It's been one of those days, all week (by Michael Lawton)

So this week I am in an exhibition put together by Paul McCann. The show as a whole features media-specific works focusing upon notions of temporatlity and nostalgia. Paul invited me specifically to respond to the Victor Burgin quote describing painting as 'the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’. My response was manifold, incorporating a digital image, a painting, a sculpture and a text piece that I have reproduced below. If you wish to see the show it is at Wimbledon College of Art until Friday.

 

Practice Nostalgia

Painting is the best medium for dealing with nostalgia because it is no longer living, and therefore need not concern itself with time or linear temporality. (After all it cannot become more obsolete and the undead don’t worry about ageing; it is what it is.) Because painting no longer exists in the same realm as time it can talk about things less fleeting, can comment from the position of an outsider and look on from a distance and observe wryly.

 

Painting is the worst medium for dealing with nostalgia because it is no longer living and therefore cannot concern itself with time or linear temporality. (After all it cannot become more obsolete and the undead don’t worry about ageing; it is what it is.) Because painting no longer exists in the same realm as time it cannot speak the same language, cannot empathise with the mechanical, the analogue, the digital or conjure up their flaws.