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Press Release WADE GUYTON DAS NEW YORKER ATELIER, ABRIDGED 29 September 2017 – 8 February 2018 Serpentine Gallery Sponsored by Joseph Hage Aaronson LLP and LUMA Foundation Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press The structure is set, there are only so many compositional possibilities. The printer functions a certain way, but you like to be surprised sometimes … often you’re trying to do a particular thing and the work will tell you that you’re wrong and there’s a better way to work. Wade Guyton, interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist The Serpentine presents the work of the American artist Wade Guyton, a truly 21 st century painter. He uses digital technologies – iPhones, cameras, computers and consumer-grade Epson printers – as tools to create both large-scale paintings on linen and smaller compositions on paper. In his practice, Guyton explores the translations that occur between these tools, transforming three dimensions into digital information that is subsequently reproduced on surfaces and in space.
Transcript

Press Release

WADE GUYTON DAS NEW YORKER ATELIER, ABRIDGED 29 September 2017 – 8 February 2018 Serpentine Gallery Sponsored by Joseph Hage Aaronson LLP and LUMA Foundation Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press

The structure is set, there are only so many compositional possibilities. The printer functions a certain way, but you like to be surprised sometimes … often you’re trying to do a particular thing and the work will tell you that you’re wrong and there’s a better way to work. Wade Guyton, interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Serpentine presents the work of the American artist Wade Guyton, a truly 21st century painter. He uses digital technologies – iPhones, cameras, computers and consumer-grade Epson printers – as tools to create both large-scale paintings on linen and smaller compositions on paper. In his practice, Guyton explores the translations that occur between these tools, transforming three dimensions into digital information that is subsequently reproduced on surfaces and in space.

This new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, entitled Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged, presents a body of work completed in the past two years. Guyton’s choice of title bears witness to the site of both the first installation of the work, in Germany, and its place of production in downtown Manhattan. It also references Guyton’s encounter with the painting Das Pariser Atelier (1807) by the Swiss artist Hans Jakob Oeri. The studio’s potential, not just as a locus for discussion and production, but as a material in and of itself, is echoed throughout this exhibition.

Guyton’s paintings are printed on to sheets of linen that are folded in half and run, sometimes repeatedly, through large inkjet printers. Inconsistencies surface on the canvas, caused by diminishing levels of ink toner or technical glitches, distorting and disrupting the image, while intentional ‘errors’, such as streaks, creases and misalignments, occur as the fabric feeds – or is pulled – through the machine. Guyton’s works on paper are printed over pages removed from art catalogues, with the artist’s additions obscuring or revealing the original images and text. Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged has evolved from an exhibition first shown at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst earlier this year. The works focus on three different kinds of image production: photographs taken of the artist’s studio on his camera phone, screenshots of web pages captured on the artist’s computer, and details of bitmap files. Together these track Guyton’s working environment, affirming the ‘potential to use anything as subject matter’. The Serpentine’s relationship to Guyton stretches back to the 2006 group exhibition, Uncertain States of America, when he exhibited with Kelley Walker.

The Serpentine autumn season continues with the photography of Torbjørn Rødland in The Touch That Made You at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery; the Serpentine Pavilion designed by Francis Kéré, home to the Park Nights series of live encounters; and the twelfth Serpentine Marathon – entitled GUEST, GHOST, HOST: MACHINE – which will be held at City Hall on 7 October.

For press information contact: Nancy Groves, [email protected], + 44 (0)20 7298 1544 V Martin, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519 Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR Image Credits: Left: Untitled, 2015, Courtesy of the artist, Photography: Ron Amstutz Right: Untitled, 2016, Courtesy of the artist, Photography: Ron Amstutz

NOTES TO EDITORS Wade Guyton (b. 1972, Indiana, USA) lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Museo Madre, Naples (2017); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2017); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva (2016-2017); Le Consortium, Dijon (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012-2013); Secession, Vienna (2011); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt (2008).Recent group exhibitions include mumok, museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, Vienna (2016); Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2016); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013); Venice Biennale (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2012); Dallas Museum of Art (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011).

