In 1950, Hans Namuth photographed American ‘drip’ painter Jackson Pollock at work. The images would be published in Art News and elsewhere. Namuth returned with a movie camera and made a short film, Jackson Pollock 51 (1951). It showed Pollock painting on glass filmed from underneath, as if he were painting directly onto the film itself. Namuth’s photos and film cemented the idea of Pollock as expressive authenticity: ‘I don’t paint nature, I am nature’, he said. However, the contrivance of performing for the camera infuriated Pollock, who reportedly told Namuth, ‘I’m not a phoney, you’re a phoney!’ 

The film may not have been true for Pollock, but it came to represent authenticity. At the end of 1952, Art News published critic Harold Rosenberg’s influential essay ‘The American Action Painters’, which was inspired by Namuth’s photos, securing the idea of painting as the index of an act—direct and performative: ‘At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.’¹ While the idea of ‘action painting’ was limited, it was also compelling. It paved the way for artists to carry painting into performance—performing painting before audiences or for the camera.

In revisiting the old idea of action painting, Auckland painter Judy Millar constantly emphasises painting’s mediated quality. In Action Movie, her work stands alongside films of Kuzuo Shiraga, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, and Paul McCarthy performing painting in the wake of Pollock, as well as ‘direct’ films by Len Lye and Stan Brakhage that draw on the abstract expressionist ethos but complicate it by scrambling expressive mark making with a vitality artificially generated by the mechanics of cinema. I talked to Millar about her work and the show.

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Robert Leonard: In 2020, you painted Pink Trap. What was the impetus?
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Judy Millar: I wanted to make an episodic painting that would read like a comic strip. I’d tried painting sequences of images on separate canvases, where one painting led to the next, but, I thought, if I painted them on one canvas, maybe the sense of story would become more obvious, the transition from one frame to the next more crucial. In Pink Trap, I taped up individual frames thinking I would later remove the tape and each separate image would be surrounded by a white border, mimicking a comic-strip layout. However, after I painted it, there was a lot of painting on the tape that seemed important, so I left the tape on. Even though the canvas became one thing, it still had the feeling of an image mutating across the canvas like a cartoon strip. The forms are like letters, like script.
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They are also like figures.
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Figures have been in my work for some time. I want to have a spatial image that viewers can relate to with their own bodies; that they can enter imaginatively, but with a sense of their own physicality. They need something to measure themselves against.
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You did one painting with tape, then two more without—Wrestle and Double Hand.
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I thought I could get the same feeling without the obviously taped-up frames. With the other two, I ruled pencil lines to demarcate the frames. Apart from this, I tried to paint them with the same attitude and using the same movements.
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What are they painted on?
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Vinyl used for billboards. I wanted to make long paintings and it comes in 100-metre lengths. It’s beautiful to paint on. The acrylic paint loves the material quality of the vinyl. Plastic on plastic. The vinyl is very thin, so, when you hang it unstretched on a wall, it almost becomes the wall.
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Did you execute the frames separately, one at a time?
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I painted each frame separately, consecutively. Using thin acrylic paint, you have to work quickly and you can’t return to make changes. Once each frame is painted, it has to be left alone, and the next frame worked on.
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Were they painted on the wall or the floor? How were you oriented?
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They were painted on the floor. I start with a strong sense of top and bottom, but it can shift during the painting process. Once I begin, it’s pretty frantic, so up or down, left or right, cease to have any meaning. Often, the best works look great from all directions.
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How did you make the marks?
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With a big bundle of rags. Fingers and hands find their way in there too.
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The marks are figurative and muscular. They’re like writhing bodies, while also indexing your own body making those marks.
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When I’m working, there’s complete absorption. Every bodily movement is imprinted directly on the surface, so the painting becomes a recording of sorts. But the use of rags means I take paint off the surface at the same time as I put it on. There is a constant exchange between the visible and the removed, between recording and obliterating. It’s as much about the absence of the figure as its presence. It’s hovering between absence and presence.
