Perl Jed the Perils of Painting Now the New York Review of Books September 24th 2015 Issue

Individual Drove/The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Richard Diebenkorn: Studio Wall, 1963

Similar the reports of the end of history that we have been hearing, the many reports of the death of painting have no basis in reality. Painting flourishes—in the studios of artists, in galleries in New York's Chelsea, Lower Due east Side, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, too every bit in galleries around the world. Museums, whatever their ever-deepening engagement with installation and performance art and the cavernous spaces designed to arrange such work, are hardly neglecting contemporary painting.

Since concluding summer, the Museum of Mod Art has presented a vast Sigmar Polke retrospective as well as "The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World." A continuing fascination with painting fueled "In the Studio," a historical survey of paintings of artists' workplaces, mounted at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street over the winter. And this summer the New Museum—a New York institution that prides itself on its innovative programming—has organized a retrospective of the contemporary German painter Albert Oehlen. Although it sometimes seems that anything just painting is what arts professionals are well-nigh eager to put earlier the public, the truth is that when artists, critics, and curators want to take the pulse of contemporary art, painting inspires much of the deepest, well-nigh heartfelt, and heated discussion.

David Salle—a painter who came to prominence a generation ago, at some other moment when painting was said by many to be dead—recently wrote that "the Spider web's frenetic sprawl is reverse to the type of focus required to make a painting, or, for that matter, to look at 1." I call back he's right. And for this very reason painting becomes a steadying force—a source of stability in an fine art world where everything can seem to be upwards for grabs. With performances, moving images, live and recorded music and sounds, likewise as just about anything that can be pulled off the Internet actualization in the galleries, it is more hard than always before to grapple with the fundamental questions of mode and pregnant that are integral to art. The essentially plainspoken, artisanal nature of painting, which can't avert registering all the pressures of the world effectually us, albeit sometimes by just setting them aside, tin help visitors to galleries and museums understand what is happening in art today.

It may well be this sense of painting'south clarifying power that motivated the Museum of Modern Art to mountain "The Forever Now," the first exhibition in the museum in at least thirty years that offered an expansive survey of contemporary painting. Laura Hoptman, who organized "The Forever Now," says as much in her introduction to the exhibition catalog. "The obsession with recuperating aspects of the past is the condition of culture in our time," she declares, "yet information technology appears in contemporary art at this moment most conspicuously in the field of painting." Although Hoptman and I practise non agree when information technology comes to how to evaluate contemporary painting—we are interested in very different artists—I tin see that we are reacting to the same seismic shifts.

For hundreds of years—probably since the Renaissance—a painter's style has unsaid a certain set of values, with Classicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, Cubism, and Expressionism each reflecting a generally agreed-upon worldview. In today's anything-goes art world a detail pictorial style no longer implies a particular worldview or set of values. Style has been dissociated from substance, and so that while for i artist classicism still represents the timeless society it did for Poussin, for another artist classicism is a camp joke about the banality of history, and for even so some other its deadened emotions suggest robotic, posthuman anomie. It is no longer enough for an artist to begin past embracing a mode. Now an artist who believes in the inextricable link between style and substance has to nearly unmarried-handedly reconstruct the substance of that fashion.

But there is another arroyo, pop today and embraced by Hoptman. An artist tin can forget most substance and gloat way for its own sake, which seems to me to be the case with most of the painters in "The Forever Now." Among them are Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens, Josh Smith, Mary Weatherford, and Michael Williams. Hoptman, who has brought these artists together forth with a dozen others, believes that "the firsthand and hugely expanded catalogue of visual information offered by the Cyberspace has radically altered visual artists' relationship to the history of fine art." Style—and the substance it once unsaid—has become a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. And this phenomenon—which she dubs "atemporality," a term borrowed from the science-fiction writer William Gibson—has created, she writes enthusastically, "a connoisseurship of boundless information, a picking and choosing of elements of the past to resolve a problem or a chore at hand." In my view, the process Hoptman describes—I would narrate it equally closer to scavenging than connoisseurship—has had a debilitating upshot on both the artist'south and the audience'southward relationship with questions of style.

