Painting in Interrogation Mode

Barry Schwabsky
From Vitamin P, New Perspectives in Painting, 2002

I. Painting as Art?

One often hears it said these days that contemporary painting - or at least
contemporary painting of any significance - is essentially conceptual. But what does
that mean? The title of this section echoes the title of a book by the English
philosopher and critic Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, but notice the difference
between them: The implicit distinction between painting as art and painting as an art
refers to a possible distinction between “art” in general on the one hand and the
various fine arts, of which painting would be one, on the other. So it refers to the
question that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy posed at the beginning of his
recent book The Muses: “Why are there several arts and not just one? “

Or to put it another way, why - above all today - do we need a book about painting
and not simply a book about art? After all, as long ago as the late 1950s certain artists,
as Thierry de Duve has put it, felt it necessary “to produce generic art, that is, art that
has severed its ties with the specific crafts and traditions of either painting or
sculpture. The artists who began producing Happenings and “environments” around
the end of the 1950s (Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman,
etc.) were among the first of these, soon to be followed by the practitioners of
Minimalism and Conceptual Art (Donald Judd and Joseph Kosuth, among others); but
today this desire for an art not limited to any particular métier or medium has become
general. This can be seen, for instance, in the fact that fewer and fewer art schools
require their students to enroll in departments of painting, sculpture, or printmaking;
in the new “deskilled” academy, there is typically one overarching department of, say,
visual arts, whose students are expected to apply ad hoc whichever techniques happen
to be most appropriate to a given project. In order to understand the situation of
painting today, it is important to look to the late 1950s and 1960s, when art was

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redefined. But we should not overlook what gives painting its specific importance to
art in general - its engagement, not so much with the eye as is sometimes thought, but
with the body of both the maker and the viewer.

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965, Photograph of a chair to scale, wooden folding chair, photographic
enlargement of dictionary defintion.

But even before the 1950s, the project of a more “generic” art has already been
inherent in abstraction, though it may be that only a few artists - Alexander
Rodchenko and perhaps Piet Mondrian among them - had quite realized its
implications. After all, abstract art was supposed to lay bare the structures underlying
all art - formal structures, to be sure, but more important, what might be called
structures of desire. Abstract painting made manifest the desire for painting in as
general and as “naked” a form as possible. In so doing it revealed that all painting
worthy of the name had already been essentially abstract, though unconsciously so.
We are used to hearing that Modernism - the period from Impressionist through
abstraction to Conceptual Art - was imbued with the idea of progress. If abstract
painting represented a kind of progress, it was essentially in the form of
consciousness - but consciousness of something that was always inherent in painting.
Thus, Clement Greenberg, the theoretician of Abstract Expressionism, once note that
“one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, ” whereas

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“one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. “But what starts out as a simple
descriptive difference turns out, with Greenberg’s next move, to be something more:
The Modernist way of seeing, he says, “is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind
of picture, Old Master or Modernist. ” In other words, Modernism took what was
already implicit in classical painting and made it explicit, that is, brought it to a more
articulate point of self-consciousness. An even more aggressive version of this
position was taken by Ad Reinhardt, for instance, who asserted that abstract painting
such as his own was “the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and unentangled,
styleless, universal painting. “

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 34, 1964, oil on canvas, 153 x 152.6 cm.

And yet, of course, abstract painting was not only more abstract, more general than
other painting; it was at the same time, and by contrast, a specific kind of painting,
one type among many others - an addition to the vocabulary of painting and not
necessarily a revelation of painting at its best or most basic. The fact that abstraction
keeps turning into something in particular - a genre like still life, landscape, or history
painting - reveals its failure to communicate the essence of all painting. That project,
that generalization of painting, could not be fulfilled within painting.

Which brings us back to Happenings, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. In retrospect

these movements, especially the last, can be seen as attempts to attain something that
would be even more abstract and generalized - more “nothing in particular” - than
abstract art. And like abstraction, they turn out to have failed at this totalizing project.

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Even Conceptual Art has become just one more genre among the may that constitute
art. Abstraction benefited for a long time from the élan of its own unfulfilled
ambitions; at least for a couple of generations, abstract painting really was where the
great drama of art was being most decisively played out. As a result, representational
painters and sculptors found themselves in a defensive position that often had a
genuinely narrowing effect on their art. Similarly, today Conceptual Art (in the
broadest sense) and its various successors retain a residual prestige that comes not
only from its relative recentness as a genre, but also from its original assumption of
triumphal progress, the summation of all art, inherited from abstraction.

