Junk for Code

Sean Scully#2

Sean Scully, 11.25.90, 1990
Sean Scully says:

"The pastels, those big pastels that I make, are very monumental. And they have a dryness. The material is pressed into the paper over and over and over again. Behind glass, they’re blurred, they’re indistinct. They have a physicality, but they have the physicality of powder … or chalk, whereas the paintings are shiny, inherently shiny. In other words a pastel doesn’t really have a skin. It’s full of air. You know, a pastel, one doesn’t get the sense with a pastel that it has an outer skin, that it has a beginning and an end. It seems, well, it’s powder, so one is chasing its outer and inner extremities when one’s looking at it, because you don’t really know where it starts and where it ends. But with the skin of oil paint, you do."

That statement is all about the physicality of the paint. Nothing at all about the cultural meaning of the way the paint has been put together as an art work that is acquired and exhibited in a museum.

How naive. Paintings are about signification as well as paint.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 1, 2004 11:52 PM | TrackBack