Aesthetic Pleasure | Johannes Meinhardt
What makes the visual access to Ines Hock’s oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, wall paintings, and “room paintings” by means of painted transparent foils less difficult, but rather the speaking and, in part, the understanding of them, is the fact that some of the central terms and categories of speaking about this painting are double-meaning; They are, however, not inherently double, but fundamental changes in painting and in the understanding of painting, which took place above all in the sixties of the last century, have given these terms and categories new meanings or have robbed them of their meaning, without this fundamental historical change being taken up and distinguished in the general use of language. This is especially true of categories and terms such as “abstract painting,” “aesthetics,” and “composition.
The term `abstractioń is actually three historically and theoretically very different concepts. “Instead of accepting the usual simple duality of realism and abstraction, we must divide contemporary painting into at least four different categories: 1. representation of nature; 2. abstraction from nature; 3. abstraction without reference to nature; and 4. that type of painting I have been talking about-a category for which there is no reasonably satisfactory name.” (Marcia Hafif: Getting on with Painting, Art in America, April 1981, pp. 138) What Marcia Hafif, probably the most important painter of the radical painting of the seventies and eighties of the last century, pointed out in this quote from 1981 is that the distinction between a still figurative, but abstract painting (1900-1930) and a non-objective abstract painting, which required a new understanding of the picture (the picture surface as an autonomous system of pictorial signs, from about 1915 until well into the sixties), was not made under the name “abstract painting”. For the new `abstract′ painting that emerged after the questioning (around and after 1960) of modern non-objective painting, there is still no clarified terminology, not even a generally shared name. What can be said and shown, however, is that this new painting, on the one hand, was a new understanding of what a painting is and, on the other hand, demanded and produced new methods.
Around 1960, radically abstract painting, the leading genre of modernism, had fallen into a fundamental crisis: the certainty that non-objective paintings convey meaning, that they are carriers of meaning like writings, that they convey meaning through the composition of purely visual elements or through legible and comprehensible traces of the articulation or expression of subjectivity, was fundamentally called into question.
But what remains of painting if it no longer represents objects, but also no longer gives subjectivity to read or follow through composition or expression? If it is no longer idealistic (in the sense of mental content, of ideas)?
The first, tautological and, like almost all solutions in art, contradictory answer to this crisis was the denunciation of all aesthetic, subjective and compositional aspects and levels of painting: what remained was its literal materiality, its reality as carrier and task. The tension between the meaning-filled, aesthetic level and the purely material, meaningless level of paintings imploded (as with Stella or Ryman since the 1960s). The painting is therefore nothing but matter on a support: “You see what you see”.
What, however, resisted and actively opposed this tautological repression of aesthetic difference was color, especially a complex use of color. For even if color is initially seen and understood only as matter, as a colored mass applied to a support and dissolved in oil or water, the peculiar event that a specific transformation can take place in perception becomes apparent: The color material, which as a component of the world of bodies is optically grasped and identified, also recognized, is transformed for the viewer into a phenomenon that belongs to a different, purely visual world of perception; it is transformed from the material, spatial, body-identifying perception into a perception that perceives color qualitatively as a phenomenon in the strict sense of the word, as an appearance. Color as a color value, as a visual quality, is no longer perceived as a measurable body within the material, three-dimensional world, but appears for a purely visual perception in a separate, qualitative, sensory reality.
On the one hand, this is expressed in the fact that the colored surface is not at a measurable distance from the viewer and is not a measurable surface, but rather a dense and almost flickering kind of colored surface space is created, which does not extend into the measurable third dimension, but rather appears as color space or color luminosity; on the other hand, different color values produce a qualitative play of differences and relationships between these color values, which cannot be measured or quantified, but rather allows intentions and qualities to emerge. The new perception that emerges in this way is an aesthetic perception, an aisthesis, in the strict, ancient sense of the word: a perception that perceives itself, a perception that makes itself and the sensory perception conscious and reflective. This aesthetics, too, would require a new name of its own: it is no longer directed at meaning or bodies conveyed by material carriers through the senses, but at the sensual and qualitative reality (visual efficacy, givenness, phenomenality) of color values and their relationships (this applies not only to color surfaces, but also to lines in the picture surface). In this respect, this visual-sensual aesthetics is also speechless: it does not work with concepts, but with sensory references and clues. Thus, for example, only the four primary colors (red, yellow, green, blue) have names that are at least to a certain degree and within a color system similar to terms; all other colors have names that are defined by reference to objects or materials that have this hue.
Even color surfaces that are seen as color value or color quality are perceived in the first moment as material, as color material on a carrier. But in the transition to visual-esthetic perception, the gaze or consciousness leaves the level of conceptual identification, of optical recognition as objects of perception, as objects; they are seen as if for the first time. In this way, a seeing is formed, a seeing that also looks at itself, perceives itself, as it was first researched by Konrad Fiedler and later by Max Imdahl and Gottfried Boehm. And since paintings are then seen as a kind of surface, namely as a qualitative picture surface, but not as a two-dimensional surface in space, since they make themselves visible in their own way to the back, into an undefinable picture depth, or even to the front, as a kind of light, an expanding color space or color dream, the surface of a painting, which is materially only a two-dimensional surface, is thrown into a strong visual unrest or movement by the application of different colors: The different colors move forwards and backwards, produce different densities and depths of color, and influence each other both in their color value and in their spatial effect; each color field seems to have its own spatial position and depth in the picture surface, so that the eye can no longer overlook and grasp the entire picture surface as a unit, but has to move from color field to color field and from color space to color space.
