Aesthetic Investigations


Conceptual Painting. An artist’s
investigation. . .

Author
Katrina Blannin

Affiliation
Sara Lane Studios,

London

Abstract: On conceptual art, from a painter’s perspective.

PART 1
In her essay, ‘Conceptual Art’, from 1980 Roberta Smith quotes ‘conceptual-
ist’ Mel Bochner from the 1970s:

A doctrinaire conceptualist viewpoint would say that the two rel-
evant features of the ‘ideal conceptual work’ would be that it have
an exact linguistic correlative, that is, it could be described and
experienced in its description, and that it be infinitely repeatable.
It must have absolutely no ‘aura’, no ‘uniqueness’ to it whatso-
ever.1

The comment that Smith makes next is perhaps more puzzling: ‘Ulti-
mately, few Conceptual works achieved this ideal state, but some came close,
and in doing so achieved an unsettling blend of aesthetic purity and political
idealism.’2 What is meant by aesthetic purity is unclear but it triggers the
idea that ‘form’, even in the most ruthlessly text-based or verbal/proposal-
based artworks, was still an unavoidable, even desirable, attribute of any of
these artworks; the aesthetic arena of which had just broadened out a bit.

c© Aesthetic Investigations Vol 2, No 1 (2017), 23-32



Conceptual Painting.

Figure 1: Katrina Blannin, Four by Four, 2016. Collograph polyptych: handmade
ink on paper 20 x 20cm. Copyright artist.

Political idealism, or any kind of political didacticism, also seem to be the
wrong generic qualities to assume of these artworks. Some may have pre-
sented a central thrusting polemic but critiquing; poking fun at society and
its politics, Dada in its truest sense, might be a closer description.

You could argue that all artistic practice (including painting) is a kind of
polemical social enterprise and, whether it is the intention or not, artworks,
and often the artists themselves, are a part of society’s dialogue: its narratives
and mirror images. You could also say that all artworks have distinctly formal
attributes; that it is impossible to avoid form-based or compositional choices
and outcomes of design. Text-based or text-framed art can directly spell
out the dialectical, or perhaps more specifically socio-political, premise of a
work. Or, frustratingly for many viewers, form may be the only or primary
intended subject for discourse—frustrating because language and the lexicon
employed for such a discourse on the ‘visual’ has never been truly developed.
But whether dialogue takes place inside the studio or outside it, whether they
are easy to read or not, the inescapable originality, or form of artworks has
been generated from in<formed choices and concepts: what we read, who
we talk to—who we are. We are all part of the human context—no artist is
alone.

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Katrina Blannin

The Human Abstract was the title for an exhibition of painting organised
by artist and curator Katie Pratt who wrote that: ‘Abstractionists employ
various tacks to transpose creative impulse and thought into imagery with leg-
ibility and coherence: chance, deconstructed observation, repetition, systems
and intuition are all frequent strategies.’3 One may ask about the origins of
these ‘creative impulses’ and the nature of this ‘thought’, and about the idea
that abstract art can be of anything tangible that mirrors both the ‘simple
structures’ and the complex mechanisms ‘of modern life’; intuitively re-stated
or re-presented in non-representational form. Depending on where you are
coming from, however, the notion of abstract art is that it is cold-blooded
and unnatural unless it is obviously rooted in or derived from a figurative
image of the imagined or real world about us. But whether artworks are
non-representational, representational or something in between, the question
is about the process of abstracting. The photographer abstracts; as soon as
something is rendered two-dimensional; the painter grasps some thing in exis-
tence and recreates an alternative view—new form. So, if human abstraction
generates form then is all form conceptual?

What is conceptualism? If some sort of starting point, or seed, is a pre-
requisite for the development of a new idea (we have to start somewhere)
then does that starting point need to begin at a moment in time when a
particular configuration of mental attributes, information, notions, concerns
and desires, occurs and thereby creates a new condition for the production
of art? Is this happenstance or are we in control? Medieval philosophical
thinkers formed the radical view that universals (relations, properties) ex-
ist only in the mind: meaning is constructed internally through subjective
thought processes and not from any kind of universal determinism of objects
that exist outside it. This kind of inward looking conceptualism, where ideas
are formed individualistically and subjectively presents a rather narrow view
of where the development of ideas takes place. In the world of avant-garde
art, and in the artists’ studios, their cameras or their desk/s (-top computers):
the kitchens of creation where ideas are cooked up into new dishes, often the
idea of the self-reliant ‘genius’ chef persists—there is no desire for decisions
made by committee.