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These paintings have a crude, primitive figuration. The forms arrayed across them seem to writhe in some state of becoming. They’re foetal.
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The forms are either coming into being or dissolving from being. The magic of drawing, the magic of making a line, means you are forming a volume on a flat surface. The forms emerge from simple volume making. In that way, they are foetal, or, at least, nascent. Not necessarily human, but lifelike.
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The palette is interesting: lipstick pinks, bloody reds, and bruise blues.
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I’ve been working with colours historically used to depict Caucasian skin tones for a while—also the bloody reds—wanting to index the body more directly in the works. Bruising the surface, yes, but also thinking of the darks and violets of night. Recently I found an entry in an old notebook: ‘There are colours for hurt and for giving hurt.’ That still stands.
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So, what were you thinking about when you were painting them?
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Reach, stretch, stroke. Be tender, be aggressive. I want the full gamut of feeling to be in the work, so I have to play that out for myself in the making. But I also have to keep my eyes open, to be fully there.
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Why make three of these paintings?
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I’ve been rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my favourite books. Milan Kundera puts forward the idea that if something happens once it’s meaningless. It must be repeated to be meaningful. I repeat myself, but in the hope of getting to a new place.
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Is there a risk in showing all three works together—same same?
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No. You’ll see the same colours, the same approach, but, within that, different possibilities and feelings.
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After these warm-palette landscape-format paintings, you made a series of seven cold-palette portrait-format ones, which we are also showing.
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I often react against what I’ve just done.
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Are they painted with rags too?
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They are, but they’re also painted with my new plastic-bag-full-of-sand dabber, which I started using a couple of years ago. In printmaking, dabbers are used to ink plates. I wanted to find something like an enlarged fingertip. In painting, fingers are good, because they’re immediate, dextrous, and smeary, but I wanted to upscale the fingertip, to exaggerate it, so I could make fingertip marks like boa constrictors.
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Do you have a different relationship to the painting when you use the dabber as an intermediary, or are you in the painting regardless?
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Yes, I’m in there, and I’m pretty close, because I still have to use quite a lot of physical force to get it to push through the paint. It increases my exertion.
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In the show, we’re presenting these seven works together. Their theme-and-variation approach quality will generate a kind of animated zoetrope effect.
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They belong together and that’s the best way for them to be seen—filmically.
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People once imagined that painterly marks conveyed feelings in some direct, unmediated way. ‘Action painting’ may have been a bogus idea, but it was a compelling one. How do you relate to it, distance yourself from it, play with it?
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The ‘action painting’ idea became a distraction and people stopped seeing the paintings. I’m trying to renovate or reanimate the cliché. Of course, I want to convey feelings, complex feelings. Any art form mediates emotions, enacts them, presents them. Direct expression is a noble quest, but in the end, in painting, feelings are conveyed through a sticky medium. And paint is a medium that’s already been used for centuries in all sorts of amazing ways. Transference through a medium makes expression no less meaningful, but it is an artifice. Art always has a cliché hiding in there. You’re trying to avoid it, but, in the end, you have to embrace it.
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You made Space Work 7 for the Adam Art Gallery’s 2014 show Cinema and Painting. It was a sculpture—with painting applied to a giant ribbon-like 3D support.
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There were two things, the printed image and the sculptural form to hold it. The image came from a painting that I had converted into a screen print. Then I dropped that image into Photoshop, re-rasterised it, stretched it out maybe ten times, and stuck it to the surface of the curved sculptural form. I was putting a handmade image through a series of technological shifts and stretching out the temporality of painting, hypermediating the image.
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What was its connection with cinema?
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It was about the relationship of space and time, image and movement. It was a time warp, a space warp. That’s how I relate to cinema, as a warping of presence.
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It suggested a length of film footage.
