VITAMIN P!!!

Response to Selected Works From

“VITAMIN P: New Perspectives in Painting”

A little less than a decade prior to the first publication of Vitamin P, Hal Foster wrote, "...the horizontal expansion of art has placed an enormous burden on artists and viewers alike: as one moves from project to project, one must learn the discursive breadth as well as the historical depth of many different representations - like an anthropologist who enters a new culture with each new exhibition." (intro, xii). Although Foster was expounding on the shifting sands of postmodern discourse, he may as well have been prophesying the current state of contemporary painting. Indeed, in Vitamin P's very introduction, Barry Schwabsky effectuates this forecast as he sums up, “How can one fulfill the task of the critic...when the range of traditions and references that artists are likely to call on extends so far beyond what a single individual can know? ...(P)erhaps only when one accepts... painting's invitation to direct experience.” (10). The visual feast in this tome, as well as these critics' statements, underscores the pluralism that has arisen in contemporary art in tandem with a dramatic and welcome “return” of painting.

Although painting's last gasp was supposedly heard in the 1960's with the neo-minimalist works of Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Robert Ryman, echoes of their visuals may still be seen in the works of contemporary painters like Ian Davenport and Markus Döbeli. At first glance, the minimal, non-objective qualities to these works might imply the bluntness of reduction. However, upon closer inspection of surface, techniques are revealed that speak to a broader intentionality. Both artists revel in the very nature of paint as a medium: Davenport uses fully saturated commercial latex (household paint), poured and spread via gravity in a precision set of moves to create his perfectly even, seemingly effortless-looking surfaces. Döbeli, meanwhile, builds up acrylic color to a variety of levels, affecting surface appearance, allowing for a variety of chromatic passages, until the canvas itself becomes the form, reveling in its own physicality. These paintings set up an atmosphere for the viewer; a dialogue which suggests a real presence to the work. They reveal their inherent existence as paintings not through overt signification, but through the artists' technical consideration of paint itself. But, unlike these works' minimalist counterparts of the past, these artworks-as-objects come without the deconstructivist baggage. Paint is not embarrassingly applied as something to be subverted, rather, it is celebrated con brio in its expressive capacity.

In its adoption of a pluralist attitude, painting has seemingly freed itself from the plodding diachroneity of art historical movements. This release has allow for a more synchronic reflection of the contemporary. Mass media has charged our visual input with seemingly unavoidable exteroception. This may have engendered a new level of pictorial semiotics, as postmodern culture now has a lexicon of manufactured images laden with universally understood signification - be they commercial (branding), high art or kitsch.

Johannes Kahrs, Richard Phillips, and Peter Rostofsky are three oil painters who liberally lift from this aforementioned “new vernacular” in full recognition of the charged nature of their recontextualized imagery. Within the teeming center of this neo-vocabulary one will find the the oft-repeated video image; a now-ubiquitous device made fully manifest in the early 1980s via the pop-music video. Kahrs substantiates the known tropes associated with such incessant visuals by distilling them down to their heraldic essences in painted large-scale keyframes. Rostofsky also co-opts the moving image, but delves instead into the cinematic genre, extracting stillframe portrayals of a filmic Sublime, played out in the climactic moments of movies such as 2001 and Contact. Although Phillips' early work was based upon still fashion photography, he has since gravitated towards the moving image as well, finding themes within music videos and popular films that have trendily co-opted the lurid glam of pornography. Phillips executes his controversial work in a re-recontexualization of these charged visuals in a much more graphic manner, juxtaposing titillating female nudes with backgrounds, costumes or other objects that challenge the viewer to confront a now hyper-realized insincerity of manufactured arousal.

Even though the derogatory popularization of kitsch in art was established by Greenberg in 1939, it has undergone – at least in its relation to art – some definitive changes. Morphing out of the Marxist illustration and its antonymous association with the avant-garde, kitsch grew into a realm of acceptance when it became aligned with camp in the postwar period, and then ratified in the 1960's as American high and low culture began to converge. Beyond this, it has been subjected to a full postmodern treatment in the art world, attaining celebrity status through the work of Jeff Koons, and at the same time, it was embraced by an unlikely ally - the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum - in an attempt to erase the pejoratives aimed at the academic as connected to kitsch.

