The Evolution of Art for Charles Gaines

Several works by Charles Gaines will be making their way around the United States over the course of the next two years, in a touring exhibition called “Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection.” The show explores how black artists have responded over the past century to an art world that has historically encouraged them to make art about their racial and cultural identities. Gaines brilliantly represents this conversation. Not only is he a confident example of an artist who has ignored this absurd market demand, but also, for five decades his work has brilliantly explored the constructed systems and arbitrary structures responsible for generating senseless notions like the one that says if they want to succeed, artists must only make work about their social identity.

Contradictions Make Good Relationships

Gaines has always had a contradictory relationship to art. Identified early on by a teacher as a possible artistic prodigy, he had little intrinsic interest as a child in becoming an artist. When he finally awoke to his personal artistic drive, he found the process of creating art from his subjective imagination to be forced and unsatisfying. It was not until he was nearly 30, in the early 1970s, that Gaines discovered the concepts of seriality and systems, which helped him come to terms with the creative act by taking ego out of the process. Since then, he has become a leading contemporary expert on theories and concepts related to the systematic creation of art.

In the studio, Gaines invents arbitrary systems then explores how those systems affect individual elements within larger environments. Outside the studio, he shares the resulting revelations with the next generation of artists. Gaines has been teaching art for fifty years, first as a professor at California State University Fresno, and since 1969 as a member of the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts. Part of his success as both artist and teacher is that he embraces the inherent contradictions in the creative process. He knows artists make choices, but that they also often hope for unexpected results. His grasp of that contentious relationship, between the forgone conclusion and the surprising accident, speaks to something uniquely contemporary about both art and life.

Charles Gaines - Numbers and Trees: Drawing 2, 2014, Graphite on paper, 25 × 32 1/2 in, 63.5 × 82.6 cm, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City

Choice and Circumstance

Though Gaines has worked with many mediums, including drawing, painting, sculpture, kinetic art and video art, the works that speak most directly to his big idea are his grid drawings and paintings. These works resemble pixelated images sketched on lined graph paper. The earliest examples are his Regression Drawings, started in 1973. To make these images, he created arbitrary mathematical systems then graphed the images the systems demanded, creating abstract, biomorphic compositions that could be mistaken for computer readouts. He then expanded the concept, sequencing images of real world objects such as plants, faces, or bodies in motion, reducing them to mathematical systems and replicating their images onto grids.

One goal of his process was simply to explore how systems could make artistic decisions for him. Another was to demonstrate how visual representations of the physical world are inherently abstract and systematic. While working, he realized how systematic demands caused unavoidable, yet unexpected, evolutions in the imagery. The results pleasantly surprised him—he knew he never would have created such images because his ego would never have imagined it. The relationships that emerged from that surprise were, in a way, meaningless, as they arose from an arbitrary, meaningless system of his own creation. And yet they did have meaning within that system, despite their arbitrary nature. Though it was not his intention to express this, Gaines has since acknowledged how this process relates directly to social systems, such as customs relating to racial identity and the creation of art—they are arbitrary and meaningless, yet meaning emerges from the unexpected relationships that flow out of them.

Charles Gaines - Regression: Drawing #1, Group #2, 1973-1974, Mechanical ink and pen on paper, 24 3/4 × 30 3/4 in, 62.9 × 78.1 cm, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Emergent Understanding

Identity art is, and long has been, a common topic of conversation among art world gatekeepers. Dealers and collectors often fetishize the identities of artists, encouraging or even manipulating them to make work that speaks in some obvious way to that heritage, because they think it will drive sales. Gaines has encountered such pressure for most of his life. He rejects the logic of it, but acknowledges it as an example of how arbitrary systems create unexpected results. For generations, he has been teaching his students to think more about the results of arbitrary systems. He has been showing them how everything in nature and society is the result of constructed systems.

His work shows us that a tree is constructed from natural systems, and a picture of a tree is constructed from different systems. There is no inherent meaning to a tree, or to a picture of a tree. Meaning emerges from the relationships we have to both. By exploring this topic, Gaines expresses a profound, universal concept useful to anyone trying to construct a different world. He demonstrates that whatever manifests comes about according to the rules of underlying systems. That should empower artists, who realize they can create their own systems to govern their creative process. And it should empower society, because it shows us the future is not beyond our control; it is just governed by often arbitrary systems. If we can adjust those systems, we might surprise ourselves by generating new relationships that lead to a more interesting and meaningful world.

Charles Gaines - Falling Leaves #10, 1978, Color photograph, ink on paper. Three parts: 20 × 16 in. each, 25 × 57 × 2 in, 63.5 × 144.8 × 5.1 cm, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

“Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection,” is on view through 21 January 2018 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Afterward, it will travel to the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina (15 February – 15 July 2018), the Snite Museum of Art in South Bend, Indiana (20 August – 25 November 2018), the Baltimore Museum of Art (Spring 2019), and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Winter 2019 / 2020).

Featured image: Charles Gaines - Walnut Tree Orchard, Set 4 (version 2), 1975-2014, Photograph, ink on paper. Triptych: 29 × 23 in, each 31 1/2 × 25 1/2 × 1 1/2 in, 80 × 64.8 × 3.8 cm

All images used for illustrative purposes only

By Phillip Barcio