Confusion reigns. Let me give an case. Recently, the Gladstone Gallery presented an exhibition of rather achieved paintings past Victor Homo, a Romanaian artist who was born in 1974 and has shown a good deal in Europe. Each of Homo's minor, dark, realist figure paintings includes a highly agonizing twist, such every bit a face with a third middle or a woman'due south caput in the lap of a woman whose own head we don't encounter. The canvases suggest the bleak sobriety of works by half-forgotten Neo-Romantics of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly Pavel Tchelitchew and Eugene Berman. I was interested in Man's paintings—and befuddled by them as well. I had no way of knowing if he meant me to take his capable, prosaic realism at face value, with the absurdist or Surrealist elements suggesting impinging nightmares, or if the violations of realistic logic were meant to mock realism itself. Manner offered no guide to substance. I left the gallery bemused.

I am non the only one who is bemused by a lot of contemporary painting. Amidst the well-nigh widely read essays and reviews that take dealt with painting in the past few years there are more than a few that at least begin in a state of bewilderment. The critic Raphael Rubinstein, in his much-discussed essay "Conditional Painting," writes near a group of abstract painters—they include Raoul De Keyser, Mary Heilmann, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool—who "all deliberately turn away from 'strong' painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or plummet."^* Rubinstein wonders: "Why would an artist demur at the prospect of a finished work, court self-sabotaging strategies, sign his or her name to a painting that looks, from some perspectives, like an utter failure?" The styles of the works to which Rubinstein refers have become enigmas, even to those in the know. An assortment of clever terms—almost sobriquets—take been devised to describe the anti-styles and united nations-styles in painting, among them Crapstraction and Zombie Formalism.

Sometimes it seems that the only fashion painters have of adequately conveying their sense of crisis is by attacking the basic elements of previous works of fine art, doing away with pigment, canvass, and a stable back up. A few years ago, the Luxembourg & Dayan gallery hosted a show of "Unpainted Paintings," featuring works made using Kool-Aid, urine, fire, and silver foil, on supports that included a piece of shag rug. Massimiliano Gionio, the New Museum curator who organized the retrospective of Albert Oehlen'due south piece of work, which is a mash-upwardly of glib pop civilisation references and scabrous abstract brushwork, writes that the creative person's goal is "to paint while at the same time denouncing the inadequacy of painting." Painting remains the primal artistic deed, which certain artists apparently seek to violate and fifty-fifty demolish. Oehlen'south canvases, with their silk-screened digital images and scraps and scrawls of paint, manage to be simultaneously brash and bland. Oehlen, Gionio observes, "paints confronting painting—he paints to kill painting." But painting volition survive.

Looking at the work of the seventeen contemporary painters Hoptman gathered together in "The Forever At present," my feeling was that style was mostly designed to role every bit a bulwark, screen, or drapery. The show opened with works by Joe Bradley that could just in the nigh tenuous way exist referred to as paintings. Each consists of a minimal sign—a rudimentary cross; the number twenty-three; a stick effigy—inscribed in grease pencil on bare canvas.

While Bradley certainly presents an extreme case of visual emptiness, even the painterly pleasures offered at "The Forever Now" suggested not so much sensuous openness as narcissistic resistance. The thickly worked compositions of Marking Grotjahn, with their elaborately tangled and riotously colored skeins, swags, and drapes of paint, evoke grandiose rope tricks or an Arabian Nights caravan. Although Grotjahn knows how to engage the heart, the engagement is somehow sterile, a visual game or puzzle without whatever discernible emotional texture. Are Grotjahn'southward pictures gladdening or saddening? I cannot say.

In her itemize essay, Hoptman summons that most fashionable of images—the zombie. "The undead," she writes, evidently in dead earnest, "are the perfect embodiments of the atemporal." And she goes on to fence that

the metaphor of the zombie—a resurrected body without a soul that feeds on other bodies—is useful: it evokes the voracious hunger for ideas and images from the past that, in some paintings today, are consumed, digested, and re-presented in guises that resemble their original forms, but are somehow changed.