Currently, kitsch may be once again reinventing itself as representational painting reestablishes itself within the contemporary. The artist-team of Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov not only takes pleasure in the flash of color and texture of oil painting, there is an obvious playful quality throughout their highly synthesized works. Some of the usual kitschy subjects are present: the odd celebrity, happy puppies, primary-colored flowerbeds, prancing naked ladies – it's all there. The veritable carnival of images is almost too much to take, but, like a chorus in a pop song, the hook draws one closer - and then, one sees the dark interior beneath all the fun. Dystopia under the fabricated veneer of utopia is nothing new in contemporary society, but Dubossarsky and Vinogradov's awareness of this sociopolitical polarity took hold in Soviet Russia, where a totalitarian state made this disparity an unassailable, stark reality. Juxtaposing the jovial psychedelia with sex, violence, war, and a general sense that “all is not what it seems,” the paintings turn into a cautionary narrative before a captive audience.

The first powerful revolution against representation in painting can be traced back to the turn of the 19^th Century with the beginnings of Cubism. Since that time, the craft that was so honored in the Sálon de Paris up until the 1890's fell hugely out of fashion – so much so that it was considered by some to be wholly retrograde by the time postmodernism got into full swing in the 1980's (see: Benjamin Buchloh). It is duly known that a great deal of this kind of criticism was undoubtedly necessary to keep art convergent and conversant with modern society. Nevertheless, the wholesale marginalization of an art form, rendered by critics as unproductive or inept, smacked of the exclusionary failures accorded to the insular tenets of modernism. Buchloh, incisive mind that he is, failed to understand the relevance of the medium, even as he commends the celebrated Gerhard Richter for “cynically acquiesc[ing] to the ineffectuality of painting,” to which Richter inexorably disagrees: “I see there neither tricks nor cynicism nor craftiness... I know for a fact that painting is not ineffectual.” (113).

As it happened, painting did not perish in its languishment, nor did it regress back to its antiquated rhetoric. Rather, thanks to artists like Richter, painting survived and revived, expanding horizontally and adopting a vast melange of global and historical sensibilities, all the while calling upon the lessons of its very history to redefine itself.

Two particular artists in Vitamin P whose representational discourse remains contemporarily relevant are Andrew Grassie and Yishai Judisman. Grassie adopts a literal dialogue with the art world, rendering photographic depictions of gallery spaces (sometimes with the exhibit not fully installed), touching on a variety of genres from old master works to installation art to outdoor shots of minimalist sculpture. In any case, each piece is painstakingly rendered in tempera, a difficult and ancient emulsion of pigment, calling to mind the leviathan that is the history of painting. Through the broad context of the subject matter, the historical medium, not to mention the fact that the source material itself is a reproduction, Grassie fleshes out a satisfyingly extradimensional mimetic approach to representation. Judisman's approach is similarly classical in technique, calling upon the spirits of Velazquez and Hals in his engaging portraiture. However, his visual references are disparate: clowns, the mentally ill, sumo wrestlers, fellow artists. By implying the presence of narrative with the very act of representing these oddly fascinating personae in oil, Judisman opens a dialogue with the viewer, challenging one to enter into a mildly discordant psychological encounter with the subjects. In later works, the artist creates an even more complete, yet complex atmosphere, featuring the works dramatically within thoughtful installations. These involved crossovers within representational painting – and painting in general - speak volumes about its perception of the contemporary and indeed bodes well for a diverse and bounteous future.

List of works cited:

Buchloh, Benjamin and Richter, Gerhard (interview): “Legacies of Painting,” Art Talk: The Early 80s. Ed. Jeanne Siegel. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988. 111-118. Print

Foster, Hal. Return of the Real. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Introduction. Print

Schwabsky, Barry. “Painting as Art?” Vitamin P. Ed. Valerie Breuvart. New York: Phaidon, 2007. 6-10. Print

ENDGAME

A Response to Essays From

“ENDGAME: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture”

The complexion of Endgame, the 1986 Boston ICA show, and its operation within the coda of the traditional art disciplines of painting and sculpture, is posited in this candid statement by Sherrie Levine: “There is a long modernist tradition of endgame art... and a lot of artists have made the last painting ever to be made. It's a no-man's land that a lot of us enjoy moving around in, and the thing is to not lose your sense of humor, because it's only art.” (61). That said, the existence of this postmodern mimetic art seems quite serious, as it is primarily contingent upon diachroneity: modernism is swallowed and then regurgitated with a subtextually analytic proposition. Endgame proposes a sort of “anti-Kant” stance, wherein it seeks to endorse an invalidation of art/object in a declamation of original signification and strives to institute a “new and improved” point of view.

