Painting
and love are like sisters; they are very different, of course, but are tightly
connected and related in many ways.
–
Isabelle Graw
The
familiarity of post-medium discourses today has, curiously, set the scene for
painting’s resurgence as an art form. Despite its gendered and discriminatory
history, painting remains valorized in contemporary art, and it is used towards
powerful feminist ends. Certain understandings of painting today might even be
incognizable within traditional definitions, as the medium looks or works more
like sculpture, performance, or pure network formation. At the moment of
capitalism’s digitization, its material obsessions are far from diminished.
Isabelle
Graw maps the forceful paradoxes driving painting’s continuous critical and
commercial allure in her landmark new publication, The Love of Painting.
Genealogy of a Success Medium (Sternberg Press, 2018). Graw keeps a close eye
on painting’s fourteenth century theoretical foundations, developing a distinct
genealogy of the medium’s dazzling vitality in the present. Interwoven among
the volume’s essays are dialogues with numerous artists whose work Graw
examines, as she considers the critic’s networked position and complicates her
interpretative strategies. In a public discussion marking the book's US launch,
she outlines some of her major arguments, inviting responses from David
Joselit, Distinguished Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY,
and New York-based painter Avery Singer.
Book
Launch & Discussion Documentation. Artists Space, New York City , May 21, 2018
Painting
seems to have lost its dominant position in the field of the arts. However,
looking more closely at exhibited photographs, assemblages, installations, or
performances, it is evident how the rhetorics of painting still remain
omnipresent. Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on
exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art
form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation
with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of
liveliness. Thus, painting is not restricted to the limits of its own frame,
but possesses a specific potential that is located in its material and physical
signs. Its value is grounded in its capacity to both reveal and mystify its
conditions of production. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists
like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel
Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw’s
insights are further discussed and put to the test.
“Isabelle
Graw’s brilliant analysis of the exceptional position of painting in our
increasingly digital economy combines a deep respect for the objects of study
and those who make them with an impressive range of critical and theoretical
insights. Along the way, The Love of Painting never loses sight of the medium’s
dialectical relationship to the art world, the art market, and society at
large. This is a lively, provocative, and persuasively argued book.”
—Alexander
Alberro, author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in
Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art
“It’s
about time for a book declaring 'the love of painting' to appear, after the
aridity of postmodernism’s announcement of painting’s demise. Isabelle Graw’s
argument in favor of this love turns on what she terms 'vitalistic fantasies':
the perception of artworks as 'quasi subjects' saturated with the life of their
creator. This notion of the work of art as a quasi subject relates directly to
the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s consideration that 'the possibility of
fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of
contemporary art.' To understand this we must ask: Why do we relate to works of
art in the same way we relate to people? The Love of Painting works on this
question—and does so with success.”
—Rosalind
E. Krauss, author and University Professor at the Department of Art History,
Columbia University
Avery Singer. The Studio Visit, 2012
Rachel
Harrison’s Rubber Maid (2018) is composed of a mixed-bag of materials—acrylic,
wood, enamel, cement, polystyrene, and a Rubbermaid mop bucket, complete with
wringer—the bright gold textured plank, embellished by pink and blue spray
paint, touches a similarly-hued plastic bucket on the floor beside it. Included
in the exhibition Painting: Now and Forever, Part III (June 28 – August 17,
2018) across Greene Naftali and Matthew Marks galleries, Harrison’s
three-dimensional piece is indicative of what Isabelle Graw terms an “elastic
conception of painting.” What has a painting historically been, and what is it
now? In her new book The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, art
historian, critic, and educator Graw ruminates on Harrison’s paintings, and the
work of Martin Kippenberger, Avery Singer, and Marcel Broodthaers, among
others, tracing the origins of the medium, its evolution, and its enduring
significance.
Graw
outlines her arguments in the book’s introduction, “rather than indulging in
the love of painting…I attempt to trace the material, art-historical, and
sociological reasons for this art form’s specific potential in view of a
contemporary capitalist system that has increasingly turned into a digital
economy,” and assembles a thematic scaffolding that runs through the critical
essays, case studies, and conversations with artists contained within. She
asserts that painting has “intellectual capacities,” citing writings by Leon
Battista Alberti and David Joselit that discuss the medium’s ability for
agency, in addition to utilizing formation (as Michel Foucault ascribed it) to
characterize painting’s dialectical general-yet-specific nature. She connects
this to materiality’s relationship to affect and the semiotic and commodity
aspects of painting. Graw also puts forth her view of “vitalistic fantasies” (how
the personality of a painter may be evident in her painting, or how paintings
achieve personas) as they relate to a viewer’s engagement with the medium.
