The Painting Factory: A Roundtable Discussion
Johanna Burton
Jeffrey Deitch
James Meyer
Scott Rothkopf
- JD:
- “The Painting Factory” focuses on American and US-based artists who have been innovators in abstract painting and who have impressive, well-thought-out bodies of work. While there are of course differences among them, they have similar conceptual and aesthetic strategies, which I would like to discuss. There is a fascination with industrial techniques and printing technology; there is a critical engagement with popular culture; there is a direct physical embrace of painting, but there is also a sense of mediation. It is interesting that painting with this tough, Pop, minimalist, factory-like aesthetic looks so relevant right now and is inspiring so many emerging painters. There are now so many artists following this trend, making monochromes and silver paintings and silk-screen paintings, that it has almost become an academy. This groundswell is hopefully an indication that something strong is happening in painting right now.
- JM:
- When I look at the artists in this exhibition, it seems to me that this show is about process, about the making of painting. And that seems to me entirely consistent with Minimalist painting, if by Minimalism you mean Robert Ryman. There are various Minimalist painters, but Ryman’s work is Exhibit A for painterly process: The task of painting is what the painting is about. It seems to me this show draws on this question of painting as process.
- JD:
- Robert Ryman is almost as much the foundation of this exhibition as Andy Warhol is. His use of industrial materials to create new structures of painting has been hugely influential.
- JM:
- Yet the phenomenology of making here is distinct from the phenomenology of making in the ’60s practice, beginning with Frank Stella and the absolute reduction of process achieved in the “Black Paintings.” We all know how Stella’s works were made—the stripes, the thickness of the structure. Everything is revealed. With Ryman it becomes more complicated, but you can still always pretty much tell from a Ryman how it was made. Those processes were relatively legible and straightforward. Whereas it seems painterly processes today are more complex and harder for a viewer to grasp.
- When I read criticism about these works, I am struck by how much attention is paid to technique—all the processes that must be described in such detail! The criticism on this painting is hyper-formalist. Critics pay enormous attention to how the works were made. The techniques are often quite elaborate and hard to talk about and difficult for the viewer to discern. I’m not talking merely about digitization or mediation—that’s just the beginning. Each artist has a very articulated and specific process. And often several different processes.
- SR:
- One reason for this may be the idea of process taking care of something that an artist wouldn’t know how to take care of on his or her own, something he or she might otherwise feel uncomfortable or embarrassed addressing. Let’s say you’re a young artist who grew up thinking about ’80s artists like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, and you have some interest in Donald Judd, and you don’t really know how to make anything, and you’re skeptical about your ability to compose a picture the way that de Kooning or even Amy Sillman does—well, one way of sidestepping your self-consciousness about creating some kind of incident on the surface might be to come up with a process that does this for you. Such as Wade Guyton’s ink-jet-printed paintings, where he doesn’t have to decide where to put the striations or the drips, because the process takes care of that for him. Or consider the amount of chance that’s involved in Seth Price’s misuse of vacuum forms or in Tauba Auerbach’s process. She’ll fold up a canvas and spray paint on it without knowing how it will wind up. Even Glenn Ligon—who began his career making compositional paintings in the tradition of de Kooning—is now making silk-screen paintings, where what goes wrong with the printing is responsible for all of the pictorial interest. Of course, he makes a lot of choices in determining the process, but then it ultimately absolves him of having to think about where this or that mark will go.
- These artists’ insistence on serial ways of working is another way of distancing the hand and questioning their own originality. This has to do, of course, with the reproducible techniques that they are using, whether it’s silk screen or digital printing, or instruction-based procedures, as in Rudolf Stingel’s early work.
- JD:
- But the artists in this show are all people who are really immersed in the craft of painting. Despite the title, none of these artists simply just orders works to be fabricated.
- JB:
- Would it matter if they did?
- JD:
- Yes—well, this is something interesting to talk about.
- JB:
- I just find myself a little nervous about the insistence on the hand in any artistic practice, because I think there’s a roundabout conservatism that sometimes creeps into what seem “liberating” readings of art. I noticed this subtle conservatism when I was working on Sherrie Levine’s exhibition at the Whitney, where one of the questions posed by critics concerned which things she “actually” made. For me, and with Levine in particular, that’s somewhat beside the point. It doesn’t mean she’s any less invested in the object if she doesn’t produce it, lay the paint herself. But this question—and even the subject of studio process—often gets smuggled in nevertheless, I think, as a way of avoiding the ideas put forward by conceptual painting. It can feel a little reactionary to me, this insistence on the studio practice. Especially if we’re being serious about following a Warholian tradition, it’s something to press back on.
- JD:
- Well, that’s one of the ironies. Because these artists all have engaged studio practices. All of these paintings reflect that personal involvement.
GLENN LIGON, Figure #45, 2010
Acrylic, silk screen, and coal dust on canvas
60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
Collection of Simons Family, New York
- JB:
- And by personal involvement, you mean the body of an artist.
- JD:
- Yes, even if their hand doesn’t touch the surface in a conventional way. Only a few of the artists in the show actually use a brush.
Josh Smith does, and maybe Kerstin Brätsch. Most of them use silk screens, electric sanders, industrial sprayers. Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton use computer printers and develop imagery on the computer screen, but the work is so physical. You feel the physicality. You feel the artist’s body in that work, which is really fascinating, how they are able, even with these layers of mediation, to continue that. There is a body gesture in that work. - JM:
- The Warholian impulse encodes an ambiguity from the beginning with regard to process. The myth is that Warhol is not making the works, and the Factory is a factory. In truth, Warhol was highly engaged with every aspect of his practice. There is a great deal of Andy Warhol in Warhol’s works.
- I looked up the word factory. It suggests “a place where things are made.” But factor comes from the Latin factore—the doer, the maker. So the maker is always at the center of a practice, in one way or another; even if the hand isn’t always making, the maker is there. It seems to me that the works in your show explore that tension between the factory idea of deskilling (the painting without a painter, as you say), and the fact that of course there’s a painter painting whose hand may not necessarily be directly involved.
- JB:
- I do think all these artists overcompensate, in a productive way, for what would seem to be a chance process. I’d argue that in the end, they aren’t chance processes at all, because they get rerouted so many times, choreographed even. If you are around some of these artists in their studios, you quickly see that a finished work isn’t just about what something looks like after it’s been run through a printer ten times.
- But there’s still a remarkable anxiety among critics around how to read such material processes; they mention them but are reluctant to offer any kind of interpretation, or even just an interpretive gambit. I’ve never seen anyone spend the time that actually should be spent narrativizing how Amy Sillman lays down thirty-seven, or forty-five, or fifty-seven layers, which she does. I mean, talk about layers on a canvas—she goes back over and over and over. She actually has a slide show in which she shows the evolution of a single painting, and at the end, you would have simply no idea what those final visible-to-the-eye layers are built out of and upon. It’s Balzacian in its Masterpiece-like belief in the mode of painting and erasure; the Expressionists took inspiration from the same book, but for Sillman, there’s a singular privileging of that process, and an operation of wrangling representation (and even abstraction) away from the abyss of pure obliteration.
- JM:
- There’s a sense of familiarity when looking at a work like Sillman’s. We’ve all seen the different photos of the painting of de Kooning’s Woman I.
- JB:
- Right. So I almost feel like we go full circle, then, to an idea about what is it that we’re narrativizing when we’re talking about processes that aren’t gestural? We should remember, as a kind of counterpoint, that Warhol actually doesn’t get discussed much in terms of process, either—or at least not as often as one might expect. There isn’t a step-by-step of how some of these pieces are made.
- JM:
- It’s reduced to silk screen and painting. And impress and index, and repetition. That’s it.
- JB:
- So I think this new attention to process among critics is in part about processes changing, and also in part about reception and criticism changing.
- JD:
- How have these processes changed?
- JM:
- In all of this work the mediated image—Warhol’s discovery—has been recoded through the digital. Yet, significantly, digitalization does not mean “dematerialization.” These artists have absorbed the Baudrillardian arguments of the ’80s (hyperspace, virtualization, etc.). But their work is insistently material. And in many instances, tactile: Walker’s chocolate refuses to let us imagine these paintings are anything but material things, that they will eventually decay.
- SR:
- They’re material, but they reflect our mediated reality. How many studio visits now begin in front of a computer screen, either with a Google search or artists showing me pictures of their works that have already been digitized? I think a lot of these younger artists accept that everything is already mediated. What many artists and critics were saying twenty-five years ago about mediation is simply a given today, and I imagine that many of the objects in this show will reflect that.
- JM:
- But they also seek a material, phenomenological outcome. The artwork must become something physical. It must be seen as a painting on canvas. And that is the way mediation is being expressed.
