That’s the tension, that’s where the traction is.
Between image and organizing principle.
—Terry Winters, interview by Nancy
Princenthal (2009)
Ontologically, traditional images are abstractions of the first order insofar as they abstract from the concrete world while technical images are abstractions of the third order: they abstract from texts which abstract from traditional images which themselves abstract from the concrete world…. Ontologically, traditional images signify phenomena whereas technical images signify concepts.
—Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of
Photography (2000)
Painting is where this new visual consciousness rose, and I think probably every evolution of it will occur in painting first. And I’ll tell you why: people can only deal with so much.
—Stan Brakhage, in conversation with Philip Taaffe (1997)
We have recently entered a new period of political and economic instability on a global scale. The collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1989 and 1990 left world capital without a viable counter or antagonist, and aggressive neoliberal policies rapidly globalized markets. As soon as the world economy became truly integrated and globalized, it became possible for it to truly fail, globally, and it did. Many now believe this world financial and economic crisis will soon be exacerbated by environmental catastrophe.
In the wake of these growing crises, the fundamentals of scientific inquiry also seem to have been shaken. According to some analysts, physics, the science of matter and energy, has been overwhelmed over the last three decades by a vast number of “string theories,” which cannot be proven or disproven by experiment, and have thus become a matter of faith.1 Physics has become more and more disconnected from the physical world, which itself appears to be disappearing. Scientists now say that 97 percent of all the stuff in the universe is invisible and almost completely unknown to us, consisting of dark matter and dark energy. It seems that Heraclitus was making an understatement when he said that nature loves to hide, and what William James called the “unseen order” has become rather terrifyingly reified.
Faced with this simultaneously disappearing and threatening environment, what’s a painter to do? If you’re Terry Winters, you go back to basic methods—“my approach is very basic; it’s like drawing or writing”2—and basic principles—“Through manual labor the haptic imagination is activated—revealing graphic expressions of vitalized geometries”3—and you take strength from what is possible:
Abstraction is a category of work and thought that is easily accessible to everybody now. Everybody understands abstract painting. Now that twentieth-century painting is finally over, everybody gets it…. I think it’s run a certain course and become part of the lexicon of what it means to be contemporary. I’m interested in how that language can be extended, and distended or torqued to address something beyond the rhetoric. To make something new, to project it into a new place.4
Refusing to remain within the inherited modernist rhetoric of abstract painting, Winters wants painting to contribute to the next iteration of that new visual consciousness. And it may be that painting is singularly well positioned to do just that. There is nothing nostalgic about making something with one’s hands—at least, not yet. Even though what it means to be human is changing, our primary experience of the world continues to be aesthetic; that is, it comes to us through the exercise of our five senses. What Winters calls “the manual imagination” will remain predominant as long as we have bodies.
But in terms of images, certainly, things have shifted significantly toward the acheiropoetic (not made by hand). What Vilém Flusser called “technical images” (comprising all photographic-based images and their digital extensions) have quantitatively overwhelmed our visual environment. Ten million images are uploaded to MySpace every day. One might argue that all images are technically “technical” (derived from technique) and that paintings and drawings are in some sense more technical than photographs or digital images, since the word derives from the Greek tekhnē, referring to art or skill. But Flusser defines the technical image as “a technological or mechanical image created by apparatus,” and apparatus as “an overarching term for a non-human agency, e.g. the camera, the computer, and the ‘apparatus’ of the State or of the market.”5
So we can distinguish between manual and machinic images, and one of the distinguishing characteristics is the intention and the level of automaticity. In the Iliad, Homer used the Greek term automatos to describe the movements of the gates of Olympus and the golden-wheeled tripods of Hephaistos, which produce results otherwise accomplished by hand.6 Over the last 150 years, projections have been that these automatic devices would someday free human beings entirely from the drudgery of physical labor, leaving us more time to expand our minds and perfect society. Many of our beliefs were transferred from the gods to technology, and theological questions have been largely displaced by what Heidegger called “The Question Concerning Technology.”7 As Avital Ronell put it, “The death of God has left us with a lot of appliances.”
We believe in technology, and we believe in technical images, and these beliefs leave us vulnerable to manipulation through apparatuses. In Flusser’s phenomenological reading of technical images, he identifies the principal feature of apparatuses:
Apparatuses were invented in order to function automatically, in other words, independently of future human involvement. This is the intention with which they were created: that the human being would be ruled out. And this intention has been successful without a doubt…. Apparatuses now function as an end in themselves, “automatically” as it were, with the single aim of maintaining and improving themselves. This rigid, unintentional, functional automaticity is what needs to be made the object of criticism.8
For Flusser, the stakes in this critical initiative are very high indeed, for it must “reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses, in order finally to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.”9 He finds hope, ultimately, in the efforts of “all those who are attempting to create a space for human intention in a world dominated by apparatuses,” and who “reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the chance necessity of death.”10
Terry Winters has drawn on all kinds of technical images over the years as source material for his paintings, drawings, and prints: anatomical images, natural history images, microscopic and telescopic images, images made with mathematical formulae or algorithms, and information systems and computer graphics. But Winters’s transformations of technical images respond to the current and rapidly changing dynamics of the visual field. He is one of the artists who made it possible for painting to renew itself as a primary means of exploration and extension of the visual field into the twenty-first century. And he did this not by ceding territory and ambition to technical images, but by growing the proprioceptive possibilities of painting and drawing as necessary knowledge. This is what sets him apart.
There is nothing automatic in Winters’s pictures. Each mark is intentional, moving from head to hand and back again, in constant feedback. From Flusser’s vantage point, Winters is infiltrating the apparatus, permeating its interstices, and refiguring the visual field. (Flusser points out that the word apparatus is derived from the Latin verb meaning “to prepare.” The apparatus is always prepared, whereas the painter is never prepared.) In the output of an apparatus, there is no feedback, so the result is automatic and ultimately autocratic. Feedback makes a different kind of progress possible, because it introduces new energy into the system.
