- Transmission Difficulties
- Vancouver Painting in the 1960s
- A painting is a pitiable thing . . .
- The experience of a work of art . . .
- A painting is mediumistic . . .
- By Scott Watson
23.
In fact, it was left to Gaucher himself to deliver to Vancouver a resolution of the tendencies to communication theory and the necessity to negate. In December 1967, weeks after he had juried the 1967 annual, Gaucher began the first of what became known as his Grey on Grey paintings, which received their first exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1969. These large canvases had their origin in earlier prints and paintings that "cited" the twelve-tone music of Anton Webern and classical Indian ragas (the anthem music of altered consciousness). Uninflected fields of grey applied with a roller were punctuated by narrow grey horizontals of varying length that Gaucher called "signals." Having mixed thirty shades of grey graduated between black and white, Gaucher worked with the ten shades in the middle range. His sublime canvases were aimed beyond the New York School as a kind of summation. Unlike Vancouver paintings, which, as Philip Leider had pointed out, drew sustenance from the world of reproduced images, the narrative provided by Gaucher for the origins of his Grey on Grey includes real-time encounters in major centres. A Webern concert in Paris in 1962 and the MoMA Rothko retrospective, also in 1962, were authentic encounters leading to the production of paintings that were fundamentally irreproducible.32 Yet, just as the work of Morris and Lee-Nova had done, Gaucher's paintings referenced the grey scale marshaled by photography. His paintings could be said to be abstractions (and omens) of the coming photographic regime. In them, one found the negation one expected of serious autonomous art, and even the injunction to approach the condition of music. But to a contemporary eye they also invoked the sensorium and communication in the abstract. As Doris Shadbolt wrote of them: "The observer who allows himself to be tuned in has the impression of experiencing them intra-sensorily as sound and motion as well as sight. . . The signals are read as being fixed in the ground matrix but also seen metaphorically: tokens of some high-frequency communication and in turn part of a constellation of that energy which rests, hovers, moves. . ."33
For Gaucher, the guiding metaphor of the Grey on Grey paintings was silence . . .
In fact, it was left to Gaucher himself to deliver to Vancouver a resolution of the tendencies to communication theory and the necessity to negate. In December 1967, weeks after he had juried the 1967 annual, Gaucher began the first of what became known as his Grey on Grey paintings, which received their first exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1969. These large canvases had their origin in earlier prints and paintings that "cited" the twelve-tone music of Anton Webern and classical Indian ragas (the anthem music of altered consciousness). Uninflected fields of grey applied with a roller were punctuated by narrow grey horizontals of varying length that Gaucher called "signals." Having mixed thirty shades of grey graduated between black and white, Gaucher worked with the ten shades in the middle range. His sublime canvases were aimed beyond the New York School as a kind of summation. Unlike Vancouver paintings, which, as Philip Leider had pointed out, drew sustenance from the world of reproduced images, the narrative provided by Gaucher for the origins of his Grey on Grey includes real-time encounters in major centres. A Webern concert in Paris in 1962 and the MoMA Rothko retrospective, also in 1962, were authentic encounters leading to the production of paintings that were fundamentally irreproducible.32 Yet, just as the work of Morris and Lee-Nova had done, Gaucher's paintings referenced the grey scale marshaled by photography. His paintings could be said to be abstractions (and omens) of the coming photographic regime. In them, one found the negation one expected of serious autonomous art, and even the injunction to approach the condition of music. But to a contemporary eye they also invoked the sensorium and communication in the abstract. As Doris Shadbolt wrote of them: "The observer who allows himself to be tuned in has the impression of experiencing them intra-sensorily as sound and motion as well as sight. . . The signals are read as being fixed in the ground matrix but also seen metaphorically: tokens of some high-frequency communication and in turn part of a constellation of that energy which rests, hovers, moves. . ."33
For Gaucher, the guiding metaphor of the Grey on Grey paintings was silence . . .
