Barry Schwabsky : Vitamin P2. Introduction

 

Left to right:

1. Joseph Marioni Contemplation Room Installation at The Basel Art Fair, 2009 

2. Paulina Olowska Wool mark, 2010 Oil on canvas 195x140 cm 

 3. Katharina Wulff Untitled, 2006 Oil on canvas 40×45 cm 

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Above are the three  pieces Schwabsky chose to place before his text. A minimalist installation followed by two enigmatic figurative pieces that feel like illustrations for young adult literature ( for European  girls.)

•  EVERYDAY PAINTING BARRY SCHWABSKY

Before there was art, there was painting. The intentions of the Paleolithic people who conjured the famous herds of bison and deer that move across the walls of the ancient caves are mysterious, but we can be sure that they had nothing to do with the concept of aesthetics that arose in eighteenth-century Europe or the field of autonomous art production that emerged around that time as painting began to detach itself from service to church and court. Neither a cave painting nor a Medieval altarpiece was self-evidently 'an object [..] in the fashioning of which the intention to enable it to satisfy the aesthetic interest played a significant causal part' - to use a definition of the artwork typical of philosophical aesthetics.' Even the masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, which for many viewers are still exemplary of great painting, possess a very ambiguous relation to autonomous art as we understand it, being devotional images whose surpassing beauty was valued at the time more for its power to kindle faith than for its own sake. Other works functioned as propaganda for the rulers who commissioned them; their impressive qualities were intended to reflect back on the patron rather than onto the painting itself as a self-reflective entity. 

Must we jump into ab origine speculation with the very first sentence?  If Schwabsky refers to the language we Americans use today -  it’s likely  that the application of pigment to surfaces ( what we call painting) predates whatever surviving examples  on cave walls we now call art. If he refers to how the pre-historic painters  talked about what they were doing, we know nothing. 

Back in the introduction to Vitamin P1, Schwabsky declared the independence of Painting from Conceptual Art - and obviously that still concerns him. “Everyday Painting” serves neither the church and state of the French  Academy founded in the 17th Century, nor the modern secular academy of the 20th. It’s not about spiriual/political ideals or new concepts of Art. It’s  just about the ordinary stuff living like sex, food, health, and entertainment.  It’s not abandoning the high ground - it’s more like  the earth is flat; so high ground does not exist.

Yet then we might ask - if nothing of great importance is at stake - why bother?

In 2012, a moral imperative was beginning to conquer the artworld;  black identity and racial justice.  Nina Chaney Abney and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, for example, appear in this catalog, and a Kerry Marshall is shown in this introduction.  But apparently Schwabsky did not yet spot the trend.

 I remember a conversation I once had with an elder painter who was a particularly adamant proponent of abstraction, insisting on the absolute importance of painting's independence from any demand that it illustrate a predetermined meaning. Well, how do you feel when you look at a painting by Caravaggio,' someone asked, 'who made such great paintings under the constraint of illustrating scenes from the Bible?' When I look at Caravaggio's paintings I feel sorry for him, the painter replied. 1 can imagine how much greater the paintings might have been if they had been free to be nothing but painting.' There is something wonderful, as much as it is absurd, in that dogmatic extremism, but it no longer has much of a grip on contemporary culture. It no longer seems of use. Ad Reinhardt may have had a point when he claimed that the project of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, [...] separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive? Infuriating bravado is always good as entertainment, but still less today than in Reinhardt's time can we see his claim that 'originality exists only where all artists work in the same tradition and master the same convention' as anything but an idiosyncratic hobby-horse, the impossible notion of a charismatic crank whose ideal academy could only ever have existed in his own fierce imagination.? The purity of the modernist dream could only have been realized either by a complete separation from daily life - Reinhardt's colleague Jack Tworkov accused him of wanting to erect 'a kind of Chinese wall between experience and painting - or a complete colonization of it, such as that aimed at by the artists of De Stijl and of Russian Constructivism, each in their own way. Today, contra Reinhardt, we know it's no use pretending that there is just one tradition or one convention. The quasi-anonymity that Reinhardt ascribed to the true painter has no social, political or economic basis for existence. Maybe that's one reason why, as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to make any general statement about painting (as opposed to the general cultural situation in which painting takes place).

Certainly glad that Reinhart’s and Grennberg’s dogmatism is no longer taken so seriously.