But most of the artists in "The Forever Now" have a sense of history that goes dorsum no more a couple of generations—which is a split second in the history of fine art. Painters such as Matt Connors, Charline von Heyl, Julie Mehretu, Josh Smith, and Michael Williams seem mostly aware of Abstruse Expressionism and the various developments, from Pop to Minimalism, that arrived in its wake. For them, tradition is puddle deep.

Hoptman may experience that in presenting what she calls "the zombie epitome"—and she admits it tin be seen as a "pejorative"—she is making a case for a changed understanding of the role of the artist, much every bit Oscar Wilde did when he troubled late Victorian audiences by comparison works of fine art to masks. Wilde'due south idea was that the stylizations of the mask revealed a truth that was dissembled past life's quotidian confusions. For Hoptman, truth is itself a kind of confusion, which artists reverberate through their willful eclecticism. Endmost her essay, she writes of artists who are "in search of a broader, bolder notion of culture." The paintings she brings together, to the extent that they are not just bland (which many of them are), office as mirrors of contemporary turmoil; personal way tends to reverberate many of the styles chronicled on the Internet. What is defective is pictorial style every bit a guide to individual feelings, individual emotions. And that is a great loss—the greatest loss of all.

Hoptman's fascination with atemporality put "The Forever Now" on a collision grade with painting itself, which is cypher if it is not timebound, the workings of the artist's hand at a particular moment, attesting to the authenticity of the artist's experience. In painting, the autograph of the creative person—the sense of the surface every bit constructed piece by piece—is an assurance of authenticity. Of course authenticity can also go a trap, an oppressive expression of the narcissistic personality. This is an idea that was argued quite forcefully by Lionel Trilling in a fascinating series of speculations, Sincerity and Authenticity, presented as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1970 and published in book form in 1972. I had never read Sincerity and Actuality—the title suggested a critic who was resolutely burying his head in the sand at a time when camp and kitsch were already entrenched—but later on the stylistic gratis-for-all of "The Forever Now," Trilling's ideas seem to accept a gimmicky indicate.

Adam Reich/Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York City

Brett Bakery: Nighttime Table, 2013–2015

Most substantial conversations about painting today—they often appear online, in magazines such as artcritical, Hyperallergic, and Painters' Table, and on Raphael Rubinstein's blog The Silo—cannot avoid the question of authenticity, whether explicitly or implicitly. Equally for sincerity, the other colonnade of Trilling'southward discussion, however alien it may be to contemporary sensibilities, he persuades me that it is, in the complex sense he means it, precisely what is missing in a lot of contemporary painting. Reading Sincerity and Actuality at present, more than forty years afterwards it appeared, I realize that far from blindly upholding values already imperiled when he was writing, Trilling was writing out of an awareness that the time had come to decide what might still be worth saving. While Sincerity and Actuality is far from a complete success—Trilling goes off on likewise many tangents, his wide-ranging ideas sometimes drawing attention away from the arguments they are meant to advance—the book is a bold provocation.

Trilling's argument was grounded in the strong opposition he saw between the nature of sincerity and the nature of actuality. Sincerity, co-ordinate to Trilling, is substantially social, "the necessity of expressing and guaranteeing" oneself to the public. Actuality is a very different matter, an obsession with individual experience that Trilling believes has in modern times come more and more than to overwhelm sincerity. Sincerity involves a "rhetoric of avowal"—a balancing, somehow, of "the troubled ambiguity of the personal life" and "the unshadowed manifestness of the public life." In this sense sincerity has much in mutual with pictorial way, which at least traditionally can be seen every bit reconciling the artist'south inner experience with the public world. Artistic style is a public avowal.

In the 1970s, Trilling wanted to warn confronting the excesses of actuality and reaffirm the importance of sincerity. He sees actuality as emphasizing the individual'south insistence on being true to "the troubled ambiguity of the personal life"—social norms can be challenged or put bated. He argues that the modern idea of authenticity grew out of an awareness of "how ruthless an act was required to assert autonomy in a culture schooled in duty and in obedience to peremptory and absolute law." But he fears that the dialectical pressure between sincerity and authenticity that originally gave modernism then much of its vitality was collapsing past the 1960s, replaced with an unfettered worship of authenticity, which could lead merely to anarchy.