Despite the specified avoidance of form or a ‘traditional’ aesthetic, and
conceptual art was not supposed to be discussed in this way, looking back now
we can see that form is nevertheless innate. Furthermore, it would seem that
many surviving low tech objects: texts (often generated by typewriter), found
images, multiples, variables, repetitions, photographic documentation and
films have now taken on an historically situated fetishistic aged or charming
dated quality, which it most certainly did not have the original intention to
acquire.

Conceptual art is not about forms or materials, but about ideas
and meanings. It cannot be defined in terms of any medium or

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Conceptual Painting.

Figure 2: Peter Lowe, Permutations of Rows, 1968. Black and white Perspex on
wood 25 x 25cm, Courtesy of Waterhouse Dodd, London.

style but rather by the way it questions what art is. In particular,
Conceptual art challenges the traditional status of the art object
as unique, collectable or saleable. Because the work does not take
a traditional form it demands a more active response from the
viewer, indeed it could be argued that the Conceptual work of art
only truly exists in the viewer’s mental participation.4

Leafing through Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art from where this introduc-
tion comes one notes that far from being dry or dull much of the work was
visually arresting and comedically driven: either set up like a Wittgensteinian
‘game’ or riddle, or realised as a kind of theatrical performance. And therein,
surely, lies an aesthetic that it could call its own—perhaps we could call it
‘sensation’: a configuration of either linguistic or image based witticisms (di-
atribes, instructions, proposals, installations) that were designed to tweak at
the intellect but also to engage us in their structures and materialities.

Today we would argue strongly against the idea that these kinds of art-
works demand more attention than, say, a constructivist sculpture, or an
abstract expressionist painting, but what is more alarming, is that these art-

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Katrina Blannin

works were not considered to have form: and that the aesthetic purity or its
literalism is assumed to be ‘anti’ art. Conversely, now we would argue that
painting itself can be non-traditional, non-unique, demands the interaction of
the viewer and can question the status of the art object—the expanded field
is expanding.

PART 2
Constructivism is something else and has a different history. If you become
interested in the idea of construction, as an artist, then you might encounter
a contradiction to the notion that all art is abstraction: a kind of trans-
formation or transposition. In the methods of constructivism form becomes
the beginning, middle and the end: both the verb, the noun, and its own
sentence. All artworks are produced, but the real question when considering
constructivism is more specifically about construction: how and with what
are they constructed? So, if an artwork is a construction then what are the
building blocks and how will it be put together? And if so how to start?
What do we need? If the starting point is to construct in non-mimetic form
then, conceptually speaking, this is known as concrete and is the opposite
of abstraction.5 This would be the process of working with form—not with
a language/word or image based transformation (abstraction) of concepts or
ideas, and what is known as conceptual art.

In an interview, Peter Lowe, one of the participants of the Systems Group
founded in 1969, was asked: ‘The Systems Group has been described as
being involved in the promotion or practice of “syntactic art”. How would
you describe the concept of artistic syntax?’
He answers:

Jeffrey Steele proposed the word ‘syntactic’ as an alternative to, or
subtext to ‘systems’. I argued that the word ‘systems’ was prefer-
able to ‘syntactic’ since it was the more common usage. We could
have translated the term ‘art concret’ but decided not to because,
although ‘concrete’ is the antonym to ‘abstract’, it also has the
misleading connotation in English of a mix of stones, sand and
cement. Syntactic tendencies are found in most cultures whereas
Western European art is preoccupied with mimesis and symbol-
ism. I directed my work towards system and syntax because of
my dissatisfaction with abstraction, mimesis and symbolism.6

If the word ‘syntax’ means the arrangement of things in order to generate a
clearer meaning through some kind of logical order, the Systems artists never
had the intention to obfuscate and make it difficult for people to understand
and enjoy the artwork, but wanted to present something that in its declared
rationality was there to be interpreted by the viewer. Peter Lowe:

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Conceptual Painting.

There is more than one way of seeing syntactic works and this
ambiguity adds to their richness. Some people say that to un-
derstand something ruins their enjoyment. Sometimes ignorance
is bliss but understanding heightens perceptions. Viewers are en-
couraged to look at syntactic art without interpreting it in literary
or figurative terms. It is not always appropriate to look at things
as metaphor.7

So, going back to the idea of construction can we use the analogy of
the constructivist artist as builder (or the word ‘constructionist’ which some
artists preferred)—a builder with the intention of creating something concrete—
perhaps something new in the sense that it has never been seen before—not
an abstraction? So, then this builder needs to have some building blocks
with which to build. Peter Lowe describes his as ‘units’—‘how can you ‘con-
struct’ something if you haven’t got the blocks with which to do it?’ he once
exclaimed.