- SR:
- Exactly. It’s a way of framing. These artists accept certain ideas coming out of the history of Pictures. They accept that our image culture isn’t necessarily original, and they use appropriative gestures as a kind of baseline, not as a major statement. They constantly navigate their way through a world of images that live in different places: digitally, on the computer; in printed forms like magazines; on TV or in film; and as artworks. This was to a certain extent true of the Pictures generation, but the Internet and jpegs have made everything so much more accessible and present, so much more open to sampling and stealing and reworking.
- Take Walker, for example. It always confused me that when he set out to make a work with Michael Jackson’s mug shot, he didn’t download the picture. He went to the New York Public Library’s image collection and borrowed what was probably one of the most widely disseminated images in the history of the Internet. Then he put the clipping on his scanner, scanned it, did something with the image on the computer screen, and then did something else with it in printed form. It’s a very complicated process that goes from an object in the world to something in the digital ether and then back into the world through the painting factory, as Jeffrey would call it.
- He’s negotiating all these different sites, but it’s not technophilic, in the sense of tricksy artists who use Photoshop to make things look digital. Instead, it’s a very intuitive relationship to the materials and computers that we encounter in our lives. The way that Walker’s images pass from the printed media to the computer screen and back into painting make him a kind of poet of these transpositions, at a time when we’re attached both to print and to our laptops. We live in a moment of a hybrid transition between iPads and books and mp3s. And these painting objects, whatever you would call them, speak to that, or frame it—not in an illustrative way, but by actually embodying these translations.
- JM:
- I’ve heard an argument made that this work is not sufficiently advanced or “radical” because it doesn’t go all the way and just become computer art or digital art. That it’s a kind of nostalgic longing for painting, or just a commodity, a “sellout” of the digital’s democratizing capacity—all the arguments that could be made against the painted object. I’ve heard it said that this work is actually quite conservative. But I like your point that we do not live totally virtual lives. We exist in a state of betweenness between two kinds of experience—the digital and the phenomenological. We are doomed to spend more and more of our lives online. And we have bodies. It’s not settled. What you’re saying about Walker’s work and the transpositions that it makes—I think it’s true of all of the artists in this show.
KELLEY WALKER, Untitled, 2011
Pantone 403U and four-color process silk screen with acrylic ink on MDF in anodized aluminum frame
Two panels, framed: 16 1/8 x 16 1/8 x 1 in. (41 x 41 x 2.5 cm), 16 1/8 x 16 1/8 x 7/8 in. (41 x 41 x 2.2 cm); overall dimensions variable
Private collection, Marseille
- SR:
- At the same time, these are very different artists in terms of how they think about making art. Another interesting person in this conversation is Josh Smith, because he’s not conflicted or overly self-conscious about more traditional approaches to picture making. He has this kind of gusto and belief in inventing or composing a painting that an artist like Stingel or Auerbach really questions. But at the same time, there’s this constant self-repetition or replication, almost a bulimia in relation to his own work—he scans it, collages printouts back into his paintings, then paints on top of them again and again. This relates to a lot of the other artists that we’re speaking about in terms of their interest in printing, whether it’s digital or silk screening, but the very basis of how the image is created compositionally is fundamentally different from a strategy like the grid or the monochrome.
- JM:
- There are printed images and gestural marks.
- JB:
- And he risks being expressive.
- SR:
- There are a number of artists in this exhibition who, like Smith, are engaged with a more compositional tradition. Take Mark Bradford, or Julie Mehretu, or Sterling Ruby. Although they at times work in series or in ways that minimize an expressive “hand,” their compositional strategies are much more relational and they approach each picture one by one. In Ruby’s work, there’s a balancing of different rectangles of various sizes, colors, and proportions. In Bradford’s and Mehretu’s, there are plays with depth and color relationships across the surface. I don’t see this as a value judgment, but I do think it’s a fundamental distinction between the ways in which Warhol, Stingel, Ligon, Guyton, and often Christopher Wool variously try to avoid composing a picture.
- JB:
- This makes me think of a shift that I’ve been curious about for a while: the move from the idea of “expression,” relative to a gesture, to something more about the exteriorization of psychology in imagery. In fact, I think this psychological imperative is actually inherent to almost everybody’s practice that we’ve talked about, if in very different ways. I think back to a show of Ligon’s roughly ten years ago, titled “Going There,” which was largely addressing his therapy sessions: There was an implication that his painting, and his ongoing investigations of subjectivity, desire, and oppression, which are realized in ostensibly formalist ways, can actually be usefully connected to therapeutic or affective models. I gave that exhibition a really awful review, as I recall, even though I thought he was making an important observation. Regardless, now I look back and I think he was pointing to something very interesting not only about his work but also about that of a number of other artists working now, even if the impulse usually doesn’t take such overt form. In fact, such rawness and pathos is something that Thomas Crow writes about as being everywhere in Warhol’s work, too, but Crow is one of the few critics to note its presence there.
