The Simultaneity of the Possible and the Impossible

Blake Rayne gave a talk at CCA on Thursday night. He is a painter and teaches at Columbia. The blurb for the lecture listed him as a believer "that painting is more than just physical...his particular "procedures" as he calls them, include translation, decontextualization, folding, superimposition, and the following of scripts grafted from other sites of production..." (confession: I thought I was going to hear Rochelle Steiner, the director of the Public Art Fund in NY and probably would not have gone to hear Blake, but my husband would have. So I took notes for him.) BR seemed very bright and open, but was talking the deconstructivist talk I am not so fond of. But he was actually making sense, unlike some people, and it was particularly interesting in terms of the artists he mentioned. Like the 70s French Support/Surface group, Cezanne, Manet, Malevich, Mondrian...There was something about the critique of composition, in terms of how does one deal with the abitrariness of it, giving as examples the chance operations of John Cage, the use of chance + gravity of Jackson Pollock, and probably others I missed. He defined abstraction rather nicely as "selection and displacement." Which for me, as a painter-turned-phototgrapher, summed it up quite well.