retinal

Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since Courbet, in favour of retinal painting... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.
Duchamp 1964

I love the concept of retinal art. It implies a certain superficiality to art. And if you think of classic, ‘fine art’ as painting and bronze, it is nothing but superficial; ‘fine art’ is a finish on another surface.
Similarly I think there are retinal people. If I had to pick a word besides ‘leave-it-to-beavery’ to describe my father, it would be retinal. His mother, an recreational ‘artist’, painted watercolors of little sailboats on Lake Erie, a pink rhodedendron, or maybe a little red lighthouse on the peninsula. R-E-T-I-N-A-L. My father, of course, loves retinal art, whether it’s by his mother, Courbet, Manet, Monet. Who doesn’t, isn’t that what art is supposed to be, nice to look at?
For my senior thesis I worked on a series of nest vessels made out of ceramic covered fabric. Ceramics, or clay, to my father means pottery. If its not pretty it damn well better be utilitarian. My vessels came from my idea and feelings of the word and concept ‘home’. They were white, cold, penetrable, delicate, fragile to the point of temporal, empty, and still.
“I could see these with flowers in them in our guest bedroom.” He says
…Yes, of course, put something in them, some shitty flowers, stick them in the guest bedroom…how retinal of you.