When Kosuth wrote in 1969 that “all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature)
because art only exists conceptually, ” he must have meant to say that almost all so-
called art was really not art at all, because only his own and a very few other people’s
work qualified in his judgment as truly and self-consciously conceptual. But Kosuth’s
works turned out to be true in a way that may be the opposite of what he intended.
Just as abstract art revealed that art had always been, in a way, essentially abstract, so
Conceptual Art revealed (or rather reiterated, since it is an old idea going back as least
as far as Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that painting is “una cosa mentale“) that all
art is conceptual, painting included.

Where does that leave painting? As Conceptual Art, only less so? As Conceptual Art
using ironically retrograde means? Or does painting still have specific capacities of its
own to discover and exploit? Is painting art? Or is painting an art?

II. Painting after Modernism?

We do not need to be able to define Modernism exactly to know that painting was
terribly important to it. Sometimes not painting could be terribly important too, as it
was for Marcel Duchamp, most obviously. And sometimes Modernism rejected the
past - as when the Futurists urged to “destroy the museums”- but more often it was
about revising the past. Painting, not painting, and what to do with the past - those
problems are still with us today. In some ways the have become more urgent. For
instance, now that not painting in no longer a rebellious gesture against an art
discourse primarily defined by painting, but rather something approaching a fully
institutionalized practice, a highly charged territorial conflict has arisen between them
- at least at the administrative level of the art bureaucracy. But in other ways, these
problems have become softer, less politicized. An artist such as Karen Kilimnik could

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make her name with “scatter art” installations and then switch to painting with none
of the agony a Modernist like Philip Guston faced when he made the transition from
abstraction to representation within painting back in the late 1960s. Guston’s actions
were seen by some of his best friends as a betrayal. Such strict adherence to positions
taken is no longer required of serious artists.

Philip Guston, To B.W.T, 1952

Philip Guston, Scared Stiff, 1970

So there are two reasons that talking about today’s painting means seeing it against
the background of Modernist painting: one is that the situations of the two seem
remarkably similar, and the other is that they seem so distinct as to be almost

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incomparable. If deepening self-consciousness is the only form of progress that could
have credibly placed abstract painting beyond representation, or Conceptual Art
beyond abstraction, here too the distinction may be best imagined as a difference in
consciousness. Put another way, today’s painting is not necessarily more conscious
than Modernist painting, but it is conscious of different things.

Mondrian painted flowers alongside his abstractions, but these two strains in his work
are not exhibited side by side. (The flowers were excluded, for instance, from the
1995 Mondrian retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). And how
to understand the late representational paintings by Russian avant-gardists like
Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin remains difficult. Do they represent a true
renunciation of abstraction or merely a pitiable though understandable submission to
the realities of survival under Stalinism? The question is vital for the reception of
their entire oeuvre. By contrast, no one sees a contradiction between Gerhard
Richter’s photo-realist paintings and his abstractions. Each needs to be looked at in a
somewhat different way, but there is no longer any question, as Greenberg once
thought, of determining the “best way” of seeing any painting. Today it would more
likely be thought that neither way of looking is sufficiently powerful or all-
encompassing to take in all possible pictorial effects - a sort of aesthetic equivalent to
Godel’s theorems of undecidability and incompleteness, which showed that no one set
of axioms could solve all mathematical problems.

Contemporary painting contends that art is not one thing and that therefore no one
way of looking is sufficient; one must always be prepared to add new aesthetic
axioms. That is one reason some of the painting in this volume keeps refusing its own
self-containment, as in the work of artists as different as, say, Chris Ofili, Matthew
Ritchie, and Adrian Schiess, all of whom both take on the idea of the traditional
pictorial rectangle and then overflow or displace it. It is precisely through this call for
flexibility over commitment that contemporary art (of which painting is just one part)
claims a higher degree of self-consciousness than Modernism.

