As the 1970s gave way to the '80s, the slogan "return to painting" was as often heard in the discussion around contemporary art as the counter-mantra, the "death of painting." In the last issue of Artforum, a group comprising mostly critics and art historians opened our two-part examination of painting in the '80s and beyond with a look back at the death-of-painting debate that raged at the beginning of the decade. For this month's pendant discussion introduced by ROBERT STORR, we assembled a second panel, largely made up of painters and curators--and asked them to tell us where painting has taken us in the last two decades, and to limn the multifarious pressures and impulses that motivate the practice today.
We do not want for paintings. There are plenty out there to choose from and argue over. Nor do we want for first-rate painters. There are enough to make us wonder why the words "painting is dead" fall so easily from the lips of those who more or less openly acknowledge the importance of--or secretly harbor a liking for--artists as different as Robert Ryman and Gerhard Richter, Leon Golub and Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Vija Celmins, Lucian Freud and Jasper Johns. And that is only to name a few of the still active-- and still debated--members of the generation that got started between the early 1950s and early 1960s. Add ten years and the list encompasses an even larger cohort that remains hard at work. Twenty years ago, of course, obituaries were regularly being written for the medium by neo-avant-garde theorists, some of whom are now furiously backpedaling with the hope that no one will recall how their "historically mandated" predictions failed to come true.
Still, beating the reaper is not the same thing as feeling on top of the world. For all its signs of life--good, "bad," and banal--painting is hardly the king of the hill it was for most of the twentieth century. Nor is it ever likely to be so again, though competitive "new" forms of artmaking aren't quite so sure of their hegemonic claims as they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, before they began to feel the drag of their own accumulating histories.
In fact, painting is in a muddle. Even as art schools field fresh contenders, galleries restock, and collectors make room on walls still crowded with large-format photographs, text panels, and screens of various kinds, painters struggle to map the incompletely redrawn and highly congested territory they currently occupy. The words haven't come easy. No handy monikers dominate conversation as "neoexpressionism" and "neo-geo" once did. ("Post-recent art" is still my favorite coinage of the label-fatigued last decade of the last century.) And compared with their counterparts in the Conceptual, installational, and technological scenes, painters seem to lack a "discourse," which--though it may reflect a certain realistic gun-shyness on the part of artists who too vividly remember the preposterous claims of restoration painting in the '80s, and the dogmas of criticism-driven painting in the '60s--puts their discipline at a disadvantage in the "marketplace of ideas." (And the constituent elements of that last term s hould be read with all their built-in discomfort, especially by those who think they're in a quadrangle when they're in Times Square.)
Except in monographic articles that lead outward from their immediate subject, critics on the whole haven't fared much better in characterizing what's going on. When the task has been assumed by curators, the results have hardly dissipated the confusion. Starting in 1999 with "Examining Pictures" at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and "Trouble Spot Painting" at the NICC and MUKHA in Antwerp, followed by "Painting at the Edge of the World" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2001), "Cher Peintre" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2002), and "Painting on the Move" at the Kunstmuseum, Kunsthalle, and Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Basel (2002), a number of exhibitions have attempted to straighten things up; but in various degrees they turned out to be lively exercises in showing how big and oddly configured the house of painting was, rather than putting that house in order. For the present, that often seems the best anyone can hope for. But as the following dialogue, convened as a pendant to la st month's roundtable addressing the "death of painting" debate in the '80s, suggests, there is plenty to do just keeping track of the twists and turns of all the strands of painting emanating from the pluralist post-'80s era.
From within painting's chambered quarters one can hear rumblings and murmurings down the hall; voices over the transom; arguments on the fire escapes; sighs and groans behind the walls--and sometimes the noises of pleasure. We can also assume that the silence that otherwise prevails--and the quiet that interrupts the contributions of some of the participants to this online symposium--is the sound of painters in the studio going about their generally solitary business. This roundtable may be less like an electronic panel discussion and closer to eavesdropping on a series of private exchanges in a once grand but still livable hotel. Listen in.
--ROBERT STORR
TIM GRIFFIN: It might seem strange to ask a group made up mostly of painters to consider the idea of "the death of painting," which posited a historical position on the medium, but now also has a history behind it. The compelling related question would pertain to the way in which painting moved beyond or outside of this particular issue. Has there been a shadow or ghost of it in practices? Or did it in fact never really register among the painters you found most interesting? What were some of your initial thoughts when you came across the idea, in general and in terms of your own work? What do you find the most productive modes to bypass or enfold the issue?
JONATHAN LASKER: My earliest encounters with the critique of painting occurred at CalArts in the mid-'70s. The students were primarily poststudio artists, and the dominant faculty members were Conceptual artists like John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Michael Asher. It was a very antagonistic environment, but it was a very good place to begin to rationalize why I was painting. For me, the issue was whether one could still make a new painting. The artists to beat were the Minimalist painters, who, as far as I was concerned, had completed Ad Reinhardt's project of attempting to make the last possible painting through reductive means. The challenge as I saw it: How do you bring back metaphor and the constituent elements of picture-making into the practice of painting?
LISA YUSKAVAGE: Fortunately, the education that I got in the '80s was with formalists of various stripes: Stephen Greene, Margo Margolis, William Bailey, Andrew Forge, Jake Berthot, and Mel Bochner. None of them ever brought up the death of anything. By the time I encountered the "death of painting," I was already a formed artist living in New York.
CARROLL DUNHAM: Douglas Crimp's ideas on the death of painting helped clarify the discussion of some very interesting work made in the early '80s, but none of it was painting. Looking back, I think his hypothesis about painting seems much less necessary to understanding …
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