 Hello everyone, is this working? You can hear me anyway, so anyways, I'm still muted. Good evening everyone, thank you for being here. It is a pleasure to host Dr. Falk Erodi for this very special lecture on the Convicts of the Exhibition of Peter Heavie, Convicts, Paintings from the 1980s. This lecture will be followed by a Q&A session led by Michel Cotton and head of artistic program and content at Moudin and also curator of the present Peter Heavie show in place. So please allow me to introduce our guest. Falk Erodi is a curator and art historian based in Glasgow. He recently completed a PhD on Peter Heavie's... So it was on. He recently completed a PhD on Peter Heavie's 1980s work at the University of Edinburgh. Previously he was a senior curator at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, co-curator of the 2015 Turner Prize in Glasgow and exhibitions curator at Space, Space Studios in London. Over the last 15 years, he has curated solo exhibitions, projects by artists such as Alexandra Dumanovich, Maudie Moul, Dean Blunt, as well as historical projects exploring the work of Raymond Petibon, Jack Smith, Cathy Acker, Bob Coving, Paul McCarthy, among others. Peroni has taught in the history art department of Edinburgh University and has been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Arts, Glasgow School of Art, Goldsmith and ZHDK. His writing has appeared in Frees, Flash Art and Art Review, amongst other publications. He also contributed with an essay for the catalogue of this exhibition. Peter Heavie comes with paintings from the 1980s, which is the name of the show as well as the catalogue, which is also available at our shop. I just wanted to mention this little part. So enjoy the lecture. Welcome Paul. The stage is yours. Okay, hello everyone. How are we doing? First of all I just wanted to thank Michelle and her team here. They've been really amazing and really supportive. I'm just so grateful this exhibition has taken place. It's just wonderful to see all these paintings, so thank you so much. And thank you also to Peter for making all this beautiful art. It's really wonderful to see it. Okay, so in this talk, which will last about 45 minutes, I will make the case that Halley's paintings of the 80s can be viewed as devices or vehicles of orientation that can help us understand the acute historical tensions shaping social reality in New York City during the 1980s. Decades marked by disorientating economic, social and cultural change. So let's begin by jumping straight in. This is a painting you'll recognise from the exhibition, Dago Prison from 1982. So what can we say about this work? Well first, despite being made in 1982, Dago Prison's geometric blocks, electrified colour and industrial materials and innovative adaptations of support establish a rich and layered engagement with the minimizing and clarifying procedures that took place in American art during the 1950s and 1960s. At this time, falling on from earlier hard-edge developments in the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Joseph Albers, artists such as Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland moved beyond the loose, gestural and expressive brushroads of abject expressionism and towards a cooler, more impersonal approach to facture that resulted in works with clearly delineated zones of solid flat colouration with a particular sharp or hard finish. Now it's this tradition or approach which ultimately culminated in the specific objects of minimalism that has been quoted by Halley in this painting. And you can see just some images here making comparisons with hard-edge works by Frank Stella from the 1960s. You can see the artistic vocabulary is kind of similar. Same here, this is a slightly earlier work by Joseph Albers. I think it's important to note that Halley is quite explicit about this comparison or this use of past art. As he explains in the Crisis of Geometry, my paintings are executed with a variety of techniques lifted from hard-edge and colour-filled stars. So we can say that Halley's work simulates pastiches when he works a form of minimalist abstraction from 20 years earlier and that's quite an intentional and obvious element of his work. Now Halley came in for quite a lot of criticism for this aspect of his work in the 1980s. Most notably, he found himself in the crosshairs of Hal Foster. Then a young critic and editor working in art in America in a 1986 article, Foster argued that the kind of nostalgic abstraction being practised by Halley was no more than a ready-made reduction of serious abstraction, a campy recycling of ultra-abstraction that evinced a post-historical attitude whereby art, stripped of its material context and discursive entanglements, appears as a synchronous display of so many styles, devices, signs to collect pastiches or otherwise manipulate with no one deemed more necessary or pertinent than the next. I think it's interesting to sort of frame Foster's analysis in terms of another theoretical framework and it's that of preeminent Marxist theorist Frederick Jameson's analysis of post-modernist culture. There's Freddie Jameson. In his 1984 article, Post-Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Lake Capitalism, Jameson used economist Ernst Mandel's term Lake Capitalism as a historical framework to identify and diagnose a set of post-modernist artistic tendencies that had become prominent in the 1980s. For Jameson, by the 1980s, Martigate forces had infiltrated culture to such a degree that a sense of historical amnesia, a profound disorientation of present artists to historical contexts had come to pass. Observing the, quote, random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, end quote, at work in post-modernist art. Jameson concluded that with the collapse of notions of progress and tealoss central to modernist art, post-modernist artists were left stumbling about in a state of historical blindness and disorientation, which resulted in works with a tendency towards what he variably labelled historicism, nostalgia or pastiche. And this was a trope at work in other artistic projects from this period. This is Ross Blackner painting from the 82, 83. And we can see immediately there's a correlation there with Bridget Riley's striped paintings, her op-up paintings from the 1960s. Philip Taffey as well, this work from 85. And we can see it's a very direct and obvious quotation of a Barnett Newman work. I think this is an aspect of this historicism or pastiche going on with near-expressionism's return in the early 1980s to European traditions of expressive figuration from the 1910s and 1920s. Movements such as Petura Metaphysica in Italy or Neuersatlichkeit in Germany. Viewed with a slightly wider lens, it's also what seems to be going on with the rise of what Jameson calls nostalgia film during the 70s and 80s. Films such as George Lucas's American Graffiti and Francis Ford Coppola's Rumblefish from 83. Both of which set out to recapture in Jameson's words the mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era. My own interpretation is that we remain in something of a nostalgic post-modernist moment. What other theorists from Jacques Derrida to Marc Fischer have described as a hauntological moment. We are haunted by images of the past. Retramania abounds in late capitalism. And this is apparent in everything from the music of Dua Lupa to the quite unwelcome return of Indie sleaze to Harry Styles' fashion, as put on him by various major Italian fashion houses who seemed permanently sort of caught in a sort of 1970s moment of nostalgia. Thinking through