WADE GUYTON: DAS NEW YORKER ATELIER, ABRIDGED 29 Sep 2017 to 4 Feb 2018 I have recently become interested in Painting. Wade Guyton Wade Guyton (b 1972, United States) has, for more than a decade, been pioneering painting techniques that explore the impact of digital technologies on image production, artistic processes and the dissemination of information. Instead of a paintbrush, Guyton utilises computers, inkjet printers, scanners and iPhone cameras to create his large-scale paintings and smaller works on paper. He purposefully misuses these pieces of mass-produced technology, testing their abilities in order to explore the anatomy of digital images and allowing the limits of their capacities to dictate the final outcomes. Sheets of canvas are folded lengthways and pages are torn from art catalogues and run through inkjet printers. The thickness and resistant surfaces of the sheets of linen, torn edges of the paper, clogged inkjet heads, technical glitches and the roughness of the studio floor over which the printed fabric is pulled all create distortions, smears and inconsistencies that draw attention to the process of making. The works presented in this exhibition, titled Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged, produced between 2015 and 2016, can be viewed as a single body of work. They bear witness to the site of their inception and fabrication – Guyton’s studio in downtown Manhattan – and their first installation at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany. The Germanic title remains as a trace of that exhibition, but also serves as a reference to the painting Das Pariser Atelier (1807) by the Swiss artist Hans Jakob Oeri, which Guyton recently encountered. Like Oeri’s composition, this body of work, in particular the canvas that depicts a scene from the artist’s studio kitchen, offers a glimpse into the space and relationships that support the production of art. The drawings, presented in vitrines placed throughout the gallery, are inkjet prints on to pages torn from art catalogues. These compositions partially obscure the original content, abutting the past with the present and overlaying one type of image-making technology with another. The changes in scale that take place from one image to the next – from the spaces between the pixels of bitmap files to the New York skyline view from Guyton’s studio window – are placed in abrupt dialogue with each other and within the frame of the Serpentine Gallery building, which can barely contain the canvases. Guyton has chosen to display some paintings in a stack, leaning against the gallery walls, echoing the way they rest in his studio and further exploring the spatial limitations of their new habitat. The gallery is too small to display all the canvases individually, and the stack also works as a practical solution, resulting in the abridged version of the exhibition referred to in the title. The vitrines function as sculptural interruptions, dictating the way that visitors are able to move through the space, while the black tiles lining their interiors reference the kitchen floor in Guyton’s studio, again collapsing the distance between the site of production and its representation in the gallery space. This overlap is explored even further in artist’s books which Guyton produces for his exhibitions – the Zeichnungen drawings book related to this show presents a series of photographs of his drawings piled against the black tiles of his studio floor. Both the sequences and the stacks of paintings recall multiple of tabs in Internet browsers, or scrollable interfaces on tablets and phones. Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged reminds us of the boundaries between the digital realm and our physical reality, as well as the speed and frequency with which we access, register and document information. Guyton’s sensitivity to his surroundings and his inspection of the minute ways in which images, technologies, spaces and bodies are mutated by constant interaction present us with a portrait of our relationship with the digital world and affirm him as a truly 21st century painter. All works are courtesy of the artist. Further information on the artworks is available in a printed guide and on mobile tours accessible via the Serpentine’s free Wi-Fi: www.sgtours.org. Please ask a member of staff for details. Photography permitted without flash. Share your photos @SerpentineUK #wadeguyton #dasnewyorkeratelierabridged

7.

FOREWORD

The structure is set, there are only so many compositional possibilities. The printer functions a certain way, but you like to be surprised, sometimes… Often you’re trying to do a particular thing and the work will tell you that you’re wrong and that maybe there’s a better way to work.1

American artist Wade Guyton is one of the most important painters of the digital age. He uses this medium as a receiver of printed images, codes and environments. He adopts digital technologies – iPhones, cameras, com-puters and consumer-grade printers – as tools to create both large-scale paintings and smaller compositions on paper. Guyton lifts seemingly banal images from his direct environment and prints them, either onto pages torn out of art catalogues, or onto sheets of linen that are folded in half and run through inkjet printers.

These images are, however, constantly interrupted, either by existing text or pictures on the catalogue pages, or by inconsistencies on the canvas surface, caused by diminishing levels of ink toner or technical glitches. These interruptions also serve as reminders that time, in  Guyton’s work, is not linear; webpages

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that would normally be skimmed through persist; sequences of paintings are suggestive of the images’ scrollable nature, yet the scroll is suspended in time; and repeated images are always different the second time around, whether produced more than once by Guyton’s printer, or encountered more than once within an exhibition.

The exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, titled Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged is an evolving show, with the first version developed at Museum Brandhorst in Munich (28 January – 30 April 2017). Guyton’s choice of title bears witness to the site of both the first installation of the exhibition, in Germany, and its place of production in downtown Manhattan, as well as to Guyton’s encoun-ter with the painting Das Pariser Atelier (1807) by the Swiss artist Hans Jakob Oeri. Like Oeri’s composition, this body of work, and pl.XXVIII in particular, offers a glimpse into the space and relationships that support the production of art, and encourages us to contextualise it within the traditional use of the artist’s studio as subject matter. The studio’s potential as a material in and of itself, is echoed throughout this exhibition.

The changes in scale that take place within the images visible in the galleries – from the spaces between pixels to the New York skyline – are placed in abrupt dialogue with the corners of a building that can barely contain them. Guyton’s sensitivity to these changes,

and his inspection of the minute ways in which images, technologies, spaces and bodies are mutated by constant interaction, presents us with palimpsests of our relation-ship with the digital world.

The Serpentine’s relationship with Guyton stretches back to 2006 to the group exhibition Uncertain States of America, when he exhibited together with Kelley Walker.2 Then, as now, Guyton’s exploration of the limits of the studio, and the site of the museum as a laboratory, is a vitalising force within exhibition spaces and we are delighted to be working with him again. We are enormously grateful to Guyton for his dedication and enthusiasm in creating this ambitious exhibition and the accompanying publication, neither of which could have been realised without his involvement. We thank him too for his incredibly generous Limited Edition artworks, which will raise key funds for the Serpentine.

This exhibition would not have been possible with-out Museum Brandhorst and we extend our gratitude to them, and Achim Hochdörfer in particular, for all of their support.

Our sincere thanks also go to the contributors to this book: to Alex Kitnick for writing an insightful essay that draws links between the sites of production and exhibition of Guyton’s work; and to Flame, for their identification of modes of temporality within his practice. This book has been designed by Henrik Nygren Design and we

are indebted to them for their creativity and hard work, which have produced such a wonderful publication.

We would like to express our gratitude to Wade Guyton’s team: James Campbell, Jessica Lin Cox, David Mramor, Jeanette Mundt, Zach Steinman, and Brina Thurston for all their hard work and commitment to this project. It has been a pleasure working with them. Thanks are also due to the artist Peter Fischli for the enlightening conversations around Guyton’s work.

The headline sponsors Joseph Hage Aaronson LLP and LUMA Foundation have been enormously generous and we thank them for their support. Galerie Gisela Capitain has supported the production of this publication and we are most grateful to them for making this book a possibility. The Wade Guyton Exhibition Circle, including Candy and Michael Barasch, the Bechtler Family, Ringier Collection, Marco Rossi and Amelie von Wedel and Petzel Gallery, has enabled key aspects of the project to happen. We are also delighted to be continuing our partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies on Serpentine’s Digital Engagement Platform. Our advisors AECOM and Weil offer exceptional expertise to help us realise the ambitions of the artists we work with and we thank them.

The public funding that the Serpentine receives through Arts Council England provides important support towards all of the work that we do and we greatly appreciate their unwavering commitment.

Our continued success is made possible thanks to the Council of the Serpentine Galleries, an extraordinary group that provides essential ongoing contributions. The Americas Foundation, The Learning Council, Patrons, Future Contemporaries and Benefactors are also key supporters of the Serpentine’s programme and we thank them.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Serpentine team: Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Head  of Programmes; Rebecca Lewin, Exhibitions Curator; Agnes Gryczkowska, Assistant Curator; Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager; and Joel Bunn, Installation and Production Manager. All have worked closely with the wider Serpentine Galleries staff to realise this project and we are most grateful for their hard work.

– Yana Peel, CEO– Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director

1. Wade Guyton, in interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 31 July 2017.2. The exhibition Uncertain States of America was co-curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar Kvaran and was organised in collaboration with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo.

21.

