The Wednesday Lecture, Documentary: Melissa Gordon
Wednesday 25th November 2020, Willow Fisher
This Wednesday lecture was conducted by American artist Melissa Gordon who is currently based in London. She began the talk by introducing herself alongside images of her artwork, ranging from her earliest to the most recent. She revealed that as well being an artist she is also a writer, which I think is of importance as it enables her to perceive artwork and the work she is creating in various creative senses. Receiving from herself alternating perceptions of art which complement each other. The mediums Melissa works in varies a lot through her career as an artist, ranging from painting, photography, installations, and working with printmaking. As an artist she is interested in exploring the relationship of gesture, primarily consisting of the body and sight. In doing this she explores her understanding and knowledge between representational and abstracted work through seeing and reading. Within her abstracted artwork she also expresses the notions of gender and identity. A recurrence for Melissa is the thought of where does gesture come from? She associates this conventionally to the human form of bodies depicted in paintings and drawings, capturing this essence of gesture through movements and glances. However she has directed her attention to capturing this expression in her art, she's become vastly intrigued in materially visualizing the human gestures into artwork. Due to this Gordon’s passion for the fluidity of the human form and exchanges has led to her creating works visualizing this very movement of definite gestures.
The American painter Robert Rauschenberg inspired Melissa and helped to construct this very particular way of working. She explained that in 2016 she visited the Rauschenberg exhibition in the Tate London, where she gathered a lot of influence from his works which we can visibly see in her own artwork. Rauschenberg is most acknowledged for his substantial impact to the art world introducing his own sense of abstraction during the later part of the twentieth century. The piece to the right is an example of Robert’s work, it is called “Almanac” and was produced in 1962. I can notice a lot of similarities in the form and composition of marks made by the artist that is evident in Melissa’s work, from the swift application of paint and monochromatic colour palette, to the use of a grid. During her time at the exhibition she became aware of artwork consistent with the ideas of place, gesture and sight in which the paintings are produced. She revealed to us that she is interested in the locale, referring to the artwork bringing about the space in which something happens or in the art sense where art happens, so in the painting. The way in which she perceives a painting, she is recognising artwork as a venue. Due to this mature perception of reading art Melissa desires to look at how gestures act in a place, and in doing so incorporate a narrative into it to create a further understanding for its audience and create more depth.
Melissa presented to us some of her older work from fourteen years ago during the time she left college. The work was given the name “the satisfaction of knowing”, this project enabled Melissa to explore realities and experiencing reality in altering forms. She explained that work was primarily about the investigation of the painting rather than what was visibly apparent to the audience within the painting, making the focal point for the artist gesture. Her inspiration for this series of work was female figures given their significance in history, rather it be that they are acknowledged positively or negatively, she chose to incorporate these historical women and events in this work creaitng the impression of a feminist installation piece. She exclaimed that she was fascinated with the paintings space, the space in which the investigation takes place. The comparison she made with her work was to a crime board with its chaotic atmosphere but contextual knowledge of beings and individuals depicted on a surface with meaning and depth. They talked about the surfaces of the paintings being of an imaginary existence feeding in a narrative to the piece.
Talking about her own experiences and artistic perception change she revealed she gave birth two twins which transformed her outlook on many things. For example how she perceived her body, others bodies, and life, but most importantly this experience changed her understanding of her own body. It also reintroduced some aspects of time, knowledge, gravity and understanding of sight that is apparent a lot in her work and feminist art. They reinforce a lot of tones of the body, sight, and gesture which is what Melissa is most interested in.
In 2013 she created a series of paintings called “material evidence” in Spike Island, Bristol. This first solo show for her featured Melissa’s artwork treating the subject matter like an imaginary surface. She describes the artwork as evidence of her unconscious bodies of work that provide a painterly practice. She tends to in a lot of her recent work enlarge images that enhance the artwork enforcing its beautiful qualities. She varies a lot during this practice mixing from working with scans of blown up images, silk screens and paints truly reinforcing that individual aspect of abstraction Melissa introduces in a lot of her art. I would describe the appearance of these paintings as being quite naive and energetic. She described them to be tongue in cheek paintings, I admire the energy a lot and I would have liked for Melissa to talk more in depth about her experience whilst creating the works and the exhibition as a whole. I feel if she had formatted the lecture this way then I would have felt more engaged to her and the work she was providing to us. But she did discuss her work and artistic career and quite a quick pace competing with the images at a quick pace to. I felt a bit lost about which artwork was what and what was made at what time and a part of which exhibition. Unlike other artist lectures I have been in, I found this was to be the most difficult in terms of the format of it and the pace. I didn't feel as though she was really presenting her work to us in an active way, it felt too fast and rushed and the notes I usually take during these lectures turned out to be quite weak. This lack of engagement I think has impacted my notetaking and review of the work and the lecture.
For her “Blow up modernist” work she focused on the failure of the paint, which I think is unusual for traditional artists but is well respected for more contemporary modernist artists and abstractors. During this work she looked at pre-existing modernist painters and their artwork, which predominantly male artists. She then blew up the images with technology zooming in on their fragments uncovering the unnoticeable structures of the paintings, which led to the production of these detailed and dense photos and paintings. She described that during this process she was actually interrupting the painting and disturbing its age. She feels content in the presence of mistakes and unpredictable actions in artwork, incorporating in her paintings mess and accidents from her prints, for example confirming the appearance of left over residue from the print that accidentally accompanied the painting. I really admire the spontaneous nature of this series of her artwork, I feel as though she is more appreciative of the natural order of things whether they are positive or negative influences on the artwork. Using the camera she is looking through the technology and treating it as a tool which enables the work to appear with a copycat like texture and presence. She tells us that the artwork is created through the lens of the camera, through flattening it and investigating it the subject is revealing itself in a different way, we are able to read the surface of the painting in an entirely alternate approach. The materialistic evidence that Melissa values so is a prominent aspect of reproduction. The investigation of gestures has been cultivated, and in many instances stolen by the copycat gestures. Apparent in these works by her is the icon to index, the striking notion of purpose within the paintings. Her densely appreciative response to the incidental marks left from the print create the impression that the work has been repainted, in a clearer sense it has been reinterpreted or reproduced. It's been reimagined and brought into our spectacle to observe and conclude our artistic perceptions of. The effect of her blown up work and intrusive artistic approach to others modernist works is revealing of the appearance of gesture.
The notion of her painting is reduced down to abstraction, similar to pictorial frames focusing her artistic gaze on representation and re presentation. She indicates this function to her compressing the history of the painting into a gesture. It's primarily occupied with the sight of production. Again Melissa is intrigued by the space in between the painting rather than what is actually being depicted within the work of art. She associates the human body with technology, comparing the eye to a camera, and that our gaze upon things moves in frames and that everything we see is photographed by our eyes and catalogued into our minds and memories. She is implying that the gesture is not the mark it's what sets it apart from the making. The iteration and scenario she uses to make us understand this conclusion is she compares it to a poet and their work. A poet makes a play but they dont act in it, and an actor plays in a play but they didn't create it. I think incorporating this into other creative senses makes it easier to understand and apply to artwork which I appreciate. She implies that during this stage in production there is an imaginative jump in your head, this is the gesture, this is what we are internally experiencing during this creative practice and action. She relates this to how our body acts, responds and behaves. Again relating back to the impression of looking at the eye like a camera, it's about how you move around and look at gestures, and our response and relationship with it. The bold suggestion was made by Melissa that how she shows her paintings and various artworks is how she encounters them, this I think creates this intimate relationship and personal understanding of the pieces.