all of this, I think it's really important to recognize that Jameson, like Foster, sees pastiche or saw pastiche as a negative symptom of the increasing reach of capital into culture. Foster also criticized Halle's citation of French theorists in his written work in interviews of the mid-1980s, but I won't get into the so-called simulationist controversy here. It's a controversy about the uses and abuses of French theory because it's been covered extensively in the literature on Halle. I want to instead focus on something else, namely the representational aspect of Halle's work. Because a work like Dago Prison isn't just a pastiche or simulation of past art, it's also a picture of something, namely a kind of prison structure or building, and I dug out some lovely clip art pieces to see how he's tapping a sort of emblematic image of a prison. The thesis I want to put forward here is that this pictorial or representational aspect of the work can help orientate us in the historical situation unfolding in New York City during the 1980s. To demonstrate this thesis, I'm going to trace the development of Halle's core iconographic motifs, prisons, conduits and cells between 1980 and 1982. Then I'll focus on one of Halle's core essays before returning to these paintings for final comments. But before getting stuck into the work, I think it's important to sort of map out what's going on in New York in 1980. At this time, after the slow going of the 1970s, the cultural scene was picking up in New York. He had the birth of punk music, a wave and new wave music in downtown New York. There was also the emergence of hip-hop and graffiti culture in the Bronx. In terms of contemporary art, there came the... sorry, then there was the rise of so-called photo-mechanical art of the pictures generation, artists such as Richard Prince, Sheryl Levine and Cindy Sherman. We have also the rise of graffiti art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Herring and Kenny Schaaf, amongst others. And as already mentioned, there's the rise of neo-expressionism, which began in Europe but had American manifestations in the work of Julian Schnabel and David Salle. Around 1981, the East Village also began to explode as a gallery location. And it's from this scene that Halle a few years later would emerge alongside other artists associated with neo-geo or new geometric conceptualism, artists such as Jeff Coombs and Ashley Bickerton. It's like a really geeky graph that's in someone's PhD listing when these various galleries open. This only also touches the surface. Many more galleries opened up during this time. It's just a few more images of this scene. This is the people who ran Civilian Warfare outside their space. And then we have the two galleries associated with neo-geo, nature-morten, international with monument. And you recognize international with monument from the show. Halle had his first solo show in 1985. As Peter Schadel, the late Peter Schadel, the critic, stated in 1981, more is happening in American art right now than ever before. There was more of everything in every body. So it was a really sort of exciting moment, a moment of sort of artistic explosion in New York. Okay, I want to now sort of trace the development of Halle's early painting. And I'd ask you to pay particular attention to the way urban and social forms, buildings, infrastructural aspects of the modern city, etc., begin to find their way into his artistic iconography. So there's Halle outside his East 7th Street studio. This was taken in 85, but he actually moved there in 1980. Just prior to moving to New York, Halle was working on paintings that he would later describe as neo-Pecasoid. I guess this is a reference to Picasso's sort of analytic cubist portraits of the 1920s. As he later explained, I went through this intense Picasso phase between 1978 and 1980. There was a sense of a frontal horizontal plane in which geometric things were piled, and that's how I was thinking when I got to New York. However, once back in New York, human figures begin to disappear from the work. These are replaced by angular, multi-sided triangle geometries described by Halle as geometricized figures like some sort of sci-fi synthetic cubism. If we look at another painting, Jacob Wrestling the Angel, here a multi-coloured, tessellated polygonal figure tilts to the right of the picture's centre, as if falling away from the depicted scene. And this is just as a large and ominous brown brick wall looms into view behind it. I was worried about the picture quality, but I guess you can see there's a brown wall behind this figure. The appearance of this wall signals a shift in focus in Halle's painting. The new direction the work is taking in the later months of 1980 is towards a depiction of inanimate features of the urban landscape, most probably architectural forms such as walls. However, before exploring Halle's turn towards walls, I want to briefly exchange a paint, engage a painting that sits slightly out of joint with the other works being made at this time. This work, The City, features vertically organised, rectangular blocks in black-muted blues, reds and natural colours. These forms are overlaid in dense clusters generating an allusion to a skyscraper-clad inner-city skyline. The importance of the city to Halle's developing painting practice can be identified in a particular kind of perceptual ruse generated by this painting. As one views the city, a kind of visual switching or flipping takes place. It is possible to see this image in two ways, either as a purely geometric arrangement of densely-improcated coloured orthogonals or as an urban landscape. This strategy of creating images with shape-shifting properties, images capable of transforming back and forth between two possible readings would be something Halle would continue to cultivate during this period of intensive development in the painting. Okay, as mentioned, the paintings Halle would make through the end of 1980 and through to 1981 would focus on reductive deadpan depictions of brick walls. This shift towards austere-imposing images of architectural forms was no doubt the result of Halle's growing awareness of the landscape surrounding him in New York City. As we would later explain, in New York I really had the profound experience of the human figure was irrelevant. I stopped trying to pile up some sort of human figure and began painting brick walls, just like home. And again, as this demonstrates, the city is beginning to penetrate and percolate into Halle's work. Stacked in the traditional one brick over two pattern known as a stretch or a running bond, brick walls set against horizon, these backgrounds become the central focus of Halle's painting for a number of months between late 1980 and early 1981. Walls in paintings such as the red wall, which we've just seen, and behind the wall there is another wall run horizontally across the picture plane, dominating the space within the frame of the painting, while also suggesting that it might carry on beyond it somehow. But this turn towards walls and bricks is also a turn towards minimalist art. And you can see here I've picked a late solid wet piece to just compare the brick-like formation. I should have probably put Carl Andre here, but I'm not going to put a slide of Carl Andre up at all. He's a horrible man. Um... Um... Indeed, these brick wall paintings demonstrate Halle's growing interest in the syntax of modular forms with the serial order of the brick itself as it was absorbed into the aesthetic logic of minimalist art. And I've got this nice quote by Robert