detail (detail)
This paper will explore different ways of looking at painting contained within the thinking process behind (detail). The exhibition developed from the scrutiny involved in looking at paintings in distinct circumstances; the studio, gallery, in various forms of reproduction and from the point of view of another art form, in this case cinema. In keeping with the ethos of the show I will flit between several different ideas and subjects, including how my painting practice informed curatorial decisions, through to ideas such as looking close up, the reproduced painting and collage. I will go on to discuss parallels between the ‘eye’ of a painter and the idea of ‘eyes’ of cinema. I aim to show that there is something particular to the way of looking, in both painting and film, one which is away from the main event.
Over the last few years I have been producing several series of works that have dealt with ideas around the reproduced painting In
Transitory Paintings, I use reproductions of figurative paintings normally found in auction catalogues; as they pass from private owner to private owner and are only seen by a public for a brief moment when the pop up at auction, I cut a series of triangles away from the reproduced painting to leave an image that both contains the original in fragments spread over the skeletal structure and also abstracts it.
In ReconFigure Paintings, the figure in historical figurative paintings is replaced parasitically by my painted geometric structure, to open up alternative ways of looking. It was born from when I look at paintings my eye wanders off from the main focus, usually the figure and looks to and focuses on other things; the hills in the background hold more interest to me than Mona Lisa’s smile, or the edge of the stretcher and how the canvas has been attached in las Meninas is just as captivating as the gaze of Valasquez or the mirrored Royal Couple.
By painting over the figure, I sort to take the attention away from the figure to other parts of the reproduced painting or to start to conjure up possibilities for what or who might be below in the mind of the

viewer; whilst also creating a tension between the original and reproduction, the representational and the abstract and so on.
(detail) moved the use of reproduced paintings and ways of looking, from a painting practice into that of the curatorial. It features photographs of close ups from 118 different paintings selected by the artists who created them, with what constituted a detail also being left for the artists to decide. These details were printed and displayed en-masse in the gallery. The exhibition is both a group show of 118 artists, and a room-sized collage.
As we know a reproduced painting is fundamentally different to how a painting is primarily experienced in the flesh, a reproduction can never reproduce the experience of actually seeing a painting.
However the reproduced close-up can allow us to get closer to an experience of actually being in front of the painting, than a whole image of the painting, it allows us to give attention to the brush strokes, surface and explore the minutiae of the painting, as in this piece from (detail) by Thomas Wright. Kenneth Clark’s book, One
Hundred Details From the National Gallery is a precursor to (detail), being arguably the first context where the notion of the photographic detail of painting was explored in depth. The premise of the book was to pair paintings from across genre, geography and time, with an emphasis by Clark on bringing out beauty and to create analogies and contrasts.
Clark recognised, in 1938, that as a culture, we increasingly don’t look at pictures carefully enough and saw a power in the photographic detail to enable us to value patient scrutiny. He wrote that, “They are, in fact, an aid to appreciation more valuable, because more concrete than the numerous books on how to look at pictures they fulfil one of the first functions of criticism by presenting familiar material from a fresh point of view.” (In Clark, 2008, p. 7) This idea of the detail of the reproduced painting offering a new perspective is still prevalent today, the close up is seen across different contexts, the guardian tests our knowledge in a weekly quiz, social media teams with glimpses of works by painters showing new works in the studio to James Elkin’s enlightening insights in books such as What
Painting Is

