press release
Please join us for a discussion and group action in which we consider color and painting in relation to visual culture. We will begin by identifying effects that are characteristic of contemporary painting, such as flatness, simplified color, scale and orientation. We will ask to what extent these effects are related to shifts in visuality attributed to digital culture. We will also look at alternative models for looking at and experiencing color and painting, that emphasize immersion, temporality and haptic experience. After the discussion, please join us on a “Color Walk” led by Fox Hysen and Munro Galloway, followed by drinks in the gallery. The Kind of Drug We Need (2016- ) hosted by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung "Walking in Color" is the inaugural event in an intermittent and peripatetic series of talks working through the problems of pleasure as form. These talks will take various structures, including lectures with projected images, walking discussion, and seminars as well as other, less traditional approaches. They will take place whenever and wherever I can make them happen, my home and/or studios, as well as other venues, to be determined. “Pleasure in general is such an expansive concept that it is useful to begin by estranging ourselves from what we think we know about it... Essential paradigms of modernism, such as the high/low or elite/popular culture divide and the attention to formal difficulty, I claim, revolve around pleasure.” from The Problem with Pleasure by Laura Frost 2013 “She is innocent and filled with mood like a very tough experimental baby.” from red doc by Anne Carson 2013 “What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics...This is, I think, my experience of non-sequential, but intensely connected, time-periods and the way they impact on each other, but lead nowhere.” from Bewilderment by Fanny Howe 1998 “...the male orgasm is culturally constructed as terminal and limited, while female sexual pleasure is seen as infinitely renewable and multiple.” from Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound by John Corbett and Terry Kapsalis 1996 “The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.” from On Tickling by Adam Phillips 1993 “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.” from The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes 1973 “...I find that my mind can only take so much of concentration, and then it must be allowed to dart off on its own, for doing so rests it and feeds it.” from Selections From the Journals of Myron Stout 1965 “I can feel my eyes actually missing - skipping over parts of the drawing I know must be taken in - in that long focus. I shut my eyes, try a fresh look - get up and do something else, take a fresh look. It doesn’t too often matter.” from Selections From the Journals of Myron Stout 1965 “She has a beautiful, fluffy dress and she has heels, high heels. If you have high heels, people will love you. If you want people to love you, you have to love yourself first.” Louise Bourgeois 1946 “The pubs were open, oozing sour whiffs of beer. People were trickling by ones and twos into the picture-houses...He yearned to go inside, not for Greta’s [Garbo] sake but just for the warmth and the softness of the velvet seat. He hated the pictures of course, seldom went there even when he could afford it. Why encourage the art that is destined to replace literature? But still, there is a kind of soggy attraction about it. To sit on the padded seat in the warm smoke-scented darkness, letting the flickering drivel on the screen gradually overwhelm you - feeling the waves of its silliness lap you round till you seem to drown, intoxicated, in a viscous sea - after all, it’s the kind of drug we need.” from Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell 1936 “―The mood has already disclosed, in every case, being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something.” from Being and Time by Martin Heidegger 1927 “...it is certain that all neurotic ‘pain’ is of this kind, is pleasure which cannot be experienced as such.” from Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud 1922 “Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home” from Fancy by John Keats 1818 “When people are tickled, they quickly burst into laughter, and this is because the motion quickly penetrates to this part, and even though it is only gently warmed, still it produces a movement (independently of the will) in the intelligence which is recognizable.” from On the Parts of Animals by Aristotle 350 BC