Perhaps once it was possible to believe that painting was one thing, and that therefore the collective effort involved in the pursuit of painting could have to do with finding its essence - for instance, flatness and delimitation, according to the definition once given to it by Clement Greenberg. But some do still believe that painting is one thing, no matter what anyone says. It's still possible to be an essentialist rather than a pluralist. More importantly, it's still possible to make very good and very relevant painting out of such a belief, one of my favourite contemporary  painters comes to mind, Joseph Marioni, who upholds severe modernist criteria in painting (he paints one-colour abstractions) in the face of an art world that insists these are outmoded. Marioni once told me that painters ought to secede from the art world. identify with the art world from which he would like to secede, but my art world would include him as a major contemporary figure. Dogma - keeping in mind the sense of the word as it was adopted by the group of Danish filmmakers in 1995 - remains a reasonable position to take within a context that continues to be plural. 

Here’s a screen grab of Marioni.

Looks like a glaze catalog at a ceramic store.

I’d call minimalism post-modern.

but history is always open to interpretation.

Philippe Decauzat, Out of Control

Dianna Molzan

What do these two pieces have in common?

An interest in language itself 

rather than whatever it might express.

They are in dialog with the academic humanities. 

It’s still essentialism - but social rather than aesthetic.

But while such essentialism may be helpful to some artists, it would be detrimental to the critic who wants to understand the work that artists are doing today. A glance or two around the art galleries - or, for that matter, a glance or two through this book - should remind anyone of the difficulty of defining painting, or of laying down any definitive statements about it. Is it really possible to bracket Wade Guyton's inkjet abstractions with Odili Donald Odita's clashing shards of colour, Paulina Olowska's canny montaging of capitalist and communist cultural histories with Katharina Wulff's symbolist reveries that float free (it would seem) of any clear historical reference points; the coolly optical/orna-mental painting-objects of Philippe Decrauzat with Dianna Molzan's funkier, more tactile take on sculptural painting (deconstructed perhaps more in the sartorial than in the philosophical sense); or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's moody imaginary portraits with Kerstin Brätsch's multivalent pictorial practice, which seems the product of multiple artistic personae? Sure, you could try to evade this multiplicity by giving yourself some arbitrary ground rules: Only abstraction! or Only mass-mediated images! or Only what evinces the artist's hand! or Only what has important socio-political subject matter! or Only what is strictly self-reflective! But how reductive would that be? Nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of art than to put on the blinders in order to feel a false security of judgment. As uneasy as it may make us to say it, our time remains what critic Corinne Robins already called the 1970s: a 'pluralist era'.

How about “painting is only what looks good”?  That eliminates whatever was made so that looks did not distract from concept - as with most of the artists in this book. But that raises the uncomfortable question “looks good to whom?” Schwabsky occasionally uses the language of aesthetic judgment, but adhering to current custom, he takes no responsibility for it.

BTW -,the writer who “wants to understand the work that artists are doing today” is less a critic than  an apologist for what the market has already given high value. 

 

One paints today according to a double perspective for which one might borrow the Saussurian terms diachronic and synchronic. Or perhaps it would be just as well to speak of historical and contextual aspects. On the one hand, and possibly in contrast to artists who work in newer media, painters are necessarily conscious of their production as sharing in an array of practices and conventions with deep roots in history. Painters are aware of a multiplicity of pictorial vocabularies from mannerism to modernism - to mention only terms relevant to the history of European art. Today, a painter might equally be inspired by, for instance, Chinese ink painting or Australian aboriginal bark painting - irrespective, of course, of where he or she happens to be from. The fact that the arts of Asia, Africa and Australia seem to be converging with those of Europe and the Americas, however, should make us especially sensitive to the likelihood that the art we encounter has sources that may not be equally evident to all viewers. In particular, a significant number of the artists included in this book have been educated in China and India; we Westerners should get used to the idea that, as fascinating as we find their work, our interpretation and judgment of it are only partial. And just as contemporary painting need not come from a European tradition, even when it does it may not be the 'great tradition' we learned about in school. Merlin James, as we discover in these pages, rates Giorgio Morandi as an inspiration. Well, no great surprise there; so should plenty of others. But how many of those others would, as James does, evoke the Bolognese master in the same breath as the less renowned L. S. Lowry, William Nicholson or Jean. Hélion? In Romania, of all places, there seems to be something in the water conducive to good painting. Shouldn't we assume that behind this lies a hidden history waiting to be excavated? 

