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Painting,
Potential and Indeterminacy
In thinking about this competition, I was interested
particularly in examining the climate of production,
reception and circulation of contemporary painting,
internationally, but specifically in this country.
We find ourselves at a particular moment in which
contemporary painting is receiving extraordinary
attention on the part of the market, the museum
and in the media.
I am always keen on investigating certain tendencies
through the lens of artists and turned to Matthew
Ritchie’s statement in Flash Art in 2000: “Painting
is essentially liberating; although there is a
lot of historical baggage, the methods of painting
are perfectly open to radical change.”(1)
Two years later, when interviewing Ritchie, I prompted
him to extend that statement and he responded: “Painting’s
radical possibilities are always underestimated.
Painting doesn’t rely on the physical structure
of the world. This is not to claim some privileged
position for painting, but it is unusual. Its weirdness
is what is underestimated to me. A bunch of paintings
opens a larger discussion about painting and about
themselves. It is probably presumptuous to call
that a language, but it is certainly a point of
view. In painting, any story will become its own
context – it will dissolve into the complexity
of its content and it will become a place, rather
than a story. Painting is about the simultaneity
of information that collapses categories...”(2)
It is here that I am able to ground myself in this
room, amongst a host of disparate paintings selected
from hundreds of solicited slides to compete for
a prize centered around the vague framework of
non-representational painting. My immediate response
to that charge was to interrogate the degrees and
pluralist definitions of what seems to be, at such
a late date, an impossible proposition of non-representationality
and to locate work submitted that would erupt and
disrupt such archaic parameters.
I find myself in this room, primarily due to
an exhibition produced in 2002 while I was a
curator
at Artists Space – one of the oldest non-profits
in New York. Artists Space has a program of formal
curatorial review of unsolicited material from
artists both nationally and internationally. Upon
my arrival at Artists Space, I collected and kept
much of the information sent to me and was dedicated
to craft an exhibition around this body of work.
Painting As Paradox resulted from mining through
this material – finding like and differing
tendencies that included young artists’ writing
on the various pressures of painting. Painting
as Paradox was an experimental exercise in synthesizing
the research of eclectic practices of emerging
artist grappling with various fraught legacies
of painting. The work reflected a continual gesturing
towards tradition and concurrent redefinition of
painting in contemporary terms. Examining the tendencies
of young artists trying to reconcile the contradictions
and taboos of painting to date, not to mention
its alleged disappearance and resurgence, the exhibition
investigated the measures taken to maintain the
medium’s relevance.
Affected by the specter of both historical and
contemporary precursors, the work represented
in the exhibition demonstrated the re-posturing
of
traditional genres within the lexicon of new
technologies. The highly self-conscious interest
in the status
of painting – its production, reception
and circulation, has led to enormous activity.
From
digital painting, hybrid painting, non-painting,
hyper figurative painting it was evident that
artists were in effect initiating a collapse
of categorization.
The work revealed contradictions within individual
practices and exposed visual and conceptual tensions
between various contemporaneous practices. I
think these operations are what is revealed in
our present
context as well. It is this collapse in categorization
that turned my attentions to Debra Kayes’ installations,
what she terms “extensions of painting”.
An inversion of Newman’s zip, the work
can be read as interrogating the viewing procedures
of painting itself. The composition signals the
act of looking, here in three- dimensional terms.
Another mode of entry in grounding ourselves
when facing the material in front of us in this
context
of the competition is by tracing the most recent
curatorial endeavors grappling with the state
of contemporary painting – the Walker Art Center’s
Painting at the Edge of the World, Musée
de la Ville de Paris’ Urgent Painting, the
Painting exhibition at the Venice Biennial, Phaidon’s
Vitamin P, and the most recent exhibit, The Undiscovered
Country at the Hammer Museum, all centered around
the weight of the legacy of the medium and its
current potency and potential towards reinvention
and transformation.
