Barry Schwabsky : Vitamin P3 Introduction

 Barry Schwabsky  : Vitamin P3 Introduction

New Trajectories

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This third edition of Vitamin P is different.

Newness is no longer restricted to  recent generations and  Barry Schwabsky is no longer the editor. That job went to Phaidon''s own team, ,Tom Melick and Rebecca Morrill.  He still writes the introduction but no longer accompanies it with chosen images. 

But he’s still on the defensive about painting - this time in response to the calumny of “ zombie formalism” - the term coined by Walter Robinson in his 2014 essay on Artspace :  “Flipping and the rise of Zombie Formalism”. This essay is much talked about on the internet, though the original text cannot be found there.

 Henry Taylor, Resting, 60 x 78, 2011

(This artist, though not this painting, was listed in this edition)

 It is a journalistic axiom: the reporter should not become part of the story. Unfortunately, this laudable maxim conflicts with what in physics is known as the 'observer effect': the only way to detect or measure something is by interacting with it and therefore necessarily having some effect on it, however minute. 

With this third installment of the VITAMIN P series, the books themselves have become part of the story that is being conveyed about the changing face of painting in the new millennium, though it's not a part l intend to exaggerate. But it is significant that the very methodology by which these books have been compiled - as much their specific contents in terms of the art included and the interpretations made of that art - has been recognized as typical of the times for the way the selection process has been, as it were, crowd-sourced, rather than representing the viewpoint of one central authority (whether an individual or even a committee). According to a prominent historian of literary theory, Vincent P. Leitch, this amounts to 'a postmodern project par excellence without the label. It encompasses many incompatible styles... testifying to twenty-first century proliferation as well as disaggregation in the arts."

Schwabsky made the same claim about "proliferation as well as disaggregation"  in P1 and P2 ,but I continue to see a monoculture of academic concerns mostly about semiotics and language.

 Leitch's summary of the present situation is suggestive in its understanding that seemingly contrary trends are not only simultaneously in force but actually complementary, that our contemporaneity is characterized by both 'a persistent disorganization of culture into separate spheres and the ubiquitous interaction, sometimes convergence, of the fields.  As a rough parallel, consider how in the political realm a dramatic rise in nationalism and sectarianism has accompanied the seemingly unstoppable tide of globalization and of its ideological correlate, the pensee unique of neoliberalism; neither trend is in itself entirely active or reactive, progressive or regressive. In terms of the arts, what this means is that painting, sculpture, poetry and so on can no longer hope to establish that 'autonomy' or 'autarchy" that the critic Clement Greenberg, for one, thought was the goal of the various arts under the conditions of modernity."

But only certain special “separate spheres” got included in this survey. Many are left out.

But nor is there any sign of that 'art in general' that seemed to be promised or inaugurated in the work of Marcel Duchamp and of the conceptual artists who followed up on his clues half a century later - at least according to the magisterial account of Belgian theorist Thierry de Duve.  Far from having confirmed itself as the one all-encompassing art, conceptual art has taken its place as one more genre among the others. Certain artists now function in a directorial mode, like managers of their own enterprises, executives who do not themselves lay hands on the materials in which their art is embodied but simply hand down instructions to be carried out by others - that said, oftentimes their works are the most dependent on fine craftsmanship. It's just that what's involved is not the artisanship of the signature artist but of the hired fabricators. (Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Ai Weiwei are just three of the most obvious examples.)" 

Back when museums of modern art were first built, they were about formal concerns much more than concept. But even though those priorities have now been reversed, museums of conceptual art have yet to appear. I doubt they ever will.

If contemporary arts - including painting - are neither autonomous nor 'general' but constantly separating and recombining, how do we map them out? It's a question of recognizing that the borders are fluid, rather than stable, so that today's overview might not match tomorrow's. That doesn't mean taking an ahistorical viewpoint and fetishizing the present. Quite the contrary, it means being careful not to mistake whatever emerges from the particular historical conjuncture for a representation of the essence or even the future of, in this case, painting. To those who want to maintain a Hegelian idea of history as an intelligible process towards a determinate aim, or telos, this may sound like an exit from history in its truest sense. So be it. In fact, the true sense of history remains unsettled, under contention. While we cannot claim that painting in recent years has either progressed towards or fallen away from some immanent goal of its own self-realization, it can be said that much has occurred in painting. In fact, from my perspective, the surprising fact is that the five years since the publication of VITAMIN P2 have been more ebullient, more eventful for this art than were the nine years that passed between the publication of VITAMIN P in 2002 and the appearance of P2 in 2011

  I’m not finding anything in P3 that could not have been made decades earlier.

