Early Morning Discussions: Barry Schwabsky : Vitamin P 2002

I regard material experimentation as inherently conceptual, meaning that painting, too, is capable of manifesting its own signs. This is to say it is capable of producing meaning from within, not as merely 'process' but as embodied thinking. This position is held neither to reassert the pre-eminence of painting nor to avow its uniqueness, but to claim that painting has become more, rather than less, viable after conceptual art, as an option for giving idea form and hence for differentiating it from other possibilities. As American writer Glenn O'Brien humorously put it in form and hence for differentiating it from other possibilities. As American writer Glenn O'Brien humorously put it in conversation with Albert Ohlen and Christopher Wool: 'Why are all the conceptual artists painting now? Because it's a good idea”….Suzanne Hudson,

Painting has yet to recover from the mid century onslaught of conceptual art. Its demise may have been exaggerated, but there remains a “ highly charged territorial conflict between them-at least at the administrative level of the art bureaucracy.”

So that was the topic of Barry Schwabsky’s essay as discussed below - and it was also addressed 20 years later by Suzanne Hudson, as shown above, in the introduction to her 2022 survey of contemporary painting.

As Hudson concludes : “Painting is a good idea”. But it’s also a very, very old one, and while conceptual art has many histories, it’s hard to find any surveys of contemporary practice. Who would be interested in buying such a book? It’s outdated the moment it's printed.

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Vitamin P : New Perspectives in Painting, 2002

Introduction by Barry Schwabsky

I Painting as Art

One often hears it said these days that contemporary painting-or at least contemporary painting of any significance-is essentially conceptual. But what does that mean? The title of this section echoes the title of a book by the English philosopher and critic Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, but notice the difference between them: The implicit distinction between painting as art and painting as an art refers to a possible distinction "art" in general on the one hand and the various fine arts, of which painting would be one, on the other. So it refers to the question that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy posed at the beginning of his recent book The Muses: "Why are there several arts and not just one?"

Interesting that the introductory essay in the entire Vitamin P series should query whether it still makes sense to assemble pieces of “art” that are restricted to the conventional components of painting ( paint stuck to a firm rectangular surface hung vertically and parallel to the horizon) . It’s a traditional practice whose expiration date may have already passed since “new perspectives” are being sought here.

Or to put it another way, why-above all today-do we need a book about painting and not simply a book about art? After all, as long ago as the late 1950s certain artists, as Thierry de Duve has put it, felt it necessary "to produce generic art, that is, art that has severed its ties with the specific crafts and traditions of either painting or sculpture. "2 The artists who began producing Happenings and environments" around the end of the 1950s (Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Red Grooms, Robert whitman, etc.) were among the first of these, soon to be followed by the practitioners of Minimalism and Conceptual Art (Donald Judd and Joseph Kosuth, among others); but today this desire for an art not limited to any particular métier or medium has become general. This can be seen, for instance, in the fact that fewer and fewer art schools require their students to enroll in departments of painting, sculpture, or printmaking; in the new "deskilled" academy, there is typically one overarching department of, say, visual arts, whose students are expected to apply ad hoc whichever techniques happen to be most appropriate to a given project. In order to understand the situation of painting today, it is important to look to the late 1950s and 1960s, when art was redefined. But we should not overlook what gives painting its specific importance to art in general-its engagement, not so much with the eye as is sometimes thought, but with the body of both the maker and the viewer.

‘Engagement with the body” is hardly relevant to anything other than action painting or East Asian brush painting. Not surprising that Schwabsky never mentions it again.

But even before the 1950s, the project of a more "generic" art had already been inherent in abstraction, though it may be that only a few artists-Alexander Rodchenko and perhaps Piet Mondrian among them-had quite realized its implications. After all, abstract art was supposed to lay bare the structures underlying all art-formal structures, to be sure, but more important, what might be called structures of desire. Abstract painting made manifest the desire for painting in as general and as "naked" a form as possible. revealed that all painting worthy of the name had already been essentially abstract, though unconsciously so. We are used to hearing that Modernism-the period from Impressionism through abstraction to Conceptual Art-was imbued with the idea of progress. If abstract painting represented a kind of progress, it was essentially in the form of consciousness-but consciousness of something that was always inherent in painting. Thus, Clement Greenberg, the theoretician of Abstract Expressionism, once noted that one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, " whereas one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. " But what starts out as a simple descriptive difference turns out to be something more: The Modernist way of seeing, he says, is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist." In other words, Modernism took what was already implicit in classical painting and made it explicit. that is, brought it to a more articulate point of self-consciousness. An even more aggressive version of this position was taken by Ad Reinhardt, for instance, who asserted that abstract painting such as his own was "the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and unentangled, styleless, universal painting."

