Painter Without A Pause

Josh Smith’s work appeared on the scene just over five years ago. It is remarkable that in that space of time, the few texts devoted to it immediately grasped its crucial characteristics. All agreed on the strategic nature of Smith’s output, on the use of his own signature as subject, on the importance of his pictorial procedures, on the work’s aesthetic kinships, and on the clear-mindedness of his ideas." While one ’s first encounter with Smith’s paintings might be somewhat of a shock, it would seem that, after the work’s initial surprise, it makes itself understood through the most intentional of ambiguities, all of which stem from its historical anchoring and formal intelligence.

Since the mid-1990s, painting has arguably been dominated by two major tendencies: one figurative (John Currin, Luc Tuymans, Neo Rauch) and the other abstract (Anselm Reyle, Sarah Morris, Thomas Scheibitz). While the figurative tendency is tinged with melancholy and a sense of nostalgia, the abstract one may be characterized by its decorative elegance, both rely on a conceptual base that distances the authors from their output. This strategy lends their works a certain neutrality embodied in a restrained style, a style under control. In this way they share an anti-expressionist position that has served as a vaccine against any suspicion of regression and allowed them to effect a reconciliation between different positions that, in the eighties, opposed one another with an ideological virulence but has since disappeared.

Seen in this shifting context, the painting of Smith – but also the way in which the artist envisions his output and its installation - was immediately perceived as an event, insofar as it was explicitly seeking to open up a different pictorial space. There was undoubtedly no better symbolic means of signifying this wish for a break than using his signature to structure the space of the picture. The previous generation had in fact bypassed the question of the signature and of style in order to focus on method. With the letters of his name occupying center stage in all his early works, he clearly announced his intention of abolishing that distance between the work and its author in order to explore, conversely, the contemporary possibility of conveying an emotion through a personal pictorial style.

Stretched, shortened, twisted, dissolved, and/or decomposed, the “Josh Smith” signature structures the picture while providing an ideal solution to the question of the work’s subject and author. These paintings, with titles like GET DOWN, GET BROWN (2003), 5TH AVE + 116th ST. (2003), and GRAY PAINTING (2002), also use the painter’s own name to avoid the trap of choosing between abstraction and figuration. Establishing this duality, Smith is then free to explore chromatic harmonies and disharmonies, dispersing these eight letters of the alphabet from their base structure in language to the contradictory, impulsive “movements” that animate his compositions from within. The palette, with its dark, oscillating grays and browns, furthers this sense of an inner space. Smith’s execution is rapid; it is simultaneously tense and casual, with much of the raw improvisational energy of the working process left showing. The result is an oeuvre that makes somewhat offhanded reference to a broad range of predecessors, from Cubism and German Expressionism to the painting of Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, and Christopher Wool, and finally the work of Franz West and Dieter Roth. From these artists, Smith has learned to use mistakes, failure, and impotence as a means of liberating form and injecting a sense of possibility into the painting process.

These artists are found at the extreme end of the modern project and can perhaps even be seen to have written its final, elegiac chapter in order to launch a critique of the project to which they themselves belong, though they refuse membership. As demonstrated by the outright abandonment of this path towards initiation by the following generation of nineties painters, it was not easy to write a sequel to such an undertaking, based partly on the total collapse of the modernist project. Moreover, the freedom with which Smith has drawn on modern painting’s vocabulary was not in the cards for Wool or Kippenberger, who were more focused, out of necessity, on liberating themselves from a stifling modernist orthodoxy. The very history of painting that weighed so heavily on many of his elders, like a relentless threat of castration, has been transformed by Smith into a repertory of forms free of copyright. However, Smith neither indulges in a blind appropriation of styles originated by others, nor does he eschew the ambition to produce a body of work that, in its very innovation, manifests an awareness of what came before.

