Anthony Burnham

In 1984 I realized a stretched canvas had sides and a back. After this minor revelation, I couldn’t help but find the window suspect. Still, from time to time, I find myself caught—at least for a little while—within those thick, resilient, cloth-bound edges, as happened this past winter with Anthony Burnham’s recent work. Steadily sliding between the inside and outside of painting’s borders, he nonetheless applies paint to flat supports, while encountering, mining, declaring and subverting a history of image-making conventions.

Mimesis is the first trick, with Burnham a serviceable technician. Rendering identifiable studio corners and exhibition spaces, he focuses our attention by isolating their particular contents and tropes, using a muted colour palette of thin, anaemic whites and greys. It is in the delicacy of his shadow-making—whether in the attention given to the mutability of light falling on depicted wall surfaces, the inevitable blemishes of their steadfast verticality or on the depicted fold lines of cloth and paper—where the integrity of appearances starts theoretically to fracture.

Images within images of painted photocopies (pins and all), or abstract perspective exercise-like studio set-ups with repeated block-like elements, underline that painting about painting cannot avoid its charged history of duplication. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s dicta and the relinquishing of romantic originality myths, Burnham’s work recalls a visual exhaustion, not unlike yesterday’s newspaper still hanging about today, soon bleached and yellowed in its exposure to natural and artificial light sources. Burnham’s referential painted puzzles invite decoding, however the identification of emblems and strategies of 1960s to 1970s conceptual key moments are not about easy nostalgia, quotation or appropriation. As with still-life objects, their inclusion is as privileged as what is being identified.

Negative, Blue Sail, 2009–2010, has no trace of blue, containing a depicted black and white photocopy located close to the centre of the canvas. Appearing to have fallen to the floor, it rests against a pale grey wall and darker grey floor. The propped page appears no longer flat as it takes on the three-dimensional form of a thin curve. Inside the support’s border we go to the page where there is an image of a generalized, grey, mound-like object. The reference to Hans Haacke’s Blue Sail, 1964–65, may be obvious, yet the illusive and allusive differences are remarkable.

Internet moments of Haacke’s 1964–65 work are easy to find. On YouTube, a tethered, cobalt blue, chiffon-like fabric rises and falls rhythmically, due to the motor-generated breeze of an upturned fan placed on the floor beneath it. Its graceful, gradual movement invokes a contemplative, hypnotic experience, not unlike the plastic bag buffeted by the wind in Hollywood’s American Beauty, some 30 years later. Yet Haacke soon left behind Blue Sail’s investigation of visual poetry, for other more trenchant and critical explorations.

Turn off the fan and the fabric will droop, something Burnham’s current work will not entertain. Instead his photocopy is anchored by the act of painting. Though the image he recalls is expansive, it is now contained and bound, the technological means of making the “original” photocopy soon obsolete. His conceptual building, or what I prefer to call the shadowing of the image, is not dissimilar to the function of a web with its inherent stickiness and ability to trap. Painting performs as a hollow act of artefact-making, cognizant of what has come before, still questioning its two-dimensional confinement while allowing for the possibility of a square of cloth to be transformed.

Not Yet Titled, 2010, is in line with Burnham’s project, not only referring and shaping our understanding of what we see on the canvas, but also drawing attention to the exhibition space we move through while looking at what he offers us. The canvas leans against the gallery’s wall, mounted on wooden blocks. This tentative set-up draws attention to the “thingness” of the canvas as do the painted words THE THING and their contractions, all veiled under layers of filmy white paint. In the upper third of the painting, again centrally located, is another painted black and white photocopy, complete with wall shadow, containing the image of an exhibition space with the very painting we are looking at, stuck by a depicted piece of startlingly green edging tape, à la Canadian artist Tammi Campbell.

Found in the centerfold of the exhibition catalogue are blue-toned pages showing works in progress in the artist’s studio. As yet another document of a document, there may still be signs of the messy materiality of the living, hinting at an opening in the evacuated, closed world of insistent mise en abyme. ❚

“Anthony Burnham: Even Space Does Not Repeat” was exhibited at the Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, from November 14, 2011 to January 29, 2012.

Deborah Margo is a visual artist living in Ottawa.