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Contemporary art is knowingly gratuitous, as Michael Fried (who borrowed it from
the philosopher Stuart Hampshire) used the word to describe exactly what Modernist
art, as he understood it, was not. Art is gratuitous, Fried wrote, when it is “not
essentially the answer to a question or the solution to a presented problem”. This
gratuitousness often registers as a concern with style, sometimes negatively inflected:
Tomma Abts’s use of abstraction as a willfully retardataire style,
Muntean/Rosenblum’s dalliance with a style that might appear merely illustrative, and

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the stylist heterogeneity of Lucy McKenzie’s work are all examples of this
gratuitousness. So is the investment of artists as otherwise different as Jim Lambie
and Inka Essenhigh in the notion of the decorative. Not only is our art gratuitous-anti-
essentialist, if you will - in this sense, but it inherently holds the conviction that
Modernist art was the product of a delusion to the extent that its makers really thought
of it as other than gratuitous. (The greatness of Modernist Art was also, in part, a
product of that delusion). And of course we can now also see and accept the
gratuitousness that lurks even within the most rigorous Modernist works as well.

What gives a contemporary painting its force, its meaning, its credibility, if it cannot
claim to be the solution to a problem posed by its most significant immediate
precursors? What is today’s painting about? I am immediately tempted to evade my
own question with the response that each painter requires his or her own answer - and
perhaps some of them more than one answer. Contemporary painting retains from its
Modernist and Conceptualist background the belief that every artist’s work should
stake out a position - that a painting is not only a painting but also the representation
of an idea about painting. That is one reason there is so little contradiction now
between abstract and representational painting: In both cases, the painting is there not
to represent the image; the image exists in order to represent the painting (that is, the
painting’s idea of painting). There is something inherently polemical in the nature of
contemporary art-making, but not in the sense that it declares other, competing
positions invalid. The difference, one might say, is that artistic positions are now
themselves received aesthetically more than in terms of some kind of truth claim - just
in the way that Jorge Luis Borges wrote of viewing philosophical systems
aesthetically. To a great extent, the way that art and art criticism have taken on that
whole vast area known vaguely as “theory” (Post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School,
and so on) has been “aesthetic” in just this way. In other words, artistic positions are
now recognized as fictions, though perhaps necessary one - as enabling devices. And
for that reason, paradoxically, this art is not gratuitously gratuitous but determinedly
gratuitous - finding ways to do something other than solve a problem has indeed
become art’s problem.

This explains why the choice of painting, no longer anachronistic, over other forms of
artistic expression is less politically fraught than it once seemed. It also accounts for
much about the nature of contemporary painting’s specific content. It may seem
strange to speak of a specific content for contemporary painting in general when, on
the one hand, anything goes, and on the other, every artist is called upon to invent a
unique stance or position that differentiates him or her from other practitioners. But

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paradoxically, in such a situation, self-invention itself becomes the primary subject
that unites all otherwise distinct and even contradictory projects. Whereas a
Modernist like Barnett Newman could claim, “We are making [our work] out of
ourselves”, today’s painters might with more justice say, “We make ourselves out of
our work. ” Today’s painting succeeds by coming to terms with its own
gratuitousness. In this sense, it generally can be called Mannerist. In the sixteenth
century, when the revolution in pictorial representation we now know as the
Renaissance was essentially complete - when a period of clear progress had played
itself out - the newly established formal canons immediately began to break down as
artists began to seek out the new techniques most extreme stylistic and expressive
potential. We are to Modernism as the Mannerists were to the Renaissance.

The same, by the way, is true of contemporary Neo-Conceptualism, installations,

video art, and so on: They manipulate existing historical models into gratuitous or
mannerist variations. In the best instances, these variations take on a real intellectual
and emotional force of their own. And yet, better than any of the other media typically
employed by today’s artists, painting lends itself to eloquent ambivalence toward its
own historicity. Luc Tuymans, Adriana Varejão, and Yishai Jusidman make this quite
clear via their overt concern with history. In a related but different way, abstract
painters like Ian Davenport and Bernard Frize attempt to locate vision in a pure
present when they evacuate time by collapsing all depth. To an unsympathetic eye, in
short, contemporary painting must always seem to be either completely lacking in
historical knowledge (the common complaint that artists no longer refer to any
models before Andy Warhol ca be cited here, as well the often - heard charge that
through ignorance they keep repeating what the artists of 1960s and 1970s have done)
or, on the contrary, completely bogged down in the past. One can wonder whether
today’s painters consider themselves heirs to a tradition that stretches back to Giotto
and the beginning of the Italian Renaissance or if they feel themselves utterly cut off
from all that, participants in or competitors with a wholly immediate image world that
includes billboards, video games, magazine ads, pornography, instructional diagrams,
television, and an infinite number of other things, among which the paintings seen in
those great entertainment halls, our museums, play a part not much greater than
anything else.