Morris here that sort of laid this out. This is told to the critic David Salvestre in 1967. There's a kind of order involved in this art that is not an art order. It's an order of made things that is pretty basic to how things have been made for a very long time. The clearest example I suppose you could cite would be the kind of ordering and object quality that may be in bricks and in the way the bricks are used. It's a kind of unit in a syntax that has been in the culture since the Stone Age, I suppose, and it's still very basic to industrial type manufacturing. Standardization and repetition and repeatability. The wholeness of a part that can be extended. The wall paintings thus mark a turn towards an interest in the syntax of modular, standardised, repeatable, orthogonal forms that would be critical to the development of Halley's painting. But what I've been lacking from Halley's work up until this point was a signature iconographic motif. This is however precisely what Halley introduced in 1981 with his early prison paintings. The outslut, the sort of whiteness of this has sort of blurred the edge of the painting but you can sort of see what's going on. This is a little Spanish prison from 1981. So we can see the prison icon right in the middle and this is one of the first times that he's used it. Quite curiously Halley has explained that this barred prison window emblem derived from an uncanny encounter with the facade of the East Village loft in which he set up his home and first studio in 1980. So again, we can see this here and there's another photo. You have a really good quality version of this photo in your exhibition and I saw it and I was like, damn, this is from a 1992 catalogue at Des Moines Art Centre and it's like a copy of a copy of a copy. So I apologise. As Halley explained, I lived in a building on 7th Street. On the ground floor there used to be a bar or a pub that had a stucco facade and windows with bars over them. I began to do the jail paintings, paintings of prison type facades. I was in front of my building waiting for a friend one day and realised that I had in fact been using this image which I had never consciously noticed before. It's completely subconscious in origin. So again, you can see how this demonstrates a growing porosity developing between Halley's painting and the median urban space surrounding him in New York. New York seems to be seeping or percolating into the painting, into its images and its materiality. But yet again, the prison motif is a deeply referential form that seems to signal the clarity and emblematics of a range of painting projects and the formation of artists. Evident here are illusions to Jasper Johns, everyday emblems, his target in flag paintings, for example. John McLaughlin's crisp and spiritually charged linear markings and even to the logo type aesthetics of Frank Stellar's 1960s paintings. Yet of all these references, perhaps the most obvious is to the plate-like overlaid squares of Joseph Alba's paintings. A foundational figure in the tradition of American geometric abstraction, Alba's is best known for his series, homage to the square, which he began in 1949 and which continued to his death until 1976. Taking an approach to painting that was relentlessly austere, geometric and anti-gestural, this series set out to explore the tensions between the quiddity of square forms and the capacity for colour to generate impactful illusions of form, space and hue. You can see the comparison here. The image sort of cuts out the outer edge of the Halle work, so you can't quite see the overlaid square effect, but you get the idea. Crucially, while the geometric order of a work like Little Spanish Prison references the reductive geometry of the homage to the square series, the presence of an apparently figurative or symbolic motif right in the middle of the depicted square, the barred prison window compromises the purity of Alba's work. As Halle would later explain a lot of my early work is the result of questioning minimalism and reopening minimalists signified to point to society, to social space, etc. All of a sudden, squares could become prisons. Now, I've discussed pastiche as a common characteristic of postmodernist artworks, but I now want to briefly discuss another called postmodernist strategy that I think is demonstrated here and that's double coding. For it's this strategy that will appear to be at work in Halle's quotation of subversion of tropes of past minimalist art. Now, if pastiche represents something like a crisis of historicity, then this kind of double coding signals something like a crisis of authorship or author or meaning. Now, this immediately calls to mind Roland Barth's arguments about the death of the author made in a same titled 1967 essay. The first translated into English in 1967, it was not only 10 years later in 1977 with the publication of Barth's anthology of essay's Image, Music and Text that this essay came to widespread prominence in America. In the essay, Barth argues that against relying on the intentions and backgrounds of an author to establish the definitive meaning of a text, the capacity for each individual reader to find their own meanings should be emphasised. Speaking in a 2003 art forum at Roundtable discussion, art historian David Jocelet explicitly aligned what was going on with postmodern painting in the 1980s with Barth's text and I quote in Barth's canonical text which was widely read in the 1980s the death of the author was one and the same with the birth of the reader. Perhaps they're quote new rules which allow new painterly permutations to emerge codify such a displacement from the writerly to the readerly. Tactics of appropriation which are regardless closely linked to postmodern painting certainly fit within this category. Halley himself has cited Barth's influence repeatedly in his interviews speaking again to Carolyn De Jong Halley stated that quote I could never accept the hermetic self-referential claims of minimalism. Donald Judd for example said that the forms of his work didn't refer to anything, that they were in fact signifiers without signifiers. In the 1980s with the influence of Roland Barth and others the signifier all of a sudden became opened up again. Ok so I want to quickly now turn to the other two motifs introduced to the painting in 1981 and 1982. You'll recognise this painting from the exhibition upstairs. Prism with conduit at the first of Halley's paintings to feature a conduit. A rare work in portrait format this prison is composed of two bolted together canvas panels. As you can see the second vividly coloured lower canvas is divided by a crisp acrylic. You can see other conduit infused paintings here from the same period. If prison suggests an image of containment, fixity and isolation then conduits contradict this image by symbolising movement and connection in the painting. Now this static or fixed Halley's conduits are reminiscent of lines of past examples of minimalist abstraction. The mono-directionality of Barnett Newman's zips for example or Frank Stetzler's deductive motile stripes. Like Halley's conduits, Newman's zips and Stetzler's stripes are not lines of free-wheeling action as opposed to Pollock's tumbling spinning schemes of tripped and poured paint. You could argue that these structural forms in their own way but that's another conversation. Rather Halley's conduits follow specific pathways and in doing so they symbolise forms of orderly controlled systematic or structural movement. See some conduit details here. Conduits also suggest themselves as tube or pipe-like