Kathy Halrbreich of the Walker writes: “The
viability of painting has undergone a number of
examinations precipitated by factors ranging from
the onset of photomechanical reproduction to the
revolutionary attempt to forge a new aesthetic
erasing the boundaries between art and life. Over
and over again, these crisises of modernism have
been linked to the death of painting as a progressive
form of aesthetic expression. Today, however, with
the apparent resurgence of painting, it has become
clear that reports of this medium’s demise
continue to be greatly exaggerated. The medium
persists in being an inclusive one, capable of
suggesting both the inner necessities of the artist
and the world(s) in which the artist operates.”(3)
Douglas Fogle named his essay the “Trouble with painting” and
concluded the text with the provocation: ‘the
trouble with painting is over or is it?”(4)
In turning to the concrete material present as
a result from a process of submission and selection,
an undeniable and prevalent tendency could be
characterized as a turn to fantasy and memory,
personal mythology
and whimsy. Michael Miller’s fantastical
lexicon is described by the artist as rooted in
polar madness defined as trance “alterations
in consciousness induced by exposure to Antarctic
isolation” and in Fui “a trance state
of blankness.” The artist reveals: “I
live for the Transubstantial line between solid
ground and sea, the gait of power, Hawaiian wave
rituals, surfers, explorers, flecks of history,
personal writings, physical feats of endurance
and liquid cinematography.” Elaine Chong ‘s
brand of material expressionism and experimentation
is articulated as a process of “mending” through
a heavily layered and worked surface. Material
is subject to an “environment of exchange.” She
articulates through time and memory how experience
is translated onto the surface of the painting
and how the “body translates experience
or moments into visual diaries or maps.”
Abstraction often collapses into the realm of
the decorative. Decoration rather than a pejorative
in painting now serves as a strategy on the part
of young artists. Adam Sorensen turns to diverse
cultural historical and contemporary references.
He speaks directly to his interest in decoration,
embracing the travesty of painting – the
decorative (what Greenberg feared in Pollock).
Commonly taken up by a young generation of painters
as a point of entry, what historically has been
equated with vulgarity, now is re-signified,
even gesturing to wallpaper by a host of young
artists.
This was a common operation in mining through
submissions. I think of Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm” as
a backdrop for a Vogue model fashion spread, what
TJ Clark called the “bad dream of modernism.” Historically
the decorative, the vulgar, was a question of
circulation and reception, yet now the decorative
is integral
to the language of conceptual painting itself.
Continuing to think through the tendencies located
in the work that was submitted, a gesturing to
technology – the Internet, the video game,
the pop up web-advertisement spoke to the barrage
and saturation of imagery via the digital and
is at the heart of many of the projects before
us.
Gianna Commito turns to scaled down isolated
imagery with a distinctively graphic presence.
A kind of
digital abstraction is translated and articulated
through an architectural lexicon. The work is
heavily abbreviated, iconography is isolated
and becomes
uncannily familiar, a kind of short hand abstraction.
Spatial consciousness in the form of suburban
and urban investigations have historical anchors
and
continue to crop up in the realm of the contemporary.
Architectural painting is increasingly common – a
painting of place and placelessness. Steven Millar
begins with architectural models. Here sculptural
form is translated into the space of painting abstracting
and flattening these structures into “shifting
pictorial spaces."
Russell Ferguson’s The Undiscovered Country
at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has been recently
produced on the heels of a host of exhibitions
questioning the status of the medium in a contemporary
context. Gesturing to historical precursors and
ruptures in the field, the show focused on the
life of abstraction and the role of mechanical
reproduction, using Shakespeare’s Hamlet
as a point of departure “the dread of something
after death, the undiscovered country….”
Ferguson’s catalogue begins with a text named “Nothing
Left to Say” and Paul Delaroche’s 1839
proclamation upon viewing a daguerreotype “From
today, painting is dead.” Ferguson’s
questions the function of painting and the challenge
of representation proposing that painting is “the
medium that requires the greatest amount of faith” and
questions “What will we represent?” His
project follows with Richter’s retort “There’s
almost nothing left to say about photography because
it’s so obvious that photography has taken
away one important part of painting: the function
of portraying, depicting.”(5)
Ferguson contributes “How can painting contribute
to representation now?” In our context, how
can these young painters contribute to the cause
of representation and (in the language of this
competition), non-representational painting now?
He continues, “Much of the most significant
contemporary painting today seems in this way both
straightforward and almost unfinished, quiet but
persistent. Compositions are often casual. Color
moves in and out of naturalism. The result is a
painterly ambiguity that holds the viewer in suspension
between the inescapable history of the medium and
the immediate physical presence of the work, between
the pull of memory and the constantly renewing
present.”(6)
In his text, Ferguson reveals, “If the task
of painting is the task of mourning, then we can
perhaps see it not just in the quest for overlooked
forms of representation, in the overt renunciation
of representation, or in the deliberate blurring
of the boundaries between representation and abstraction.”(7)
In light of this discourse, how can young artists
contribute to the field? What kind of effect
can painting have? What is the potential of painting?