Investigations may always go in  either  diachronic or synchronic directions,  whether the art was made yesterday or a thousand years ago.  BTW - we may note that though the artists in in this survey may have  been inspired by “ Chinese ink painting or Australian aboriginal bark painting “, those who actually work in those traditions were categorically excluded.

But painting is hardly the only form of visual input to which today's painters attend - and for that matter, their artistic interests may not even be predominantly visual. You'd be hard put to find many who don't use photography as a tool or a source; movies, television and the internet are all felt influences. 

Anj Smith, Quinkunx of Heaven

I’m not seeing any 

Bosch or Cranach here.

This image is miserable.

Fashion too (as we learn, Anj Smith introduces Bosch and Cranach to Chanel and Vuitton). And so are all kinds of music. Even the onetime phobia against literary' painting seems to have fallen by the wayside, and we find painting once again being used as a vehicle for historical and social commentary as well as a reflection on narrative (Nina Chanel Abney, Michael Fullerton, Li Songsong),

Nina Chaney Abney, Close but no Cigar,  2008,  72 x 171”

Graphics catch excitement, but the social commentary is limited to “ these folks is all crazy” 

Li Songsong,  Flowers on the sea,  11 feet x 9 feet

The title  likely refers to a classic of modern Chinese literature which I’ve read in translation as “Singsong  Girls of Shanghai”. - the poignant stories of  the hopeless love between courtesans and their clients.  i've written about it here.   

This original image is quite large - like a political poster - and it does feel  appropriate for that book. But what does it offer beyond book illustration?  The  Pace Gallery page says that the artist wants to 

“emphasize the way images operate as nebulous fragments of a history that is open to interpretation.” That would be the “reflection on narrative” which Schwabsky mentions.

Michael Fullerton : An Unexplained Mystery, Not Broadcast on CBS's "Unexplained Mysteries" (Roberto Calvi), 2010 Oil and gold leaf on linen 24 x 18”

(Roberto Calvi was a banker. enmeshed in scandal and murdered)

Pomp, power and politics jostle for our attention in the work of Glasgow-educated, Scottish-born painter Michael Fullerton.  One of the most conceptually sophisticated figurative painters of his generation, Eullerton uses his medium against itself in order to expose the mannerisms and sometimes dirty machinations of businessmen and women, politicians and both left- and right-wing lackeys. '

The three artists cited by Schwabsky do indeed offer a social commentary that is comical or mocking - which contrasts strongly with the following piece that is shown later in the introduction:

Kerry Marshall, untitled (painter)’ 2010,   48 x 43”

This proclaims a group identity no less specific, proud, and ethnocentric displays in the Parthenon or Nineveh.  Marshall took Art back to expressing something rather than deconstructing its own language.

 In place of the issues surrounding their work, readers of standard references on contemporary art might also find themselves puzzled as to why established artists primarily known as conceptualists so often seem to turn back to painting as a medium of expression - from first-generation conceptualists like Mel Bochne or Art & Language, who have been making paintings for decades now, to more recent converts such as David Hammons, Rodney Graham and Martin Creed. Clearly, painting continues to satisfy artistic needs that objects, texts, photography and so on don't. What Vitamin P supplied, and what this book means to supplement, was an overview that never claimed to be a canon. It was never asserted that these were the hundred or so most interesting younger painters working today - merely that they were painters whom some people knowledgeable about the field considered interesting. For that very reason, it provided glimpses of the range of possibilities for contemporary painting, including possibilitie that might be mutually incompatible. This was something that was only possible because the book did not represent a single critic's viewpoint or even the consensus of a committee but rather the passions of some seventy nominators. Such a book could never presume to give the reader a formula to determine what authentic painting is (and isn't) in our time. It does not prescribe a style, a range of subject matter or a historical agenda for painting. But neither does it prescribe pluralism as a style in itself. 

Schwabsky acknowledges no limitation to the “range of possibilities” selected by “some people knowledgeable about the field” - so presumably it’s  the borders of that field  that exclude all the other kinds of art made today.

Where he sees a pluralism of ideas, I see an Intellectual mono-culture devoid of passion.

it does not contend that all these disparate things are good or that all are equal. It merely suggests that all these clashing proposals might be worth entertaining, and that, in undertaking such a task, readers will be sure to have the raw materials necessary to make up their own minds as to what painting can or can't or should or shouldn't do in our time.

I accept that museum staff must ask “ what painting can or can't or should or shouldn't do in our time.”. Their gallery space is limited.  But why should anyone else try to be exclusionary?  What can possibly be gained?  A sense of intellectual authority?