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Yes, but I didn’t want that to be read too literally. I was more interested in the relationship of the printed image on the surface to the physical structure holding it—the stretching of the image in relation to the bending and warping of the physical structure.
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When you look at a length of film, you can see the images on it, but, when you look at a length of videotape, you can’t. And, now that we have various forms of digital capture, it’s not even linear, just a stack of ones and zeros.
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And yet we still think of moving images as time unfolding in strip form. Another thing about film that’s always intrigued me is that, while with a painting the physical presence and the illusion are present as one, with a projected film, if you put your hand into the light, the image vanishes. With film, you have the illusion and no physical presence, so there’s a completely different relationship between presence, illusion, time, space, and our bodies. In cinema, the presence is always a haunted one. These were things I was playing with.
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In Action Movie, we’re showing your paintings with two ‘direct’ painted films: Len Lye’s All Souls Carnival (1957) and Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987). In both, there may be a vital, expressive quality to each painted frame, but, when the films are run through a projector and animated, they take on a different life. There’s a play between painterly expressive vitality and cinema’s mechanical vitality.
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What amazes me about painting on film is the tiny scale that’s involved. Painting directly on a piece of film a few centimetres wide is such a different experience to the work I do. There’s not much room to move in or on. This is compensated for by the movement from one frame to the next, which, as you say, gives the vitality. The understanding has to be in the totality of the film experience rather than in the individual images, frame by frame.
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The Dante Quartet slows down and speeds up, and combines different aspect ratios. So the painterly aspect grinds against the mechanical-cinematic one.
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Yes. Of course, these aspects of the cinematic medium interest me because they transform the directly handmade mark into something new. It’s important for there to be a distance between the work and the way it’s made. At times, I’m surprised at how my paintings look printed or photographic. I’ve deliberately used technological processes—camera, Photoshop, printing—to create distance between my hand and the viewer.
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In Action Movie, we’re also including films of four artists performing painting. There’s documentary footage of Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga, from the Gutai group, painting with his feet while hanging from a rope, which he did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We see French artist Yves Klein employing women’s bodies as paint brushes for performances in 1960 and 1961. Italian artist Lucio Fontana punctures a canvas for Belgian TV in 1962. American performance artist Paul McCarthy paints a line along the floor using his face in 1972. Judy, you introduced me to Shiraga.
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Coming from a small country, away from the ruling paradigm of New York painting, I’ve always been interested in Gutai. Shiraga dragged his feet through extremely thick oil paint as a direct painting method. Maybe five years ago, at Art Basel, I saw lots of his works. I was shocked by what great paintings they are.
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Why shocked?
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Previously, I thought the foot thing was a gimmick, but they are extraordinarily good paintings. What still amazes me is that Shiraga would not have been able to see what he was doing during the act of painting. His bodily movements weren’t at all connected to vision. There’s a complete separation of the bodily and the optical. I once hung a rope in my studio and tried it out myself. It was very difficult.
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There’s a link with Carolee Schneemann’s ‘painting up to and including her limits’ and Matthew Barney with his ‘drawing restraints’.
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Yes, it is to do with drawing restraints, but, with Shiraga, there’s also a total immersion in material. And there’s something missing in that, because, for me, painting must always exist between the material and the illusionistic, between the body and the optical. Shiraga completely gives himself over to materiality.
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While trying to transcend it?
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Trying to push through it to reach another place, certainly. I assume there’s a desire for total immersion, being totally in the moment, totally present—a transfixing. The works carry that. Shiraga later became a Buddhist monk.
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His paint is so thick.
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Very thick.
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And in your works?
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Very thin. Painting is a grubby process, but I don’t want the grubbiness to stick to the work. The grubbiness is part of my own experience. I think the world is grubby enough, actually.
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And the space in your works is very illusionistic, whereas, in his, it’s the opposite.
