PUSH TO FLUSH
Painting After Painting
BY PACO BARRAGÁN
The first decade of the 21st century is over, and we should talk not so much about the return of painting as much as a blowout/excess of the artistic medium par excellence. “It is said that the actual interest is the consequence of 9/11,” wrote David Lillington back in 2003 in the
Dutch magazine Metropolis M. “The art world has panicked and goes back to the most safe, commercial and conservative art form: painting.” More recently, in an interview with ARTPULSE1, Barry Schwabsky said, “The fact remains that there have been no deep innovations in art for 40 years.”
Once Saatchi got rid of the British Young Artists and started to collect paintings, everybody—Rubell, Margulies, De la Cruz, Broad et al—thought the “pictorial turn” would brighten their lives again. This started some time in the late 1990s and gathered mo- mentum some time in the mid-2000s, coinciding with the climax of what I called “The Art Fair Age.”
Along with it came globalization thanks to the Internet, cheap travel, digital cameras and iPhones, scanners, video consoles, You- Tube and social media such as Facebook and Twitter, the world be- came a smaller place, and we all participated in one way or another in the “biennalization” and “fairization” of the art world. This also introduced the idea of “post-production” (Bourriaud) and the artist as a DJ who samples images. Even the common layman becomes an active member of this new visual regime in which everyone can cre- ate, manipulate and distribute images. This also means that these new approaches question art’s status, as the authenticity of an art- work or the origins of the source material are irrelevant.
So, this brings us back to painting. When does a painting cease to be a painting? How can we construct a painting that informs itself through the analogue and digital realm? Is a moving painting a per- version of painting? Can the act of painting itself be performative?
Society has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, having become more mass-media and high-tech driven than ever. To claim, as does Schwabsky, that “there have been no deep innovations” is, of course, very bold, but incorrect—although if we look at most painting today we surely could get that impression. Think of stars such as Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Neo Rauch, Peter Doig and Dana Schutz, all of whom use contemporary imagery but the painterly approach comes out of the 19th and early 20th century movements, including Impres- sionism, German Expressionism, Picasso, Picabia and Matisse... And this is something that is being continued now by younger artists. We could say that the formula exists because we immediately recognize it from art history and reward it for being good painting. It has a clear precedent. Is it radical? Is it challenging? Not at all!
MULTIPLE INCLUSION DIAGRAM (MID)
Painting always measures itself against its own history and mythos, but while it does so it also “expands” and interacts in this new technological context with photography, video, installation, sculp- ture, performance and digital technology. Departing from Rosalind Krauss’ “Double Negation Diagram,” I came up some years ago with a “Multiple Inclusion Diagram”(MID)2, in which painting became a positive condition that expanded the limits of its traditional place, assuming a central role. Painting as such has less to do with the history of art and more to do with the history of the media. Some of the artists that are in my opinion investigating the pictorial discourse in a critical way are Albert Oehlen, Franz Ackermann, Fabián Marcaccio, Pedro Barbeito, Nicola Verlato and Vargas Suárez-Universal, just to mention a few.
In this alley, video and performance in particular have established themselves as surprising comrades-in-arms by reprogramming or referencing in a fascinating manner both the pictorial as moving image and the idea of painting as performance, or, better said, per- formative. Think of Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tim White-So- bieski, Mariana Vassileva: The painting unfolds as we watch, thus unveiling its genesis. And think also of Myritza Castillo, Johanna Reich or Sergio Prego, whose deconstructions of paintings in front of the camera become an exercise of real painting in real time.
Formal experiments and performative actions reinvent and expand the concept of the pictorial, and new technologies have helped put painting back at the vanguard of contemporary artistic discourse.
Painting may well be a state of mind that has to do not only with the “what” but also with the “how.”