ART FOR THE UNIVERSAL GENERATION

Every day when we look on a screen, we barely see our reflection in it, its colours are more vibrant than life; we, on the other hand, are submissive receptacles waiting for transmissions. A natural lifespan in the West is somewhere between 79 and 81 years.1 In the first 15–25 years, the biggest identity formations occur. As our organic flesh melds, there is also an atomisation – the ‘other’ – the space that exists around the positive ‘growths’ – and the gaze that identifies the object for what it is. Between 25–35 years, certain compromises and judgements have accumulated, even reconciled. Between 35–55 years, those accumulations have aggran-dised from the process of natural selection (which is universal), into a specific organic allotment which becomes continuously self-identified. From 55–65, the last crest of malleability, the organic being’s liquidity has almost entirely diminished and exchanges become a form of micromanagement. Continuously, the being can remain in this state for the next 20–30 years.

Consumption happens to have become the most common denominator of globalised human existence in this evolutionary era. Consumption hasn’t so much

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become a desire but a need for self-validation via the social – the need to be socially relevant, the quest for meaning outside ourselves. The thousand images we endlessly search through, trying to find answers into human consciousness, into ourselves are reflected back at us. Will there be  any answers to our desires, our consumption needs, our micro-validations? We see so many messages already, we see time slipping away, progressive things we could do as a society that could keep people awake and alive, but we search and search relentlessly, with or without dignity we search publicly, privately searching for an answer. Asking Google, asking Alexa, asking Siri, asking each other for help, advice, recommendations, small pieces of life that will augment or enlighten our own. The consumption inundates us like rain – cascading rain drops upon plants and animals that feed off nutrients that will then decompose and disintegrate into the aether.

If there would ever be a meaning of an artist’s work it would be in how the artist fought off the Great Filter2 to solidify matter against the enormous pull of entropy. Wade Guyton’s images do not refer to a synthetic world produced by an a-human malevolent entity that wants to subordinate us, because it is not power that subordinates us, but the matrix of desire – our submission to desire. Norms of identity become our problem… our role plays, narratives, personal wills, ambitions,

value judgements, hierarchies, social constructs, sexual drives, fictions, self-modifications, and adaptations that we impose on ourselves are taking place because we personally want to gain from the experience of content transfer in art – but that’s our problem, not Wade’s. His streams of images take us out of this animalistic and survivalist impulse into a completely different life cycle. Instead they exist alongside us, in exchange with us, converting our footprint and discharging it back to us as traces of data – a by-product of contemporary human life like documents of history, or civilisation or anthropological evidence of our activity. They are images that don’t want anything from us, they don’t speak our codes, instead they are merely ‘there’.

As a painter, Guyton is one of very few artists who actually uses the medium appropriately to the 21st century – how an Artificial Intelligence processes information horizontally – using painting as  a carrier of images (essentially data) – that is streamed in feeds and processed through the medium. This is what inherently differentiates him from Warhol as well as any post-war painter whose hand became just as important as their imagery. Warhol’s portrayal of culture was iconic, disastrous, melodramatic, in the end full of Catholic atonement imbued with the Western ideals of that time which today feels structurally outmoded. Guyton’s work, however, is actually more in keeping

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with the moral codes of the East – the nature of time repeating itself in a cyclical and satisfying motion, like the course of a person’s life, or the life of a flower, or any organism – it stands to be born, live entirely  and then pass on to another form. Technology, like the printer, is a means to an end – it is the carrier hosting and emitting images on a screen like in the film Arrival (2016)3 – it does not judge us, instead it provides us space whilst speaking a language entirely different to linear, progressive Western thought processes. There is none of the moral engagement from the perspective of an agent who ironically or post-ironically refers to their surroundings, no hinting on Christian notions of good and evil, original sin, ‘enlightenment’ and redemption. Guyton’s paintings are more progressive than that; because they operate in a wider frame of reference. A scroll of historical time – like an AI on the wall.

As the progress towards postmodernism and de-construction in Western art pushed forward a natural development towards relativism, Guyton’s paintings relate to this consequence, but their own relationship to reality leads us to a stable embodiment of a universal idea that is firmly in the now. Whereas ‘human’ expression became a fragmented struggle for empowerment for many, Guyton’s paintings just directly embody power. They don’t instrumentalise it, they merely perform something that binds us. In painting, self-expression

has become such a meme. Memes are part of a culture of endlessly repeating the same ideas like a psycho-physical twitch – behaviours that come from the immediate need for short-term circulation – they are the result of collective pain sublimated by a multiplication of sharing that social need. Wade’s paintings exist outside any of these ‘whims’. We feel no pain in his paintings, because there is none and there needn’t ever be. In fact, his paintings are extricated from human feelings of pain. One finds that other instincts return instead, such as how Dale Cooper experiences reality in Dougie Jones’ body in Twin Peaks (2017)4 – distant but benevolent, other-worldly but in this world – existing in a different measurement of time.

