79differently flat tape surfaces arranged in geometric
compositions are each quietly compromised whether
by the cut of the hand-held scalpel or the loss of tack
over time, so in places they lift and rumple.
What I had seen was their proximity to doing and
undoing, a give-and-take at the heart of the artistic
enterprise that calls to mind, then as now, Penelope
at her loom. Only now I think this is less a mindful
strategy of stalling or delay (Penelope holding off her
clamorous suitors, perhaps anticipating the return
of Odysseus) as it is a condition of simultaneity that
lies at the heart of artistic and specifically painting
practice. Jullien repeats Chinese theorists’ idea
that ‘to paint is “to give-take back” (qu-yu)’.^10 It is
a remarkably resonant suggestion in the context of
Millar’s methodology, where each gesture, whether
subtractive or not, results in precisely this sense of
sustained intimacy and interdependence.
The closing weekend of The Future and the Past
Perfect coincided with the opening weekend of Frozen
Gesture, a group exhibition curated by Konrad Bitterli,
Lynn Kost and Andrea Lutz at the Kunstmuseum
Winterthur, about 45 minutes from St Gallen by train.
This exhibition presented different responses to
painterly gesture that share, if nothing else, a move
away from the heroicism of high modernist practices
such as those of the abstract expressionists. Taking its
lead from Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965 Yellow Brushstroke,
the exhibition brings together this painting and work
by 15 contemporary artists, including four paintings
by Millar.
One of the interesting opportunities afforded
by this coincidence was to see her practice in
direct relation to other painters. It reinforced the
apprehension that her art remains a consideration
of painting’s fundamental task. In this respect some
key differences may be charted between Millar’s
painting and, say, Gerhard Richter (her investigation
of painting’s spatial possibilities), Bernard Frize (her
methodology of contingency) or David Reed (her
gestural openness and responsiveness)—to each she
remains experimental, less painter being painting-
maker, more painter doing (and undoing) painting. It
is a quality that seemed, in this exhibition, to align her
more with Katharina Grosse’s or Fabian Marcaccio’s
practices—although, again, there is a difference in
methodology whereby Millar is both subtractive and
haptic.
One of the paintings shown at Winterthur was Be
Do, Be Do IV (2013), in which enlarged screened black
gestures interact with a vibrant array of different
colours painted onto the canvas. This painting brings
attention back to a specific relationship with, perhaps
surprisingly, Lichtenstein and his investigation of
painterly gesture. While Yellow Brushstroke might
be viewed as simply deflating and ironising in
its graphic quality, later works (paintings and
printed media) included impasto encaustic wax or
Magna acrylic resin paint. This calls forth a broader
project: Lichtenstein deflects the ego of the classic
expressionist gesture (a characteristic he shares with
Millar) and he interrogates the operation of such
a gesture beyond its attachment to personality or
indexicality (again, so does she), not merely trashes
gesture as the worn-out trope of an exhausted
medium. As if to ask: we know the past historical
sequence but what of the future?
Which is where the nomenclature ‘frozen gesture’
feels awkward in relation to Millar’s painting. At
best one might think of gesture in ‘freeze-frame’—a
temporary moment of pause during movement in
film or stage performance or the action of stopping a
moving image to look at it closely. ‘Frozen’ sounds too
finite, too concluded. Art historically, it infers an irony,
melancholy or perhaps decadence arising from the
reanimation of something whose time has passed. I do
not think Millar is interested in reviving painting as if
it were subject to cryogenesis because she recognises
the restlessness that continues to propel painters,
paintings and audiences. It is this proposition that
she comes back to and comes back to; undertaking an
investigation that develops from the one prior, that
maintains an address of the possibility of painting
without ever being concerned with some practical,
material or theoretical endgame.
A clue to this lies in the title of the St Gallen
exhibition: The Future and the Past Perfect. Millar
not infrequently and for sometimehascalledupon
grammatical tenses and/orplayfulnesswithsubject/(opposite) Judy Millar’s The Future and the Past Perfect at
Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland, March 2019 installed at the
museum’s Skylight Hall, showing from left (partial) It to Them, to
Us to I, It to Them, to Us to I, It to Them, to Us to I, It to Them, to Us to
I, It to Them, to Us to I, & (partial) It to Them, to Us to I (all 2018). Also
visible through doorway is Untitled (2018)
(below) JUDY MILLAR Untitled 1995
Masking tape & purple electrical tape on paper, 765 x 656 mm.
(continued on inside back cover)