These examples are offered as possible reasons why painting has continued
relevance and renewal within the sphere of contemporary art.
Graw
explains that “in recent years, painting has received much more attention in
critical writing and theory, and contemporary painting exhibitions have been
extremely popular, bolstering an increased interest in the art form.” This is a
counterpoint to the idea that painting has lost relevance since the middle of
the last century due to the proliferation of performance, video, and
installation art. Painting has not only persisted, but morphed and acclimated,
as Graw delineates through her evaluations of artists’ practices. From the
outset, she states that her writing will focus on the discourse surrounding
painting primarily in Western Europe and North America, and that “the ideas and
values associated with painting in this book are thus characterized by Western
thought, and are not easily applicable to non-Western painting.” It is useful
to be told of the scope, though a mention toward a larger reach may have been beneficial.
A
collection of Graw’s meditations on this art form, The Love of Painting is
organized into six chapters, where each section combines case studies, essays,
and conversations thematically in a mixture of previously published and new
work. At times the prose is discursive, but this is ultimately helpful to draw
out her most salient points regarding vitalism, subjectivity, semiotics, and
value.
A
co-founder of both the Berlin-based art periodical Texte zur Kunst and the
Institute of Art Criticism based in Frankfurt (am Main), Graw draws from a rich
cache of critical writing to situate her thinking—the notes at the end of each
chapter are plentiful and worth perusing by those interested in her source
archive. She engages with the practices of over a dozen artists, including
Frank Stella, Édouard Manet, Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter,
Jutta Koether, and many more in her comparisons and appraisals. Conversations
with friends Koether, Charline von Heyl, Merlin Carpenter, Wade Guyton, Alex
Israel, and herself on the merits of Jana Euler’s work are the most enjoyable
to read and are successful at elucidating Graw’s hypotheses on the prominence
of painting today. In her conversation with Koether, Graw ponders Joan
Mitchell’s style as an “alternation between impulsive action and a considered
approach” with a nod to the “conceptual expression” of Kippenberger’s
paintings. Koether does not wholly agree, answering “after all, conceptual
expression, even if it’s present here, is based on completely different premises.”
The close relationships between the writer and her artists are important, as
they lend an intimacy to the conversations which allows for honesty and
disagreement.
In her
essay on Harrison and Isa Genzken, Graw names the figure-like assemblages found
in both artists’ practices “quasi-subjects”, which she defines as “objects that
behave (or seem to behave) as subjects, as though they are possessed of agency
and changeable inner states and capable of acting upon their environment.” The
works reflect lives burdened by the struggle to survive in late capitalism, a
struggle that, for most artists working today, is all too real. The book
culminates on the subject of value and the work of painters in a neoliberal
economic context. In an increasingly digital (art) world, painting occupies a
particular space that reinforces its appeal and worth.
Isabelle
Graw's The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium. By Lauren Palmer.
The Brooklyn Rail , September 4, 2018.
Rachel Harrison, Alexander the Great, 2007
Art
historian and critic Isabelle Graw’s loquacious book The Love of Painting: Genealogy
of a Success Medium — a rumination on the long history of painting and its
significance in the contemporary art world — is easy to esteem but tough to
love. Passionate ardor requires none of the elaborate rationalizations that
take place between these covers. If you need to be convinced to love something
the author calls a “meta-medium” through an avalanche of appeals to
art-historical tradition and critical opinion, then that ain’t amour.
That
said, by mingling the surface heft and vibrant shimmer that is contemporary
painting, this corpulent German-American-French-centric paperback effectively
blurs the lines between the artist-subject and the sensual painted-object.
The book
is thematically organized into six chapters that offer lively evaluations of
various painters’ practices; Graw’s thoughts on Frank Stella’s early black
paintings and Joan Mitchell’s general struggles are topnotch. Other essays
offer valuable insight into the work of Édouard Manet, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar
Polke, Rachel Harrison, Martin Kippenberger, Avery Singer, Marcel Broodthaers,
Jana Euler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Isa Genzken.
These
polished reflections are interspersed with significantly shallower
conversations between Graw and her contemporary artist “friends,” including
Wade Guyton, Jutta Koether, Charline von Heyl, Merlin Carpenter, and Alex
Israel. Through these conversations, Graw tries to refute claims of
contemporary paintings’ mannerist zombie stature. A co-founder of both Texte
zur Kunst and the Institute of Art Criticism based in Frankfurt, Graw seems to
view these friends of hers as the reason why painting now has meta-level
relevance within the sphere of contemporary art — because their work exhibits
“unspecific-specific” attributes of “quasi-people” (don’t ask) while being a
“comeback” commodity exchange chip always popular with the auction houses.