- SR:
- It’s funny, Ligon has actually talked about those paintings based on children’s coloring books as though he’d borrowed someone else’s unconscious. He would make a silk screen of a coloring-book page, in this kind of Warholian or ’80s-appropriative way, but he could never imagine actually coloring it in, which was his idea when the project started. He had an incapacity to make that kind of freehand mark on the surface: What color would he choose? Where would the paint go? How would he handle it? So he ended up appropriating those gestures—that psychology, even—from the children he did a workshop with, just as he appropriates the form of the monochrome or lets mechanical failure create surface incident in other cases.
- JB:
- David Joselit has been making some interesting arguments about how compositions can be pressured from the outside in terms of affect. His argument is that paintings themselves can be seen to have a kind of will, agency, and drive, or perhaps more accurately, as becoming nodal points in relational networks. When you look at a Stingel painting, for instance, what does it mean that you see your own reflection? There is a direct imperative to relationality. I also think it’s interesting to consider how such an affective register bridges the individual and the social in a particular way.
- JD:
- Do you see an evolution in abstraction from Warhol to Wool and Stingel to the younger artists in the exhibition, such as Auerbach and Brätsch and Röder?
MARK BRADFORD, A Thousand Words, 2011
Mixed media collage on canvas
104 x 144 in. (264.2 x 365.8 cm)
Collection of Susan and David Gersh, Los Angeles
JOSH SMITH, Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
120 x 96 in. (304.8 x 243.8 cm)
The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT
Photo: Farzad Owrang
- JB:
- The spread of ages in this exhibition is good, but it makes speaking about genealogy very complicated when it comes to putting, say, Stingel and DAS INSTITUT together. I think it ends up being an important problem as to how you even define abstraction. This has come up in essays by Frederic Jameson, for instance, in which he addresses the abstraction inherent in postindustrial economies steeped in speculation and derivatives; even simple objects bespeak vast networks that generate value. Similarly, in art, abstraction is no longer just a formal consideration—it also has to do with modes of knowledge production and acquisition, among other things. The idea of abstraction doesn’t just relate to a monochrome; it also relates to a perfectly readable image now. You can argue that there are abstract painters whose images are figural or figurative.
- SR:
- Well, Urs Fischer’s “dust” pictures sometimes feel both representational and abstract. On the one hand, they often suggest random blobs, in an all-over abstract pattern, but then there are little details in the silk-screening that make you realize you’re looking at an image of something in the world.
- JD:
- And one can read Auerbach’s Fold paintings as representational, as a kind of trompe l’oeil.
- JB:
- Well, isn’t an abstract painting a representation of abstraction now?
- JM:
- It has been since Lichtenstein and Richter.
- SR:
- And especially today in the prevalence of the “monochrome” that Jeffrey mentioned in the beginning. It’s interesting to me that this form—whatever it means and as contested as it may be—has such recalcitrance. It just doesn’t die, as many observers long presumed it would. Take Ligon, for example. After fifteen years of bringing text into his work, he ended up at the black monochrome. And this exhibition will probably include a number of monochrome-ish paintings—by Price, Auerbach, Fischer, Stingel, or Wool.
- JD:
- Johanna, you’ve given a queer or feminist reading of the work of some of these artists. That’s an interesting contrast with the idea that Abstract Expressionism reflected a kind of machismo. Is there something fundamentally different in this body of work? Because it’s actually a diverse group of artists—several of the artists in the show are gay. Is this a different kind of abstraction, connected to feminist and queer issues?
- JB:
- I’m not sure that all of the artists would agree with my readings, but to my mind, they’re following in the legacy of asking what it means to appropriate an image and, moreover, to veil and unveil something simultaneously. Some of these artists bring inflections of feminist or queer histories and theories into play in a way that, on the one hand, does not shy away from making works that claim to be primary and essential, and, on the other hand, suggest that works also always act as doubles, or decoys. In a way, what I’m claiming for these artists is pure ’80s poststructuralism. They might repeat a gesture that has a kind of hegemonic force in its typical usage; but by being a woman or a queer artist who’s doing it, they put forward the object so that it is necessarily redoubled. The artist allows for that object to circulate differently, to accrue different kinds of meanings, and to be thought of relative to different subject positions. To give a relatively straightforward example: When Mary Heilmann makes an abstract painting, suddenly the pink resonates differently; it’s a grid, but it looks like a domestic item, a heating grate or a tie rack. She gets to do both those things. She gets to have the pleasure of participating in a conversation she’s interested in—that of painterly abstraction—without fully assuming the mantle that I think is expected.