Well spoken, Ad Reinhardt ….. but who wants to look at your paintings more than once?

Art for art’s sake must summon a “generic art” ideology for validation. Which does not make it any better or worse to look at.

And yet, of course, abstract painting was not only more abstract, more general than other painting; it was at the same time, and by contrast, a specific kind of painting, one type among many others -an addition to the vocabulary of painting and not necessarily a revelation of painting at its best or most basic. The fact that abstraction keeps turning into something in particular-a genre like still life, landscape, or history painting-reveals its failure to connunicate the essence of all painting. That project, that generalization of painting, could not be fulfilled within painting.

Which brings us back to Happenings, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. In retrospect these movements, especially the last, can be seen as attempts to attain sonething that would be even more abstract and generalized-more "nothing in particular"-than abstract art. And like abstraction, they turn out to have failed at this totalizing project. Even Conceptual Art has become just one more genre among the many that constitute art. Abstraction benefited for a long time from the elan of its own unfulfilled ambitions; at least for a couple of generations, abstract painting really was where the great drama of art was being most decisively played out. As a result, representational painters and sculptors found themselves in a defensive position that often had a genuinely narrowing effect on their art. Similarly, today Conceptual Art (in the broadest sense) and its various successors retain a residual prestige that comes not only from ite relative recentness as a genre, but also from its original assumption of triumphal progress, the sunnation of all art, inherited from abstraction.

All of the above is both credible and sad - and it does hint at why postwar American figure sculpture was so bad: it was styled to look more abstract for no other reason.

When Kosuth wrote in 1969 that all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only existe conceptually, " he must have meant to say that almost all so-called art was really not art at all, because only his own and a very few other people's work qualified in his judgment as truly and self-consciously conceptual. But Kosuth's words turned out to be true in a way that may be the opposite of what he intended. Just as abstract art revealed that art had always been, in a way. essentially abstract, so Conceptual Art revealed (or rather reiterated, since it is an old ides going back as least as far as Leonardo da Vinci's observation that painting is "una cose mentale") that all art is conceptuai, painting included.

Form is a mental thing as well. Thinking need not be restricted to the verbal.

Where does that leave painting? As Conceptual Art, only less so? As Conceptual Art using Ironically retrograde means? Or does painting still have specific capacities of ite own to discover and exploit? Is painting art? Or is painting an art?

It’s also sad that Schwabsky feels he must ask these questions. As if a painting's looks could not be a sufficient discovery

II. Painting after Modernism

We do not need to be able to define Modernism exactly to know that painting was terribly important to it. Sonetines not painting could be terribly important too, as it was for Marcel Duchamp, nost obviously. And sometimes Modernism rejected the past-as when the Futurists urged to "destroy the museums"-but more often it was about revising the past.

Schwabsky is cautious about asserting that “Modernism” exists independently of those who use the word, but not cautious enough.

While there is some dispute whether Duchamps should be called a modernist, he himself did not think so.

Painting, not painting, and what to do with the past- those problems are still with us today. In some ways they have becone more urgent. for instance, now that not painting is no longer a rebellious gesture against an art discourse primarily defined by painting, but rather sonething approaching a fully institutionalized practice - highly charged territorial conflict has arisen between them-at least at the administrative level of the art bureaucracy.

This essay on behalf of painting participates in that territorial conflict - even if it is of no consequence outside the “art bureaucracy” who run art museums.

But in other ways, these problems have become softer, less politicized. An artist such as karen Kilinnik could make her name with "scatter art” installations and then switch to painting with none of the agony a Modernist like Philip Guston faced when he nade the transition from abstraction to representation within painting back in the late 1960s. Guston's actione were seen by some of hie best friende as a betrayal. Such strict adherence to positions taken is no longer required of serious artists.