In part, that eventfulness can be registered by way of an escalation of conflicting ideas about and within painting - a sure sign of the liveliness of any art being the degree to which it sparks dissensus which, following the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, we can define as not just a difference of opinion but more broadly as 'a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we sense something is given! This is the shared ground of the realms of politics and art - again, fields that are neither entirely distinct nor congruent, but whose boundaries are always being redrawn as they meet and diverge. As Rancière goes on to specify, 'Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions produce dissensus by hollowing out that "real" and multiplying it in a polemical way... It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done." 

Word salad.

When the VITAMIN P series began in 2002, what seemed most noteworthy to me was the dispute over whether the frame within which a painter's work should be received really was something that could be indicated by the word 'painting' or whether it had to be framed in terms of the broader category 'art’ . Today, although the category of painting has not been re-established as an entirely autonomous domain, disputes within that domain - about the trajectories that might be most productive and whose boundaries are now understood to be shifting and provisional or else blurred and indistinct - appear more dynamic. 

 Should the experience of painting be affected by how they’re talked sbout?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

One of the most animated discussions, at least in the United States, has been the ruckus over 'Zombie Formalism', a term popularized (if not invented) by Walter Robinson, a painter and writer who has been a mainstay of the New York art scene since at least 1973, when he co-founded the post-conceptual, proto-punk magazine Art-Rite. 

Walter Robinson, Lots of Paint, 2024

 (I wrote about his Chicago exhibition here )

Part of what makes the debate over zombie formalism interesting is the fact that while it takes the form of a debate about aesthetics (“formalism") it was set off by a concern about the market - in particular, a concern about what has been perceived as a new prevalence of 'flipping' in the market for works by emerging artists.It is not clear whether this has in reality become any more common; The New York Times concluded that 'the data indicate that contemporary works appearing at auction within three years of their creation are not coming to auction faster than in the past, and that such flipping remains very much the exception, not the rule." Nonetheless, spectacular phenomena, such as the May 2014 sale at auction for $125,000 of a canvas that had sold for $7,500 out of the artist's debut show less than a year earlier, turned many heads. At a time when economic inequality has been increasing exponentially - and giving rise to social moments intended to resist it - it is inevitable that old concerns about the intimacy of painting with the market should once again come to the fore. The difference today is that other forms of art no longer seem exempt from the same concerns, since their bureaucratic support structures are now so nakedly dependent on, and vulnerable to, the same neoliberal economy.

If  it’s been proven that “flipping” is just as rare today as it’s been in the past, how can  it make a discussion of form any more interesting?  And are the formal qualities of new high market art really that much worse than what came before?  This whole argument is just attention grabbing  fluff.

 While many observers were rightly suspicious of the market's heavy and very visible hand in the careers of a few young artists, and especially of its potential consequences for young men - mostly - who had shown no sign they could sustain careers at such a level in even the medium term, Robinson identified an aesthetic common to much of the new art being flipped and gave it a name. Unlike the names of Modernist movements that were invented by opponents as scathing takedowns and now survive as terms of honour - Impressionism, the Fauves, Cubism, and so on - 'zombie formalism' will most likely not live on in the history books. It is worth looking at now, though, as an index of post-millennial anxieties about painting and its relation to the market and the broader culture. The art-historical assumptions in Robinson's polemic 'Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism' are surprisingly shaky: he is right to associate the idea of formalism with the brilliant but ultimately wrong-headed critic Clement Greenberg, the rejection of whom 'was absolutely central to SoHo art conversation in those pre-Chelsea days' when Robinson came on the scene." He is wrong to imagine that Greenberg had 'championed' the early work of Frank Stella, and probably even more mistaken to think that the work of contemporary painters like Jacob Kassay and Lucien Smith accord with Greenberg's 'aesthetic’ principles. Nonetheless, Robinson's description of what gives paintings like those of Kassay or Smith their attraction is spot on:

 With their simple and direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, and can be said to say something basic about what painting is - about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings ... Finally, these pictures all have certain qualities - a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm - that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design." 

Sounds like a good description of Barnett Newman paintings as well.