containers conduit from the Latin conductors are leading a pipe. And this is something grounded once again in an imminent sensual encounter between Halley and the built space of New York. As Halley's explained of the moment he first began thinking about conduits quote, I was working on this idea of the square becoming a prison. I was at home listening to the radio turning on electric lights being able to turn on the faucet flush the toilet, talk on the telephone turn on the air conditioner I began to become obsessed with the idea that all these natural things air light, noise and speech were being piped in I began to think about conduits. As this experience suggests we are encouraged to read conduits as infrastructural elements comparable to commonplace network systems such as those of utilities or communication systems or the tunnels of subterranean transportation systems. Conduits can therefore be understood as relational motifs, structures that form connections and relays in the painting between fixed forms such as prisons and another core motif introduced to the painting in the early months of 1982 cells. The first appearing in white cell with conduit in 1982 cells are simple square forms that mark a shift towards a higher level of abstraction in the painting. On one level Halley's cell appear to repeat notions of imprisonment suggested by the prisons yet the visual abstraction of this motif is mirrored by an expansion in its possible representations a cell having a more generic connotation as an abstract signifier as a cell abstract signifier of a kind of self contained or enclosed space. The appearance of cells in 1982 soon after conduits marks the moment Halley's cell and conduit motifs were in place alongside his prisons. This latter cell and conduit unit of motifs allowed Halley to represent a more holistic kind of network vision in this painting. You can see this here and an image of isolated units linked together by way of underground networks of conduits. This turn towards network imagery in 1982 suggested a whole new register of our historical illusion in the work. On the one hand this early network style painting two cells with underground chain but clearly resonates with the kind of cybernetic artistic imaginary that is again firmly rooted in the 1960s. This is a piece by Ruella Wigan from 1964. Wigan's enigmatic and obsessive depictions of commuter circuitry and electronics are a good example of this for example. On the other hand somewhat unusually for Halley given the strong routing of his references in post-war American art we might also frame his cell and conduit paintings in terms of an earlier moment of mechanical enchantment in art. The subtle and not so subtle meditations of the modern industrial infrastructure and engineering found in Francis Bacabia's mechanomorphic portrait drawings that appeared in the data journals 291 and 391. Okay, so Going backwards, here we go. Okay so by 1982 Halley had cultivated methods for creating an unstable symbolic space in the painting. The main aspect of this instability sees the geometry of minimalist artworks collapse into a set of spatial references to landscape to built form to network like technological systems and structures. The elliptical relations generated by this procedure are both representationally suggestive, minimalist forms are transformed into specific things and historically provocative. The Greenbergian idea of formalist art as pure, transcendent or autonomous is countered by the suggestion that these forms might in fact represent objects in the real world. In this way Halley cultivates a form of painting with the power to switch or flip between pure abstraction and abstracted representation. The result is a de-familiarizing model of abstraction. I should note that the title of this talk is a reference to this capacity to flip between abstraction and figuration but it's also a track on Talking Heads 1983 album Speaking in Tongues. You see this really nice cover art by Robert Rauschenberg right there. The question I've yet to answer however regards the orientational logic of these paintings the way they locate us amongst the historical tensions of 1980s New York. In order to flesh out this question I want to now briefly turn to one of Halley's key essays, The Crisis in Geometry 1984. Having sent unsolicited articles to the editor of Arts Magazine in early 1981 I soon became a regular contributor to the magazine. Between 1981 and 1984 Halley published numerous essays with the magazine. These include Beat, Minimalism, New Wave and Robert Swiss and a speculative analysis of conjunctions between literary musical and artistic cultures in post-war America. This appeared in the main 1981 issue of the magazine. Another essay was against post-modernism reconsidering Ortega which explored Spanish philosopher and essayist Ortega Gase's concept of modernism. That was also from 1981. As mentioned already he wrote about Ross Blackner's 1981 exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in an essay called Ross Blackner Painting at the End of History which is a really nice dramatic title. Another article was Nature and Culture a sweeping periodization of the immediate post-war years in American art. And finally The Crisis in Geometry which is today probably Halley's most widely read essay. And it's an analysis of the relationship between idealized geometry in a range of post-war formalist art projects and a periodized conception of geometricized urban environments. The Crisis in Geometry is a text closely yoked to the 1970s theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. Regarding the influence of Foucault sometime in 1981 after he'd already started painting prisons Halley read Foucault's 1977 book Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison. Drawing influence from Foucault's book Halley's essay meditates on Foucault's analysis of the way in which industrial urban space is structured around the need to rationally manage the movement and flow of human bodies circulating through it as part of the everyday grind of industrial life. The innovation of the Crisis in Geometry comes when Halley associates a geometric abstraction of formalist art projects with the castle order of this industrial urban space as described by Foucault. If Foucault was cited in this essay in order to construct a critical image of the castle or coercive logic of industrial urban space, Baudrillard is invoked to describe the fully network logic of post-industrial social space. Halley's essay features repeated references to soft geometries or seductive geometries related to technologies such as computers and electronic entertainment. In this way Halley associates his cell and conduit imagery with a kind of cyberneticized technological vision of post-industrial society expressed in Baudrillard's writings of the late 1970s. Now in an interview published the year after the Crisis in Geometry Halley reiterated this periodized understanding of the form at work and his core motives. As he said I see my work over the last few years as being about working through a change in the way geometry functions socially from an industrial type geometry to a post-industrial type. I started with a situation of coercive geometries symbolized by the jail and then moved to a more seductive geometry symbolized in the day glow colors the systems of conduit and the sort of video game space I think my painting has now. That corresponds to a movement from Foucault who mostly talks about the coercive geometry of industrialism to Baudrillard who's more interested in seductive geometry. Now we can