Smith’s interest in Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat echoes that ambition. In the eighties, while artists like Eric Fischi, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel used “tradition” with a certain complacency, those two artists had managed the remarkable feat of producing a new kind of painting by jubilantly taking over a liberated pictorial space and inventing a formal vocabulary that engaged directly with the period.

With its explicit references to the history of painting, its “expressive” style, its signature effects, and its ambiguous subjectivity, the work of Smith may appear to be out of time, especially since he refuses to load his paintings with explicitly contemporary signs and subjects. Like many of the artists to whom he refers—Kirchner, Picasso, Haring, Wool—Smith does not use painting to illustrate a project. Instead he “thinks in paint,” as evidenced by the sheer quantity of works he produces—a phenomenon deliberately displayed in his installations. The picture is not conceived as a closed site, nor as something completed, but merely as one stage in a continuous process of creation.

On the occasion of his first exhibition at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York in 2007, Smith’s controversial decision to re-hang the entire exhibition with a second, entirely different set of paintings, some of which had been produced after the official opening, was received by some as a cynical gesture and by others as a critique of the inflated art market. I see it as Smith’s way of taking the opportunity—at the moment his work was making its entry into a major gallery alongside artists with whom he was often associated, like Wool and Oehlen—to state a major difference between his and their practices. The decision to title the exhibition “Abstraction” underscores his weariness of misrepresentation and / or association with painters of the eighties. Furthermore, all of Smith’s pictures had the same format and were much more modest than those of Wool and Oehlen. They were, in fact, associated with his Palettes, canvases on which he literally wipes the remaining paint from his brushes while executing other paintings. In the Palette series, the other “composed” pictures find their mirror image, as formless and unarticulated muddy smears of pigment. Along with the unprecedented re-installation of the exhibition, the modest format of the works and the undermining nature of the Palettes signifies that Smith was not seeking to offer a tasteful collection of “masterpieces” to an eager clientele, but to impart to every element and by-product of his process a portion of the overall creative tension that drives the work. Compared to Wool or Oehlen, Smith’s work resembles a naive, crude grimace but in its aggressive nonchalance, it finds a fresh sense of conflict and vitality that lends it a lethal effectiveness. While his predecessors subverted modernist assumptions from within the space of the picture, Smith furthers this imperative beyond the limits of the picture frame by applying it to methods of production and distribution.

For many exhibitions, as in Memphis (Power House, 2006), Oslo (Standard, 2006), London (Jonathan Viner Gallery, 2007), and Brussels (Galerie Catherine Bastide, 2006/08), the artist executes his works on site in the space of one or two weeks, sometimes making as many as a hundred pictures though he only has room to show twenty. He distributes thousands of photocopied drawings in books published in editions of twenty or more. He makes and prints posters himself, which he then recycles as vehicles for paintings or elements in his collages. In recent months, Smith has started using plywood supports for collages and paintings. Light and inexpensive, he keeps hundreds in his studio for spontaneous experimentation with silkscreening techniques, paint, bits of paper found in the street, and even newspapers. A few months ago, Smith began to produce digital photographs in order to document the rapidly fluctuating surfaces of his works; he has begun to collage these cheap low-resolution images onto the surfaces of other works. It is this hyper-productivity that defines the work and that is crucial for the artist in a world that often equates quality with rarity. Smith is not interested in heightening the value of his work by limiting the quantity of his output.

The impenetrable boundary separating “originals” from “reproductions,” which has compromised painting ever since screen-printing was introduced in the sixties, is undermined from within by Smith’s proliferation of originals. This strategy allows the artist to emancipate himself from the hierarchical value system that distinguishes major from minor works. Smith succeeds in offering an alternative to the constant flow of products and images by producing a different kind of flow that cracks the value system wide open. In the case of Smith’s output, authenticity does not lie in the triumphant subjectivity of signature and expressiveness, but in a frenzied search whereby subject and work are constantly co-produced and modified. It is because the works carry within them the intensity and urgency of this flow that their number will never threaten their power. Quite the contrary.