Perhaps in the same manner as some passages from Elkin’s book and
In a more extreme way than Clark form of close up, Malcolm Morley has claimed that looking at a painting under a microscope changed his approach to painting; saying, “…that’s really where the energy of the painting was – in all those tiny strokes. I realized I wanted to see through and into, instead of across.” (Bonnet & Mangion 2010, p. 18)
This is brilliantly illustrated in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in a scene where the delinquent teenagers choose to go to a gallery to look at art as they skip school! Cameron Fry appears to ‘zone out’ when looking at A Sunday on La Grande Jette. The camera increasingly zooms into the painting, going beyond Seraut’s dots into the weave of the canvas, as a metaphor for the character’s state of mind. Painting is something that has much more beneath the surface and the activity of really looking offers a space for thought, meaning and other (as yet unknown) possibilities. In a gallery I often start up close to a picture, as when painting in the studio and then move in and out, sometimes imagining what could lie potentially beyond the frame.
In Grids, Rosalind Krauss talked of how a window frame limits our view of the landscape, whilst confirming our certainty that the world continues beyond it. Krauss also wrote that, primarily, Modernist paintings that use the grid, only present, in her words “…a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame.” (In
Krauss, 1997, p. 18) I would argue that this could be equally true of most paintings, rarely is a painting so complete that the frame fully contains it and the mind cannot expand possibilities beyond the composition.
Like the window frame, the photographs in the exhibition are each an image themselves that we know does continues beyond it’s edge, as we know that they are a fragment of the original painting, as illustrated in my own contribution.
Based on our knowledge of the painting this is either known or unknown, to be imagined or ignored. So the photographs in (detail) are taken from the original paintings by each of the 118 artists, but they are also removed from the context of the original,

as we can see here in this work by Dominic Shepherd, the image of the painting is changed when we see first the detail from the exhibition, which could be read as a complete composition. to when we see the actual painting
In each case we are seeing an image created by Shepherd, on the right a photograph of the painting he has created, and on the left a photograph of the detail he selected of the painting at the same size; but the context is changed by what and how much we see. By making the images all the same size and shape, then there is another sort of equalising and reading of the images.
When seen on mass in a grid, they hint at an almost infinite amount of possibilities in the connections created between images. This is akin to how we process and make choices in an increasingly image saturated world, the way we see images online, in shops and on the streets is becoming more than ever a complex collage of information for us to make sense of.
Collage as a mind-set has increasingly become something filtered across contemporary art practices, including of course painting; the idea of collage in (detail), is extended beyond the arrangement of artworks in a space, into the changing placement of these artworks and the overall tone of the exhibition as it moves from venue to venue. In Bangkok the distinctive existing framework on the walls dictated the number of artists that would be in the exhibition and also decreed in this instance the images shape and size so that each fitted into the panels. The placement of works in this case was decided by someone else.
In London the order was arranged by pulling names out of a hat and the height of the gallery dictated the size of the squared images so that they hung 4 deep in the space to create a grid that filled all the walls, resulting in surprising, unplanned partners for each image.
In Lincoln the images remained the same size as London but were released from the grid and from necessarily being the right way up.
The feel for the hang was conceived with another curator, to try to conjure the artist’s movement of images on a flat surface when trying to create collaged compositions. The eye of the viewer constantly darts back and forth; fragments become the whole and vice versa.

(detail) is not an exhibition of paintings, it is an exhibition about painting. A consistent response to (detail) has been that it has made people want to see actual paintings, perhaps ironically more so than if it had been a show full of ‘paintings’. This both confirms Benjamin’s notion of the aura of the original artwork, but also extends it. I would argue that the reproduction can also make you desire a painting more than you might if the original was actually there. In the case of
(detail), the absence of the original paintings, whilst being almost there by being printed reproductions of details, perhaps makes the original more wanted, in the same way that a crossed out word makes you want to read it even more. In his essay ‘What do pictures want?’ W J T Mitchell speculates whether a picture can have a kind of mastery over the viewer.
Mitchell quotes from Michael Fried’s paper, Absorption and
Theatricality, “a painting had first to attract the beholder, then to arrest and finally to enthral the beholder, that is a painting had to call someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move”.
Mitchell immediately adds that “the paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyse the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture in what might be called.“ the Medusa affect”(In Mitchell, 2005, p36). This creates a strange position on how we look at paintings, especially as
Mitchell goes on to conclude that paintings do not want any thing from us apart from to be asked what they want! The Medusa effect
Mitchell talks off and the ability of a painting to paralyse a viewer is a familiar one to me.
For me this power of painting and how the viewer becomes transfixed by the experience of looking, is intrinsically linked to the notion of the suspension of disbelief of the cinema. Like in a gallery, the loaded space of the cinema allows the audience to step out from the immediate surroundings and enter into the film space, the film can mesmerize and apparently displace the viewer’s presence to that of the narrative of the film. Not only can painting (art) and film both transfix a viewer, but there is also something akin to how both can allow the eye to wander or to take in and notice details around the main action, we pick up on these details and they inform our viewing,