In place of the  aesthetic autarky once sought by a certain strand of modernism, the present seems as enamoured of free trade between artistic disciplines as it is of untrammeled exchange in the economic sphere. Painters are as interested in what their work shares with other cultural and subcultural pursuits as in what distinguishes it from all the rest.

To put it another way — In place of aesthetic demands, the present mainstream artworld is enamored with  ideas.

 These developments are hardly native to the new millennium. As I've pointed out, the idea of pluralism in art was already mooted decades ago. But it has gathered force in recent years, if only because the hold of classic modernist thinking on artists and critics has grown ever more tenuous. As a result, it has become difficult to get an overview of what painting is or can be today. This was already true when Vitamin P was published in 2002, by the way. That book had an immediate impact that was surprising even to those of us who had been involved in making it. Clearly, it answered a widely felt hunger. In particular, as someone who regularly visits art schools and university art departments, I could hardly help but notice that nearly every painting student - or rather (since these institutions no longer necessarily divide themselves into departments of painting, sculpture, print-making, new media, and so on) nearly every student who was making paintings - had a copy of it in his or (more likely) her studio. Naturally I had to ask myself why Vitamin P had been so enthusiastically received. Part of the reason, it seemed and still seems to me, was that the paucity of serious discussion of contemporary painting had, particularly but not only for students, led to a genuine sense of perplexity. A credible overview arrived as a relief. What made that overview possible was that, rather than trying to establish a single Olympian authority to create a synthesis, the selection process involved creating a dispersed network of nominators - it was crowd-sourced, so to speak. And the same is true here again. 

Nothing necessarily wrong with either a single Olympian authority or a thousand of them.  I would follow all or any of them  for as long as their choices feel like good ones. 

A crowd sourced catalog of contemporary painting might also be a good idea.  The Vitamin P crowd was vetted to only include those with status in the artworld.  No vetting at all might have yielded more interesting results.

 

As in any art, the meaning of a new work is relative to its position in relation to other works in the same field, past and present - its significance emerges on diachronic and synchronic planes. 

This is where I stand beside Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”.  Artworks themselves have no meaning, much as they may feel meaningful in one way or another to one person or another.

The significance that emerges from aesthetic experience is greater than whatever emerges from context - exceptions being printed currency, or artworks that function as such.  

I often hear the complaint that young painters have little grasp of history. In fact, I find the opposite is true; they have a better grasp of history than of the present state of the art. Young painters who have studied art formally may have a good general grasp of the history of the medium from the beginnings of modernism up to about, say, the 1960s, maybe even the 1980s, but after that it all tails off - at least in widely used, thematically organized sourcebooks such as Charles Harrison and Paul Wood's Art in Theory or Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz's Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Subsequently published histories like David Joselit's American Art Since 1945 or the massive Art Since 1900 by Hal Foster et al. merely codify the reigning prejudice that after Pop art and its German offshoot, the capitalist real-ism' of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, further developments in painting can be safely ignored. 

“Art in Theory”  is an anthology of 20th C. art writing. The title suggests that it favors theory over visual aesthetics - just as Schwabsky does. But allusions to aesthetic preference will probably be made anyway - just as in the following paragraph where aesthetic terms like “impressive” and “striking” are used. 

Reviewing Joselit's book for Bookforum in 2003, I regaled readers with a somewhat arbitrary multigenerational listing of some of the names that went entirely unmentioned in it: 'Alex Katz, Larry Poons, Vija Celmins, Malcolm Morley, Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, Leon Golub, Robert Colescott, Brice Marden, Sam Gilliam, Mary Heilmann, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Ross Bleckner, David Reed, Terry Winters, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jonathan Lasker, Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams, John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. Looking back now, I can only wonder why I didn't make my list even longer. But I could probably make an even more impressive and equally disparate list of international names that you won't find in the index to Art Since 1900, starting with Eugêne Leroy, Carol Rama, Carla Accardi, Raoul de Keyser, Lee Ufan, Rémy Zaugg, Martin Kippenberger, Marlene Dumas, Cheri Samba, Bernard Frize, Michael Krebber, Luc Tuymans, Takashi Murakami, Gary Hume, Peter Doig, Katharina Grosse and Beatriz Milhazes. 

If  omissions are important, shouldn’t we be told why?  Is it market value - critical reception,

 - personal preference for certain looks or ideas?  There may be no established limit for how many artists a survey can mention, but isn’t it still a zero sum game?  If some names are added, others  must be removed. If pluralism is desirable, why must all lists include what  Schwabsky wants them to have?  Let everyone make their own list. 