And yet the subjective quest for meaning goes on because it is the only thing we humans can aim for. Whether this is the seed for the inequality we face, the evolutionary accumulation of generations and generations of desire for validation, no one can know. Whether this is the true nature of evolution is also unknowable. Nevertheless, in the present moment we cohabit a globally biodiverse world with parallel rights of passage of each and every lifespan, from human to leopard to hibiscus. Whoever wants to deny us this mercy are delayed in their way of thinking, as we still live in a universal society that absorbs the sun in exactly the same way. Dancing, praying to whatever God, enjoying the sensuality of

1. List of countries by life expectancy. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy (accessed on 3 July 2017)2. The Great Filter theory says that there is a stage in every evolutionary process in the universe where all life will inevitably evaporate.3. In the film Arrival (2016), alien life forms communicate by projecting complex circular ink graphs into the air. 4. In Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 3 (first broadcast on 28 May 2017).

Flame would like to acknowledge the influence of Iain Robertson’s and Steven Shaviro’s ideas on the text and thank Dieter von Graffenried for an important reference.

whatever body, beautifying in whatever way we choose, this is all that matters: to go beyond the boundaries of any time and place; ultimately towards an unquantifiable image that captures our collective immortality.

– Flame

13.

STUDIO INTERNATIONAL

‘What is the function of the studio?’ Daniel Buren asked in 1979:

1. It is the place where the work originates.2. It is generally a private place, an ivory tower perhaps.3. It is a stationary place where portable objects are produced.

For Buren, these tensions – between the stationary and the portable, the private and the public – are foundational to the studio-gallery system, but they also form a contra-diction in terms: once a work leaves the studio, where it is ‘closest to its own reality’, it is susceptible to ‘infinite manipulation’ and loses much of its meaning as a result. If, for Buren, this ‘unspeakable compromise of the portable work’ leads to contingency, an artistic practice that took shape in situ would be a fitting antidote.1 At the very least, it would be specific to its site.

Today, artists seem less worried that their work might be out of place or manipulated – in fact, they tend to accept placelessness as a general condition brought on by digitalisation, migration and the market economy

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– and yet a number of Buren’s terms remain significant to contemporary discussion. Questions of site and format – even compromise – continue to preoccupy makers of contemporary art, which has led to a revaluation of certain media and forms. While Buren shunned painting due to its connotations of class power and commodity exchange, artists today explore it for precisely these reasons: perhaps even more than art’s institutions, they grapple with its networks of distribution.2 And so painting, as the portable object par excellence, has taken on a  new relevance in this situation. Where Buren sought to fasten his work in place so as to undermine its status as a liquid asset, contemporary artists have set their work free on the currents of the market. Painting, after all, is still the best medium for getting around, and as a result the studio, its launch pad, has returned as a site ripe for exploration.

Wade Guyton’s recent depictions of his Bowery studio, as well as various screenshots and bitmaps, all pulled tight over stretchers, have no worries about their porta-bility. We grasp them as objects, and yet they elude easy possession at the same time. Versions of identical images abound, and references ramify widely. Many of these works contain shots of Guyton’s own painting and sculpture in various states of production and repose, while others offer close-ups of his studio floor that recall the paint- erly abstraction of Gerhard Richter or Clyfford Still.3

Images generate images in combinatory fashion, in other words, but it is less an infinite regress than an exponential, ‘self-playing’ aesthetic: one feels that it could go on indefinitely. Work here is never settled; rather, it is constantly on the move, refracted, ready to be photographed and reproduced again, transformed into a poster and affixed to a door only to become a source for yet another painting. If these works depict the restless social lives of painting, however, others appear relatively grounded; pictures of a LinkNYC Wi-Fi kiosk or Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower – both shot from the studio window – verge on the mundane, and yet this outside world of wireless technology and constructed ideology reframes the studio once again. At times, this feed-back loop between work and context nearly collapses onto itself, as when a regime of graphic design merges with Guyton’s own signature aesthetic, the ebony of an iPhone 7 advertisement suturing together with the artist’s striated black.⁴ In short, pressure comes from all corners, both from within painting and from without.