What was beingness lost was the dynamic human relationship betwixt sincerity and authenticity that had given the work of an artist such as Cézanne its slow-edifice ability. For Cézanne, the sincerity of his delivery to traditional stylistic legibility was constantly challenged past the authenticity of his idiosyncratic feel of nature. Information technology is Cézanne's double allegiance—to the sincerity of tradition and the authenticity of his own perceptions of form—that has made his piece of work central for artists from Matisse, Picasso, and Braque downwards to our own 24-hour interval.

We cannot even brainstorm to determine the authenticity of a painting until we have some sense of the artist'southward character—of the quality of the creative person's sincerity. This brings me dorsum to how utterly misreckoning I found Joe Bradley's glib graffiti in the "Forever At present" exhibition. Bradley'due south style—if we can call it that—is so stripped down that information technology offers no way to fifty-fifty begin to judge what Trilling called "attitude and posture." But it is not easy to judge the sincerity or authenticity of a work of fine art even when one is given more than stylistic show. This is because in the arts what Trilling referred to as "peremptory and absolute laws" are never entirely peremptory or entirely absolute, at least not when they accept any expressive value.

Some have argued for a render to traditional skills in painting and drawing, to what Robert Hughes one time called "the nuts and bolts of the profession." While there is much to exist said for the skills on which Hughes insisted—for what Trilling might have called a legible rhetoric—we are all likewise perfectly aware that neither proficiency nor virtuosity is in and of itself a guarantee of either sincerity or actuality. We know this from the history of fine art. Anthony Van Dyck, who was every flake as much a virtuoso as Rubens, tin nonetheless strike u.s.a. as glib and insincere in his mastery, something nosotros hardly ever feel with Rubens. The awkwardness of the figure drawing in many of Claude Lorrain'due south landscapes and in some of Poussin's later pastorals may past some standards be judged a failure of proficiency, and yet the artists marshal their weaknesses (if that's what they are) as a guarantee of both authenticity and sincerity.

To the extent that virtuosity can exist seen as reflecting a respect for exacting standards, information technology is a course of sincerity. Certainly, this is how it was frequently interpreted during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. And nonetheless virtuosity tin besides be a form of obfuscation, insincerity, or inauthenticity. Merely call back of the virtuosity of John Currin, the most tongue-in-cheek of contemporary figure painters. Currin's nudes, with breasts and thighs and so smooth and shiny equally to suggest porcelain dolls, are a parody of erotic delight. His confectionary pink mankind and glittering highlights take a conventional "terminate" that feels glib and perfunctory. With Currin, virtuosity is a sly gambit, not a hard-won accomplishment. Sincerity and authenticity must be communicated through a pictorial struggle, through the ways that stylistic traditions and qualities of line, color, and composition are embodied, enriched, and transformed. That'southward missing in Currin.

One younger painter I think is actually grappling with these difficult questions is Brett Baker. He was born in 1973 and has been showing his abstract canvases at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in recent years. I have seen these small, heavily impastoed pictorial inventions a couple of times, with deepening interest and admiration. Their tight-packed, elongated rectangular forms—which are invariably based on a rather elementary grid—bring to listen some of the layered compositions of Paul Klee as well as some of the textiles of Anni Albers. Working with orchestrations of jewel-rich blues, purples, and reds or forest-deep greens, oranges, and browns, Bakery builds images that are simultaneously luxuriant and austere; the thickness of the paint is ready in a tension with the express nature of his structures. The vertically and diagonally aligned strokes of paint suggest geological layerings. The paintings have a Limoges-enamel intimacy.

