Gestures

The Gesture of Painting

61 the Gesture of Painting If you watch a painter at work, you seem to be watching a process in which various bodies (that of the painter, his tools, the pigments, and the canvas) move in some fundamentally obscure way that “results” in a painting. Still, you don’t have the feeling of having understood the process. And so, behind the observed movement, you project a further, invisible movement of an invisible body, perhaps the “painter’s intention” or his “idea of the painting to be painted.” From such an approach to painting, which can serve as an example of the occidental approach to the world, come familiar attempts to explain the phenomena we seem to be observing , the difficulties with which arise at the point where “idea” is equated with “painting” or “subject” with “object” (or whatever one wants to call this spurious dialectical pair). But this looks less and less like a genuine problem. Rather, we are dealing with a question that has been improperly posed because the phenomenon to be explained has not been properly observed . The suspicion arises that in observing the act of painting, one does not actually see what he thinks he sees. That is a tricky assertion. Would observing the act of painting properly just once be enough to dispel the problem of “body–soul” or “mind–matter” that has been consecrated by centuries and by religions, philosophies, and ideologies? Yes, it would be enough, if it were successful. The question is just this: how can you really observe something properly? Can you observe anything without having some kind of point of view? Don’t you always see what you believe you see? So if at first the demand to finally look at painting properly seemed banal, obvious, now it seems impossible. The truth lies in between. In fact, it is very difficult not to see things as the dominant point of view demands. 62 the GestUre of PaintinG But it is not impossible. There are methods of bracketing out prejudices of observation, even if these prejudices lie very deep in the observer. It is symptomatic of the crisis in which the occidental perspective finds itself that there are such methods and that they are being applied everywhere. What you see when you observe the act of painting are synchronized movements, that is, the “gesture of painting.” At its most basic, “something ” moves. But the moment you try to give “something” a name, you are in trouble. You do not see how the painter moves his body: you just think you see it. You don’t see the body of the painter, still less the painter that’s moving it. You see a moving body one could perhaps call “hand–brush” and another that one could call “right foot,” and you see how these two movements are coordinated through their engagement with other bodies that can’t be designated any more closely. We believe we see that hand and foot “belong together” and the brush came later, but we believe we see that because we believe we know it. In fact, we see that hand and brush “belong together” and that the foot moves as a function of the “hand–brush” connection, like a tool. We don’t permit ourselves to see this because we believe we know better. We think we know that the brush, and not the foot, is the tool of the invisible painter. We believe we know the foot is an organ of the body. We get nowhere. The first thing we must do to actually see the gesture of painting is to dispense with the catalog of moving bodies involved in the gesture. Such a catalog is in fact “metaphysical” in the sense of presuming bodies that are located somewhere outside the gesture and move only within it. This can be seen if we try to suggest some sort of catalog and then use it. For example, (1) the body of the painter, (2) a brush, (3) a tube of oil paint, (4) a canvas. The following phases of the gesture can be distinguished: (A) “The painter opens the tube.” We see two hands, a stopper, pigment gushing out, and a number of bodies that are only indirectly engaged in the gesture. The hands, the stopper, the pigment were not anticipated in the catalog. (B) “The painter loads some pigment on the brush.” We see a body called “hand–brush–pigment” that was not anticipated in the catalog...