When or where to start and stop ordinarily besets creative enter-
prise. The Martins used permutations which contain a beginning
and an end. I invented an alternative conclusive method using
identical units. Four units combined, layer upon layer, form a
cube. This allows me to convey direction, growth and scale.8

Is one aim of systems art to eliminate all evidence of the personality of
the artist? Peter Lowe again:

Not only the Constructivists but also some of the Dadaists and
Surrealists shared this aim when they experimented with chance.
Syntactic art does not glorify idiosyncrasies of craftsmanship like
the brush mark. Bravura performances of technical skill or lack of
it are not essential. But, for better or worse, the personality of the
artist will emerge whatever systems or structures are in place.9

PART 3
Did Cézanne become, in the later paintings of his career, an abstract painter
or a constructivist painter? When Lawrence Gowing discusses Cézanne’s
‘patches’ of paint in his essay ‘Cézanne: The Logic of Organized Sensations’
he uses terms like systematisation, composition, arrangement, fragmentation,
and importantly disintegration, which he suggests was the first phase towards
the most significant development: modulation. ‘The move toward a disinte-
gration of the object in some of the most memorable works of a painter so
attached to objects is the attraction and the riddle of Cézanne’s last phase.’10

In 1866, earlier in Cézanne’s career, he had used a palette knife, for a
time, to shape his patches of paint: patches of paint with straight edges. But
although this had been done before, as Gowing says:

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Katrina Blannin

Figure 3: Jeffrey Steele, Square in Cinematic Rotation through 90 Degrees, 1960.
Gouache on paper 26cm x 36cm, Collection British Museum, London.

he instinctively knew that if this approach was to be used at all
it should be done consistently throughout the picture—and that
the handling was the picture.’ The consistency of facture that
Cézanne achieved makes a new kind of intrinsic material unity,
which links the picture not only with the material significance
of the objects, but with the common consistency of the material
world.11

A few years later, patches applied with a knife, together with new ideas
about colour differentiation, appeared in the painting L’Etang des Soeurs in
1877 and were, as Gowing suggests, crucial to the development of his method.
Gowing’s essay sets out in detail the development of a modular approach and
how Cézanne began to organise colour systematically in sequences.

For him colour modulation was the sense of the painting. . . Cézanne
himself [later] referred to the colour patches that he was using in
1905 as abstractions, and he felt them to be in need of expla-
nation. But he made it clear that they possessed a systematic
figurative function, a function which though not descriptive was
expository—the history of these expository systems of colour ap-
peared in the later watercolours and now ultimately permeated
Cézanne’s whole art.12

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Conceptual Painting.

Gowing’s analysis of Cézanne’s late paintings reveals how his thinking as
a painter translated itself into the construction of the paintings, and pro-
poses that ‘he was well aware that his mutations of colour originated as much
in theory as in observation.’ In perfect synchronicity, the theory originated
in ideas about form: ‘Modulation implies a transition through perceptible
stages. Smooth monochromatic modelling always seemed to Cézanne a falsi-
fication.’

PART 4
Extracts from an interview with Jeffrey Steele, a founder of the Systems
Group 1969:13

KB: Can you clarify the importance for ‘Systems’ art of staying with
painting—as opposed to say relief, sculpture or architecture inspired instal-
lation pieces, which became an important new vocabulary for the construc-
tionists? Why is it important to develop or advance the historically charged
process of ‘paint on canvas’?

JS: I hadn’t worked this out theoretically during the 50s and although
it seemed sometimes as if I had been producing constructivist art then in
fact I spent the whole time experimenting with how to be a painter: talking
about it and exchanging ideas with whoever would participate and avidly
looking at everything. It was a ‘given’ that painting was the thing and I
have always wanted to try to justify the supreme importance of painting.
As [Charles] Biederman said: art is the evolution of visual knowledge and
visual knowledge is knowledge. And then knowledge or cognition affects our
actions and this in turn is political. It is the fundamental question in its
widest sense. I am interested in what happens to people’s psychology and
the collective ideation or ideology borne out of encounters with painting and
imagery in all its visual manifestations: comic strips, mass media, advertising,
different sections of fine art: in fact, the whole notion of ‘Bildlichkeit’ as set
out by Feuerbach, who influenced Marx and Engels when they wrote The
German Ideology in 1846. It was Feuerbach who recognised the crucial effects
of Christian images on society. Painted images of the Madonna and Child
were for instance key to the forming of German romanticism and this impact
could not have been created by anything except through the art of painting—
and it’s inescapable—to this day! To turn one’s back on painting and all its
political effects throughout history would be foolish.