And the omission of names is not really relevant to what Joselit was doing.  In his preface, he says : “I have attempted to reframe canonical movements by indicating their position in a broader field of practices”. He’s making a map, not an inventory.  So it would be more appropriate to ask - what territories did he leave out?  (And actually there’s quite a few.)

Like my American roster, that's not a group whose members could please any one viewer equally, but it demonstrates the range of striking and influential figures working primarily or significantly with painting in recent decades; it would stand to reason that at least some of them ought to have been mentioned (even if only to be criticized) in considering the art of our time. 

Schwabsky does not offer even one sentence in this essay to justify keeping so many genres out of  the “Art of our time” as he knows it.  Contemporary mimetic portraiture, landscape , still life - are excluded with no explanation.

And aside from being left unapprised of some of the leading painters of the day and of the issues surrounding their work, readers of standard references on contemporary art might also find themselves puzzled as to why established artists primarily known as conceptualists so often seem to turn back to painting as a medium of expression - from first-generation conceptualists like Mel Bochne or Art & Language, who have been making paintings for decades now, to more recent converts such as David Hammons, Rodney Graham and Martin Creed. Clearly, painting continues to satisfy artistic needs that objects, texts, photography and so on don't. What Vitamin P supplied, and what this book means to supplement, was an overview that never claimed to be a canon. It was never asserted that these were the hundred or so most interesting younger painters working today - merely that they were painters whom some people knowledgeable about the field considered interesting. For that very reason, it provided glimpses of the range of possibilities for contemporary painting, including possibilitie: that might be mutually incompatible. This was some. thing that was only possible because the book did not represent a single critic's viewpoint or even the consensus of a committee but rather the passions o some seventy nominators. Such a book could never presume to give the reader a formula to determine what authentic painting is (and isn't) in our time. It does not prescribe a style, a range of subject matter or a historical agenda for painting. But neither does it prescribe pluralism as a style in itself. It doesn't contend that all these disparate things are good or that all are equal. It merely suggests that all these clashing proposals might be worth entertaining, and that, in undertaking such a task, readers will be sure to have the raw materials necessary to make up their own minds as to what painting can or can't or should or shouldn't do in our time. 

Why ask " what painting can or can't or should or shouldn't do in our time.?"  What might be the positive outcome of a correct answer?  Is such a determination even possible? Schwabsky expresses some anxiety about that below:

The question of the historicity of art, of what art has to do with the now, with today, is one of the most serious questions that criticism has to deal with, and one of the most urgent. 'The chance won't come again,' as Bob Dylan once sang. It also represents the greatest possible temptation to sheer superficiality - to futile trend-chasing. Remember the singer's advice: 'Don't speak too soon / For the wheel's still in spin. The movement of the now may be always on the verge of overwhelming us, but, by the same token, it never reveals itself until the last minute, until it's almost too late. And while the movement of present time may be enigmatic in itself, even more enigmatic is the relation to it of any art form, for art has its own unique course of development while at the same time being affected by a constellation of broader social, political and economic factors. Is it through its responsiveness to its context that an art embodies its time, or is it rather through the integrity with which it resists external pressure in order to follow through on its own internal logic? And, if the latter, is this internal development still somehow correlated to social developments, so that autonomous art nonetheless takes on a broader historical resonance - for free, as it were? This point often seems to be implied by the writings of, for instance, Frederic Jameson, or of Theodor Adorno, whose music criticism was based on the idea that 'the time that is immanent in all music, its inner historicity, is real historical time reflected phenomenally' ® But that seems too good to be true; it sounds like a way for the critic to act as if he could speak with the voice of history itself. Art criticism today, if not the art of painting itself, is still sufficiently woozy with its hangover from the ecstasies of modernism that it really might be wise not to 'speak too soon'.

A discussion of politics is inevitable if we ask "what art has to do with the now, with today” - so art gets judged politically.  But that becomes reductive of contemporary life as a whole.  I love the discussion of this Summer's blockbuster hit: The Odyssey.  But I can tell from the stills and the reviews that it's a movie I could not endure for more than five minutes. 

