direct the flow of paint by tilting his canvas ( think of the American expat James Bishop, for instance) or the first painter to custom design a movable easel (Willem de Kooning had one built for his Long Island studio, though it only rotates, much like that of New York painter Gary Stephan), but he may be unique in using the easel as his primary, even sole, painting tool for an entire body of work.
At the end of 2017, Kremer made his new method public by curating a group exhibition at the. Library Street Collective, an alternative space in Detroit. Featuring himself and three other artists (Mark Flood, Momo, and Jason Revok) who also employ self-invented tools to create their work, “Machine Show” presented numerous paintings along with the implements used to make them, sometimes side by side. Best known, perhaps, for his “downtown line” of 2006, an eight-mile-long ribbon of orange paint that snaked across lower Manhattan spelling out the artist’s name a single time, Momo has recently been using a homemade winch to slowly tear away layers from large-scale drawings executed on sheets of glued-down paper.
Flood uses a multi-brush tool to create moire-like patterns that often appear alongside more ornate patterns made by imprinting the canvas with paintsoaked pieces of lace. In a statement for “Machine Show,” the artist, who often wields self-deprecation as a means of social critique, confessed:
My secret is that I use super-brushes of my own design. They’re three to six feet long, and have dozens of brushes joined together, on a metal armature that’s bent like stair-steps. So every stroke I make is like 12 strokes, evenly spaced … if I do it right. I sit my fat ass on a rolling metal cart, and my sad assistants earn their dough by rolling me slowly back and forth before the painting. I make little up and down movements with the super-brush, until the painting looks good. When I first tried the cart technique, I thought all I would get out of it was a funny picture for Instagram. But it works.
Revok, who first emerged as an influential Los Angeles graffiti artist, has developed an interesting array of painting tools, including a rack-like apparatus that simultaneously activates a dozen cans of spray paint and a large wooden Spirograph that he uses to make spray paintings . The centerpiece o f the show-which, unfortunately, I was unable to see-was a raised platform crowded with two of Kremer’s custom easels (one that tilts, one on rockers) and a dozen or so of his paintings in various sizes.What, I began to wonder after my studio visit, are Kremer’s mobile-easel paintings about? Should they be read as critiques of automatist freedom, along the lines of Rauschenberg’s twin pieces Factum I and Factum II? In contrast to those iconic works, none of Kremer’s paintings contain copied shapes; the forms are duplicates of one another rather than iterations of an original. One has only to glance at Great Art in Ugly Rooms to understand that Kremer enjoys undermining cultural sanctimony (a Diebenkorn in a garishly painted public restroom, a Caravaggio in a Starbucks). But rather than being driven by any polemical intention, Kremer’s adoption of a moving easel (designed and constructed by his father-in-law, Roy Kerstiens, a retired engineer) was motivated by his wish to find new ways of making a painting, new things to do with his materials. More specifically, having previously planned out paintings pixel by pixel on a computer, he now wanted to surrender a degree of control. Painters have been designing novel tools-or repurposing existing ones-for a long time. It could even be argued that the history of painting since the middle of the twentieth century is, to a large degree, the history of new tools: Franz Kline‘s opaque projector, Lucio Fontana‘s knife, Niki de Saint Phalle‘s rifle, Yves Klein‘s naked bodies, Giuseppe (Pinot) Gallizio‘s “industrial painting” machine, Jasper Johns’s stencils, Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, Miriam Schapiro’s sewing machine, Howardena Pindell’s hole punch, Noel Dolla’s smoking tapers, Claude Viallat’s sponge, Dan Christensen’s and Katharina Grosse’s spray guns, Jules Olitski’s and Gerhard Richter’s squeegees, Beatriz Milhazes’s plastic sheets, Ed Clark’s push broom, the rollers employed by Peter Halley and Christopher Wool, the drinking straw that Mary Heilmann occasionally uses to blow paint around, the electric fans that Lydia Dona has pointed at her drips to deflect them, the hot gun Bruce Pearson uses to carve into his Styrofoam supports, Mark Bradford’s power sanders, a paint-extruding “pen” employed by Pedro Barbeito, the washing machine that Bause often runs her stained unstretched canvases through to produce unforeseen painterly events. Added to this wild array of machines and hand tools are the digital technologies that for several decades have been providing artists with a vast new range of tools, from the basic drawing software that Albert Oehlen harnessed for his paintings in the 1990s to the more sophisticated digital imaging lately embraced by Laura Owens, the 3D printer employed by Fabian Marcaccio to fabricate sculptural elements he fuses onto his paintings, the iPad that David Hockney has enthusiastically embraced, and the touchscreen applications Amy Sillman has been using since 2011 to make animations that, in turn, inform, and sometimes invade, her drawings and paintings.
As I compile this partial list of painters and their tools, I am aware that there are many other artists who have not built their own tools or repurposed existing ones. For me, their work isn’t any less compelling, any less capable of innovation. Does this mean that tools don’t really matter, that it’s immaterial whether an artist is using a Princeton sable brush or some weird contraption no one has ever seen before? Getting paint onto canvas in a new way can be done with nothing more elaborate than a paintbrush, or a plastic bucket, or fingers. One could even make a painting with no tools at all by simply leaving a canvas outside exposed to the elements. And yet, it’s very clear that the discovery or creation of a tool can sometimes substantially change the work of an artist. That’s the case with two of the most emblematic tool-inventing painters: Jack Whitten and Bernard Frize. Around 1970, Whitten, who died this January at the age of seventy-eight, had a breakthrough in his work thanks to a self-designed tool that he called the “Developer.” By the end of the ’60s, he was dissatisfied with the gesture based abstractions he had been making; his gallery was enthusiastic about them but for Whitten they were derivative and backward looking. As he explained to Robert Storr in 2014, “I made the vow that I’m gonna stop doing those gestural paintings altogether, and I had to find a way to get around Bill de Kooning. Bill de Kooning had trained my hand.”
Once you do something in art, it seems that it becomes a trade mark. Ryman’s white or Reinhard’s black. I wanted something different—for painting to hold as many colors as possible; such a proposition is not always realizable. But it became a specific problem that many of the paintings deal with: how can I get as many colors as possible in one brush stroke?2
Chromatically, Frize’s paintings are dazzling, so much so that it can take viewers a little while to appreciate their technical complexity, which sometimes requires not only multiple brushes but also a team of assistants to handle them. Interestingly, speed was crucial for both Whitten and Frize when they began using their bricolage tools. Speaking about the Developer, Whitten recalled:
Over an extended period of time I might go backward and forward in layers. But the crucial part took place in three seconds, two seconds. I took the Abstract Expressionist gesture and amplified it. That speed removes it from relational thinking to non-relational thinking. Because when that tool I was using would fall across the canvas—it did not allow for relational thought. 3
Frize is blunter: “To me, a painting has to be done quickly to be able to show its process, to be clear, without tricks. I don’t like the mess of painting; it has to be done most of the time in one go—otherwise I get bored.”4 Like other tools, painters’ devices offer time—and labor-saving ways to streamline production, but that is rarely the initial impetus for their use, nor is it their ultimate significance. What painters seem to value even more than efficiency is the mechanical intervention in the process, allowing some degree of agency to pass from the artist to the implement. As Whitten once put it: “The tool is a sort of medium, you might say, that stands between me and the painting.”5
“MACHINE SHOW” CAME at a time when tools seemed to be on the minds of many thinkers. In his 2015 book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature philosopher Alva Noe proposes that we consider all forms of art-making a species of tool use, while the contemporary philosophical movement Object-Oriented Ontology ( 0 0 0 ) arose initially as a reaction against the discussion of tools in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). In this well-known passage, which comes in section 15 of the book under the heading of “The Being of Beings Encountered in the Surrounding Worlds,” Heidegger argues that when we use a tool such as a hammer we are unaware of it as an object-the hammer “withdraws” from our consciousness, becoming invisible and wholly subsumed into the task of hammering. Only when a hammer, or any tool, ceases to function (for instance, by breaking) do we begin to perceive it as a thing. He further contends that an essential aspect of tools is that they exist and function within a system of associations and relations—the usefulness of a hammer, for instance, cannot be separated from its relation to nails, wood, and the entire realm of construction. Thus, there is “no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is. “6
What this might have to do with art becomes clearer—to the extent that Heidegger is ever clear—in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” an essay in which he elaborates his ideas about tools while analyzing a Vincent van Gogh painting of a pair of old shoes. Embarking on a speculative reverie, Heidegger describes them as a “pair of peasant shoes,” which allows him to posit a “peasant woman [who] wears her shoes in the field.”7 (In a highly critical essay, Meyer Schapiro later pointed out that the shoes in the painting almost certainly belonged to van Gogh himself rather than some imagined peasant woman, and, worse, that Heidegger’s article is permeated by Nazi-tinged imagery.8) Building on his earlier description of tools in Being and Time ( 1927), Heidegger, who first drafted “The Origin of the Work of Art” between 1935 and 1937 and reworked it after the war, states that the woman senses “without noticing or reflecting” how the shoes embody the conditions of her hard-working life. The shoes are invisible to her, just like a hammer in use is invisible.
