PETER FOX

"A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks."
Georges Bataille

I make my ‘Process’ series paintings using acrylic paints. I arrange colors in a series of invented applicators, from which the paint drips onto inclined canvas, allowing chance and fluid dynamics a central role in shaping both process and outcome. Through observation and repetition, I gain a degree of control over the accidents I encourage.

The project began with a thought about disassembling and reconstructing languages, in critique of an orthodoxy that confines critical understanding to a kind of positivist conceptual algebra. This 'algebra' recognizes material objects as repositories of cultural reference, encoded with associations analogous to language. Focused on explication, 'thingness' - the quantifiable, identifiable – is emphasized. Content exists in the words, not the language.

I challenge the formula by feeding it an object language whose cultural references associate to indefiniteness, maintaining the form of the equation while leaving the variables undefined. It negates itself in its own unpacking. There are fewer 'things' to say. The object language I engage - with a smile - is ‘Abstract Painting’.

At the center is the canon of Jackson Pollock and Donald Judd, Gene Davis and Morris Louis. I pick apart Minimalism and Process, Op and Psychedelia, then stir it all around. The parameters are rigorous: exposed canvas, primary colors and the law of gravity. It's hands-off, all-over, self-reflexive and self-aware. I throw representation and narrative intention to the wind and let the work tell its own story (again); and while the words are all familiar, the language itself is new.

Positivist interpretation naturally spins back on itself, evaporating in its own negation; then I freely kick back and dream a happy post-utopian dream ... of a fully-blown, present-tense, universal indeterminacy.

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