Article: Michael Stubbs in Conversation with John Bunker, 2018

So what has changed in abstract painting since the 1980s? If we have moved on from what some might call the ‘end games’ that became synonymous with Postmodernism’s parodies and ironies, then where might abstract painting be now? Via our highly mobile screens, we can search out almost any kind of representation of anything at all, from seemingly all-seeing and all-knowing conglomerations of big data. It might be argued that there are historical instances of abstraction, both geometric and hard-edged, and of gestural sign-making, that lend themselves to the visual experiences we associate with the screen. So what happens when the digital realm impinges on abstract painting? How does the artist’s and viewer’s sense of agency and subjectivity change in relation to painting if it is somehow mediated by a screen? According to the precepts of late modernism and formalism, painting must undergo a process of being hunted back to its essential qualities as a medium and an object. Now, by contrast, painting in an expanded post-medium phase is able to reconsider and reclaim its agency as seen through, and in relation to, other mediums. If, as Isabel Graw says, ‘We conceive painting not as a medium but as a production of signs’ 2 then paintings are opened up as complex visual structures, full of historical references and linguistic turns. Here, there is no single essence of painting, but a series of overlappings, slippages and collisions of positions. This chimes with an attitude to images and their manipulation attuned to our digital era; one in which it is possible to see a certain kind of contemporary abstract painting working as optical ‘search engines’, mining the imagery that traverses the real and the virtual. I have developed an approach to abstract painting that inhabits this territory. I cover some of the theoretical positions that seem relevant now in discussions about abstraction. I have used sub-headings to highlight those parts of the text that consider these positions as the discussion... Re-Investigating ‘Medium Specificity’;‘Being in Painting’; Material Making; The Process of Painting; Simultaneous Ecosystems in Painting; Decorative Delirium