In point of fact, modernism sought, and perhaps achieved complete reduction in painting and sculpture. But in an artistic culture of pure asceticism and self-denial, vitality could not persist. In “The Return of Hank Herron,” by Thomas Crow, a rationalization exists that, within the art of Endgame there is indeed a vitality in the art of recontextualization. However, it may be equally arguable that a mimesis of known reductive artworks engenders reduction. In mimetically reproducing minimalist art, it may well be that the reductive qualities become inherently coded within the new work due to the formalist structure of a technical narrative.

The landscape of Crow's essay is dominated by a central field of gray that is the early '70s parody write-up “Fake as More,” which touts the fictive Hank Herron and his equally fictive show. A ten-year-old make-believe review is rather an odd genesis for an art movement, but it is clear that the fantasy article became a kind of artistic canon, a platform upon which postmodern artists could assail the mannered aesthetic of the modernists. This attitude is clearly delineated in Crow's statement that, “'Fake as More' is a thoroughly unsympathetic attack, displaying more than a tinge of philistinism, on the inwardness of modernist practice...” (15). In this case, we have a vanguard attacking the old guard, the justification for this being that, in the complex war of artistic progress, those who have fallen behind are weak and cannot contribute to art's advancement. The Greenbergian necessity to “make it new” was made nonviable. But this is merely a half-persuasive justification for collapsing 20th-Century modernism in upon itself. Endgame shows how modernism can clearly be re-presented in a contemporary paradigm, but the question remains: does this imitative art also travel down a limited path, keeping 1960s modernism on veritable life-support?

In Elizabeth Sussman's “The Last Picture Show,” high praise is given to Sherrie Levine for her utilization of key technical and theoretical components in order to arrive at her diverse imagery. As fascinating as this may be - in the context of modernist work transubstantiating into postmodern - the technical, formalist arrival at the works' distilled appropriation conceivably do not institute as dynamic a shift as Sussman sets forth. Levine's statement (q.v. - opening sentence of this essay) reflects an attitude not quite in synch with Sussman's assertion that the artist's efforts to level abstraction to a generic, commodified signifier is laced with a “tone of anger.” (62). The artist's intentionality is rendered rather imprecisely by her own words. Truth be told, Levine does not retain her “sense of humor” in that her work engages in a feminist discourse, copying works from a period dominated by men. Sussman confirms this: “Levine, who only copied male artists, explained her exercise as related to feminism.” A tongue-in-cheek approach is not inspired by feminist critique.

A more precise account of what occurred through Levine is that a precedent was set that has allowed for an arguably too-fluid methodology of appropriation 20 years after Sussman's encomium. In 2007, the artist Andrew Mowbray re-created Janine Antoni's feminist-critique-heavy performance piece “Loving Care.” It was, in its technical essence, the exact same work: the artists painted the floor of a gallery using the hair on their heads saturated with hair dye. The difference between the two pieces is a single contextual shift: Mowbray is a man (his piece is titled “Just for Men”). In this, one can see Endgame's purposeful rupturing of modernism reflected forward into a new splintering within the postmodern. Matthew Nash elaborates: “Mowbray's piece is not unique in its approach, nor is it a failed work of art. In fact, it is an ideal example of the state of Postmodern art, which has become thoroughly self-consuming... just as the Modernists rushed toward the "Last Painting" in that endgame, it seems that we are now involved in another endgame.” (Nash).