Brian Tydings speaks of an interest in abstraction
via palette and perspective. He intends to represent
emotion, the unconscious and contemporary experience.
My interest in the work stemmed from a brand
of abstraction gesturing to anti-figurative painting
akin to de Kooning’s dissolving female figures.
The pink paint reads as flesh. This dissolution
of the figure was duped by Ryan Turner Roth’s
interest in the figure – a particularly classed
and gendered figure, collaged in a moment of isolation – a
kind of everyman tinged by a capitalist critique.
These works actually are complemented by a second
term; the foil for the businessman is the “slacker.” I
took out the literalization of this gesture, thinking
it was stronger in its absence. I was struck by
the level of risk involved with the mode of painting
as quasi-sculptural or installation based – off
the wall if you will – effecting a spatial
tension in the work, concretizing a sense of placelessness
for his subjects. The work’s strength rests
in its lack of specificity. My questions to the
artist would be why this figure in this format,
what will follow, is the seriality at the core
of the work and is this mode of installation
necessary?
In reviewing the submissions, I was also looking,
not merely at formal concerns but questioning
when is painting political? Cooper Sanchez’s work
so too speaks to notions of place and placelessness.
Collecting and manipulating debris from abandoned
or forgotten spaces, Sanchez examines notions of
shelter by means of architectural and banal found
materials. The materiality and level of critique
is regional – turning to dilapidated barns
and Southern soil – the artist is interested
the debasement of the rural landscape. Here,
social and cultural intervention is lodged in
highly abstract
terms.
What is most glaringly apparent in the submission
process is the interest of this young generation
of contemporary artists in the Superreal. A reinvention
of the historic superreal and hyperreal, I took
on this topic in a text entitled “Reality
yet Again,” which referenced a 1972 New York
text written by Harold Rosenberg in response to
a show at Sidney Janis Gallery called “Sharp-Focus
Realism.” The project served to question
the resurfacing of realism yet again, at a particular
moment in contemporary art, and more specifically,
contemporary painting. This turn to traditional,
familiar and well-exploited territory has been
reassessed at a time when it is received as temporally
dislocated in light of technology’s encroachment
into the visual field.
The term superreal used in the early to mid 1970’s
characterized a popular trend in painting and
was termed in February 1974 in Arts Magazine.
Like
many of the precursors from the seventies, this
new generation of artists based painting on photography,
both appropriated and staged. However, unlike
the early incarnation of this movement, the recent
practitioners ambivalently negotiate their relationship
to photography as well as to veritable reality,
fluctuating between a more minimal real and maximal
real through various strategies of mediation
and
invention.
Information and imagery, no longer circulating
and consumable tangibly, is superceded by the
virtually real or the new real. Why readdress
a quasi-objective
reality in paint? Is this the product of a digital
age? Can the medium of paint compete in this
game of the super or hyper real? A recent conversation
published in Artforum between Jean-Pierre Critqui
and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn focused on the exhibition
Hyperrealisms USA 1965-1975 (mounted at Musee
d’Art
Moderne et Contemporain Strasbourg). They articulated
the break between photorealists and studio realists
during this historical artistic movement. The discussion
centered around the question of “instability” around
the hyperreal which is of particular interest
in examining artists working today. This instability
is based on nominal insecurity and a kind of
atemporal
production.
Turning to the serialized inquiry of extension
cord paintings in a superrealist fashion, the
work of Eric Lo Presti, marks a temporal dislocation
from this historical movement, perhaps providing
for a reading of the work of this generation
as
more excessive and bizarre. What kind of counter
gesture is this? It is post-digital abstraction,
anti-figurative, a post-Photoshop language of
crashable virtual reality? It negotiates the
spaces of content,
process, transcription, mediation, innovation,
tradition, spectacle, banality, camp and kitsch,
conceptual and vernacular realism. Historically,
the subject is “present but of no importance” but
in the realm of the new supereal – subject
is everything. What is interesting in the work
of LoPresti, his still life or anti-portrait is
both excessive and ambivalent, in the words of
the artist, “I think of these paintings
as allegories of conscious experience, in all
its
tangled glory.”
To conclude, the generation is marked by all-over
cultural sampling – shifting subject matters
and styles – a kind of search engine logic
towards the interstices of historical and contemporary
painting that allows for the recycling and re-signification
of tradition again and again.
Lauri Firstenberg
Juror, 2005
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