say that Halley's prisons on the one hand and his conduits and cells on the other seem to be yoke to specific moments or periods in the recent history of capitalism this is what this quote suggests at least and this is an approach that I think has two important implications for Halley's work. In general by linking the geometric form of his prison, conduit and cell motifs to historically specific social structures in particular urban architecture built space and urban network systems Halley's work takes on a kind of carted graphic valence Halley's model of abstraction demonstrates a will to map or register the features of the world around him we can say therefore that there's an ambition to orientate viewers expressed in the formal logic of Halley's core motifs a desire to somehow visualize or image the city Halley's re-inscription of minimalist geometric form therefore reveals him as a painter of the urban panorama an artist registering albeit in a highly abstract way the different features of social space in which he found himself in New York secondly in as much as prisons are in attempt to describe the geometry of social space described the geometry of social space ordered by an industrial logic and conduits and cells describe the logic of social space in a post-industrial moment we can see that Halley places particularly emphasis on the importance of periodization in his painting this is an emphasis I would argue that points to the fact that the early 1980s were a crucial historical inflection point in New York the moment the city's forwardest industrial legacy was consigned to the past once and for all after two decades of breakdown and decline and this was just as an incipient post-forwarded or post-industrial mode of production was coming into full view we can therefore understand Halley's core motifs as something like attempts to see or map the tensions generated between these two modes of production now the question of how to aesthetically map the historical dynamics of capitalism at this chaotic and confusing moment in America's recent history was a question also on Frederick Jameson's mind in the early 80s back to Frederick Jameson as you can see it's a common theme there he is three of him in war Hylian mode for Jameson this aesthetic project of cognitive, sorry at a conference entitled Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture held in the autumn of 1983 at the University of Illinois Jameson presented a paper titled Cognitive Mapping in which he speculated about the potential of new forms of political aesthetic mapping, new aesthetic tools that might offer orientation during this period of widespread and significant social economic and political disorientation in America disorientation for Jameson this aesthetic project of cognitive mapping would serve as an integral part of any socialist political project offering critical depictions of social spaces and relations at hand in early 1980s America as media theorist Douglas Kellner suggests in a useful summary of Jameson's position on cognitive mapping individuals need some sort of image of mapping of their society in the world as a whole cognitive mapping involves a task of individuals artists and theories in providing orientation a sense of time, history and place through theoretical models of how societies is structured combined with historical analyses of stages of development what I want to put forward here is the idea that we consider the model of abstract painting how he had begun to elaborate in the early months, early years of the 1980s in particular the way he exploited the strategies of an emerging post-modernist aesthetic such as pastiche and double coding to produce a set of core iconographical motifs that broke with the paradigm of formalist abstraction to depict historically specific industrial or post-industrial social structures to share the kind of ambition expressed in the idea of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping Jameson was attempting to elaborate in 1983 so the value of these paintings for me at least is their cartographic value the way they locate us and that leads us to this moment where we can suggest that post-modernist abstraction functions as cognitive mapping and while there's not the time here to delve deeply into the myriad mapping procedures taking place in Halley's painting you can read my PhD for that I want to conclude by briefly demonstrating just a few ways in which Halley exploits certain tendencies in 1950s and 1960s of minimalist art for example its industrial materiality or its mass produced mass production inflected modular serial structural geometry to map this moment of historical attention in New York and again just to make clear it's a moment of tension between a lost or disappearing industrial horizon and emerging post-industrial one regarding the lost industrial city we have various images from this moment of crisis in the 70s so by the early 80s it was clear that industrial capitalism in New York had more or less died general developments in the global economy led to radical changes in New York's economic base that took effect from the late 1960s onwards significant capital flight led to widespread deindustrialization in what was once a proud blue-collar city has manufacturing workshops warehouses and storefronts across the five boroughs relocated to more favorable locations areas lacking New York's high wages real estate costs and robust unions loss of working-class industries and jobs took place in lockstep with so-called white flight the departure of the city's middle class tax base to the suburbs and commuter towns facilitated by what transpired to be racist policies such as the GI Bill and racist practices such as bank redlining in turn this decentralization of New York's workforce and indeed the flight of industry have been facilitated by the commencement of construction from the late 1950s onwards of the in-state highway system a vast network of controlled-accessed highways that plug themselves into the New York only accelerating the movement of industry and labour beyond city bounds New York's troubles were only further compounded in the 1970s by trouble, by solutions devised to resolve a debt problem that had been slowly building in the city since the 1960s this problem came to a head in 1975 with what is known as the urban fiscal crisis a crisis that began when bankers refused to continue to purchase debt bonds from the city lawmakers and which resulted in the city's near bankruptcy a withering program of austerity and cutbacks drawn up by an elite of government officials and financiers appointed to resolve the city's debt problem had by 1980 not only ravaged New York's once famously robust public sector he had left the city in a state of material breakdown and decay as theorist Jeff Kilmkel the speaker of the city Halley returned to in 1980 he had to describe the city more or less abandoned by the lifeblood of capital I think you can sort of see this in some of Halley's earliest works these are apartment paintings that are not in this show but they're in a show of early works in New York that's running concurrently so we can see one of Perler de Leon's photographs of the South Bronx in 1980 and one of Halley's apartment paintings and we can see a similar sort of comparison here one way an atmosphere of quite quiet brooding industrial crisis and social exhaustion is captured in a work like apartment painting this one here is through Halley's method of forcing representational imagery into the airless pictorial space pioneered by American abstract geometric painters of the 