even if we are only subconsciously noticing them, we are drinking them all in
In this scene from one of the most painterly of film director’s, Alfred
Hitchcock, the camera swings around a flat, the eye takes in all sorts of incidental details; the green of Jimmie Stewart’s top against the orange curtains, to the coffee pot on the coffee table, to the night outside, to the pictures on the wall, to the white washing hanging in the all white kitchen, the streak of purple and orange creates something like an abstract expressionist painting and so on. The way we can look at film is similar to the experience of looking at painting in the studio and the gallery, the eye darts and takes in all this visual information. The film, like Mitchell’s notion of pictures, does not want anything, but we benefit from noticing and asking questions of it, to try to unlock meaning. As you will have just noticed, this is actually the painter David Reed’s version of Vertigo, where his work, Painting
#496 has been inserted into his perfect location for his work, the bedroom, and specifically in this case the bedroom of the characters
Scottie from Vertigo, as shown here and also in a parallel work, featuring Judy’s bedroom. I am reminded, in a context removed from what Morley meant, of his desire of wanting to see through and into; to actually get into and inhabit a work. In fact this is the second version that Reed has made of this work,
The first created in 1994 featured a different work in Scottie’s bedroom, Painting #297. The film is usually show as an installation featuring the video playing on a monitor in front of a reproduction of the bed with Reed’s painting that features in the scene hanging above it.
A newer version is currently on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof. As
Reed explains, “I wanted to make it clear that the bedroom was not done for just one painting but that several, or perhaps any, painting of the right size could be inserted into the bedroom. I didn’t want it to seem that the color or forms in some way made this the only painting that fit into the bedroom. Originally the insertions were made in video tapes of “Vertigo”. I’ve just updated the versions as the technology improved. I like it that there are versions with several paintings.” End quote; I am much taken with how this also places
‘pure’ painting into an arena of collage and of testing, not of finality.
Somehow the changing of paintings by Reed in the Vertigo work also

fits with many of the film’s themes around representation, mistaken identity and substitution.
Reed has consistently cited the presence and influence of the cinematic in his paintings, something seen in things such as the stretcher paralleling film formats, the sweep of gesture being akin to camera movement and in the montage-like use of build up and editing of marks. Reed’s insertion of his paintings into Vertigo creates a directly seen relationship between cinema and painting, but this is something inherent in much of his work form the last two decades.
There is for me something about the films of Dziga Vertov and his inventive use of the camera and of montage that is aligned to the composition of Reed’s paintings and beyond this to the ‘eye’ of the film director mirroring that of the painter, who sees the whole through details. Vertov’s idea of the Kino-Eye is intrinsic to this as seen in his famous proclamation:
“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” (In Michelson, 1984, p. 17)
This buys into the notion that Vertov saw the camera as more perfect than the human eye for, in his words, ”the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space.” (In Michelson, 1984, p. 15)
However the Kino-Eye is not simply the view of mechanical camera lens. Vertov saw the Kino-eye as -
Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film with the camera) + kino-organization (I edit).” (In
Michelson, 1984, p. 87)
Importantly this puts the Kino-eye away from the camera and the machine and back into the focus of the person who creates, I SEE, I
WRITE, I EDIT. This to me links it back to the artist; the artist sees and notices, they ‘write’ with what they create and they, along with the curator, ‘edit’ through their decisions over what is then seen and with what.
Here we see the camera and the camera-man kino-writing this scene of every day life in an extraordinary way, then something even more extraordinary happens, Vertov reveals film for what it is, still images being shown very quickly. The details of life that the Man With A
Movie Camera depicts are together just as much, if not more, ‘whole’ than more established forms of narrative and his isolating of