I report my impressions of Baker's paintings in a speculative spirit. He sets his piece of work securely inside a tradition of geometric abstraction, and he embraces that tradition with a virtuosity that leaves u.s.a. at the very least with a sense of his deep and considered commitment—with a sense of his sincerity. He carries off his chosen style with considerable panache. As for the more complex question of meaning, of emotion—of the work'south truth to something inside—I feel it remains an open question. My second encounter with Baker's work in a couple of years suggests that its style, however limited, registers an emotional amplitude through the growing confidence of his stained-glass color, with its plangent, mysterious tonalities.

Much of the trouble in the visual arts today comes from our increasing dependence on the Internet, where all the richness and complication of an creative person'due south painterly surfaces is reduced to pixels. Paintings are flattened out by the Net. And the paintings that "take" to digital reproduction about invariably trump the ones that demand the straight response of a human being heart. The Internet, with its clicks and links, threatens to deny us the gradual, evolving, unmediated associate with an artist's actual work that I've had with Baker'south. In social club to empathize an artist's piece of work, we need repeated opportunities to see how qualities of surface and texture—what might be called facture—exercise and do not reverberate deeper impulses.

No contempo exhibition in New York has represented more of an effort to reestablish some contact with the bedrock of painting than the extraordinarily ambitious "In the Studio: Paintings," mounted for the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street by John Elderfield, formerly primary curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Mod Art. A parallel evidence, "In the Studio: Photographs," was at Gagosian on Madison Artery, curated by Peter Galassi. In Chelsea, Elderfield brought together works from the sixteenth century to well-nigh the present, and in his catalog essay he also discussed the studio paintings of Velázquez, Vermeer, and Courbet. Elderfield emphasized the etymological human relationship between the studio and the idea of study, the studio every bit a place where artisanal and intellectual impulses are united. He underscored this idea with a powerful quotation from Delacroix, who envisioned the studio as a place where "nature" would exist reimagined by "human genius at the apogee of its development."

"In the Studio," while too diffuse to be an birthday successful experience, tapped into the longing that so many people at present experience for painting'south primal power. In the Western tradition—where at to the lowest degree since the end of the Renaissance painting has been the essential visual art—the studio has become the place where questions of creative sincerity and authenticity and their relationship are resolved. Fifty-fifty Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum curator whom nobody would accuse of existence unwelcoming to new media, finds himself commenting in the catalog for the Albert Oehlen exhibition that

it is ironic—if not downright depressing or, maybe, sadly illuminating—that i of the best descriptions of what life in the digital era feels similar had to be captured in the old medium of painting rather than in some new, hyper-technological invention.

What I believe Gioni—and Laura Hoptman—are unable or peradventure embarrassed to see is the source of painting'southward enduring strength. Painting, with its many intertwined conventions, provides models of sincerity through which individual painters tin communicate their particular experiences, attitudes, ideas, and ideals.

Among the most striking works Elderfield included in "In the Studio" was Richard Diebenkorn's Studio Wall (1963; run across illustration on page 55). For me this dark-toned canvas evokes the java-and-cigarette melancholy of fog-spring afternoons in Berkeley, California, where Diebenkorn painted some of his finest canvases in the years around 1960. Diebenkorn gives us a very austere view of the studio, with a humble folding chair and behind it the studio wall, on which a selection of the artist's drawings has been hung, at to the lowest degree three of them effigy studies. Amidst the objects leaning against the wall are probably a couple of canvases. This is a painting near the processes of the studio: the drawings that may or may not lead to paintings; the paintings that are unfinished or finished or abandoned; the chair on which to sit and draw or sit and reflect on the human activity of painting.

It is a wonderfully grave composition. The minor austerity with which Diebenkorn renders the various elements in his studio assures the authenticity of the artist's experience, even every bit the subtle elegance of the composition guarantees the sincerity with which he addresses his audience. Information technology's no wonder that Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, is a painter for whom and so many contemporary artists have peculiarly warm feelings. He recognizes the perilous state of painting. He makes a painting that unmakes and so remakes painting's traditions. While those traditions are very much under assault today, the challenges coming from so many unlike quarters just serve to reaffirm painting'due south extraordinary vitality.

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Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/perils-painting-now/