And with good reason. Everyone knows that for the last hundred years or so, in principle, anything can be art. It started with Marcel Duchamp, of course, but it didn't end there - and didn't really take effect.in a big way until the 1960s. If art can be a snow shovel or a urinal, then why shouldn't it be some live horses or dead cows, a tent, some newspapers piled up, or even an immaterial something possibly transmitted by telepathy between two people and inaccessible to anyone else? And if art can be any of those things, why, couldn't it also , be a painting? Maybe. But what kind of painting? Any kind, presumably. Figurative or abstract - in this view, it might not matter. But if figurative, for the sake of argument, then realism might be as good as fantasy or expressionism, classical technique as good as primitivism or faux naïveté , pompous allegory as good as nihilistic disdain for meaning or an engagement with the phenomenology of perception, the icons of commercial culture as good as objects of intimate personal significance. (Those last two might in any case be identical in practice.)

Sure wish he had pursued this skepticism concerning artworld preferences long enough to put a few nice landscapes into his book.  But if he were such a person, he would not have been hired to edit this survey.

  Abstraction, likewise, might be hard-edged or atmospheric, geometrical or gestural, systematic or intuitive, illusionistic or 'what you see is what you see'. It can limit itself to the monochrome or attempt to overwhelm the viewer with its structural complexities.

There are many ways to categorize non-representational painting.  I prefer categories that are psychological rather than technical. 

And it’s a bit surprising that after one hundred years, realism-abstraction remains the primary polarity of contemporary  painting.  What about celebratory/reactionary ?  Or private/public?  Or ethnic/universal? Or peaceful/disturbed?

 Let's look a little more closely at the commonplace dichotomy between abstraction and representation. Although many of the works in this book depict recognizable people and things, very few of the painters who made those works are engaged with representation in the classical sense - the art that dominated Western painting from the Renaissance through Impressionism and which still had significant proponents at the end of the twentieth century (Balthus, for example).

Ellen Altfest, The Back, 16 x 24, oil on canvas

 Among those in the book, Ellen Altfest still upholds this practice of reconstructing visible appearances through direct observation and not through the treatment of already mediated imagery, but she is one of the few. It should go without saying that those who paint from photographs or other forms of technically reproduced imagery are engaged in projects quite distinct from classical representation. 

If Classical representation is about anything more than a likeness achieved by direct observation, Altfest is apart from it as well.  Her interpretation of the subject is as joyless as the graphic qualities that present it.

Pure abstraction is more common than traditional representation, yet still less so than one might have expected even twenty years ago, when there was a notable resurgence of energy around abstract painting. 

As I scan Instagram for paintings, I’m attracted to more examples of  pure abstraction than anything else. But I’m looking for something quite different than Schwabsky. For example, his attraction to this:

Jacqueline Humphries, 72 x 78 “

Jacqueline Humphries was among those I saw then as great hopes for abstraction; it is interesting that she is reemerging now with renewed relevance. The strength of her recent paintings is evidenced, paradoxically, by the fact that they still speak of promise, of the pursuit of something glimpsed, rather than of mastery. 

When is promise unfulfilled better than promise realized?  Only when ideas trump aesthetics, and aesthetic enjoyment really doesn’t matter.

Of course, there are others too; Ida Ekblad, Richard Aldrich and Sarah Crowner show that abstract painting takes numerous forms today.

Sarah Crowner, 34 x 27

Ida Ekblad, untitled, 78 x 63”

Recent work

Richard Aldrich, Two Planes with text,  32 x 20 

Richard Aldrich, Craggy Face on the precipice, Recent work, oilwax on linen

Some of my favorite pieces in his catalog - but still hoping they look much better in person.

 But a great many contemporary painters work on the borderline between abstraction and images; this contested and highly porous boundary is in itself an object of great fascination. It's as if the potential for transition had become more urgent than identification with a fixed position. Mobility trumps rigour. More than in images or abstraction per se, there is a tremendous interest today in what the art historian Dario Gamboni has called 'potential images': 'those established - in the realm of the virtual - by the artist but dependent on the beholder for their realization. [...] Their property is to make the beholder aware - either painfully or enjoyably - of the active, subjective, nature of seeing." That is, seeing one thing rather than another is not a given; it is a commitment. And a form of painting that lays emphasis on this latent state of the image (which is also a latent state of abstraction) is one that throws back on the viewer the question of his or her own choice or predisposition in determining what to see. In particular, the whole phenomenon of 'painterliness' has a different value today than it did in the past.