Jacob Kassay, 2011, 49 x 178

Lucien Smith, Southampton Suite, 2013, each 108 x 84”

I would not travel to see these works, but if I had to wait somewhere they were hanging, I’d probably find them enjoyable.

Walter Robinson, Spin paintings

… as opposed to these annoying pieces by Robinson.

To a large extent, Robinson was perfectly placed to recognize these qualities because he had himself pioneered many of them, in the spin paintings he made in the mid-1980s (several years before Damien Hirst hit on the same idea. Zombie formalism - like Robinson's (or Hirst's) spin paintings - is a way of lending a conceptual allure to what would previously have been thought of as Colour Field painting or process painting, but without burdening it with too much intellectual content. The conceptual aspect is the application of a one-shot idea, fulfilling the maxim (from Sol LeWitt's 1967 essay 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art) that 'the idea becomes a machine that makes the art. Robinson, like others after him, became fascinated, for a while at least, with the notion that an actual rather than a metaphorical machine could become the executor: You want to make abstract paintings, but it's so difficult because you can't think of anything that seems original, he later recalled of his use of a spin machine. 'Suddenly the idea of using this machine, which everyone knows about, frees you totally. It's like this postmodern epiphany. You don't have to worry about being original!" One could say much the same of Lucien Smith's trouvaille of painting with a fire extinguisher, or Jaco Kassay's employment of an electroplating apparatu: except that the results are less various and surprisin than those provided by the spin machine. The charm of zombie abstraction is that it encompasses at once painting, an imitation of painting, a joke (or anyway a witty conceit about painting and a critique of painting and that it can be all these things at once because the removal of the artist's first-hand involvement allows his or her intention to become utterly ambiguous; the artwork's unique selling point is the extent to which the artist has arrived at an original tactic for evading originality. That this is a desire deeply embedded in artistic modernism can be shown, for instance, by Greenberg's praise of Jackson Pollock, back in 1948 for having (like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in their Cubist period, according to the critic) arrived at 'a style that, so to speak, feels for the painter and relieves him of the anguish and awkwardness of invention, leaving his gift free to function almost automatically'" That this was, in retrospect, so fantastically wrong about Pollock, whose 'anguish and awkwardness' would later have such tragic consequences, only highlights the idea's power as a fantasy, that of the perfect meshing of imaginative liberty and constrained mechanical activity. 

Machines making art?   How prescient!   Welcome to the new world of  artificial intelligence. Now that’s what I’d call “zombie art.”

Regarding the “ambiguity of artists intentions” - hopefully they are always so.  ( otherwise I would call it commercial art or propaganda)

This approach to art-making is pretty much guaranteed to provide diminishing aesthetic returns. For some commentators, such work really does portend the death of the creative spirit. According to the critic Jerry Saltz, for instance, the age of modernism has been one in which 'the most original work led the way, but suddenly, he continues, circa 2014: 

something's gone terribly awry.... An inversion has occurred. In today's greatly expanded art world and art market, artists making diluted art have the upper hand. A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by the market, and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends' wealthy friends, getting them to buy the same look-alike art." 

 Speculator collecting may be something new, but hasn’t a large swath of artistic production always been market driven?

Such paintings, says Saltz, are 

'decorator-friendly. looking spiffy amidst contemporary décor, but also, and perhaps more importantly, Net-friendly: tailor-made for instant digital distribution and viewing via jpeg on portable devices. It looks pretty much the same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collectors needn't see shows of this work, since it offers so little visual or material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see and get it fast, and then it doesn't change. There are no complex structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incongruities to come to terms with. It's frictionless, made for trade. Art as bitcoin."

(The full text  is found here )

Good contemporary painting does not necessarily need viewers to “come to terms with unique visual iconographies” or assimilate “complex structures”  But work that is incomprehensible and painful to see does need such extra effort - or leaps of faith - or to rely on the specialized expertise of gallerists or art critics like Saltz.

 Saltz's passionate and timely demand that painting should be a rich experiential encounter rather than a quantum of information sliding effortlessly and indifferently through the digital ether is one that I fully agree with. At the same time, it would be odd if the people who make and enjoy paintings were somehow to remain unaffected by something that has affected our culture as deeply as social media. Not only do these media change the way we perceive things, but they do so in part by changing the way perception is distributed - who is perceiving what. There is a kind of multiplication of views. What the critic Lawrence Alloway understood fifty years ago, when what he called 'the communication network' in which art is implicated was far simpler and slower than that which we experience today, is all the more true now: We are all looped together in a new and unsettled connectivity" Reproductions, whether in printed or digital form, cannot replace the painting they reproduce, but they do, as Alloway reminds us (against the conservative tendency to deplore their very existence as a snare), 'widen our comparative knowledge of art!”