Not sure that the dispute was ever about anything other than authority. Also doubt that such disputes are avoidable.

So there are two reasons that talking about today's painting means seeing it against the background of Modernist painting: One is that the situations of the two seen remarkably similar, and the other in that they seem so distinct as to be almost incomparable. If deepening self-consciousness is the only form of progress that could have credibly placed abstract painting beyond representation, or Conceptual Art beyond abstraction, here too the distinction may be best imagined as a difference in consciousness. Put another way, today' painting is not necessarily more conscious than Modernist painting, but it is conscious of different things.

Would Schwabsky claim that Modernist painting is any more conscious than the representational painting that came before? Maybe not ….. but I would.

Mondrian painted flowere alongside his abstractions, but these two strains in his work are not exhibited side by side. (The flowers were excluded, for instance, from the 1995 Mondrian retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New vork.) And now co underscand che late represento" tional paintings by Russian avant-gardista like Kasimir Malevich and Viadimir Tatlin renains difficult. Do they represent a true renunciation of abstraction or merely a pitiable though understandable submission to the realities of survival under Stalinism? The question is vital for the reception of their entire oeuvre. By contrast, no one sees a contradiction between Gerhard Richter's photo-realist paintinge and his abstractions. Each needs to be looked at in a somewhat different way, but there is no longer any question, as Greenberg once thought, of determining the "best way" of seeing any painting. Today It would more likely be thought that neither way of looking is sufficiently powerful or all-encompassing to take in all possible pictorial effects-a sort of aesthetic equivalent to Godel's theorem of undecidability and incompleteness, which showed that no one set of axions could solve all mathematical problems.

Godel’s theorem makes my eyes glaze over - but yes, the aesthetic equivalent does make sense. I do feel that there’s a way of looking that can relate to everything so long as it ignores context. But it’s only a feeling - completely intuitive - so outside the logic of Godel’s theory.

I remember a Richter exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago about 30 years ago, and was indeed surprised that it included photo realist landscape as well as completely non-representational smooshes of thick paint. But both did seem to say: “ nothing matters, and what if it did?”

III. PAINTING NOW

“There are two problems in painting," a young but already notorious Frank Stella once told an audience of art students. "One is to find out what painting is, and the other is to find out how to make a painting” One of the possible distinctions between Modern and what we all seem to have agreed to call contemporary (rather than Post-modern) art would be to say that Modernist painting was more urgently concerned with what painting is. In general it was thought that if one could come to a clear sense of what it is, it would already supply or at least inply the answer-one might even say, the formula-for how to make it. Anything like virtuosity for its own sake would only hamper the complete realization of the defining conception. That is why Greenberg could say, for example, that “the onlooker who says his child could paint a Newman may be right but Newman would have to be there to tell the child exactly what to do.-

Yes - we do have Stella, Newman, and Greenberg “concerned with what painting is”.

But we also have that seminal text in the Modernist canon, Kandinsky’s “Spirituality in art” which prioritizes something to express - and most of the iconic Modern artists would seem to share that concern.

Today, on the evidence of the most interesting work being done, the question of what painting is - the fundamental question for Newman, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, and Daniel Buren - has been demoted to the secondary status once held by the problem of making. Today it seems that artists are more concerned with how to make a painting - again, this comes out in the obsession with style I mentioned earlier - or sometimes with how to use the materials, methods, concepts, or traditions of painting to make a work that should not necessarily be called a painting. What it is will then emerge from how it is.

Shouldn’t "how it is" follow "how it looks"? Why care about how something was made unless compelled by its look - and what that might mean.

