May 2010

cross-posted to Paddy Johnson's blog (sorry for the lack of para breaks over there, I fear the dreaded "n/n"

More on the David Joselit essay that an AFC commenter considered timely on the topic of "painting vs cyber-everything-culture."

The essay starts with obligatory reference to the crazy world of cyber-networks in which we increasingly spend our time but then drops the subject. Other than saying you can look up "internet maps" on Google and not learn very much (well, duh) there is no comparison of current painting to Internet architecture or new media practices such as GPS art that attempt to make sense (or nonsense) of the web.

Instead, Joselit leaps back into the timeworn discourse of postmodern challenges to the autonomous Modernist object. Paintings that refer to information outside themselves are given a new, clunky title, "transitive painting."

Joselit assumes as given that we can't completely abandon the ancient practice of smearing pigment on a support but must find ways to make it intellectually and morally justifiable. He acknowledges painting's role in the market (somewhat tepidly--the truth is painting sales keep the art world on life support and allow shows of "immaterial" art) but can't or won't think outside the frame presented by his chosen artists and what are probably his own preferences.

His article heaps one shaky assumption on another and concludes by lumping Amy Sillman (who sells stand-alone paintings) into his transitive canon because she has overlapping images in her canvases. (As AFC commenter vc noted.) This was before her current show where she offered a zine and CD in addition to the paintings, as if to fill in something Joselit left out.

from vc on the AFC "angry painters" thread, talking about an article by David Joselit on so-called transitive painting (as in "it's not just painting, see I have a band/zine/website/video"):

I thought it was strange how Joselit in October began with painting/installations that effectively tweeked how we see paintings as IN a network, and then bestowed transitiveness onto Sillman because she depicts diagrams. I don’t know if this weakens or strengthens his argument.

Weakens. The thought of a critic "bestowing transitiveness" upon artists needy for a theory for conservative work doesn't stop being funny.

Amy Sillman and her gallery raised the "painting is dead" argument in the press release for her current show (not sure why--a couple of AFC commenters think it's so she could be seen as refuting it). A Time Out New York review by Howard Halle considered whether "painting is dead" is itself dead:

...It would be fairer to describe painting-is-dead as a persistent if vestigial meme, vastly diminished from its Conceptual Art heyday, when Tricky Dick was compiling enemies lists and planning break-ins, but still a notion to be reckoned with.

Not that anyone had ever stopped painting in the first place, of course, but let’s face it: Beyond what transpired in the ’60s and ’70s, some important milestones in 20th-century art stem from similar repudiations of the craft—notably Marcel Duchamp’s dismissal of painting as being merely “retinal,” and Walter Benjamin’s association of it with reactionary politics. I’d submit that a lot of curators, dealers and collectors today must agree with such characterizations on a certain level; otherwise, why would so many biennials and art fairs be stuffed with video, installation and found/fabricated objects?

So if painting-is-dead isn’t the 800-pound gorilla it used to be, it remains, arguably, a more elusive Yeti loping among the art-world’s high-cultural Himalayas.

This assessment is good, if arguably not necessary, if the reasons for invoking "painting-is-dead" are spurious. If discuss it we must, Halle's account omits some points, so here is how it could be rewritten:

Painting-is-dead is a persistent but by no means vestigial meme, having morphed from its Conceptual Art heyday to a set of working conditions beyond the artworld's ability to frame: to wit, the culture of "cyber-everything" seducing viewers and practitioners away from the creaky rituals of stretching, daubing, and displaying pigment on canvas.

Beyond what transpired in the '60s and '70s, some important milestones in 20th- and 21st-century art stem from repudiations of the craft—-notably Marcel Duchamp’s dismissal of painting as being merely 'retinal,' Walter Benjamin’s association of it with reactionary politics, and the critique from video art and new media that painting avoids more pressing problems of the dominant techno-culture.

I’d submit that a lot of curators, dealers and collectors today must agree with such characterizations on a certain level; otherwise, why would so many biennials and art fairs be stuffed with video, installation and interactive web art? Painting-is-dead is still an 800-pound gorilla, which is why painters continually have to assert their 'primacy' in press releases.