III. Painting How?

“There are two problems in painting,” a young but already notorious Frank Stella
once told an audience of art students. “One is to find out what painting is, and the

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other is to find out how to make a painting.” One of the possible distinctions between
Modern and what we all seem to have agreed to call contemporary rather than Post-
modern) art would be to say that Modernist painting was more urgently concerned
with what painting is. In general it was thought that if one could come to a clear sense
of what it is it would already supply or at least imply the answer - one might even say,
the formula - for how to make it. Anything like virtuosity for its won sake would only
hamper the complete realization of the defining conception. That is why Greenberg
could say, for example, that “the onlooker who says his child could paint a Newman
may be right but Newman would have to be there to tell the child exactly what to do.“

Today, on the evidence of the most interesting work being done, the question of what
painting is - the fundamental question for Newman, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman,
and Daniel Buren - has been demoted to the secondary status once held by the
problem of making. Today it seems that artists are more concerned with how to make
a painting - again, this comes out in the obsession with style I mentioned earlier - or
sometimes with how to use the materials, methods, concepts, or traditions of painting
to make a work that should not necessarily be called a painting. What it is will then
emerge from how it is.

Painters are merely the first onlookers of their own work. A thoroughly Duchampian
view would say that is all they can significantly be, the fundamental artistic act being
contained in the contemplative act of choice. A number of the painters whose works
are included here would probably agree, for instance Hong Seung-Hye, whose
paintings are industrially fabricated, or Francis Alys, who commissions some of his
work from artisan sign painters. But the painters who are involved in making work by
hand, through the preliminary act of choosing to enter actively into the productive
process - implicitly asserts that there is more involved in art than choice or, at least,
that there is something more to choice than Marcel Duchamp and his artistic progeny
imagine. (The choice to make art in this way as opposed to another is probably no
more a real choice than what has become known as “sexual choice, ” an analogy
based on so much of the work itself, particularly that of Marlene Dumas and Ghada
Amer, among others, bridging aesthetic investment in the activity of forming the
object can no longer be part of the definition of art, the specific contribution that
painting can make to artistic thought more generally is probably related to the value
of this choice to enter a realm beyond mere choice. That is, it has to do with this
cultivation of the tactile dimension of things, of a plastic relation to materials that
(because of the potential this relation offers for continual feedback between matter
and sensation) is also a proprioceptive activity - to the indirect benefit of the viewer

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who partakes of this relation only imaginatively, though as vividly as possible. For the
viewer, painting is a noun: the finished object we see. For the painters it can also be a
verb: the activity in which they are engaged. When painters succeed in evoking and
disclosing painting-the-verb within painting-the-noun, as may of those in this book do
(Suzanne McClelland being a particularly clear example), they offer the rest of us a
rare gift.

If Modernism was, as I’ve said, an advance in consciousness - and if Conceptual Art

likewise represented an advance in consciousness within Modernism - that we can
never go back to seeing what is in a painting before seeing it as a painting. Even (or
rather especially) the most apparently traditional painters you’ll see in VITAMIN P,
including those like John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage whose work may seem at times
downright provocatively retrograde, depend on this assumption. Their paintings, like
most of the work here, are always reflexively concerned with heir own status as
paintings. They are paintings, yes, but also allegories of painting.

IV. Painting Where?

Once, art historical narratives were organized by “schools”; although the notion
persisted into the Modernist era (Ecole de Paris, New York School), a new historical
unit, the “movement” (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism), eclipsed it. But today an
introduction to contemporary painting no longer forms a chapter in the chronicle of
successive movements any more than it charts a geography of adjacent schools.
Positions are now multiple, simultaneous and decentered.