Painters are merely the first onlookers of their own work. A thoroughly Duchampian view would say that is all they can significantly be, the fundamental artistic act being contained in the contemplative act of choice. A number of the painters whose works are included here would probably agree, for instance Hong Seung-Hye, whose paintings are industrially fabricated, or Francis Alys . who commissions some of his work from artisan sign painters. But the painters who are involved in making work by hand, through the preliminary act of choosing to enter actively into the productive process-implicitly asserts that there is more involved in art than choice or, at least, that there is something more to choice than what Marcel Duchaap and his artistic progeny imagine. (The choice to make art in this way as opposed to another is probably no more a real choice than what has become known as "sexual choice, "an analogy based on so much of the work itself. particularly that of Marlene Dunas and Ghada Aner, among others, bridging aesthetic Investment and sexual desire. Although this personal investment in the activity of forming the object can no longer be part of the definition of art, the specific contribution that painting can nake to artistic thought more generally is probably related to the value of this choice to enter a realm beyond nere choice. That is, it has to do with this cultivation of the tactile dimension of things, of a plastic relation to materials that (because of the potential this relation offers for continual feedback between matter and sensation) is also a proprioceptive activity-to the indirect benefit of the viewer who partakes of this relation only imaginatively. though as vividly as possible. For the viewer, painting is a noun: the finished object we see. For the painters it can also be a verb: the activity in which they are engaged. When painters succeed in evoking and disclosing painting-the-verb within painting-the-noun, as many of those in this book do (Suzanne Mcclelland being an particularly clear example), they offer the rest of us a rare I gift.

Every day, millions of toddlers make paintings that evoke the fact they were painted - so it’s hard to accept this as important criteria.

If Modernism was, as I've said, an advance in consciousness-and if Conceptual Art likewise represented an advance in consciousness within Modernism-then we can never go back to seeing what is in a painting before seeing it as a painting. Even (or rather especially) the most apparently traditional painters you'll see in Including those like John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage whose work may seem at tines downright provocatively retrograde, depend on this assumption. Their paintings, like most of the work here, are always reflexIvely concerned with their own statue as paintings. They are paintings, yes, but also allegories of painting.

The current canonical narrative of art history does seem premised on advancing consciousness - making it something like a religious catechism - an article of faith,

Needless to say - all do not share it. Curious that it should be so vigorously and exclusively promulgated within institutions dedicated to reason and open inquiry.

BTW, it explains why museums of contemporary art categorically exclude anything that too closely resembles what might have been made before 1900.

IV Painting where?

Once, art historical narratives were organized by "schools"; although the notion persisted into the Modernist era (Ecole de Paris, New York School), a new historical unit, the "movement" (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism). eclipsed it. But today an introduction to contemporary painting no longer forms a chapter in the chronicle of successive movements any more than it charts a geography of adjacent schools. Positions are now multiple, simultaneous and decentered.

The ongoing practice of Chicago Imagism being one exception - as well the West African figure painting now showing up at Art Expo Chicago. Im sure there are many, many more across the planet. The world is much larger than the artworld.

It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting. There are too many hidden corners. Even in the carly to mid-1980s, it was still possible to imagine that painting, not in its eternal essence. perhaps, but in its present being, was this as opposed to that. This sense of certainty had apparently been the case for a long time. In his nemoirs, Alex katz, for instance, recalls that as a young painter in New York in the early 1950s, all serious painting was white and black. "You weren't 'allowed to use color," he wrote, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically. Then after a big Bonnard show in 1953, "suddenly everyone was using color, "Thirty years later painting could not be categorized as a certain palette and not another-this aspect was ad libitum-but it seemed pretty clear that painting was figurative, for instance, rather than abstract, impulsive rather than systematic. But it used a space that was not naturalistic. Some people thought of it as expressionist, or neo-expressionist. Or as an expression of a minority taste, painting might even be abstract-a painter like Jonathan Lasker had his admirers already-but hardly geometrical or "minimal, - which signified tired and academic. (Just as in the 1960s, by contrast, anything that smacked of lyricism or impulsiveness tended to seem boring, epigonal, provincial) Sure, established painters may still have been working away in such modes (Marden, Ryan, etc.). just as there were still realists of one sort or another (Philip Pearistein, Neil Welliver), but there seemed to be little room for new arrivals at either of those inns.

Wow - never heard of Welliver, a landscapist who recalls Courbet and Rockwell Kent. I agree that “ It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting”, though I doubt it ever was.

On the face of it, today there is no consistent look, - no particular method, style, material, subject, or theme that identifies a painting as credibly contemporary - or that disqualifies it from consideration as such.

If this means that consciousness is advancing simultaneously in all directions, then might we allow it to happen outside the studios of blue chip artists?

