Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters
Organized By: Gareth James
Artists: BANK, Simon Bedwell, J. St. Bernard, Daniel Buren, Merlin Carpenter, Nicolás Guagnini,Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Lucy McKenzie, R.H. Quaytman, Blake Rayne, John Russell, Reena Spaulings, Cheyney Thompson
Like the son of William Tell, standing there nervously with an apple perched on his head, caught between The State and its brutal enforcement of the Law(metonymically represented by a hat on a pole) and the distended individualism of his father, Orchard makes an attempt at a painting exhibition.
Perhaps now more than any other period in recent memory, the presumption of an immaculate self-identity between the objects that go by the name "painting" and the subjects given the name "painter" goes unquestioned. While we might welcome the new readiness to allow the practice of painting to generate its own historical and contemporary concerns, the new accord runs the risk of unreasonably delimiting the kinds of questions which may be posed in its name. Famously for Debord, the question was not whether filmmaker, writer, theoretician, anarchist was the better name to describe his practice, but how to refuse that nomination itself. Painters Without Paintings & Paintings Without Painters brings together the production of 14 artists and collaborative groups for whom facile identifications remain questionable.
