Painting today: the art industry collaborator
In Holland Cotter's contribution "Lost in the Gallery-Industrial Complex" which was recently published in the New York Times Arts Section, Cotter makes an important distinction between the art industry and the art world. The art world, according to Cotter, is a "labor source" that serves the more powerful art industry (the latter includes high-price galleries, auction houses and collectors).
In his article, Cotter touches on many sensitive and significant issues regarding the role money plays within the numerous and interlinked realms of the art world. He discusses the role of media and argues that art critics tend to favor a conservative approach to art (Cotter labels this approach a "describe-the-strokes style of writing").
This all is very true from my point of view. What I found particularly striking was Cotter's understanding of what is missing from contemporary art criticism: "evaluative approaches that developed in the 1980s and 1990s, based on the assumption that art inevitably comments on the social and political realities that produce it, tend to be met with disparagement now [...]."
Austin Lee, Supplemental, 90" x 60", acrylic and flashe on canvas, 2013
I would claim that the same is true for much of today's painting (specifically among younger, emerging artists and recent MFA graduates). The trace of the hand, mark-making, drip painting, 'casualist' painting, the aesthetics of 'bad' painting, Neo-Expressionism (once again) - whatever you want to call it - plays a more important role within painting than its social and political implications. By social and political implications, I have a more literal understanding in mind: the absence of social and political issues and problems that can be directly addressed by contemporary painting.
The paintings that I include in this post are not meant to be seen as illustrations of what painting should not do. Nobody can impose any such restrictions on art, nor would these restrictions be helpful. The more important point is this: a large portion of contemporary painting makes itself palatable to the art industry when it really should and could take a more critical stance that would resist and challenge it.
A. R. Penck, Standart, acrylic on canvas, 1971
A painting like Austin Lee's Supplemental is a good example of painterly attitudes that are mistaken for ideas (a formulation Holland Cotter uses in regard to critics). When paintings become all attitude, their attitude might be spot on and justified and certainly entertaining. But it does not save these paintings from being concerned with art alone and, in this case, a particular style/attitude of painting.
When the painter A. R. Penck developed his Standart works (Standart is German for "standard" or "normative", but can also be read as a word play on "stand" and "art"), he had a simplification in mind that could operate on a very basic formal level: a Bildsprache (or visual language) that functions as an outlet of our most human needs - the need to communicate and share our views with each other. At that point in his career, Penck was already being monitored by the East German secret police who were suspicious of his artistic activities. Penck - a citizen of Dresden in Communist East Germany - was not allowed to exhibit his work in his country and when several of his paintings and various other works were destroyed during a raid in 1979, Penck fled to West Germany.
A particular style of painting is always an expression of the conditions it is produced under. You can talk about Penck's stick figures in a purely formal way. You can talk about him in regard to Jörg Immendorf who he was collaborating with, you can talk about an alternative history of painting that undermined classic and traditional tropes of representation and Penck's contribution to a new, more deliberate painting. You can talk about the relation between figuration and abstraction and a myriad other things. But what will never work is the claim that Penck's work stands for itself, can be enjoyed as is and maybe should not be bothered with history. If you look at paintings that way, all you get is half a painting - its shell, without substance. What you will miss is painting's mode of resistance. In Peck's case this would be a resistance toward matters such as pictorialism, conventions of representation, and resistance toward a political regime hellbent on silencing its artists.
Ridley Howard, Red Buildings and Gray, 9" x 8", oil on linen, 2011
Much of painting today is an endless story of empty shells. The idea of a painting as a shell is not very new either. In the late eighteenth century, it was the German Romantics who considered much of classicism in poetry, literature, music and the visual arts to be a series of empty shells (leere Hülsen): embodiments of a past long gone and the inability of the arts to respond to the changed social and political conditions of every-day life.
Angelina Gualdoni, Sonia Sauntering, 28" x 24", acrylic on canvas, 2011
Painting today has become a willful collaborator of the art industry. Ironically though, painting tends to regard itself as subversive. While Lee's or Howard's work might have caused an uproar at the 1913 Armory show, it will most likely and without much hesitation be bought up by today's collectors. What painters seem to ignore is that new styles and formerly subversive aesthetics get absorbed and repurposed by the art market and industry much faster today than just two or three decades ago. In terms of style and technique, almost anything goes; no matter if it is rendered meticulously or thrown together in an hour.
In order for painting to stop or at least delay its facile consumption by the art industry, it has to realize that its subversive potential is not exclusively located in stylistic and formal attributes that painters have learned to appropriate and recycle. Painting's power of resistance is located much deeper, below its surface.
Kerstin Drechsler, If you close the door (47), oil on canvas, 2008-10
What is absent from much of today's painting, but surfaces in much of Kerstin Drechsler's work, is a sense of unease and ambiguity. We are accustomed to looking at paintings (and drawings for that matter) and instantly 'getting' them. What we usually 'get' is what a painting's or drawing's source is, what it refers to, what it cites, what it makes fun of, what it plays with. These paintings rarely reach beyond their references and when they do, all they want is to please (which makes them susceptible to art industry/market consumption).
In Drechsler's If you close the door (47), we are offered a glimpse at an intimate moment. In its intimacy and fusion of bodily parts, this painting does not give away the gender of its participants in any clear or definite way. We could be witnessing a lesbian couple (a subject that Drechsler has employed) or a heterosexual couple in which one partner is engaged in deep throating. This is where the formal aspect of Drechsler's painting comes into play. In its sketched and fuzzy appearance due to the thin washes and runny layers of paint, the actual encounter remains ambiguous. Are we seeing a couple in which the man dominates the woman by pushing his shaft to the point where it reaches the back of her throat causing her to gag? In this case the fuzziness of the paint is suddenly infused with a degree of force that springs entirely from our mind. No matter what our reasoning might be, the fascination with this painting lies in its fluctuation between deep, raw affection and possible abuse, not unlike a Nan Goldin photograph.
Kerstin Drechsler, Revolver, gouache and watercolor on paper, 2005
If more painters were to embrace ideas instead of vague attitudes or styles, and if they were less concerned with painting as a source of pleasure alone, then painting would be able to diminish its art industry dependence - although it will never rid itself from this dependence, what Clement Greenberg once called the "umbilical cord of gold," because it just looks too good on a white wall.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Painter and the Art Lover, engraving, 1565