FERNAND DELIGNY
Autism and its "WAY OF BEING OUTSIDE OF LANGUAGE"
To act for nothing, the endless movement, that is at the limit of what we normatively understand by productivity.
MARLON MULLEN
Marlon Mullen, artista autista y con afasia expresiva (dificultad para producir lenguaje hablado, manual o escrito).
Formas cerradas, superpuestas, entrelazadas / Bloques de color-forma / Colores sin variaciones en valor / Pinceladas texturas
El acto de pintar como performance que no proviene ni regresa a la lectura (lenguaje). (Sasha Frere-Jones, Artforum, Abril 2019, Vol. 5, nº8)
Marlon Muller, Untitled (P3201), 2014, acrílico sobre lienzo, 61 x 61 cm, Jack Fisher Gallery.
PAINTING AND CRITICAL THINKING
“The new pedagogy has been endorsed mostly by younger painting professors but a few geezers too, who see painting as best learned through critical thinking, a method borrowed from literature and the social sciences.
The approach benefits disciplines based in words, and I use it myself when teaching modern art history and humanities seminars. But it’s a disaster when used to teach painting, […]
Applied to painting, critical thinking too often ends up calling into question the very medium—a deconstructionist impulse that particularly sabotages beginning students. Playing baseball or tennis requires accepting the game as a whole, and so does painting. But unlike baseball or tennis, painting is an open-ended pursuit without any numerical victory or defeat. It’s fraught with subjectivity and uncertainty. It is, as an artist I know has said, one semi-mistaken brushstroke after another applied until a kind of truce against the possibility of a perfect painting is reached.
With today’s identity-conscious students wanting, right off the bat, to express in paint ideas about anything from gender crossing to wealth inequality to global political oppression, competence in painting’s traditional skills has become almost a no-go zone. Painting professors have retreated to merely “supporting” and “nurturing” student painters, asking only that students “articulate” what they’re trying to do — that is, to retroactively apply critical thinking to their works. As a result, a lot of students leave painting courses prematurely feeling good about themselves because they’re able to talk some pretty good contemporary smack about art. But few have learned much about painting.”
(Laurie Fendrich. Excerpts from How critical thinking sabotages painting, 2016, twocoatsofpaint)
JUAN USLÉ Y EL PELIGRO DEL EXCESO DE REFLEXIÓN SEMÁNTICA
“No creo que las obras anteriores carecieran de ligazones a lo vital. Pero quizá en algunas ocasiones la especialización del lenguaje, sobre todo cuando va precedida de un exceso de reflexión semántica, conlleva una pérdida de riesgo, que desemboca en una carencia de pasión a la hora de ejecutar la obra.
Pasión y riesgo que he intentado recuperar, persiguiendo un mayor diálogo, un mayor intercambio, sobretodo en lo gestual y en la propia acción de pintar. […]
El discurso y la vivencia coinciden en el momento de pintar.”
(Juan Uslé, “Pasos y palabras”, p. 14)