Current
Image is Not Property
An art note on material, property and seeing When looking at a painting, we think we know what we're looking at: a face, a landscape, a bowl of fruit. But what we're looking at is also what it's made with. Material stands silently beneath the image and often says more than the image itself: who made it, with what means. We hardly notice this because we consider material natural. But material is a choice; often also a necessity. Let's look again at the Gainsborough on this page's cover, Mr and Mrs Andrews. For years we read this painting like a nature depiction: a couple sitting under a tree, with a luminous English countryside behind them. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, disrupts this comfortable reading — the painting depicts not nature, but property. The Andrews couple stands not within the landscape, but in front of the land they own; their posture, their gaze, that rifle under the chair, all are declarations of belonging. And it's not just the pose that says this; it's the material itself. Because for centuries, oil painting was the painting of the tangible. It could show the shine of fur, the coldness of silver, the weight of flesh; it made objects almost graspable. In Berger's words, oil painting was the language of things that could be possessed: to paint something with it was, in a way, to acquire it as property. This is why large canvas, thick paint, expensive pigment was never just material; it was a boundary that predetermined who could produce images. Now let's cross to the other side of the boundary. Recently, in an open call, a painter described, in an almost cheerful tone, how they couldn't afford paint for large canvases. They had reduced the canvas size; now they make tiny, black-and-white works, finishing the incomplete parts of the painting with embro...