Many of Ines Hock’s watercolors and oil paintings explore this complex interplay of differences in color value and color space: small, similarly sized, almost rectangular color fields, separated by the white support, line up next to each other, forming a kind of lines that follow each other and cover the picture surface. The edges remain free, so that a colorful overall field of painting emerges, even if its edges are somewhat irregular. The individual color fields differ, often minimally, in their color value. In the case of the earlier works, this is due to the fact that the fields, both in the aquarelles and in the oil paintings, were created by a multiplicity of transparent layers overlapping one another, so that the resulting color is already very complex in its layering. Likewise, they differ, mostly only slightly, in their size, in the course of their edges, in their format, in the density of the color, in the brightness of the color.
From about 2000 on, Ines Hock hardly layers any more, but places color surfaces closely next to each other, sometimes touching each other. These color surfaces refer more strongly to the surrounding space, they also appear as wall paintings and especially in painted transparent foils, which, due to their transparency for the gaze as well as for the light, also produce overlaps of light-projected colors in the space.
On the one hand, Ines Hock’s paintings are easy to perceive at first glance: they avoid most pictorial categories, the fictive pictorial space as well as the authorial composition, and approach a kind of colored ornament. This reduction of the categories of painting, however, allows Ines Hock to make the remaining categories, both of painting and of perception, more complex and diverse. This applies both to the color and to the use of the hand: since in the individual color fields the trace of the paintbrush is visible – albeit without any expressive or gestural readability or physical comprehensibility – and since the color fields and layers can be perceived in their materiality as applied layers, the viewer is confronted with a play of transitions that sometimes even brings into play incompatible modes of perception or orders. The material color is transformed into visual and qualitative color values, which in turn can assume the immateriality of colored light. The activity of the hand that has applied the paint becomes visible as a largely neutral brushstroke that is revealed as an empty or illegible, sign-free trace of inscription.
In a number of aquarelles, the palette is more strongly limited than in the oil paintings to a narrow range of related tones, which, moreover, due to the strong dilution of the applied paint, sometimes visually merge into noncolors, appearing as material impurities or tints of the paper (which again makes them at least partially objects of identifying, conceptual perception); or the color is reduced to gray, almost colorless, transparent tones. In the oil paintings, on the other hand, individual color fields are so brightened or darkened that they tend to lose their colorfulness in the white of brightness or the black of darkness.
Since the individual color fields differ from one another, however, in terms of their hue (but also in terms of their respective position, their format, their size, the course of their edges), the viewer’s gaze is challenged not to focus on the identification of material, physical, and spatial objects of perception, but rather to engage in the play of visual differences beyond recognition and conceptual grasping; his gaze does not become the master of what is seen, but allows itself to be tasted on all sides, to be given the opportunity to see differences.
The specific visual pleasure of discovering and affirming such visual differences differs profoundly from
is profoundly different from the pleasure in the dominance of the gaze over what is seen and conceptualized in the idealistic modern age.
The play of differences in color and brightness also shows that these paintings are not simply applications of a process, illustrations of a principle, but bring into play an aesthetically selective and decisive subjectivity. The various deviations and differences are not accidental or contingent, but chosen in the process of creation. The choice of colors, the non-compositional but decision-related choice of colors and the arrangement of the color fields, as well as the reduced but present visibility of the strokes, make it palpable how a painting or drawing subject has become active in the process and has made aesthetic decisions.
This brings another fundamental change in painting into play: Whereas in modernism, composition, which had become a central criterion, especially in non-objective art, was always understood in such a way that the various optical parts and elements organized themselves into a total, into a unity in which everything stood in relation to everything else, with an overarching instance securing and regulating the context; And while after the destruction of composition, as the domination of the subject over the process and the work, procedures were used above all that, by means of repetition, by means of the same repetition of elements or methods of use, deprived the paintings of all composition (a basic principle of Minimal Art and Minimal Painting), in this new painting complex, iterative and regressive procedures are now used that show a different kind of composition (not of previous, but of reactive and iterative composition).
Iterative procedures are characterized by the fact that they do not follow a predetermined principle, that the individual steps cannot simply be derived from a rule or formula, but that each step only results from the previous step or several previous steps. The most famous example is the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is derived from the addition of the two previous numbers; because the process always returns to itself, the Fibonacci sequence is recessive.
This new “compositional” process also needs a new name: It is not a composition out of an overarching unity, but a composition as a gradual progression that requires new decisions at each step. In the paintings and drawings by Ines Hock, this step-by-step approach, which refers to already existing inscriptions, lines and color surfaces, from which it is radically or minimally differentiated in ever new interventions, is shown in its purest form in many of the drawings. The lines that are inscribed into the paper are similar to one another, show minimal but clear differences; since they are iteratively and regressively placed next to or sometimes also between already existing similar lines, they generate a field of differences in the surface, which seems to be regulated by similarity, but again and again requires new decisions in the surface, without a previous plan, a draft or a mental sketch existing.
In order to see the surfaces created in this way aesthetically, the gaze of the seeing subject must become very active, it must enter into the world of differentiating aesthetic perception; it must become aware of the sensory qualities and intensities in order to be able to grasp the multiplicity of often minimal differences in the color values, the color layers (also in the earlier pseudo-monochromatic oil paintings and in many of Ines Hock’s aquarelles), the color values of the adjacent color fields and the lines in the drawings. Becoming aware of visual differences does not lead to an understanding, to a concept, or to an optical possession; this non-descriptive, almost speechless (but not unconscious, but highly conscious and tense) perception itself proves to be a self-reflexive and pleasurable process, the pleasure of which lies equally in perceiving visual differences, in becoming aware of these differences, and in reflecting on this process of perception.
Prof. Dr. phil. Johannes Meinhardt