So in perusing the pages that follow you will not be surprised to find paintings that might be immediately identified as abstract, whether geometrical, bionorphic, or gestural; or as realist, symbolist, surreal, expres sionist, narrative, and so on - however nuch one will want to qualify such rough and hasty characterizations after closer acquaintance with the work itself. Why not paint with embroidery (Aner) or elephant dung (ofill) just as well as with oil or acrylic? There are paintings that would have been accepted as such by our great-grandparents and work that ignores almost every convention, however nominal, of traditional painting: worke without inages, without drawingc, or without color. Others eschew the material basics- stretchere, canvas, paint, or the employment of the artist's hand. At the limit, it becomes fascinatingly difficult to tell what counts as painting and what doesn't- as Stephen Melville has recently pointed out.

How certain things look fascinates me - but not whether to classify them as paintings. That is the job of a taxonomist.

Nor does one know where painting comes from. It is no great simplification to say that in the nineteenth century, great painting was made in Paris; or the decades following world war II, the preeminence granted New York may be exaggerated but, at its base, reflect a certain truth.

But it truly is an oversimplification — just as in an Art History 101 textbook.

The earlier question about whether today's painting is or is not cut off from the traditions of the European masters was seriously misleading; the question should rather be to what extent it is or is not cut off from European, East Asian, North African, or any other tradition. Artists appreciate the art of the museums but seem disinclined to worship it. The museum is not a binding institution; it is even a liberating one, insofar as it now equates many obviously unlike things (Kwakiutl masks, Impressionist paintings, Egyptian mummies, celadon pots, Empire gowns, medieval armor, Dogon ladders, Northern Renaissance altarpieces, Chinese scrolls, video installations, Roman copies of Greek marbles) and therefore exalts the potential value of almost any artifact.

This is the application of institutional theory: Art is whatever’s found in an Art Museum - with no other requirement. Wonder why he felt the need for an “almost” before the “any artifact”. What might be an exception?

Those of us educated entirely in the West may be at a certain disadvantage for appreciating this multiplicity; our complacent engagement with the most familiar traditions-even where we imagine that engagement to be a critical one-may blind us to important aspects of art whose sources are more distant. We are too quick to affect the typical blasé attitude of a cosmopolitan inspecting the efforts of a provincial: very nice, but it's all been done before-the kind of attitude that led the outstanding English critic of his generation, on seeing his first Jackson Pollock painting, to dismiss it as an immature rehash of Wols and Raoul Ubac.

If pioneering innovation is important in evaluation (cf. “New Perspectives” in the title of this book) the critic was quite right to suggest Wols as a precursor to Pollock. They are, of course, different - but so are contemporary Impressionists from Monet and Sisley.

What at first seems familiar may have different sources and a far wider compass than one had imagined. How can one fulfill the task of the critic-which is just to say, perhaps, the dedicated viewer-when the range of traditions and references that artists are likely to call on extends so far beyond what a single individual can know? When is it acceptable to be not just unfamiliar with what an artist is referring to, but unaware of my own ignorance? Perhaps never, or perhaps only when one accepts art's gift of openness and painting's invitation to direct experience. ………Barry Schwabsky

Two thumbs up for “direct experience”, but it’s only mentioned here at the very end of the essay. Typically, that’s an aesthetic approach, while Schwabsky’s concerns here have been more conceptual. Witness the Rodchenko color swabs placed at the very beginning, immediately followed by a theoretical concern for whether “painting is art”.

The artists included in this survey were nominated by 80 international artists, curators, and critics - but the actual selections were made by Schwabsky himself - so it's curious that he really had nothing to say about his criteria. Did those chosen need to have had solo shows in important galleries or museums? Did they need to please him personally? Was he aiming for the widest variety? Did they need to stand out forbeing different as much as better ?

I haven't gone through the list yet - but I'm guessing that Schwabsky's priority will also be conceptual , and since Kerry Marshall is absent, it appears that racial identity art had not yet conquered the artworld, so his interests will be linguistic and philosophical.

I will return to this post after all the artists have been viewed.

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Below are the images that accompanied the essay.

Alexander Rodchenko, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color, 1921, Oil on canvas, triptych, each panel: 24 5/8 × 20 11/16 inches, 62.5 x 52.5 cm, Coll. A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow