Page 49 - Studio International - November 1971

immediacy of paint texture, in favour of an each figurative image, the range of colours used representing reality as it is about real
idiom at first sight improbable for serious new to paint it, the sequence in which these were appearances, he concentrates in his work on the
painting in 1971. He employs patient and used, and the dates of the painting activity. A act of presentation. The act of presentation is
exacting academic technique to give detailed central subject of the painting is thus the act of itself an act of invention. Not only is the
accuracy to copies of pre-existing painting itself, in its decision-making as much substance of a representational image re-made
representational images usually derived from as in its manual aspect. (in pigment rather than emulsion or printer's
postcards. Through isolation and the peculiar That this is so is underlined by some of ink), but by isolation and juxtaposition its
concentration of their reconstruction, these Phillips's strangest and most beautiful pictures, meaning and its range of meaning are radically
images communicate a sense of mystery and also, the Farbenverzeichnis (colour catalogues) and altered. Phillips thus comments in practical
for all their quietness, emotion. Their smooth the Terminal Greys. Apart from their identifying terms on that mutability of meaning inherent in
legibility and almost unnatural clarity are built legends, these paintings consist of at first sight all visual facts, on which the postcard industry so
of a fractured tissue of obsessively individual arbitrary sequences of colour, ordered in ruthlessly capitalizes. His work is at once an
brushmarks; each image curiously speaks as parallel bands or crosses; in fact, they constitute obsessive translation of received material and an
much of the intellectual act and physical records of the colours used by Phillips in opening of that material to fresh interpretation.
process of painting it as it does of the scene it concurrent paintings; interval, colour and A picture postcard of a particular view
depicts. Yet each painting is a record of the colour-sequence are all determined by chance. records not only topography but a particular
process that produced it in a much more The degree to which the traditional idea of a moment in time. The scenes of ordinary life
thorough and programmed way than this; for painting as a finely-worked out composition or as which reach Phillips's paintings by way of the
images are augmented by bands of colour and the vehicle of illusionistic representation or postcard gain their peculiar immediacy and
by lettering, and these have equal status as abstraction has been abandoned is clarified by the vivid sense of a special segment of time from the
images. With Phillips's varied, deliberated curiously attenuated formats of some of these combination of his concentrated process of
brushstrokes, and his use of a wide range of works, which are sometimes not dissimilar to transmission with an initial revelation that is all
academic styles (sometimes within a single painted rods or planks, and which operate, the more convincing because made through the
work), these devices spell out with a dogged, whatever their proportions, as neutral shafts of chance, unwitting, impersonal agency of the
literalist insistence the source and subject of colour. Of course as in a factory-produced postcard photographer. This double vividness
5 Warhol silkscreen portrait or any work by not only exposes the bizarreness of real-life
LeWitt, the interaction between the human behaviour in ordinary situations but
predetermined aspects of such a work (the also, since the brief moments seen so sharply
physical and other limits within which Phillips reach us only through acts of contrivance (one
allows chance to operate) and the actual marks of them of extended duration) brings a sense of
made is a revelation of the artist's personal, the tragic irretrievability of past moments and of
idiosyncratic temperament. And works like the the inexorable passage of time.
Terminal Greys are mysterious meditations on This is at least equally true when the
time, on making, on distinctness and merging, on moment depicted is one of relative inactivity,
space and even on movement. But in considering concerned with memories and with waiting, as
those paintings by Phillips in which allusive in the cameos of elderly people in public
pictures and texts are prominent, the bias gardens which so many cards contain. Among
towards the registering of sheer visual, physical the human activities recorded in picture
and procedural fact which these relatively austere postcards it is not only ceremonial events that
works in particular demonstrate should be have the character of ritual. However
constantly borne in mind. For however striking spontaneously performed, actions like sitting on
as 'heraldic' tableau or however ambiguous in a park bench, standing in contemplation of a
mood or subject a work by Phillips may be, monument or congregating to sunbathe are
concern with the artist's process in its fullest modes of social conduct ingrained in the culture.
sense is a central element of its content. By revealing a general human concern, easily
Most of the representational images in inferred from postcards, with the correct
Phillips's work are details transposed from performance of obsessive actions, Phillips's
contemporary topographical picture postcards. work emphasizes the ritualistic aspect of
Such cards are sold under the pretence of ordinary life. The specific moments and
conveying a reasonably accurate idea of the configurations shown in his work thus acquire,
appearance of the scenes identified in their in the very process of their detailed disclosure,
captions. Yet to those who objectively see them a curiously abstract quality.
(not only as concepts but also as marks and Through isolating the details of ritual (thus
shapes), many of them present a world so exotic, compounding ambiguity of context and the
improbable and contrived, and so obsessed with flexibility of its interpretation), Phillips
certain situations and categories of subject, as demonstrates that the presentation of human
to constitute an 'invisible' neo-reality in our activity made in his painting might easily be
midst, the Emperor's New Clothes in reverse. made in other modes. In so far as they imply
Phillips's work exposes this other reality. He performance, his paintings operate also as
reveals the extremes of artifice and gratuitous notional theatre or music (often connecting with
interference which the public effortlessly treat as music also in the more general sense of uses of
unsullied documentation, but enlarges this colour, tone or interval that are interchangeable
theme, beyond mere commentary on the between the two disciplines). All serious works
postcard industry, into an exposition of his of art operate on many levels at once, but
own artifice in applying paint to canvas. Phillips's paintings are also close to music
Because he rightly sees the postcard as being as and theatre (and also to many postcards)
much a repository of information about means of in giving deliberate prominence to the

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