1950s and 1960s part of the power of this painting lies in its odd insistence that immediately recognizable object from the real world an apartment building can be contained somehow within a pictorial space defined by rigorous polarity this generates a form of de-familiarized figuration or depiction in Halley's painting emaciated, lifeless, we seemingly encounter this building in a state of exhaustion it's as if history has moved on from this particular structure yet it remains before us denatured and defeated this is a painting that makes use of a particular kind of fluorescent yellow which suffuses the sort of architectural prison figure one way of constructing a social context for this type of light is to consider it as a representation of a specific kind of street light technology commonplace in New York until very recently when LED lighting supplanted it high pressure sodium vapor street lighting known as HBS lighting bathed the street in an eerie, flat orange light by the late 1970s HBS bulbs had become the preferred choice for street lighting in New York City selected for being highly efficient as light sources and therefore cost-reductive as write a Hal Aspen notes after the energy shocks of the 1970s high pressure sodium lights gradually took over New York as it consumed very little energy 2000 hours on a single bulb a work like prison with yellow background here therefore seems to glow with the same quality of light and color as HBS lighting the peculiar transfixed in glow of this painting seems to capture an image of a crisis ravaged urban landscape robbed of of chromatic complexity by a light form that in its economic efficiency signals at one review run remove the economic tumult of the fiscal crisis years of New York in the 1970s we can also see in a work like ideal city which is in this exhibition after images of industrial here in New York so the alienating monotony of mass-reduced landscapes landscapes produced by processes such as urban renewal and I think this image here is quite symbolic really for me it's a melancholy image a factory an industrial form seemingly failing into the twilight failing into the night of history in a way okay but shift in register the 1980s were also the moment of an emerging post-injustice city the breakdown of the clay of industrial New York reached the climax of the recessions of 1980 and 1981 to 1982 however by the middle of 1982 as President Reagan settled into his first German office alliances between corporate and state interest put in place to resolve the fiscal crisis were well on their way to reconstructing New York as a neoliberal post-forward city and this was just as new forms of monetary capital liberated by a wide range of regulations greenlit by the Reagan administration began to flood into the city if urban decay and social breakdown had an imposing impact on New York's urban subjects the covert if not invisible quality reformed to privatize capital restructuring the city alongside a more general impasse towards new technology and network systems only redoubled this effect and we can see this time towards technology and network systems mapped in Halley's work too this is one and only moving image work computer generated piece called Exploding Cell which you'll see upstairs in the exhibition you can see it clearly correlates with the aesthetic of 8-bit technology emerging at the same time we can also look at these abstractions as sort of being similar to the emerging computer systems at the time and we might also relate them to the way the shadow finance industry was emerging at this time and I think that's something definitely sort of baked into Halley's use of two separate canvases and above visible canvas and below invisible canvas I just want to clarify a point here about representation however to be clear the idea that the abstract minimalist aesthetic of Halley's paintings could successfully represent the systems at work in contemporary network capitalism the complexity of a fully wired up trading floor for example it's myriad of telephone and computer connections it's screens and it's connections to real lives and to mortgage judgments policies, banks, legal systems etc. is of course absurd while this is the kind of complexity we mean when we discuss things like financial networks it is not something that can be captured in a simplistic painting featuring squares and lines however this way of viewing representation in terms of correlation as a kind of mirror held up to reality or a photographic image made of it is clearly not the form of representation at work in this painting rather I would argue it's the very simplicity of a painting like this it's very failure to properly represent the fibrillating complexity of network capitalism that I would argue successfully expresses something of the unbridgeable void between individual experience and the vast underworld of advanced capitalism shadow technological networks in reducing an image of advanced technological networks down to the most basic relationships between elementary geometric forms squares and lines and in pitching his paintings as diagrams yet withholding captions, keys or indexes what we read is reflexively engaging the very problem of representation particularly the new forms of technological capitalism how we can see a few more illusions here this is one often made between the silicon chip and one of the paintings that's upstairs Halley's use of Daeglo paint also seems to sort of conjure the aesthetics of screen based technologies iPhone aesthetics in particular and in a 2016 interview Halley commented on this connection directly on his use of Daeglo color which is obviously a reference to 60s abstraction but it also chimes with these new technologies as he stated there were a few artists using fluorescent color Warhol, Stella but at the beginning of the 1980s at the beginning of what I considered to be the digital era our world was getting more electronic more colorful, more intense and it really seemed to be that fluorescent color was the way to express that I wanted my paintings to have the light of technology it's absolutely true that my work has become more popular with people since the iPhone came along there's something about the idea of glowing something that generates lights that seems to appeal to humans okay pretty much at the end here but I just want to conclude with some suggestions for the historical influence of Halley's work one possible reference is to YBA art of the 1990s an argument can be made that Halley's pursuit of the social logic of abject geometric form established an important example to the YBA is a generation born roughly a decade after him these are Gary Hume's very Halley inflected door paintings we can also see some sort of comparison with Rachel Whiteread's work this is a piece called House I'm bringing us right up to the contemporary moment I would argue that there's a trend of socialized minimalism that continues today that was very influenced by Halley we can see that in something like Cameron Rowland's work or Park MacArthur's work and finally this piece by Stuart Middleton from last year okay that's it that's the end of my talk thank you everyone oh it's very tough is that too tough I'll flip it when you make your way over thank you maybe I can start by before while we just find a second microphone for you just by saying thank you for such fascinating well timed and engaging I didn't actually look but I think so yeah engaging talk but also one of the most visually stimulating talks I've seen here at Middleton I don't think Peter's ever been in the company of