Zhang Enli, White Tables and chairs, 98 x 98”

 In the work of painters such as Phoebe Unwin, Jules de Balincourt or Zhang Enli it functions less as a signifier of the individual artist's stylistic signature, or of emotional expression, or of the labour of making that would have been concealed by a smoothed-over high finish - though it can still be all of those - than as a way of allowing the painting to linger in the condition in which things are still unsettled, metamorphic, in transition. Many such artists seem determined to catch painting in an in-between state, a sort of amorphous lability in which any given mark can read as abstract or as image-bearing, depending on how you look at it. 

Perhaps this trick was interesting back in the early years of Abstract Expressionism.

In the above example, however, it’s also a salute to traditional Chinese mandarin culture and its pursuit of emptiness: an empty table with empty chairs, expressing  no feeling but awkwardness.  

Zhang Enli - Poetry and Wine Welcome the Tiger

Though this artist can be quite delightful when he wants to please a different mindset.

( above was commissioned by a high end liquor company)

G

Pierre Dorion, Sonnabend 1,  72 x 54”

 Then there are the painters whose work appears more abstract than it really is - particularly those who use the subject of architecture to rediscover abstract form, as Pierre Dorion, Josephine Halvorson and Martin Kobe do in very different ways;

Dorion paintings represent the walls of the white cube galleries where he'd like them to hang.  Clever - no?  But dreary nonetheless. 

Lesley Vance, 21 x 16

Lesley Vance

or those who use motifs from observed reality as starting points for paintings that might as well be abstract and yet retain something of the aroma of representation, as Lesley Vance does in her intense little paintings derived from still-life set-ups.

More elegant but less feisty than a local painter I’ve seen - Magalie Guerin.  Hopefully just as enjoyable in person.

Li Shutui, Lights no.78’. 55 x 55”

 Li Shurui's paintings may remind you of Op Art, but they are inspired by all sorts of artificial and natural light sources. 

Reminds me of Ed Paschke : electro visionary

Wendy White, exhibition view of Up w/Briquette

Meanwhile, artists such as Wendy White and Josh Smith explore the common ground (and the conflicts) between writing and pictorial mark-making - a different way of not painting entirely abstractly. 

Tauba Auerbach, Crumple IV, 80 x 60”

Tauba Auerbach's recent paintings, as Jens Hoffmann points out, look [...] like oversize photocopies' - that is, like reproduced images - but instead have been made using non-representational processes.

Dana Schultz

Karin Mamma Andersson , Who is sleeping on my pillow?,,  28 x 48”

Victor Man, Composition with pagan statue,  installation photo

Adrian Ghenie, The Hunted, 87 x 62”

Silke Otto- Knapp, White Lilac, 55 x 47”

Tala Madani, Panties, 15 x 12

Can you imagine wanting to see any of these paintings more than once? They eschew meaning as much as visual appeal.

 Still, it should be evident that if most of the salient painters of the 1990s were painters of images - Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Gary Hume, Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik - their influence has remained strong in the first decade of the new millennium. Younger painters such as Dana Schutz, Karin Mamma Andersson, Victor Man, Adrian Ghenie, Silke Otto-Knapp or Tala Madani continue to develop the idioms of contemporary image-based painting with extraordinary freshness and vigour. 

“Salient” implies a personal aesthetic reaction - as when a painting leaps out at you - capturing attention. But that’s not why Schwabsky is mentioning them is it?  These artists of the nineties are not much different from those who followed ten years later.

Everything goes, it would seem; or, as another great song of the 1960s had it, 'different strokes for different folks'. Well, isn't that a good thing? It appears that nothing and therefore no one is excluded from the happy realm of contemporary art, either as a producer or as a receiver. This is the era of what Boris Groys calls 'the logic of equal aesthetic rights'.  And yet exclusion - perhaps we could even say discrimination, in both the positive sense of discernment and the negative one of bias - seems to be central to the notion and practice of art. 'Art is always choosing, as Duchamp once insisted, and for that reason always entails excluding what has not been chosen. And this is as true of the enjoyment of art as it is of its making. If you walk through a series of galleries without periodically saying to yourself, 'No, not that, 'No, that's not so good either,' 'No, I don't need to look at this,' "No, no, no,' then your yeses will probably not mean very much to you and your pleasure will be merely mediocre.

Never thought I’d agree with DuChamps - but yes, art is about choosing.  That’s why negative art criticism can be so important.

