Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden, On Painting — up to 27
Painting must be understood against a background of events initiated by conceptual art in reaction to modernist painting which more or less excludes it (4-5). It was, if anything, about “not painting” and instead sought to “put texts where paintings had been” through which “a way of thinking about art is invoked and is indexed and then migrates to the walls” (6-7).
But playing with language is playing with a big machine. And playing with language in the context of a tradition of painting is taking on a legacy of powerful descriptions. [...] For us, as Conceptual Art developed into an art of describing, what grew around it was a constituency of interlocutors – listeners and learners as much as speakers and producers. As it turned out, this was a threat to professional securities – for instance to the crucial distinction between artist and critic. But it was also here that the substantial connection was established between Conceptual Art and its syndicalised antecedents in painting. The text may have colonised the physical location of painting, but this text had to mean something – as painting had had to once. It had to be made, and not just be artily found – and the making at issue was a social and conversational pursuit.” (9)
The text within these conceptual ‘paintings’ was, therefore, both in place of the painting and also as “an analogue for the modernist critical text [... which had] come to function prescriptively in respect of that to which it was supposed to be subordinate” [i.e. Clement Greenberg and abstract expressionism]. Baldwin cites Stella’s early paintings as "[throwing] the prescriptive text back at itself, reflecting upon their own status as insolent readings of the rules.” (10)
Painting is problematic for Institutional Theory. The Duchampian readymade and consequent ‘generic’ art relies upon an institutional conferral of its status as art, however “it turns out that paintings have the cheek to look a bit like art whether the art world thinks they do or not” (13-14).
In Joseph Kosuth’s formulation, generic art develops through critical operations on the concept of art; you cannot if you are making painting or sculpture be questioning the concept of art since they are merely fixed kinds of art, i.e., mere subsets of the generic class. In this world, painting is either an authenticist anachronism or it is one postmodern option among many. (17)
[...]
History and historicism are abandoned in favour of a certain simultaneity. The various senses of order, sequentiality and periodicity can thus be abandoned. We are now, it seems, sure that artistic forms are not at all bound to the context of their emergence – and that they do not need to overcome them, for example. We can divorce things from their historical context and put them in any arbitrary combination. (18)
All of this creates a situation in which the institution is empowered to an ever-increasing extent. (20-21)
In the form of the doctrine of indiscernibles, the Institutional Theory argues that the status of art is conferred upon objects by the art world. There are thus still objects that somehow lie ‘behind’ the artwork, however installed, evasive and dematerialised they may be. Here is an instance of Cartesian theatre, the machine behind the artwork’s ghost. Perception and description are pulled apart. In the case of the snow shovel we are supposed to perceive a snow shovel and describe it as a work of art. But in the case of a painting of even minimal internal complexity, our address to it will tend to obliterate a Cartesian object in the background, even if we allow the implicit ontology to linger. (23)