Over the last 20 years, Blake Rayne’s work has been central to questioning, contributing, and putting to test contemporary beliefs regarding painting. The pictorial practice of Blake Rayne develops in the mid-1990s, a moment of historical acceleration, in which a new economy of network communication emerged based upon the principles of speed and spectacle transforming the relationship between work and leisure. The conditions of cultural production are modified through the implementation of forms of flexible self-managerial labor, producing new forms of social power based on the capture and control of time and experience. Rayne’s work tests how painting is responding to shifts in perceptual regimes, labor conditions, and temporal paradigms. Painting has no essence outside of its historical models, thus gathering and dispersing itself at every moment. On that premise, Rayne works on and through the technologies and institutions of painting, placing its conditions of possibility into relief. Rayne’s practice is an ongoing act of revision that creates a catalog of processes and operations. Through this constantly evolving catalog, he produces a discursive and material strategy that creates a plastic interplay between art and the social. Rayne’s work is included in various public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has taught extensively over the last ten years, including, most recently, as Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University, NY.
FULL CV (PDF)
Tense and Spaced Out Polar Nights, Glacial Chaos, and the Ecology of Misery
Blake Rayne
Published by Sequence Press, Blaffer Art Museum, and Sternberg Press, 2017
ISBN 9783956793264
Softcover, 205 pages, 1161 color images
Proposing Painting as a Form of Refusal by Anthony Hawley
Blake Rayne's first midcareer survey is full of linguistic disruptions and quiet repetitions, bringing to mind Bartleby the scrivener's disarming resistance.
HOUSTON — As our 45th president's chief white house strategist tells the media to "keep their mouth shut," as the newly appointed press secretary chastises everyone for unfairly misrepresenting the 2017 inauguration crowds, and as Kellyanne Conway transmutes alternative facts into reality, one wonders what kind of refusal might counter refusal itself. Given a political machine working overtime to silence any competing versions of the truth, how does one counterattack a far right-extremism that touts falsehoods as "telling it like it is"? Like Tom Huhn, chair of Visual and Critical Studies at the School for Visual Arts in New York, put it in a recent piece in the New Yorker, "Part of what makes Trump attractive to many is that he practices a kind of great refusal himself, saying no to just about everything, and thereby appearing to be on the side of human beings liberating themselves from restrictions and hierarchies." As we enter a global political climate where the alt-right is on the rise and a large constituency is convinced that it's being "liberated" by a particular form of refusal, how does one form a refusal of another kind, one that resists and retrieves difference?
One avenue might be something akin to Herman Melville's infamous "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." In it, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an intense period of impressive work, simply refuses to make another copy or do any of the other office tasks expected of him. Whenever the lawyer asks Bartleby to do something, Bartleby quietly utters, "I would prefer not to." The phrase beguiles the lawyer: It's not exactly a bold-faced rebuttal, nor is it walk-out, a workers' strike on the streets. While the lawyer continues to press Bartleby to do various tasks, the scrivener instead does less and less. Bartleby eventually starts living in the office as he maintains his staunch and paralyzing "I would prefer not to."
I thought about Bartleby while viewing Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Rayne's first midcareer survey is full of linguistic disruptions and quiet repetitions, bringing to mind the scrivener's disarming resistance. Wall Street doesn't know the act of "preferring not to" — the simple statement has so much power not just because it interrupts but because it also creates a lingering silence in its lack of alternatives. For me, Rayne's oeuvre and exhibition embody a similar act in the various refusals.
Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused
22 October 2016 - 18 March 2017
Blaffer Art Museum
4173 Elgin Street
Houston, TX 77004
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused, at Blaffer Art Museum, the first midcareer survey of the New-York-based artist. The exhibition features major works completed from 2003 to the present which showcase the breadth of his work in various media including in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation.