UNTITLED
WADE GUYTON, 2006
The letter X is the fastest way to say no. One keystroke. Done. Nothing personal. Now here's a canvas covered in them, top to bottom, and half of them falling apart. The how is where the whole thing starts. Wade Guyton opens Microsoft Word, types an X, repeats it, blows it up. Then he sends it through an Epson Stylus Pro 9600, a large-format inkjet built to print clean images on paper. But this is primed linen. Thick, floppy, not supposed to be in there. It drags. It slips. The ink pools. The image doubles. Guyton leaves all of it in. Look at the right side. Clean Xs. Even spacing. They showed up on time and followed the instructions. Now the left. The Xs bunch together, smear, stack on top of themselves. The machine got one simple job and started losing the plot. At first, the Xs feel like a wall of no. But said this many times, by a machine this tired, they stop sounding final. They start sounding like somebody who's said no all day. Now go back to the smears. The pooling. The doubled image. In a painting, a mark like that is supposed to tell you something about the person who made it. How fast the hand moved. How hard it pressed. Where it hesitated. Here, it tells you the wheels rolled through wet ink. The marks look expressive. But nobody expressed them. He takes all the old evidence of the artist's hand and hands it to a printer. Except the printer can't make the same painting twice. The file stays exactly the same. The object doesn't. And then one detail rearranges the whole canvas. It's seven feet tall, almost six feet wide. Too wide for the printer. So Guyton folded the linen in half down the middle and printed each side separately. Same file. Same machine. Two runs. One mostly behaved. One didn't. The printer never saw the whole painting. Neither did Guyton, until he unfolded it.