- SR:
- I’m interested in this idea of the doubling, or the serial, or decoy as being a queer or feminist gesture.
- JB:
- Well, Brätsch is a good example, maybe. She comes out of a German context that was seen primarily in terms of a kind of macho, gestural mode of mark making, and she was really interested in messing with the contours of what she saw—using precisely that style in order to subvert it, sending it up even while indulging in it, rendering it hyperbolic, even embarrassing. I’m not sure that Brätsch’s work is overtly feminist, but I do think it’s fair to say that she thinks about gender. Similarly, for me, Guyton and Walker and Ligon are utilizing something that’s immediately recognizable within a certain kind of vernacular—i.e., abstract painting—and yet they’re redeploying it. In this regard, perhaps the idea of seriality is slightly different from doubling. I guess I’m wanting to say that the thing has its referential stakes, and then it slightly hovers over itself, moving away from the kind of pureness of any referential status.
- JD:
- James, can I ask you for a more historical perspective, because you’ve thought so much about Minimalism and so on. Does the younger generation in the show represent a different formal or conceptual structure that is possible only because of this more open orientation?
DAS INSTITUT, Blocked Radiants (detail), 2011
Mixed-media installation
Installation view, “ILLUMInations,” Italian Pavilion, Venice, 2011. From the 54th Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York
URS FISCHER, Untitled, 2007
Aluminum panel, transparent primer, vinyl paint, pigments, silicone, screws
10 8 x 138 1/8 in. (274 x 350.8 cm)
Private collection
© Urs Fischer
- JM:
- Artists have inscribed marks of gender, sexuality, and race in abstraction since the ’60s. Those connections have been made, those possibilities explored. Which isn’t to say there isn’t much more to be done.
- SR:
- I agree. There are certainly questions of race and subjectivity that Ligon explores in his monochromes of the early ’90s, or even Byron Kim. And then there are figures like David Hammons, whose basketball drawings open onto a huge range of issues pertaining to different communities but have an abstract surface quality that might not feel out of place in a show like this. Maybe it’s not enough to “queer” or “gender” the monochrome today. Or, as James suggests, it’s now a given strategy. It’s not that I’m uninterested in questions of gender and sexuality, but this notion of self-consciously imbuing certain abstract forms or gestures with other kinds of non-formal “content” has been explored for a long time.
- JB:
- But what you’re saying makes it sound like, on the one hand, these are no longer urgent issues, and on the other hand, that they’ve become so stylized as to be just another aspect of formal inquiry. Which would worry me, I have to say. I’m not saying that the urgency is the same; it’s just changed. But I agree that race, gender, or even subject positions more generally are often taken as a given. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, though. It seems actually to neuter the work or to shrink the context for its reception. I’ve been thinking a lot lately of Moira Roth’s 1977 essay “The Aesthetic of Indif-ference.” If we’re talking about Rauschenberg and Johns, for instance, homosexuality played a part in their works, their day-to-day projects, but it had to be encoded, it was only legible in precise ways, and one had to decode and consider how the kind of formal obfuscations operated also as confessions of certain kinds, or as collective conversations, somewhat under cover. I’m not saying that’s all that was there, or that there’s even a one-to-one interpretation in any given work—indeed, the last thing I’d want to do is reduce work to biography. But the mode of production in both
artists’ work certainly courts scrambles of meaning that one
might define as “queer” in a number of ways. So now if we assume these are no longer urgent questions and that sexuality outside the norm is simply legible to culture at large, it’s the same as saying we’re post-black or post-feminist. We are neither of those things, as far as I’m concerned, nor are they necessarily aspirations to
be held up. - SR:
- It may also just be a methodological question: When I think about most of the artists’ work in this show, questions of queer or gender identity are not at the forefront of my mind or tools that I use to think about what they are doing, whereas for you they are. I’ve explored this in my work on Ligon, but in all the many thousands of words I’ve written about Guyton, for example, I’ve never used the words gay or queer, and you have.
- JB:
- That’s an interesting question—where content is or isn’t in this work.
- JM:
- Jeffrey, you have a claim about subject matter in your introduction: You feel this work is opening out to contemporary issues. But then Johanna asks: What is the content here? How do we talk about it?
