Page 14 - Studio International - July August 1973

Nouns, gerunds, and participial adjectives means of moral support and the art market a
viable means of economic support. But no
Emile de Antonio's Painters painting film-maker, not even with a film about painters
and the art world, can subsist on the patronage
Mich Tuchmann of the art market. Even to be a succès d'estime a
commercial film must be seen by more people
than have sold or purchased all the paintings of
all the painters who appear in Painters
Painting.
`My friends the painters, Jasper Johns and
Rauschenberg and Frank Stella may make a
million dollars a year, which they do . . . But
you know they reach a small corporate and
social elite. They're talking to three thousand
people. When my film fails and I don't reach
a wide audience I still am reaching one
hundred times, one thousand times that number
of people'.
The meaning of 'painting', the gerund,
subsumes that fact, because 'painting' is a
composite social activity which comprises
creative production by whatever refinement of
technique, distribution, exhibition, reference to
an artistic tradition, ever-changing relations of
the supply of raw materials and the physical
and economic means to work, the establishment
of the parameters of taste and the perception of
beauty, the sale of product (and the creation of
surplus value) and the ideological summation of
these relations which in any generation goes
under the name of criticism. These relations are
common in essence, if not in detail, to painters
in a particular society in a particular time and
serve variously to alienate the artist from his
own work. From these relations which constitute
the practice of painting and the struggle to
overcome alienation arise the painter's
perceptions of his own life, his own complex
Painters Painting is an intentionally ambiguous Pollock in action, is not used, though many practice inside and outside his studio, his whole
motion picture title. With the words printed other present participles, 'sitting', 'drinking', world with its artistic predecessors and
vertically on the screen and no apostrophe `reminiscing', `criticizing, 'interviewing', cohorts, and the abstract cognitive significance
appearing after 'painters', 'painting' might be `cropping', 'editing', and 'making history', he assigns to these perceptions. Whatever form
any of three parts of speech, a noun, a gerund, even art history, are. he may give those meanings in his work,
or a participial adjective. As a preface to What does de Antonio mean by 'painters' ? whatever largely idiosyncratic, psychological
explaining for me the equally ambiguous title of His use of 'painters' is the common or garden matter he adds to the mixture, the complex
his previous film, Millhouse: A White Comedy, variety, a person engaged in the practice of social practice of 'painting', the gerund, is
Emile de Antonio paraphrased the critic, painting. But what does de Antonio mean by latent in the painted surface, its content, its
William Empson, saying, 'Ambiguity is the act `painting' ? That is what makes the title scale, just as, or better, to the very degree that
of an idiot', and then with mock resentment at ambiguous and the film a personal (political) perception is. Paintings per se cannot be
my having asked him to explain, he added, recollection of the New York art world, 1940 explained by reduction to 'historically
`and I shall now proceed to be an idiot'. to 1970, the years covered by the Henry interpretable forms' (Sontag) but perceptive
Still de Antonio prides himself on his titles Geldzahler show at the Metropolitan Museum frameworks can.
and purposefully composes them as mysteries. in 1970. To the artist, the painter, whose livelihood,
If ambiguity is the act of an idiot, attempting to `Painting', the noun — there is no trouble beyond the sense of mere sustenance, depends
explain a multi-dimensional and there — an object, painted, unique as a work of on the conception of art as an authentic,
sophisticated one like Painters Painting may be art. As Walter Benjamin explained it, it is valuable entity in the age of mechanical
the task of a fool. Yet working through this valuable in our capitalist society for its reproduction, this sociological definition of his
puzzle is the key to understanding this new authenticity and uniqueness. Of course the essentially conservative practice is an unwelcome
documentary film about New York artists, opposite is the case with the motion picture as observation. But that is it in black and white,
because the use of colour in de Antonio's first Benjamin pointed out. There is no film print Painters Painting's black and white.
colour film is tied to that grammatical more authentic than any other; uniqueness is Of course, if the dialectic of practice and
ambiguity as well as being expressive of a not a salient attribute. Even making paintings perception is true as a conception of the
critical manner of comprehension. so grand in scale as to challenge the notion genesis of painters' thought, it is equally true
Colour for the noun 'painting'. Black and of the painting as possessable within the for film-makers. Like 'painting', 'film-making'
white for the gerund, 'painting', and for bourgeois home, successful painters — and too, is a gerund which names a veritable
`painters'. 'Painting', the participial adjective, Painters Painting deals only with financially complex of creative and distributive
except for the Hans Namuth photos of Jackson successful painters — find the art world a viable relationships. And, like painting, film-making