or Peter's work has ever been in the company of Harry Styles thank you for making that link yeah no it was really enjoyable I'm sure there are other questions I hope there are other questions for the audience but maybe I'll kick us off because one of the things that has preoccupied me of course putting together an exhibition of an artist who's still living and working very much part of the conversation also for our show was the relevance of Peter's showing Peter's 1980s work today and as someone who spent the last five years looking intensely at this body of work I wanted to ask you what your take on that was why you think we should look at what we can what we can find or how we can locate the relevance of this 1980s painting in our own moment I think it was Dan Cameron who said I think it was in the Saatchi New York Art Now catalogue produced for the Saatchi Gallery Show in 1986 I think in that catalogue Cameron says that Halley is one of the few artists who is effectively restating the project of abstraction for his own moment so just in basic historical terms if we consider abstraction to be something that's constantly coming back in a sort of orbital historical movement then I really feel Halley is the most important abstractionist for that period in history much as many critics didn't want to recognize that I think he restated abstraction for the 1980s and as suggested by the images of his influence while again certain critics didn't approve of it in a way I think a lot of artists did because he reopened abstraction and I think there's some really interesting games you can do with history based on that notion one fun game to play and it's something that Roberta Smith from the New York Times has done in her writing is to align Halley with Kelly and to talk about Kelly as this moment because obviously Kelly's work is very inflected by urban imagery be it the shadows on stairways and her argument seems to be that just before the real hardcore formalist term you have this sort of teetering moment where abstraction is sort of partly about the real world and partly about pure form and then we go straight into the literalist moment of minimalism let's say which is very sort of hostile to representation but then if you imagine Halley as someone that we encounter coming out of minimalism and again the city re-enters the real world re-enters so I think in simple terms he offers a model of abstraction that isn't hostile to representation and I think for people wanting to use abstraction for example as a diagrammatic tool that's incredibly fertile perhaps more fertile than notions of literal form that you get and say minimalist abstraction thank you I want to come back to that abstraction and the flipping the notion of flipping between abstraction and figuration that you touched on in the talk also but before I do I want to talk to you about Halley's European not Harry Star well maybe later I want to talk to you about Halley's European or European appeal because these paintings were produced in New York and you articulate so well so beautifully that how they their origin and their in that social technological moment is kind of seeps into the work but Peter maintains that their critical reception their primary critical reception in that era was in Europe and I'm thinking particularly also of the first institutional exhibition in Krefeldt in Germany that tour to the ICA into St. Etienne in 1889 and then the exhibition organized by CAPC in Bordeaux that travelled to Lausanne to René-Sophia, Madrid to Stadelic Museum in Amsterdam in 1991 why do you think that these paintings which are so deeply informed by their immediate environment and conditions and condition of living in late 20th century America found their critical kind of home as it were or spoke so clearly to European audiences it's a really good question and I don't have a clear answer it's somewhat mysterious it could be to do with traditions of abstraction in Europe being different to traditions of abstraction in America I think the hostility to certain forms of abstraction in America were very much built upon a generation of October critics who took it upon themselves to really oppose Greenberg informalism so there's a micro-politik there to do with American art history which I don't think is as relevant in Europe Eve Allenbois for example came from a tradition of worshipping Greenberg arrived in America and everyone was like no he's the devil so it could be the for taste makers for those who would set the agenda for Halley's art the art historical tectonics are different in Europe that's one guess but I don't know I mean coming to Luxembourg it feels almost like we're in a Halley painting of some sort so I think it's possibly important to pass this notion of Europe a bit more and to say it's really Eurozone Europe that really embraced these works because they were sort of in Britain a little bit but not so much the big shows were really Italy here Switzerland, Bischoff-Berger buying a lot of the work so I don't know I think maybe there's something hard edged about this part of Europe geometric that sort of just chimes on an aesthetic level but I certainly concur that Europe has been the spiritual home I never forget watching an episode of MasterChef and seeing a Peter Halley painting hanging in a very posh restaurant in Modena I think in Italy and just like this stuff is really embedded in this European world in a way that it isn't in America and we spoke a few days ago about you know where Halley's legacy is in America compared to Europe and there's some definite differences it's very curious but I don't have a fixed answer I'm not sure Welcome to the flipping Most people would classify Halley's work as abstract Here in the museum we've been actually surprised by how younger audiences kids actually engage with and actually love this work and read it as figurative or read it as figurative elements and you put forth a very compelling reading of the paintings in their representational terms or in representational terms Is the pervasive classification of this work as abstract an oversimplification or is it in some ways a misreading of this work? Yeah it's funny I think Halley's quite clear that he described or historically I think in his 80s interviews he said that I don't consider my work abstract, I consider it diagrammatic Again so much of this conversation is bound up with the micro-politics of a post-Greenbergian abstraction right? So in one sense it's not abstract if we understand abstraction to mean pure abstraction, formalist abstraction but I think one of the important lessons we take from Halley is this widening of the meaning of the term so for me these are abstract paintings it's just they're not purely abstract and I think it's not an accident that Halley was making kind of cubist work very very early in his career in the late 70s and early 80s and if you consider analytic cubism it's abstract but it's also representational and its potency is in the I guess the movement, the journey from one to the other so this idea that an image, a figure can begin to fragment or tessellate or become cubic that says so much I think about social reality at the moment that it's taking place and again why I think Halley is a really important artist for now is because he offers us a visual language for abstractly representing reality and in an age where we place a lot of faith in realist images in documentary images I think we lose like a theoretical or conceptual possibility congealed within abstraction itself and you know Halley's a master at that sort of using abstraction but