FRIGIDITY BEFORE STASIS*
Malcolm Terry’s new paintings are quite mechanical. They have a processional appearance which privileges accretion and momentum and operate around ideas of construction. Most of the paintings all toy with the idea of the cubic form as a building premise. The paintings often verge on the diagrammatic, they all unfold their own origination. This gives them a credible pragmatism which is quite refreshing but makes the experience of standing before them a little static. But that’s okay because what they also highlight is the indeterminate aspects of this perspective. That is, they actively pick apart and transport dimension from its linear mobility and offer up a more tangible and idiosyncratic experience which has more pertinent bearing upon contemporary society. Terry’s paintings are often marked spaces. These are often the result of jumbling and erasure, accretion and union. In these new paintings atmospheric tone and spatial shifts are conducted through the linear conjunctions of Terry’s mark. In this sense he inscribes space onto the pictorial plane but also allows for tonal and perspective adjustments. For instance his line works build up a terrain of co-joined form which operates collectively as one discrete mass. This jumbling also often privileges the anamorphic allowing the larger body to appear organic and mobile in its spread. This privilege seems to be a direct connection with his use of the cubic form which is more often bent and modified through orientational perspective rather than a more strict parallel striation. This is a fairly important aspect of Terry’s paintings for it plays up that mechanical experience his paintings invoke.
If there was a feeling of static mobility within the viewing space of Terry’s exhibition at HSP then it is a direct result of his ongoing exploitation and manipulation of linear abstraction. This manipulation can be seen as a processional gear which values accretion as a mobile, creative act. Why else would Terry’s practice be as equally marked by erasure as it is by inscription. The same principle can be applied to his use of colour, which is often patched into the dimensional diversions in order to accentuate not only the prescribed spatial shift but also the possibility of more to come. This possibility seems to be the driving premise of a mechanical pragmatism which values transparency and procession. In Terry’s paintings it is always obviously seen how his marked out forms come into shape. This honesty coupled with its processional development lends Terry’s work an almost architectural air and if we were to borrow some of Paul Virilio’s words we’d want to call this transparency a heightened awareness of the ‘choreographic dimension’. That is, because Terry’s paintings are so obviously about the mechanics of construction we can also see in them the development and pace of a processional or cursive appearance so familiar to contemporary society.
Almost twenty-five years ago, Virilio called out for a contemporary Albertan to create a new sense of perspective that took into account the increasing diversion of tele-presence within contemporary society. Arguing that Modernism witnessed the standardisation of presence, valuing and depending on the empirical unit, Virilio shows the way in which the post-industrial period has moved towards a ‘reign of synchronisation’ which manipulates such individuation as a simultaneous mass. Calling to account the ubiquitous spread of a global culture compressed by its informational order, Virilio is able to show how the arbitration of market placement works as the solvent element of power through its presentation and shifting visibility as a cursive presence. To use a close example you only need to think about how quite simply the technological bond of the cell-phone enables a mode of mobility and frequency which moves beyond the standardisation of the sedentary version of a pre-satellite, telecommunication. This instantaneousness of global order has pushed aside the material presence and humanistic grounding of an earlier form of perspective. That Euclidian order with its orthogonal and regulative appearances now appears as a one dimensional, monolithic form which has easily exhausted its one directional vector of progress. Suggesting that the ‘pre-eminence of information’ has supplanted transportation and material presence as a regulating bond, Virilio is pushing for a sense of perspective that takes into account the contemporary pressures of synchronisation and the simultaneous compression of identity within a corporate-global order.
While Terry’s work doesn’t have the immediate cultural context that Virilio’s vigilance would require it is still easy to see how it might operate alongside or perhaps even within that critique. The pragmatic order of these paintings and their constant processional gear is certainly a direction that works alongside a re-evaluation of a regulative and constrictive geometry. If we really are to call Terry’s perspective an idiosyncratic slant then perhaps it’s also worth considering how it might best operate out in the social context. I’m not sure though that Terry would want to go along with that. I suspect he’d want the paintings to more contemplative and less determined - which to a point is fair enough. These paintings do highlight a mobility and range of meaning that isn’t as affixed as I’d like to make it sound. Even more so, these paintings all privilege a processional identity which works to highlight their mechanical processes of a becoming largely unhindered by our own fictional, even narcissistic projections.. But if this is the case then surely we could read these works as a stationary moment of a material and chronological process which also at least mirrors a historical accession of contemporary pressures. It’s going to be interesting then to see where Terry goes next. If it can be said that these paintings represent the still-framed mobility of the pictorial plane, then the interiorising gestures keenly at work within this work could just lead to a display of the neurotic anxiety that Virilio likes to call ‘polar inertia’, that frigidity that quells before the ‘privileged instant of an act’.
* ACTUALLY DEATH DRIVE SUCKS!
ACTUALLY ALL I REALLY WANT TO SAY IS THAT MALCOM"S PAINTINGS ARE ABOUT THE FRIGIDITY WE FEEL BEFORE OUR INMOBILE STASIS OF LINERARITY. IT IS A PRIVELEDGE TO SEE HIS PAINTINGS, THEY ARE EXTREMLY VALUABLE TO THINK THROUGH. WE ARE A FOOL IF WE MISTAKE THEM AND IT IS OUR LOSS IF WE DO NOT LEARN TO LOOK HOW HE SEES - Harold Grieves (2007).