Rather than taking a stand against painting, as Anthony Hill and the
Martins were said to have done at the time, I became interested in Tachisme
and painters like Michaux and Hartung. In 1960 when I was living in Paris
I saw a group exhibition with the wonderful title ‘Antagonismes’ which in-
cluded Vasarely’s 1950s paintings and they influenced me greatly. Although
I am not a complete Vasarely apologist, (earlier and later works were infe-
rior: rather tinselly and cheap), here I could see everything: the geometric,

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Katrina Blannin

the mathematical, the Cartesian and a bid for rationality. Here was every-
thing combined from the history of painting: Poussin, Uccello, Chardin and
Watteau and crucially the pictorial architecture of Cézanne. Here you could
see the birth of Cubism in Cézanne’s last paintings. Here was Tatlin and
Malevitch. Here was a realist facing all the problems of picture making and
dealing with the clash of mimetic and constructed imagery.

KB: I have seen your works in the setting of a gallery and they are so
much more pleasing to the eye than reproductions with regard to materiality
and sensation. Can you say something about the aesthetic values that we
might bring to Systems painting?

JS: This is a very fine question because I can’t answer it readily at all.
It is a central problem but I don’t really know the answer. Take my newest
painting for example, which is a set of 15 square paintings, each 50cm x
50cm, the culmination of many years of research. We were just talking about
the white, which is actually the priming of the canvas and then there are 4
colours. In a sense they are like a set of drawings and the whole piece could
be seen as a prototype for a work which could go on to be realised again
in different materials—I don’t know, I don’t have an engineer’s outlook. It
is like a mine of visual structural information and is, I think, perfect. Yes,
there is perfection here in the offing, waiting in the wings. This perfection of
course raises problems and to clarify I just mean that nothing can be added
or taken away without damaging the whole. Now, why should the prototype
be superior to the eventual product in the case of a painting, when this is
obviously not the case with an aeroplane or other utilitarian objects? The
question begins to answer itself doesn’t it? The artists who I was influenced by
or working alongside in the early 60s, such as Getulio Alvani, were interested
in having their works made for them in a factory. They were against the idea
of the artist’s touch. They believed that the artist was the manager in a way:
a Bauhaus idea of course. However, in this process you lose the evidence of
the ‘journey’. And for me the ‘journey’ is worth knowing and the traces of
that ‘journey’ are important to see.

kitt.pet@googlemail.com

NOTES
1. Smith 1980.
2. Idem.
3. Notes by Katie Pratt. See urls.
4. Godfrey 1998, 4.
5. Steele on ‘concrete’ (from an interview):

JS: Well, if you have something that
is completely abstract: a mathematical
structure like for example a Euclidian tri-

angle, in order to make it concrete you
need to invent a syntax. Ah, and this
is where it gets genuinely problematic.
Cézanne, in one of his letters to Emile
Bernard (Aix, 26 May 1904), uses the word
‘concrete’ probably for the first time in re-
lation to painting. The phrase he used was
‘[. . . ] le peintre concrète [. . . ]’. Note the
final ‘e’. He was using it as a verb—not
as in ‘concretises’ as in the English mean-

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mailto:kitt.pet@googlemail.com


Conceptual Painting.

ing to concretise from the abstract—turn
the abstract triangle into a drawing - but
something else—it’s a different meaning.
He didn’t mean ‘to concretise’ it but to
‘make’ the triangle or ‘concrete’ the trian-
gle.

6. Peter Lowe interviewed by Alan Fowler,
May 2005. See URLs.

7. Idem.
8. Idem.
9. Idem.
10. Gowing 2001.
11. Idem.
12. Idem.
13. Blannin 2012.

REFERENCES
Blannin, Katrina. 2012. “Jeffrey Steele in Conversation with Katrina Blan-

nin.” Turps Banana Magazine.
Godfrey, Tony. 1998. Conceptual Art. Phaidon Press Ltd.
Gowing, Lawrence. 2001. “Cézanne: The Logic of Organized Sensations.” In

Conversations with Cézanne (1977), edited by Michael Doran, 180–213.
University of California Press.

Smith, Roberta. 1980. “Conceptual Art.” The New York Times.

URLS
Pratt, Katie: https://thehumanabstraction.wordpress.com/

Peter Lowe interviewed by Alan Fowler, May 2005: http://www.peterllowe.
plus.com/pages/page1.htm

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https://thehumanabstraction.wordpress.com/
http://www.peterllowe.plus.com/pages/page1.htm
http://www.peterllowe.plus.com/pages/page1.htm