There is
no index (which annoys), but each chapter is generously illustrated in color,
which helped me follow along with gabby Graw as she traced the material,
art-historical, and sociological reasons for the “specific status” of painting
within the capitalist system. She posits that the artist’s individual human
touch is part of what elevates painting to this “special status,” but she fails
to adequately demonstrate this: intimate touch and bodily presence usually
plays an even more significant role in most performance art, drawing, and
ceramics. But it’s cool that Graw divines haptic touches even in mechanical
artistic processes — for example, in the scratches and dust on Guyton’s inkjet
print paintings.
If Graw
was entirely sincere about her love of painting (which she is not: her true
feeling, she eventually confesses, is “love-hate”), she might have skipped the
formalist questions and spent more time investigating sex, love and gender in
the history of the genre, where political content merges with form and
materiality in complimentary communion. Rather, what we hold in our hands is an
aggressively nerdy book inspired by paintings’ brush with death.
Since
the 1960s, prissy painting has wrestled with its mortality. Suddenly, though,
it feels more alive than ever. Following Douglas Crimp’s essay The End of
Painting and Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings series (1953-67), supposedly the
last paintings that anyone can paint, Graw makes frenemies with this demise by
placing it within the post-medium condition of Rosalind Krauss and the
expanded, “transitive” understandings of painting proposed by David Joselit.
For some reason, she failed to mention Nicolas Bourriaud, Peter Weibel and
Félix Guattari’s use of the “post-medium” term. Those additions, and a
consideration of the post-media condition, could have considerably enriched her
institutional critique.
Thought-provoking
assessments of painting’s death (or near-death) aside, Graw maintains that “in
recent years, painting, after losing its dominant position, has received much
more attention in critical writing and theory, and contemporary painting
exhibitions have been extremely popular, bolstering an increased interest in
the art form.” Fair enough, but she might have raised the question of whether
such popularity places painting on a dangerous path to derivative conformity.
After
citing Marcel Duchamp’s reframing of his paintings as symbol-discourse, Graw
offers a fascinating breakdown of her concept of painterly “vitalistic
fantasies,” suggesting that a painter’s personality manifests in their work,
which is what lends a painting a particular panache, and allows viewers’
perceptions to transform these flat objects into “quasi subjects” saturated
with their creators’ lives. This enchanting proposition is very interesting to
me as an artist who amalgamates artificial life with painting, particularly
when Graw insists upon paintings’ “production of aliveness.” This jubilant,
vitalistic view of painting might also relate to viewers’ engagements with the
phantasmagorical aspects of painting — thus serving as another key counterpoint
to claims that painting is irrelevant within our electronic wonder world.
How
Painting Survives in the Digital Era. By Joseph Nechvatal. Hyperallergic , March
18, 2019.
A
well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a
founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of
Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of
Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an
eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary
moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify
themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social,
economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since
then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the
primacy of the medium.
Graw’s
term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure
was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated
with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes
suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a
finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t
actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion
that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime
of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are
not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is
irrelevant to this concept.
One
would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the
Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that
projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist
Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings
such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the
Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the
author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it
painted itself.
Graw
stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is
painting?”[1] For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art
that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes
boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey
to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920).
Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work,
Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth
of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined
fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it
on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to
be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it
say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the
artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find
an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke
(1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he
did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s
quest for information.”[2]
Graw
cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves
Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans,
Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not
incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic
definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t
commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of
the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture
on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of
this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When
exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in
the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the
norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious
iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in
them, or not.
Graw
discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and
his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is
achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of
Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can
be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its
creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s
material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a
difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a
performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a
painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since
painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after?
I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the
lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.
Graw
reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which
doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must
have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce
cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s
words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an
author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of
photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and
descriptive—seriously?
Graw
decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have
subjectlike power—a power that she
repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol
and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant.
Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to
mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting
over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her
argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on
aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s
familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky
ground.
The
American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went
on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature
style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from
their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s
no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist
uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags
paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she
apply the same logic to photographers?
A
painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and
economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She
explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the
Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed
to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide
(including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will
be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary
example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which
satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting.
(Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too
well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a
fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a
fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was
the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.
The
Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several
audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of
digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw
summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the
Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how,
and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they
integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet
the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a
similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if
not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of
the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection
between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people
to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse:
painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a
good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
[1] Her
exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion
of painting?”
[2]
Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.
Much
Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting. By Christopher Howard. In Terms of , June 27, 2015.
The
Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of
Liveliness
Reporting a lecture
on June 4, 2015. Jewish Museum, Scheuer Auditorium, New York
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