No external observer, Heidegger argues, can truly apprehend the essence of the shoes, because that property comes into play only when they are in use, and the condition of being in use makes them invisible as objects. The moment we (or the peasant woman) notice them, they lose the quality that defines them, their shoe-ness, their way of being embedded in a network of functional relations.
The only way to access the essence of a useful thing explicitly, says the philosopher, is through art. When we contemplate van Gogh’s great painting, we recognize the simultaneous status of the shoes as things, as useful objects, and as components of a larger system (a system that encompasses all aspects of a peasant’s life, from farming technology to rural social structures to a sense of place). All this has been discovered, Heidegger points out, “not by a description and explanation of a pair of shoes actually present; not by a report about the process of making shoes; and also not by the observation of the actual use of shoes occurring here and there; but only by bringing ourselves before Van Gogh’s painting . . . . The art work lets us know what shoes are in truth.”9
Generally, the tool passage in Being and Time is read as favoring practical lived experience over theoretical abstraction, or championing networks of meaning over isolated objects, but Graham Harman, the founder of Object-Oriented Ontology, turns the argument in another direction. For him, Heidegger’s error, and that of many philosophers before and after, was to offer accounts of reality that were anthropocentric, that sought to understand objects solely in relation to human subjects. Object-Oriented Ontology, like its allied movement, Speculative Realism, refuses to privilege the human, arguing instead that the relationship between objects is as important, and as slippery, as the relationship of humans to objects. Harman is thus able to offer a broad-some would say too broad-characterization of tools:
The tool is a real function or effect, an invisible sun radiating its energies into the world before ever coming to view. In this way, the world is an infrastructure of equipment already at work, of tool-beings unleashing their forces upon us just as savagely or flirtatiously as they duel with one another. Insofar as the vast majority of these tools remain unknown to us, and were certainly not invented by us (for example, our brains and our blood cells), it can hardly be said that we ‘use’ them in the strict sense of the term. 10
In his lectures and articles Harman has frequently referenced art and art theory, from Clement Greenberg to Nicolas Bourriaud, and a number of art critics have identified contemporary artworks that are in sympathy with OOO’s project of flattening out any supposed gulf between the worlds of humans and things. Others have strenuously rejected what they see as OOO’s and Speculative Realism’s abdication of ethical concerns and its underlying pessimism, most notably, perhaps, British art critic J.J. Charlesworth:
What speculative realism thinks of as its novel philosophical insights-that humans are no exception to things, that there should be no distinction between human and nonhuman ‘actants,’ and that the subject-object hierarchy in philosophy should be abolished—become the philosophical cheerleaders for a contemporary culture that denounces the idea that human beings can—even should—actively reshape the world in their own interests. 11
In contrast to Harman’s chilly sci-fi vision of dueling tool-beings, Noe (who draws heavily on Heidegger’s tool theory even though he mentions it only in passing) offers a warm and fuzzy, decidedly hum anist vision. In Strange Tools, which I first read on the recommendation of Pedro Barbeito, Noe describes basic human functions like dancing, singing, and drawing pictures as “organized activities.” At a higher level, he argues, these activities, which he considers to be technologies, are “put on display,” which then allows them to “loop back” and “reorganize” the primary activity. Thus, choreography reorganizes dancing, visual art reorganizes picture-making, and so forth. It is these practices that Noe calls “strange tools.” What makes them strange, he says, is that they prevent us from “taking the background of our familiar technologies for granted.” 12 As he explains:
Art is interested in removing tools (in my extended sense) from their settings and thus in making them strange and, in making them strange, bringing out the ways and textures of the embedding that has been taken for granted. A work of art is a strange tool, an alien implement. We make strange tools to investigate ourselves.13
If art is a strange tool, how should we think of the too ls used in its making? Can they also be “strange,” helping to “reorganize” the medium, preventing the artist from taking his or her medium for granted? When an individual artist resorts to a novel art-making device there is always some specific problem that the new tool addresses, even if its adoption is accidental. One artist wants to make the working process faster, another wants to remove the hand, a third hopes to achieve a certain kind of texture, but the ubiquity of new and strange tools, the frequency with which painters seek alternatives to the brush, suggests that there is more at stake than the solution of technical problems.