Especially when seen together, tall and wide against the white cube’s walls, these diverse works speak to a peculiarly contemporary condition in which places appear composited one upon the next, or are at least strangely adjacent, giving a confounding sensation of placelessness and dislocation. These works might depict different species of spaces – the real, the virtual and the

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digital rendering of the former – but they all stand next to one another as similar orders of space. Moreover, where the work for which Guyton became known – the black monochromes, the cancelled Xs and perhaps not surprisingly, a series of Buren-esque stripes – suggests a relationship to modernism, this latest body of work partakes in something approaching a vernacular mode. And it is somewhat disquieting to see them after the monochromes, as if the everyday were only a kind of printing test – an image sent through to test the machine.

If many of these new works allow us to peek through portals and, in a certain sense, conform to a traditional definition of painting as a window on to the world, it might be because the telltale sign of postmodernism – the ‘flatbed picture plane’ that Leo Steinberg located in the work of Robert Rauschenberg – has taken on a second life here. Steinberg wrote that Rauschenberg’s work, coming after the stringencies of post-painterly abstraction, ‘let the world in again’ by comparing itself to horizontal surfaces, such as ‘tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards’.⁵ And while it is uncanny how many tabletops and studio floors appear in Guyton’s recent work, the metaphor has changed: the screen is now the universal equivalent and, as a result, there are new effects as well. Standing in front of these works one is often unsure whether one is encountering a presence or a void, a glow or a fade, a vertical or horizontal surface.⁶

(If traditional painting is vertically oriented, and post-modern work ‘horizontal’, Guyton’s pictures might examine the 45-degree angle at which screens are typi-cally tilted in our hands. The fact that the artist has begun to exhibit and document these works stacked on top of one another and leaning against the wall would also seem to evoke a scrollable sequence of images on a screen.) If these paintings present smartphone imagery, however, it is also because both painting and phone are portable objects that move globally and transmit information. The two surfaces demonstrate a sympathy for one another. But like Guyton’s own works, which are comprised of sheets of linen folded at the centre, the two meet in strange and stuttering ways.

Clearly, these works take part in a new kind of appro-priation: where Andy Warhol used silkscreens to graft disaster onto canvas, Guyton ‘captures’ and ‘grabs’ banal images with the click of his phone or mouse, sending them to his computer for printing. While Guyton’s work is almost disarming in its simplicity, he has nevertheless found a way to collapse technical images onto the warp and weft of painting and, in doing so, transform each in turn. This shift in material and scale – from small glassy screen to long length of linen – is central to the work’s effect, but so is the way it reformulates questions of site. Websites that one is meant to click through quickly now stubbornly stay around, while the site of production

– the studio – is refracted, taken on the road, made international. Indeed, it is significant that these works bring their origins with them like a memory imprint or trace, and that painting itself has often been imagined as a repository for history.⁷ Given all this, one might ask if with his new work Guyton, like Rauschenberg before him, has let the world in again. Perhaps, but if he has, the world appears here less as a full-fledged presence than an elusive ghost.

– Alex Kitnick

1. Daniel Buren, ‘The Function of the Museum’, October vol. 10, Fall 1979, pp. 51–8. 2. For more on the relationship between Guyton and Buren, see Johanna Burton, ‘Rites of Silence’, Artforum, Summer 2008, pp. 365–73.3. The studio shots might remind one of Louise Lawler’s practice, except that where her works capture artworks in their sites of reception, Guyton focuses on sites of production, as well as sites of distraction, and the grey area in between. 4. Guyton’s recent exhibition, SIAMO ARRIVATI, at MADRE, in Naples, in which the artist produced his work in the exhibition space, capturing images and printing them in turn, might be yet another example.5. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 92.6. This effect manifests in a different way in Guyton’s drawings, which the artist presents laid flat in vitrines and in which figure and ground – source image and graphic mark – appear in constant tension.7. For a series of 2008 exhibitions Guyton remade the black floor of his midtown studio as a way of ‘staging’ his paintings, a gesture that the artist has described as ‘bringing the studio into the gallery’. See Catherine Chevalier, ‘2008–2014’, Wade Guyton: 26 avril-7 juin 2008, Paris, Galerie Chantal Crousel, 2015, p.67.


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