There is sustained and significant focus upon kitsch, commodification and fetishism in Hal Foster's “The Future of an Illusion.” The Duchamp-ian paradigm of readymade art looms large over most of the sculptural art of Endgame, and Foster duly notes the masterstroke of fetishism contained within that modernist master's work. Considering this, one wonders just what Duchamp would think if he were to see (for instance) Haim Steinbach's work nearly three quarters of a century after “Fountain.” Foster uses the example of Steinbach and Jeff Koons as artists who have purportedly transcended Duchamp with their readymades, but these artists have merely concretized the institutionalization of commodified fetishism in art. Koons, at least, makes it a little more fun than functional.

Foster proceeds, critiquing the work of late 1970s painter Julian Schnabel as lacking mastery due to his (barely) coded sexual fetishism: “Here, then, the work of art discloses what it disavows, and is again seized by fetishism with all the violence of its contradictions...” (95). Yet, when Foster continues along the same tack, using the commodity fetishism of Koons, Steinbach, etc., he describes it as “a fact at once obvious and enigmatic.” (95). It appears that, at some point in postmodernist critique, it needed to be suddenly understood that the sign/symbol had to be abandoned as an idea referent and re-instituted as a neutral and literal signifier. Therefore, it is within this specific mandate that one must approach Koons' “Two Ball Equilibrium” and not see testicles - just a couple of Spalding basketballs suspended in a tank. [This is decidedly more difficult with Koons, when one looks ahead to the hypersexualized fetishism of the 1991 exhibition “Made in Heaven.”] For all one knows, this forced state of insistence is the answer to Foster's query, “...the tension between art and commodity... has it somehow collapsed?” (96).

Concern over this may be a non-issue, however. Foster later espouses the nascent pluralism in the kitsch/commodity fetish work of Koons: “...it was precisely the commodity that destroyed artistic aura in the first place... it effectively turns the readymade from a device that demystifies art into one that remystifies it.” (100).

A“premature” argument that may now be addressed is Foster's distillation of Baudrillard's hypothesis that “all primitivisms are corrupt and all surrealisms are futile.” (103). Is kitsch truly outmoded as an artistically conceptual basis of hyper-realization? In the 25 years since Endgame, this argument may have borne itself out. Kitsch, in postmodern art, has moved far from the point of elevated, commodified fetishism. Contemporary subculture has seen to this, adopting and recycling kitsch as an irony-supersaturated meme, rendering it sufficiently neutral, if not neutered. When recontextualized cliché becomes itself outmoded, it becomes akin to salt that has lost its saltiness.

With the consistent appearance of readymades, the looming specter of Warhol, and the adoption of decades-old parodies as new paradigms, it might give one the impression that Endgame is inconsistent with the tenets of the postmodern. That is, postmodernism's ultimate goal (as with all art movements before it) is to advance itself, to further elaborate upon our changing contemporary condition. Yet, in mimicking modernism with a kind of nuanced imitation in mind, it is successful - in its time – but it is painfully short-lived. Contemporary consumer culture is rehashing itself at alarmingly greater chronological rate. In order to “sell” such a backtracking to the consumer, a heavy dose of irony must be ingested with our daily intake of culture. As the speed of salvage is ever increased, contemporary art must reflect these changes. The simple mimetics of Endgame are no longer enough; art can no longer respond with such axiomatic reflectivity. A far more pluralistic, all-encompassing approach must be taken to the artistic field of battle, as Martha Schwendener intimates: “Those battles are distilled into a different kind of mandate: It's more than just OK to conflate Ab-Ex and Pop, Burchfield and Mitchell, or Johns and Bridget Riley - it's expected. Painting now can function... at the center of the market or within the endgame of postmodernism (or post-postmodernism). Its status, like everything else in the art world, could change at any minute.” (2).

List of Works Cited:

Crow, Thomas. “The Return of Hank Herron.” Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture. Ed. David Joselin and Elisabeth Sussman. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. 11-27. Print

Foster, Hal. “The Future of an Illusion.” Joselin/Sussman 91-105.

Nash, Matthew. “The Endgame of Postmodernism.” BigRedandShiny.com. Big RED & Shiny, Inc. 13 January 2009. Web. 25 April 2010.

Schwenender, Martha. “Eva Lundsager, R.H. Quaytman, and Mary Heilman Brush Up on Their Painting.” VillageVoice.com. The Village Voice. 20 January 2009. Web. 29 April 2010

Sussman, Elisabeth. “The Last Picture Show.” Joselin/Sussman 51-69.