- I have a question about the place of the ’80s painters in this genealogy of abstraction. Both Johanna and Scott have a scholarly interest in the ’80s—whether it’s the queer and feminist legacies of that era or the role of mediation, of “appropriation,” of that era and its current reverberation. Jeffrey, you have a strong relationship to the ’80s too—as a participant. Yet that decade is missing from the genealogy of work in your show.
- SR:
- There’s Wool and Stingel.
- JM:
- But the story Jeffrey tells in his catalogue introduction is a kind of anti-Greenbergian, anti-formalist narrative; you talk about Jasper Johns and Pollock and Warhol as this canonical triumvirate, and add on Minimalism and post-Minimalism on top of that. You trace the new painting back to these mid-century models: The ’80s are all but absent.
- JD:
- Painting in the ’80s is for me the foundation of the work in this exhibition: “The Painting Factory” examines how a younger group of painters has created a new reading of the painting innovations of that decade. But Warhol’s abstraction and the response to it from Wool and Stingel are much more relevant to the current dialogue than neo-expressionism or the Transavanguardia.
- SR:
- Wool is obviously a huge person in this lineage, but a lot of the most well-known ’80s painters don’t necessarily fit the premise of this exhibition.
- JB:
- The ’80s provide a reference for the artists in this show, but it’s rarely the painters of the ’80s that come to mind.
- JM:
- It would be Sherrie Levine—
- SR:
- Or Richard Prince, or artists from Europe in the ’80s, like Rosemarie Trockel. But when I speak with the younger artists in the show, they’re not talking so much about Basquiat and Julian Schnabel or even the neo-geo artists; 90 percent of the art that we discuss isn’t even painting. Maybe it’s André Cadere or Dan Flavin or Isa Genzken or Michael Asher. This doesn’t mean that the objects in this show aren’t part of a painting tradition, but it’s important to acknowledge other genealogies—be they Conceptual art, installation, or whatever—which aren’t necessarily medium-specific but have had a profound impact on these so-called painters.
- JB:
- It’s interesting to think about this question of genealogy, and timing. For me, the interest in these artists was about a group of people who moved to New York at the same time, and with a particular history in mind about what this city could provide. We all showed up determined to make a community of people with a kind of discursive center. And so the work felt really urgent to me when I first started being a part of the conversation, because it felt like we all got here too late. And so we had to start, in a funny way, with the black, the X-ing out. How do you retrieve a history that you came for, but that’s gone?
- JD:
- Fascinating.
- JB:
- And I think we all wanted to be here so much, but we carried our little bags with our books from the ’70s—
- SR:
- Or the ’80s—your Hal Foster readers.
- JB:
- And I do think that something is at risk of being lost in the reception of our peers’ works, as often happens when people become iconic quickly. The community aspect isn’t as legible, because now New York’s a different place. Or when it is legible, it’s levied as a critique—like, “Oh, it’s a clique,” instead of, actually, “It was a conversation.” And that’s a shift culturally. I think you know, James, very well about the importance of coming to a place that meant something. Or that you wanted to mean something.
- JM:
- For me, it was ACT UP and AIDS activism—that was my moment.
- JB:
- I regarded the work of my generation, as it was happening around me, to be crushingly relevant, with a through line being created in terms of feminist and queer questions around subjectivity, and around looking more generally. Guyton’s black paintings seemed to mean, “I have competency in art history. I understand the conceptual framework.” For a while, I think, until we became more comfortable with those gestures, they felt really fragile and dumb, but in the sense of being existentially at sea, searching.
- SR:
- Like, “Oh, my God, what am I doing? I’ve never made a painting in my life, and now I’ve ended up in the field of the monochrome?”
It was so absurd. I remember the first time seeing those paintings at Guyton’s studio and him looking at me like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” - JB:
- Right. And there was an earnestness about the move; it wasn’t in any way cynical. It felt desperate, actually, in a good way. And for me, the promise of those black paintings is how mad they make people. Although now there’s a little bit of a tricky situation as they’ve been absorbed by the market in certain ways, and that is a different context. So then the arguments become different.
- The return to painting is interesting in this regard. Right now a few different camps are trying to argue for a return to painting, but with very, very different motivating factors. Painting has so often been deemed the most appropriate kind of market-driven medium; but now because of, or despite that, there’s a way in which you can inhabit a different space. For example, Joselit argues hard for painting as holding a kind of critical potential. He argues painting as a kind of performative object, rather than an object in and of itself. I don’t know that all of the artists he discusses would necessarily think about their work that way. But it’s helpful to think about painting not as a medium but as a function, which somebody like Peter Halley was already considering in the ’80s.
