This is a revised and expanded version of the first essay, updated on the 9th December. I have been very conscious not to undermine James Merrigan’s arguments made in response to my first posted essay, or to alter or reposition any substantive elements that may lead to confusion by my new additions here. My defence: it’s the painter’s curse of fiddling about with things.
I pen this partly in defence of a painter’s work I’ve long admired, and partly in sheer frustration at an art writer whom I also admire, and for what he’s trying to achieve. I care about what James writes about, because I really believe he cares about what he writes about. He makes compelling arguments in our noisy time of big claims art, and the noise he generates is always worth listening to, particularly when it comes to painting matters. Painting really matters to him, I know.
Hence my surprise at the strong dislike he expresses, almost to the point of churlishness, around Innes’s recent show ‘St. Sebastian’ at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. I do not wish to unpick the content of James’ essay ‘When the Revolution Becomes a Regime’, because a lot of it makes really good sense in a generalised ‘the problems with formalist abstraction’ sort of way. However for him to say that his gripe is not with the Innes paintings per se, but with the broader painting tendency they belong to, I find highly questionable. The well timed punches of the essay are aimed specifically at the Innes paintings, let’s not be under any illusions about that. This is the thing I can’t let go unchallenged. It’s not that my own subjective sensibilities have been bruised and offended, having spent two separate and long visits (on the same day) looking at and being captivated by those Innes paintings. For how boring most art opinion has become, with everyone liking everything and posting inane comments on Instagram, usually along the lines of: “I love your work (insert name here)!!”, “Oh thanks (insert name here)!!” coming back the artist’s reply. I would normally find James’ polemic refreshing, as I think this is really what he is trying to drag us out of, the inanity of Insta art commentary. It’s good to see him swinging at some of the big players in the painting world, but I don’t like sucker punches. The paintings of Callum Innes are, to many painters, things that you want to keep looking at, again and again and again. In those initial encounters with his paintings, I don’t give two hoots about what they’re bringing to the debate. You just look. But James is a critic, so of course he must cut quickly to the chase. Zizek and Freud are all very well (Zizek I find utterly impenetrable and useless, especially from a painter’s point of view) but neither of them are going to get you out of trouble when your painting is going to shit.
So yes, I did just embrace the experience of seeing those Innes paintings in the serenity of the Kerlin space, hidden away down its side lane in Dublin, just as I had embraced on another occasion seeing paintings of his in the serenity of the massive De Pont space in Tilburg. I left both shows, around 10 years apart, feeling I had experienced something original and complex, a rare thing as far as paintings go today. My feeling was that if there is something formally to be addressed through a manner of painting, and even if this becomes an habitual pursuit, then yes, go ahead and keep painting it.
Can there yet be something more radical to challenge those Innes paintings James? I don’t know – I really don’t think that making and looking at paintings can ever be exactly like the experience of listening to Gil Scott-Heron, or reading William Burroughs or Kathy Acker. For me Painting’s interesting projects came and went in the 70s and early 80s. It was a relatively quiet affair admittedly, at the peripheral of the bigger art arena of that time which Painting had been dismissed from. When painters like Martin Kippenberger, Julian Schnabel and Peter Halley came along to suggest that theirs was a ‘sui generis’ sort of art, ready to rally the troops again on behalf of Painting, it arsed things up badly. It was then left to lone individuals such as Luc Tuymans to literally paint a pale palored version of the discipline struggling from its sickbed (although reports of its death were always greatly exaggerated I feel).
We have been going round in circles ever since (not the revolution we wanted or expected). It takes a painter like Innes to refocus the eye and mind on a more purist attitude towards Painting’s potential, one that tries to build on its history, not bury it. I accept that for some people like James, the limits of Modernism’s project are long outspent and redundant, that the foundational mothers and fathers of 20th century radical painting need to be left there if we are to not keep pointlessly repeating the old revolutions. However for me, there are some histories worth repeating, or what I mean is perpetuating.
It’s a work-in-progress idea of mine just now, that the unfulfilled revolution proper of the 70s and 80s had a lot to do with Philip Guston (for the image painters) and Agnes Martin (for the non-representational ones). Wherever that is taking me, I definitely see Innes’s work as an important and ongoing ‘building out’ from the latter’s painting project within Abstraction. This Painting Revolution may not be televised, but so long as it does not get covered by Instagram I’ll be happy.
Courbet's Tent 