 That is to say - and I think Groys would agree, though perhaps for different reasons - equal aesthetic rights are something that we are never quite prepared to put into practice even though the concept is foundational for artistic modernity. One's capacity for tolerance, let alone love or even just sincere interest, can never be infinite. The parallel lines of apparently incommensurable artistic aspirations may never meet within a given subjective structure of aesthetic judgment - that is to say, within any one person's taste. Or else you could say that they do meet but only in the infinitely extensive judgment and infinitely deep sympathy of God. In any case, never in the finitude of being human. And just as equal aesthetic rights exist but, as Kafka might have said, 'not for us', so it is the case that the predicament of this contradiction weighs upon all art, but not equally. It affects painting more than the rest. That's because painting is so familiar, so well-known. It is the default mode of art-making (and the usual form in which art is appreciated and marketed). 

It does appear that most of the artists in this survey first decided to make art - and then - by default - made paintings.  Driven by the question “ what is art?”, a compelling aesthetic is not a likely result.

The critic and poet Bill Berkson cites the figure of 'the Ordinary Artist'. He defines this as 'the one who just gets the job done. No sweat."° Elsewhere, Berkson speaks of a student who asked, 'Is it my goal to make art, or is it to contribute the next step in art-historic discourse?""' A very astute question, to which the only possible answer might be "Yes, of course. Both!' But really there is always going to be an emphasis on one side of the coin or the other, and the people who paint are setting out to be people who mean at least to make art, whether or not they make the next step in artistic discourse, whereas those who are determined at least to make the next step in the discourse, whether or not they do so by making any art, are not necessarily painters. In other words, the ordinary art made by the ordinary artist is likely to be painting. It's an art that meets its beholder on a plane of equality. It may be in this particular sort of ordinariness that the necessity and contemporaneity of painting now resides; it is in painting, more than in other, less deeply rooted artistic forms, that art can hope to succeed in the task Groys sees for it in the face of the onslaught of media imagery, to be 'where the visual vocabulary of the contemporary mass media can be critically compared to the art heritage of the previous epochs'," which in its totality is so much wider and deeper and full of possibilities for the future. 

“Ordinary art” does seem to apply to most of what’s in this book - as ordinary as any high school curriculum.   I don’t want a painting to “ meet me on a plane of equality”. I want it to be so much higher than I can ever reach.  I want it to fathom the unfathomable.  I need the extraordinary.

BTW. - I do enjoy an insightful critique of  mass media  - like Ezra Klein’s review of The Odyssey as "the political movie of the decade".    But as a critical comparison with the Art heritage,  a painting is literally quite dumb.

For me, and I think for many others, the ordinariness of painting has become one of its most important characteristics. It's where the much-cited modern project of linking art with everyday life continues to be worked out.

Everyday life was the subject of early modern painters like Manet, Van Gogh, and Cezanne, but there was nothing ordinary about their paintings.

 When a collection of Gerhard Richter's writings and interviews was first published in 1995, what was possibly the most resonant thing about it was not any of its particular contents, but its title: "The Daily Practice of Painting'. It's not necessarily through any particular subject matter that painting comes close to us, nor through the avoidance of it, but more likely through the evident manner of its doing. I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, as Claes Oldenburg famously said, 'that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. [...] I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.

Happily, the text of the  Richter book is available online. Here is an early quote:

  As soon as artistic activity turns into an 'ism' , it ceases to be artistic activity. To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and for survival. (By way of analogy: social concern is a form and a method that is currently seen as appropriate and right. But where it elevates itself into Socialism, an order and a dogma, then it loses its best and truest qualities and may turn criminal.)

 “art making”  seems as  important to Schwabsky’s artists  as a  “daily struggle for form” was to Richter.   They are hardly synonymous.  “Art” is currently a matter of theory - “form” is a matter of aesthetic if it’s not  an ideology like Formalism.  Richter is passionately anti-ideological.

 It's ironic that, when Oldenburg made that statement in 1961, it was a manifestation of a revolt against painting in favour of the new art of happenings and environments, whereas now, fifty years later, such art has become in many cases a form of entertainment, a distraction, a spectacle used to draw crowds to vast museum spaces like Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Meanwhile it's painting that keeps trying to draw us closer to a sense of our own daily lives and to whatever is political, erotic and mystical. This everyday art is more necessary than ever.

This final sentence is empty rhetoric - beyond hyperbole.  The paintings in this book may have been necessary to those who made or collected them -  but that's not a whole lot of people.  They certainly aren’t necessary for me - and actually - Schwabsky shares nothing about how they have been necessary to him either.  

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With the onslaught of black identity art , hopefully this will  be the last edition of Vitamin P to be focused on language instead of what it expresses - and on dysfunction instead of celebration.

Whatever the case - it’s the last one Schwabsky will edit.