I guess the answer would be abstraction is not like a characteristic, it's a process and these are definitely images in the process of abstraction they are abstracting if that makes sense are there any questions from the audience I'm struggling to see you actually so if you Rob you've got to have a question I was just thinking about it's more of an observation really about Halley being well received in Europe and less so in New York I'm trying to remember what you showed alongside thinking of his peers America is just very weird so I mean Basquiat was not accepted at all by institutions I mean he's barely I don't think there's any of his works in MoMA's connection now so I was just thinking about that a bit but Schnabel obviously had huge commercial success did he have institutional attention I don't think so I mean there's a terrible portrait in the Metropolitan Opera of who's it of again Placido Domingo it's hilariously bad is it a crockery piece no just really crude stupid painting presented by the friends of the Metropolitan Opera yeah I think what your point is makes a lot of sense to me I just went on a Jeff Koons deep dive a couple of months ago and just to massively watch everything online that the Whitney produced for their massive Koons retrospective I think it was probably the last show they did at the Brewer building so 2016 maybe and Scott Rothkopf is continually having to defend this choice to show Jeff Koons' work and I think what this points to and it was just interesting to see it because I've been so locked into Halle I hadn't really thought about it with a wider lens but you know I think again speaking of historical tectonics the 80s is a really ticklish subject for a lot of people and I think a lot of people are more comfortable placing the art of the 80s in some sort of parenthesis because a more convenient narrative is you know a long process of waning minimalism and then bang the Berlin Wall falls down and we get a globalist art movement and we also get the return of the real the return of the body and this sort of odd, awkward, theoretically infused moment which only lasted a few years can just be junked and put to a side I think also like the fact that this was art celebrated by blue-chip people at a time when a lot of money was flooding into the art world, a lot of money an unheard of amount of money it's hard for us now we're so used to this finance infused art world but the shift from the 70s to the 80s in New York was mind-blowing for people I mean they had something similar in the 60s with Pop Art didn't sell in America it did but it didn't sell to sophisticated people in New York it's sold to industrialists in the Midwest and it's sold in Chicago rather than New York and the first people to buy Pop Art Untold were German industrialists desperate for something I don't know to invest in yeah people like Ludwig and what's his name Zvernus Dad what's his name David Zvernus Dad Rodolf Rodolf Zvernus yeah sold a lot of Pop Art and so people like Warhol sold first in Europe not so much in the States but I think in the end it's I've not read the book but I wonder if it's kind of that thing David Batch identified chromophobia the idea that if it's brightly colored it can't be serious yeah so if it's brightly colored and it sells and people love it it can't possibly yeah yeah which speaks to a trope of equating sort of seriousness with authenticity and playfulness with being a bit suspicious somehow also makes me think did minimalism sell that much of being reading about how Donald Judd's financial issues Richard Sarah bankrupting himself so there's some things that maybe art history is just much more comfortable with or steer financially not obviously financially attractive work something like that but it's a big issue it's a big question about the fate of the work that's the question what go on that's the question I'm going to repeat what you say I mean I mean the question of how Foster's original critique is really sort of complicated and layered I think it's hard to separate it from the moment and I think Hallie was maybe a victim of circumstance but what I can say is that if you look at Foster's critique or you look at similar critiques that made their way into Ivan and Buyer's work you know there just simply isn't that much attention being paid to the painting most of it is about the essays it's a reaction to certain theoretic formulas that are located in the essays and that's all good and fair but I certainly feel that this sort of critique of simulationism it's basically you know worrying about how images become duplicitous and problematic through their accelerated circulation but for me at least the best thing we can do to confront that situation is to pay attention to things to really look at images and I don't think anyone could say if you read an essay like Science Taken as Wonders or the essay that he wrote ten years later for the return of the real there just simply isn't the sort of engagement with the work itself and you wonder how much work he was looking at so again I think really looking at Hallie's work is an important task and important project and that's maybe not what was happening at the time but you should send him a catalogue and see what he says it would be a Hallie Foster discussion Q&A would be so good and I don't know actually I'd be super interested to hear them discuss things with the power of hindsight like Foster's very antagonistic to Neogeo for example that moment and sees it as the worst emblem of commercial art but you actually look at it historically and it was artists running their own spaces selling directly to collectors in terms of our art fair model of today other things it was really quite pure they were supposed to write about it in their magazines and then the institutions were supposed to get excited about it and then the industrialists were supposed to buy it the idea that artists cut out those the critics essentially would have furiated them especially Hallie with his writing and you also think of the Collins and Malazzo stuff can you imagine he was young when he was doing that who the hell is this precocious upstart writing theory he didn't go to a university he didn't hang out in Nova Scotia you know oh okay but was that on but that wasn't with the October people didn't go to Yale did they I don't know but it's interesting because Foster is making a claim around postmodernist art at this time writing anthologies around postmodernist artistic form and it's an irony that I can't get my head around is the fact that in 1986 he writes the crux of minimalism which ends with certain arguments and conversations about the possible social readings of minimalism that great against its purported hostility to representation so he's doing what Hallie's doing at the same time but that makes me think that you're correct what we're actually dealing with is social relations and not cogent art historical arguments we're dealing with cultural differences rather than the work itself which is more like kind of not even considered but that's kind of inherent through all Marxist philosophy this endless contradictions and internal just struggling with their own hypocrisy yeah I say that as a fan of Marxist philosophy I'm not going to... I say that as a Marxist yeah well in some sense struggle, Marxist eternal struggle it only remains for me to thank you once again Paul for bringing your extensive research and thinking on Hallie Luxembourg and enriching this exhibition and catalogue which I have I can hold up now for the benefit of Antonia mentioned earlier tonight yeah thank you