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Yes, his is absolute materiality. I want my work to have this hovering illusionism. For me, the greatness of painting is being able to be material and illusion at the same moment. In the most basic sense, it seems that our biggest problem as humans is that we live in this dual world of materiality and of dreams, aspirations, and fantasy. Religion and art are all about trying to harmonise these two aspects.
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Did Shiraga’s feet inform your use of dabbers?
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No, because he used his feet directly. The dabber was an attempt to make my fingermark bigger, to be larger than I am. Actually, using the dabber is another kind of mediation. The use of rags to apply and wipe away paint often makes marks that look like phoney brushstrokes, a sort of mimicry. The dabber is another version of that.
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On the one hand, there’s Klein using naked women as paintbrushes to apply blue paint, evoking the ideal and beautiful. On the other, there’s McCarthy, at his most abject, and materialist, face in the mud.
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Yes, but they’re all very materialist. I think the difference is that I’m trying to make my works very immaterial, even though I use the material means to do it. As a child, I had a fantasy of being invisible. It’s a push towards lightness. Could we hover? The poet Kay Ryan has said ‘the most beautiful thoughts and feelings must be light or they’ll break us’.
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Your paintings are perky, full of movement. They’re energetic, vital. They have attention-deficit disorder. Your gestures want to spring off the surface and jump out of the frame.
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The gestures become characters. I want to animate them, but surprisingly they often take on a life of their own. They separate themselves from ‘the field’, even when being a detail of that field.
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When you take a small sample of a field, the pattern disappears and there’s a new relationship between the mark and empty space. I think of Gerhard Richter taking 128 detail photos of a single painting. Richter also made all those squeegee paintings. In a way, he’s wiping off, like you. In 2011, Corinna Belz made a film of him painting them.
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It was amazing to see how quickly his paintings were transformed by a slash or a swipe, or another colour on or off. In showing the simplicity of the trick, he made himself more of a genius.
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Where Richter kills expression, you amp things up.
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Richter’s work is cold, whereas I overplay the heat. I believe that a good painting is an energy transmitter.
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We looked at a film of the French ‘tachiste’ Georges Mathieu painting on stage in 1971, ‘improvising’ alongside Vangelis playing music and a woman dancing. It was a campy, theatricalised idea of painting performance. We didn’t include it.
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Some of Mathieu’s paintings are great. But that particular video, well, apart from the nubile, young woman being used …
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She looks like a hangover from Klein’s performances.
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… whatever she’s doing there. There’s painting’s theatricality and there’s theatricality brought to painting. Mathieu brings the theatricality to painting. I’m not sure what he achieves by doing that.
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But Klein’s ‘performing’ too. He’s also a dandy.
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But he’s operating on a metaphysical level, isn’t he? The music, the formality of the event, the women’s bodies, and the blue paint—all of it is implicit in the finished work. I’m more sympathetic to that.
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Fontana was quite the dandy too.
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Yes and no. To me, his slash is all about Christian iconography, the wound in the side of Jesus—opening up the wound. When you first go to Italy, you are confronted with paintings of the wounded Christ and this desire to open up the male body.
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Fontanas flip-flop between the material and the immaterial. Are these punctures in canvas or a constellation of stars?
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It wasn’t called ‘spatialism’ for nothing. Of course, Fontana also came out of ceramics, out of the earth. So there’s this incredible combination of being in the mud and reaching for the heavens.
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While McCarthy remains face down in the mud.
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The abject McCarthy. I know, on one hand, it’s a pisstake, but on the other, I see him, just as much as Shiraga, as trying to really get through the constraint of material. I see that ambition there.
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You would never perform a painting, would you?
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In that sense? Never. I’m interested in painting being an object. A thing that carries all that inside itself, not a thing that absorbs it from the outside. As a painter, you need to be out of the picture in order for the gesture to seem vital, not to be a distraction from it.
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[IMAGE: Judy Millar Pink Trap 2020]
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1. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (originally published in Art News, November 1952), reprinted in The Tradition of the New (London: Paladin, 1970), 36–7.