- With some recent vested interest in the younger painters we’re discussing, both when it comes to market and the potential meaning of painting, I feel like there’s been the not unexpected switch in context as they’ve been pulled from periphery to center. And so I have my own questions about how they continue to operate or whether they will account for their new positions and thus change course somewhat. James, in your book on Minimalism you made this really wonderful argument about Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and how the idea of novelty is a thread in various of his writings. I wondered if some of the questions that we have around the translation of the object from the virtual and the conceptual into the material and the gestural could be framed in terms of the high and low debates that we no longer seem to have—the notion of high art as kitsch. It’s a big conversation, but it’s one that I’m sure you’ve thought about in relation to these things. I find myself wondering: Are these works kitschy because of rather than despite their status as high art objects? Is kitsch even a translatable concept anymore? If so, it would seem to define certain aspects of elite culture in a way not possible previously.
- SR:
- Kitsch monochromes?
RUDOLF STINGEL, Untitled, 2010
Oil and enamel on canvas
130 x 185 in. (330.2 x 469.9 cm)
Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York
Photo: Rob McKeever
WADE GUYTON, Untitled, 2007
Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen
84 x 69 in. (213.4 x 175.3 cm)
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo: Lamay Photo
- JB:
- I mean, it used to be the end of the beginning when you saw a black monochrome. It was a position. It was a challenge. What is it now? If you can have fifteen of them hanging side by side, what is it?
- JM:
- We’re in a very different historical situation from the ’60s, obviously, when Greenberg was looking at Minimalism and Pop, and rethinking his 1939 argument on avant-garde and kitsch. And the question of the middlebrow—a word he gets from Van Wyck Brooks and Virginia Woolf—was a big issue for him. He argues that Minimalism and Pop look serious, but they’re not really; they suggest a dumbing down of high art forms, rendering them consumable for an upper-middle-class audience. In a way, the Museum of Modern Art’s “High and Low” show (1990) was the end of the high and the low. And maybe Jeff Koons is both the paragon and conclusion of high/low.
- JB:
- So are we talking about middlebrow culture when we’re talking about abstraction now? Abstraction has always been seen as a way of moving against narrative and figuration, against certain sorts of temporality, against, against, against . . .
- JM:
- Abstraction as resistance: an Adornian idea of abstraction. Benjamin Buchloh has written about what it means to make the monochrome for the second time. Once Yves Klein repeats the monochrome and, in the “Actions-Spectacles,” transforms its making into entertainment, it loses its opacity, its distance from spectacle. Thomas Crow makes an interesting comparison between the young Greenberg and Adorno. For all their differences, they believed that the modernist work of art could stand in resistance both to mass culture and to what Greenberg calls the middlebrow: to kitsch and the culture industry.
- We have had generation upon generation of monochromes since then. Yve-Alain Bois once described this compulsion to repeat the monochrome ad nauseum as a manic mourning, as a melancholia for the condition of “zero degree” that Malevich and Rodchenko achieved, or came to signify as having achieved, for painters to come. As Bois suggests, this compulsion to repeat doesn’t mean that painting is finished. His essay “Painting: The Task of Mourning” has been misread along these lines. To the contrary: Each generation finds its way back to the monochrome; each of these repetitions is historical. Every white painting is a different white painting.
- SR:
- Well, I think it is harder to explain or make an argument for why a certain kind of abstract painting has more urgency today than work that has more obvious content—in the sense of a video by Ryan Trecartin or Paul Chan, to take two random examples. We know how to see the urgency in those kinds of works more easily than we do in another monochrome in 2012. I’ve thought a lot about the kinds of abstract paintings that are in this show, that are appealing to people who have studied the critical literature that we have. It’s easier to create a discourse around these printed paintings, which are so self-conscious about their belatedness, than it is to talk critically about other kinds of abstract painters who are working in a more compositional or “freehand” mode. To talk about this or that figure-ground equivocation can only feel so urgent at this point.
I don’t know whether James’s emphasis on process is a way of importing some urgency back into abstraction, or at least saving it from being some kind of formal noodling or from descending into kitsch. How do we keep a conversation about abstraction feeling urgent and alive, and which artists prompt us to do that? - JB:
- This goes against everything I might be expected to say, but Greenberg seems really relevant to me again in this conversation—his desire to cordon off certain kinds of cultural production in order to protect aspects of society.
- JM:
- But are you arguing for a kind of Greenbergian autonomy? (I mean the later Greenberg of “Modernist Painting.”) The work of art as “art for art’s sake,” or an Adornian model of opacity suggesting a politics of refusal?
TAUBA AUERBACH, Untitled (Fold), 2010
Acrylic paint on canvas with wooden stretcher
60 x 45 x 1 3/4 in (152.4 x 114.3 x 4.44 cm)
Schorr Family Collection, New York. Courtesy of Standard (Oslo), Oslo
Photo: Vegard Kleven
STERLING RUBY, SP194, 2011
Spray paint on canvas
160 x 235 x 2 in. (406.4 x 596.9 x 5.1 cm)
- JB:
- Neither, in the sense that I think that neither is an appropriate model to describe our current situation. While I am arguing for distinction within culture, I would say that questions of subject position are more key than ever: not an object standing alone, but taken alongside the subject positions of the artist producing a monochrome, say, and the viewer looking at it. The relationship between production and reception remains, for me, very important to any work’s meaning.
- JM:
- One of the problems with thinking about Greenberg in this light is that he believed that it takes a long time for a “truly” avant-garde work (a “major” work, as he would put it) to be understood and marketed. He came up with the idea of novelty in the ’60s because the market for contemporary art started to take off then. A young artist like Frank Stella could make a fine living from selling his work. Allan Kaprow wrote “The Artist as a Man of the World,” in which he debunks the romantic myth of the starving artist, whose authenticity is correlated with the difficulty of his material circumstances. It became okay to make money. There was a shift in attitude, and for Greenberg this was a great offense because the artists he grew up with, the Abstract Expressionists, took a long time to make it. Greenberg would see many of the works in this show as “middlebrow.”
- SR:
- Because they are so assimilable instantaneously into the market?
- JM:
- Yes. His idea of delayed response stopped working during the ’60s.
- SR:
- Obviously, we all believe in those works, and the fact that they are appreciated by the market does not necessarily undermine or devalue them in my eyes, critically.
- JB:
- But there is a way in which they function differently now because they were codified for a while as critical.
- SR:
- I still think many of the artists in this exhibition keep a critical questioning alive through their skepticism toward their ability to actually make something that counts as an abstract painting. Sometimes they make “decoys,” to borrow Johanna’s term, without any paint at all. And sometimes there’s a sense that the painting is already a kind of copy of itself or of something else. Through an approach like this, a painter may say something about the moment they’re living in that isn’t illustrative and isn’t about fetishizing contemporary technologies. There’s a desire to keep making art, to remain in a certain conversation or history, while being aware that at this point abstract painting is already a century old.
- Of course, I don’t know how much longer this skepticism about making or expressing something can remain viable. And I am even suspicious of my own attraction to that mode—it’s a little late in the day to feel like someone needs to come up with yet another noncompositional strategy. It’s not like we’re in the moment when Ellsworth Kelly faced Picasso in the ’40s, or Sol LeWitt confronted the legacy of de Kooning. In a post-pluralist art world, what would be the problem to go paint a figure or a landscape? So, as much as I’m attracted to this kind of perpetual rephrasing of one’s inability or skepticism, I am constantly reconsidering and questioning my own interest in that mode.
- JB:
- I don’t know that I have any inherent faith in painting, necessarily, as a critical field or a critical medium. But I do have a faith in it as an arena for argumentation. It has a history that allows for that and demands a certain kind of rigor, sometimes in spite of itself. Scott and I have had a lot of conversations around the connoisseurial versus ideological imperatives that drive painting.
- SR:
- We acknowledge our different sides in that debate.
- JB:
- I’m most interested in thinking about it as an ongoing polemical sphere. In the art world, it’s often sadly hard to get someone to have an argument with you, but it’s easy to have one around painting.
- JM:
- I came to this as the least engaged and committed participant. It’s your painting more than it’s mine. But this work poses various questions. It has been assimilated so rapidly—the market has embraced it, serious critics have written about it—yet there’s still a lot to figure out. Do these works line up in the sort of historical sequence Jeffrey maps—from Warhol’s Factory to a “post-Factory” painting? Can we speak of the younger artists as some kind of coherent tendency? And the issue of subject matter Johanna raised—what is the balance struck between the content of these works and these highly elaborated formal processes? Why make paintings this way? We’re only at the beginning of understanding what’s happened.
Julie Mehretu’s Middle Grey, 2007–9, in process. Photograph by Sarah Rentz