NOTES
1. See, Barragán, Paco. “Interview with Barry Schwabsky.” ARTPULSE, No. 8, Sum- mer 2011, pp. 54-59.
2. See, Barragán, Paco. “The Advent of Expanded Painting.” The Art Fair Age. Milan: Charta, 2008, pp. 59-69.
24 ARTPULSE l www.artpulsemagazine.com
Painting After Painting
BY PACO BARRAGÁN
The first decade of the 21st century is over, and we should talk not so much about the return of painting as much as a blowout/excess of the artistic medium par excellence. “It is said that the actual interest is the consequence of 9/11,” wrote David Lillington back in 2003 in the
Dutch magazine Metropolis M. “The art world has panicked and goes back to the most safe, commercial and conservative art form: painting.” More recently, in an interview with ARTPULSE1, Barry Schwabsky said, “The fact remains that there have been no deep innovations in art for 40 years.”
Once Saatchi got rid of the British Young Artists and started to collect paintings, everybody—Rubell, Margulies, De la Cruz, Broad et al—thought the “pictorial turn” would brighten their lives again. This started some time in the late 1990s and gathered mo- mentum some time in the mid-2000s, coinciding with the climax of what I called “The Art Fair Age.”
Along with it came globalization thanks to the Internet, cheap travel, digital cameras and iPhones, scanners, video consoles, You- Tube and social media such as Facebook and Twitter, the world be- came a smaller place, and we all participated in one way or another in the “biennalization” and “fairization” of the art world. This also introduced the idea of “post-production” (Bourriaud) and the artist as a DJ who samples images. Even the common layman becomes an active member of this new visual regime in which everyone can cre- ate, manipulate and distribute images. This also means that these new approaches question art’s status, as the authenticity of an art- work or the origins of the source material are irrelevant.
So, this brings us back to painting. When does a painting cease to be a painting? How can we construct a painting that informs itself through the analogue and digital realm? Is a moving painting a per- version of painting? Can the act of painting itself be performative?
Society has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, having become more mass-media and high-tech driven than ever. To claim, as does Schwabsky, that “there have been no deep innovations” is, of course, very bold, but incorrect—although if we look at most painting today we surely could get that impression. Think of stars such as Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Neo Rauch, Peter Doig and Dana Schutz, all of whom use contemporary imagery but the painterly approach comes out of the 19th and early 20th century movements, including Impres- sionism, German Expressionism, Picasso, Picabia and Matisse... And this is something that is being continued now by younger artists. We could say that the formula exists because we immediately recognize it from art history and reward it for being good painting. It has a clear precedent. Is it radical? Is it challenging? Not at all!
MULTIPLE INCLUSION DIAGRAM (MID)
Painting always measures itself against its own history and mythos, but while it does so it also “expands” and interacts in this new technological context with photography, video, installation, sculp- ture, performance and digital technology. Departing from Rosalind Krauss’ “Double Negation Diagram,” I came up some years ago with a “Multiple Inclusion Diagram”(MID)2, in which painting became a positive condition that expanded the limits of its traditional place, assuming a central role. Painting as such has less to do with the history of art and more to do with the history of the media. Some of the artists that are in my opinion investigating the pictorial discourse in a critical way are Albert Oehlen, Franz Ackermann, Fabián Marcaccio, Pedro Barbeito, Nicola Verlato and Vargas Suárez-Universal, just to mention a few.
In this alley, video and performance in particular have established themselves as surprising comrades-in-arms by reprogramming or referencing in a fascinating manner both the pictorial as moving image and the idea of painting as performance, or, better said, per- formative. Think of Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tim White-So- bieski, Mariana Vassileva: The painting unfolds as we watch, thus unveiling its genesis. And think also of Myritza Castillo, Johanna Reich or Sergio Prego, whose deconstructions of paintings in front of the camera become an exercise of real painting in real time.
Formal experiments and performative actions reinvent and expand the concept of the pictorial, and new technologies have helped put painting back at the vanguard of contemporary artistic discourse.
Painting may well be a state of mind that has to do not only with the “what” but also with the “how.”
NOTES
1. See, Barragán, Paco. “Interview with Barry Schwabsky.” ARTPULSE, No. 8, Sum- mer 2011, pp. 54-59.
2. See, Barragán, Paco. “The Advent of Expanded Painting.” The Art Fair Age. Milan: Charta, 2008, pp. 59-69.
24 ARTPULSE l www.artpulsemagazine.com