It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting. There are
too many hidden corners. Even in the early to mid-1980s, it was still possible to
imagine that painting, not in its eternal essence, perhaps, but in its present being, was
this as opposed to that. This sense of certainty had apparently been the case for a long
time. In his memoirs, Alex Katz, for instance, recalls that as a young painter in New
York in the early 1950s, all serious painting was white and black. “You weren’t
‘allowed’ to use color, “ he wrote perhaps somewhat hyperbolically. Then after a big
Bonnard show in 1953, “suddently everyone was using color.” Thirty years later,
painting could not be categorized as a certain palette and not another – this aspect was
ad libitum – but it seemed pretty clear that painting was figurative, for instance, rather
than abstract, impulsive rather than systematic. But it used a space that was not
naturalistic. Some people thought of it as expressionist, or neo-expressionist. Or as an
expression of a minority taste, painting might even be abstract – a painter like

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Jonathan Lasker had his admirers already – but hardly geometrical or “minimal,”
which signified tired and academic. (Just as in the 1960s, by contrast, anything that
smacked of lyrics or impulsiveness tended to seem boring, epigonal, provincial.) Sure,
established painters may still have been working away in such modes (Marden,
Ryman, etc.), just as there were still realists of one sort or another (Philip Pearlstein,
Neil Welliver), but there seemed to be little room for new arrivals at either of those
inns.

Jonathan Lasker, Systemic Autonomy, 2002. Oil on linen, 152.4 x 203.2 cm.

On the face of it, today there is no consistent “look,” no particular method, style,
material, subject, or theme that identifies a painting as credibly contemporary or, on
the other hand, disqualifies it from consideration as such. So in perusing the pages
that follow you will not be surprised to find paintings that might be immediately
identified as abstract, whether geometrical, biomorphic, or gestural; or as realist,
symbolist, surreal, expressionist, narrative, and so on – however much one will want
to qualify such rough and hasty characterizations after closer acquaintance with the
work itself. Why not paint with embroidery (Amer) or elephant dung (Ofili) just as
well as with oil or acrylic? There are paintings that would have been accepted as such
by our great–grandparents and work that ignores almost every convention, however
nominal, of traditional painting: works without images, without drawing, or without
color. Others eschew the material basics – stretchers, canvas, paint, or the
employment of the artist’s hand. At he limit, it becomes fascinatingly difficult to tell
what counts as painting and what doesn’t- as Stephen Melville has recently pointed
out.

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Nor does one know where paiting comes from. It is no great oversimplification to say
that in the nineteenth century, great painting was made in Paris; for the decades
following World War II, the preeminence granted New York may be exaggerated but,
at its base, reflects a certain truth. Today, painters live not only in those cities or in
London or Cologne – with all that this would imply in terms of a common
acculturation – but in Bangkok, Alexandria, or San José, Costa Rica. The earlier
question about whether today’s painting is or is not cut off from the traditions of the
European masters was seriously misleading; the question should rather be to what
extent it is or is not cut off from European, East Asian, North African, or any other
tradition. Artists appreciate the art of the museums but seem disinclined to worship it.
The museum is not a binding institution; it is even a liberating one, insofar as it now
equates many obviously unlike things (Kwakiuti masks, Impressionist paintings,
Egyptian mummies, celadon pots, Empire gowns, medieval armor, Dogon ladders,
Northern Renaissance altarpieces, Chinese scrolls, video installations, Roman copies
of Greek marbles) and therefore exalts the potential value of almost any artifact.

Those of us educated entirely in the West may be at a certain disadvantage for

appreciating this multiplicity; our complacent engagement with the most familiar
traditions – even where we imagine that engagement to be a critical one – may blind
us to important aspects of art whose sources are more distant. We are too quick to
affect the typical blasé attitude of a cosmopolitan inspecting the efforts of a
provincial: very nice, but it’s all been done before – the kind of attitude that led the
outstanding English critic of his generation, on seeing his first Jackson Pollock
painting, to dismiss it as an immature rehash of Wols and Raoul Ubac. What at first
seems familiar may have different sources and a far wider compass than one had
imagined. How can one fulfill the task of the critic – which is just to say, perhaps, the
dedicated viewer – when the range of traditions and references that artists are likely to
call on extends so far beyond what a single individual can know? When is it
acceptable to be not just unfamiliar with what an artist is referring to, but unaware of
my own ignorance? Perhaps never, or perhaps only when one accepts art’s gift of
openness and painting’s invitation to direct experience.

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