Availing yourself of an unconventional tool and putting it into action is a way of wrenching yourself out of habitual behavior. It’s not that you can’t be an innovative, original painter when using an old-fashioned paintbrush, but when you find yourself making a painting with a washing machine or a 3D printer or an easel that can turn every which way, you are compelled to think afresh about what you are doing, and you are less likely to restrict yourself to familiar territory. The primary reason for this is that an unorthodox tool—at least until its use becomes routine—does not withdraw from consciousness like Heidegger’s hammer. Instead, it forces you to pay attention to it, to experiment with it, to ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing; it changes your relationship to the medium you are working in, to the world you inhabit as an artist. It makes things unpredictable.
Thinking about the impact of new tools I recall an episode from the life of New York painter and critic Sidney Tillim (1925-2001). Often at odds with whatever was the prevailing artistic style, Tillim spent much of the 1960s and 1970s stubbornly devoted to history painting, producing canvases on subjects ranging from the American Revolution to the Patty Hearst kidnapping. All this changed when in 1987 he accidentally knocked over a bucket of paint in his cluttered Bleecker Street studio. Grabbing a roll of paper towels to clean up the mess, Tillim noticed how rapidly the towels absorbed the paint. Suddenly, he got the wild notion of applying one of the paint-soaked towels to a nearby blank canvas. When he removed the towel, he found himself surprised and fascinated by the imprint it left behind. The effect so impressed him that he abruptly changed his painting mode from figuration to abstraction, and commenced a decade or more of imprinting canvases with paint-drenched paper towels. As devices, Tillim’s humble off-the-shelf paper towels and Paul Kremer’s elaborately engineered mobile easel couldn’t be more dissimilar, but as strange tools their impact is identical: total artistic transformation.
The author would like to thank Rice University philosophy professor Steven Crowell for reading this article in manuscript and for sharing his insights into Heidegger’s tool theory.
1. Quoted in Robert Storr, “In Conversation with Jack Whitten,” in Kathryn Kanjo et al. Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2015, p. 55.
2. Quoted in David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with 12 Contemporary Abstract Artists, New York and London, Routledge, 2002, p. 98.
3. “Jack Whitten by Kenneth Goldsmith,” Bomb, July 1994, bombmagazine.org.
4. Quoted in Ryan, Talking Painting, p. 96.
5. “Jack Whitten by Kenneth Goldsmith.”
6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 64.
7. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row, 1971, p. 33.
8. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” 1968, reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York, George Braziller, 1998, pp. 135-42.
9. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 35.
10. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago, Open Court, 2002, p. 20.
11. J.J. Charlesworth, “The End of Human Experience,” ArtReview, Summer 2015, artreview.com. See also Dylan Kerr, “What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?: A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World,” Apr. 8, 2016, artspace.com.
12. Alva Noe, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, New York, Hill and Wang, 2015, p. 100.
13. Ibid., p. 30.