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PETER SHAND
Judy Millar’s painting was the subject of an overview
exhibition curated by Roland Wäspe, Director of the
Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland from March
through May 2019: Judy Millar: The Future and the
Past Perfect.^1 It was a rich, concentrated, enriching
and concentrating exhibition, undertaken with care,
insight and remarkable acuity by both Wäspe and
Millar. Shown in seven large naturally lit rooms on
the first floor of the neo-classical revivalist museum,
the paintings and masking-tape works offered a
compelling invitation for engagement, contemplation
and activated response both as objects and as
representatives of painterly enquiry.
If I propose this exhibition as exemplifying Millar
as an artist in-between, I need to make it clear that
this is not a state of being stranded or lost. Indeed not,
for the notion of the in-between is a critical necessity
for art and perhaps most particularly painting in
the current epoch. What it means for painting is that
paintersandpracticesarenotsingularlyoriented
towards some ongoing mode of representation or
narration, not caught in a reductive interrogation
of formalist concerns of the medium alone and
not in retreat to some form of intuitive or creative
solipsism—affirming only this creative impetus, this
creative individual. Rather, they find the task to think
and make painting between these reductive culs-de-
sac to be galvanising.
It seems increasingly important that painting
operates in-between—in-between traditional nodes
of enquiry, in-between proclivities of audience
and critical interpretation or response, in-between
presence and absence. The in-between in painting is
neither safe nor comfortable; it involves a repudiation
of safety and comfort tied to certainty (of self, of
representation, of formalism) or ontology. French
philosopher François Jullien discusses this state
in relation to the simultaneity of presence and
absence in pre-modern Chinese painting and the
treatises attached to its different schools. He remains
implacably opposed to Euro-American philosophy’s
mistaken insistence on an ontology of painting
because of its teleological intent.^2 Instead he affirms
the unique advantages of painting as an exploratory
medium. Although a longish quote, Jullien affords
insight when he writes:
at least since Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosophy has sensed
that painting is engaged in an exploration that escapes its
mastery, something it fumbles to grasp and even fails toAccumulating Subtractions
Judy Millar in Switzerland
JudyMillarTheFutureandthePastPerfect
KunstmuseumSt Gallen,Switzerland,2 March–19May
curatedbyRolandWäspe
FrozenGesture:GestureinPainting—fromRoyLichtensteinto
KatharinaGrosse
KunstmuseumWinterthur,Switzerland,18 May–18August
curatedby KonradBitterli,Lynn Kost &AndreaLutz