individual frames pulls us out from our normal way of seeing film.
Vertov shows us in this clip all three of the components of the Kino
Eye equation- kino-seeing -kino-writing - kino-organization.
Like the film editor seen in a moment, the projectionist is acutely aware of the individual frames of film when they handle, make up and project. They also have a unique and rather strange way of viewing films, something I have experienced first hand; peering through a scratched, dirty window, the big screen appears miniature from the booth. The clattering roar of the projectors drowns out any semblance of a soundtrack and the narrative becomes deeply fractured and mixed up with other films, as the projectionist dart from projector to projector to change reels. As the end of the reel approaches the projectionist forensically examines the film, keeping a watchful eye out for the cue-dots as Ed Norton explains here.
Play fight club clip
A projectionist for example would see the film, zoomed in and in part, like this.
As opposed to how the audience sees the film like this. Looking out for cue dots or cigarette burns would allow the projectionist to get to know (often forgettable) parts of a film in intimate detail and I was struck by how insignificant moments can become potent when they are removed from the narrative of a film.
Frames is a series of hundred’s of different paintings on 35mm celluloid filmstrip, made in part as a response to the projectionist’s way of looking. Each painting features an image of one frame taken from a film. Each single image was taken from hundreds of thousands of possibilities that appear for 1/24 of second during the length of each film and was chosen as not being memorable to the viewer and outside the overall narrative, something thats not noticed.
A projectionist work is best done when no one notices that they are there; their presence is only visible when an error occurs such as when the film breaks or burns. Maybe this is a little like the role of a film director, curator, or artist. We don’t necessarily notice the person or people behind a film, exhibition or a painting when it is done well, we do notice them and see their lack of ability or mistakes when something is done badly. However my point is more that if the stance of the projectionist, for example, can be adopted when

viewing a painting and maybe noticing beyond the main event to instead look around a little, then something else can be opened up.
The film playing at present is Stefan Zeyen’s Farewell, for me a beautiful example of what can happen when you examine and go in close and how that can open up new possibilities, As the artists says
“The film image is continually scaled up in such a way that the departing movement is completely neutralized and the protagonists retain their original size. Because of the physical zoom into the film material the image degrades continually. Film grain increases, sharpness decreases, until the image gets completely absorbed in the film material.” It is, for me inherently painterly, both from the standpoint of making and the type of looking that I have been trying to articulate. Like looking at a painting, it shows what is there already, but also shows what can happen if you keeping looking, if you start to look more intensely or from a different position or perspective. We are left with an image that is both microscopic and macroscopic. I think that looking at and using what is already there, to then add to through combinations or additions, by isolating parts, or by zooming in on a detail, and so on, allows for new and exciting ways of looking. (detail) as an exhibition combined many ideas around what and how it means to look at a painting, but ultimately the adoption of a projectionist’s eye in looking at painting is the one that I am most intrigued by and perhaps offers ground for further thought. Maybe this correlates with Morley seeing new possibilities after looking at paintings under a microscope, to try to “see through and into.” This seems to be a good position for both the activity of painting and looking at painting.
References
Mitchell, W T J, What do pictures want?, University of Chicago Press,
2005
Searle, A, Unbound, South Bank Centre, 1994
Verhagen, E, 2010, The Painting of Gerard Gasiorowski circa 1970: A
Comparative Reading, In Gerard Gasiorowski, ed. by Bonnet, F &
Mangion, E, 2010, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag how is it for essays in books with harvard?
Lasker, J, Complete essays 1984-1998, Edgewise Press, 1998
Steeds, L, Exhibition, Whitechapel, 2014
Clark, K, One Hundred Details From the National Gallery, National
Gallery, 2008
Haldane, J B S, Possible Worlds, Chatto and Windus, 1930

Michelson, A, Kino Eye: The Xritings of Dziga Vertov, Pluto Press,
1984
Douglas, C, Transmitter / Receiver, Hayward Publishing, 2011
Beaumont Newhall, “Moving Pictures”; in The Cinematic, ed. David
Campany, (London, Whitechapel Publications, 2007)
Rosalind Krauss, 1997, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, London, MIT Press
Dorothea Von Hantlemann, “30 July 2010 – 22 October 2010”: in
Phillip Parreno: Films 1987-2010, eds. Karen Marta and Kathryn
Rattee, (London, Serpentine Gallery, 2010)