“Ontologically,” Flusser wrote, “traditional images signify phenomena whereas technical images signify concepts.”11 Phenomena are remarkable appearances, whereas concepts are things conceived. The chain of mediation is longer with technical images. In drawing and painting, there is less interference between the maker and the thing itself—a pencil (Sanford/Design Ebony/Jet Black/Extra Smooth) or a brush or foam pad loaded with oil paint—so it is by definition more immediate.
But there is something in technical images that Terry Winters wants. Standing over a table full of drawings (Animal Associations, 2008) in his Tribeca studio, he told me, “I want to make drawings that are as clear and evident as a photograph; to make an image of something you can’t photograph as believable as a technical image.” When the endlessly reproducible photographic image lost its aura of uniqueness, it gained another: the aura of believability. As Flusser (and many others) have pointed out, this believability is based on a series of misunderstandings about the nature and operation of technical images, but that doesn’t lessen the effect.
The most persistent misunderstanding about photographs is that they have a direct relation to the real, that they are one-to-one transcriptions of reality, and the analogous misapprehension of paintings is that they are purely fictional and have no direct relation to the real.
Terry Winters’s desire for believability indicates, I think, a wish to make a certain direct connection with the contemporary viewer. In 2001, I spoke with Leon Golub about the relation between painting and photography, and he told me that he was “trying to make some connection to what is going on in the world. To make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.”12 Golub and Winters are very different kinds of painters, but they were and are both painters, through and through, and they both were and are committed to present and future relevance. Toward the end of our conversation, Golub voiced his belief that painting would only become more relevant in the future:
Painting has the capacity to send out signals, and you may be attuned to that signal at that particular moment…. [Painting] may become even more critical due to the very transience of virtually everything else. You know? As everything goes speeding by and we’re running for our lives, so to speak, painting may have staying power, for those who are susceptible to it!13
As our day-to-day communications environment grows ever more crowded and complex, the signal-to-noise ratio plummets. The signal, the sign for giving notice, is increasingly overwhelmed by the din, the nausea, of noise, and sifting for signal consumes more and more of our time.
The signal-to-noise ratio first arose as a measurement in electrical engineering and quickly migrated to other fields, especially neuroscience. In this ratio, signal refers to meaningful or desired information and noise to background interference. In digital image processing, the Rose Criterion (named after physicist Albert Rose, whose work in converting optical images to electrical signals led to the development of the modern television tube) states that a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 5 is required to be able to distinguish image features at 100 percent certainty. The term signal-to-noise was eventually picked up by hackers and quickly gained widespread use online, to refer to the ratio of useful information to fake or irrelevant data.
The image is a fossil of its evolution and hovers in the time and space of its creation.
—Klaus Kertess, “Drawing Desires,” in Terry Winters (1992)14
In Terry Winters’s work over the last decade, certain things are constant—the work in series, the central importance of drawing, the close attention to materials—but the relation between the image and the organizing principle has always been in flux. This, as he has said, is the engine, where the tension and the traction are. His prodigious drawing is constantly discovering and transforming new images, and the paintings put forms and images into play in a seemingly inexhaustible array of energetic transfers.
The seeds of the spherical and molecular forms in the paintings from Winters’s show “Knotted Graphs” at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in December 2008, can be found in paintings from 1983 and 1984 like Colony (1983), Morula I and II (1983), and Double Gravity (1984). Today, these forms remind us of stem cells at the stage of explosive embryonic growth, when all is possible. A great deal of our future on this planet appears to depend on events occurring at the microscopic level, on particles too small to see with the naked eye, moving through charged grounds. We cannot see our future, but we must imagine it.
When does something become an image? Is it when enough of it is recognized, as one of those “things the mind already knows” that Jasper Johns pointed to? Surely an image can be something previously unknown and unseen, but there must be enough in it to signal a recognition, to prepare a place for it. The image is not the organizing principle. It is an appearance. Paying attention to appearances is, or can be, at variance with the desire to organize them. The tension, and traction, is in this movement from image to organizing principle.
Ten years ago, the philosopher John Rajchman responded to the problem of the flat-bed picture plane first raised by Leo Steinberg in 1968. Steinberg, Rajchman writes, found in Robert Rauschenberg’s works a situation wherein “the picture plane abandons its appeal to upright posture and frontal vision as in the classical window on the world. Opaque, tiltable, mixing disparate elements, no longer governed by figure-ground or near-far relations of projection or Gestalt psychology, it acquires a new function: it becomes an operational device, an abstract machine….”15 Rajchman then proposed that Terry Winters’s paintings of the time, especially the “Graphic Primitives” works, were moving into a place where the “window through which one sees, or the frame within which one locates” was being eclipsed by “the table of information in which things slide back and forth, images arising from other images rather than from external things.”16
It now appears that this field of visual information that Steinberg saw behind Rauschenberg’s paintings was the first effluvium of Flusser’s apparatus, and it is this effluvium of images and information (defined by their excess) that Terry Winters now draws on, and subjects to the painting process, turning this table of information (concepts about concepts) back into a window on phenomena, through which archaic images move.
One of the things that initially attracted me to Vilém Flusser’s phenomenological analysis of technical images was his use of the word “magic” to describe the effects of images—“action at a distance.”
This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example: In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical.17
It is in this magical world that Winters’s paintings primarily function. Flusser defined an image as “a significant surface on which the elements of the image act in a magic fashion towards one another.”18 Terry Winters said, “I see the painting process as a combination of the technical and the magical—invisible forces are generated by the images, and they’re moving.”19