Online  reproductions can also provoke a “rich, experiental encounter” - though I would never call the reproduction of a painting a “quantum of information” unless it was intended to be nothing more (i.e. conceptual art)

Here are the examples of “zombie formalisms” or “crapstraction” that Saltz provided:

None of the above thumbnails provoke my interest as well.

… and even the larger images leave me cold.

So I’m agreeing with Saltz here.

And applaud him for showing what he does not  like.

That’s highly unusual for a published art critic to do.

By way of contrast, here’s  the kind of thing that the Instagram algorithm predicts will interest me, based on the artists I follow and pieces I’ve liked.  

 I do sense  some inner life here that the “zombies” do not have.

These artists are acting like industrious junior post­modernist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction, deploying visual signals of Suprematism, color-field painting, minimalism, post-minimalism, Italian Arte Povera, Japanese Mono-ha, process art, modified action painting, all gesturing toward guys like Polke, Richter, Warhol, Wool, Prince, Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Sergej Jensen, and Michael Krebber. ,

It’s art-historical clear-­cutting, aesthetic monoculture with no aesthetic biodiversity. This is not painting but semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s work, recently called “established postmodern praxis.”

I agree - but would include most of the Vitamin P painters in that monoculture as well - as well as everyone on Saltz’s list including the ones I like ( Oehlen and Richter. )

There's an irony embedded in the fact that Saltz's heartfelt attack on zombie formalism - which, he admits, even includes some work that he likes - is accompanied online by a slide show intended to prove his contention that too much contemporary painting looks too much alike. A succession of tiny thumbnails is actually more effective as evidence that you have to see the paintings in person to know what significant characteristics they share, if any, than that the paintings really have anything in common. Besides, one can imagine seeing a similar slide show of, say, quattrocento Madonnas, seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes or nineteenth-century French landscapes and being asked, 'Don't they all look alike?' The fact is that in this form the works in each category would all look very similar. One would have to see them in person to discern - assuming a sufficient level of knowledge - which Madonna is by Bellini and which is by an also-ran, which genre painting is a Vermeer, which landscape a Corot. What Saltz should really be complaining about is the fact that years of becoming habituated to an art world ecology in which each artist cultivates some distinct signature device (say Mark Rothko's rectangular clouds of colour, Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots or Christopher Wool's stencilled block letters) to immediately distinguish his or her work from that of his or her peers, has left us relatively poor in connoisseurship. The paintings are different enough, only we've become too dull to see it. 

An interesting discussion - because, as already noted,  I agree with Saltz that “too much contemporary painting looks alike” - while I disagree that a piece by Bellini, Vermeer, or Corot must be seen in person to be identified as such.  Even small thumbnail of those great artists  would make me want to see more.

 BTW - Here is an  example of a Corot drawing - where the fake looks better than the original. For cash value, the tepid Corot original is worth thousands - the superior copy is worth almost nothing. Art  museums today are way more concerned with authenticity than aesthetics. 

In any case, another New York-based writer, Howard Hurst, soon posed the essential question: Who Has the Cure for "Zombie Formalism?" 

I doubt there is a cure for “zombie formalism” ( or zombie figurative, for that matter).  But at least  gatekeepers can keep it out of art museums, if they have been trained and selected for aesthetic awareness rather than conceptual conformity or agility. That runs counter to European academic values going back to Charles LeBrun , however, so it may be a pipe dream for many centuries to come.

Below, Schwabsky suggests that we need artists to mature - so they have time to outgrow it. Whatever. Including older artists is a good thing - but mostly because artworld recognition comes later for some than others.  I’m glad that this edition is less concerned with age.

The clue, as it turns out, lies 'with the idea that it takes years, possibly decades for an artist to mature, and that it's impossible to make every painting successful'" The cohort of painters who have made it into this third iteration of VITAMIN P - that is, the painters who've been recognized by a certain number of the critics, curators, and fellow artists who've served as nominators for this volume - suggests that today there is stronger backing for Hurst's faith in persistence and maturity as elements in the artistic equation than there has been for many years. Look back to 2002, when VITAMIN P was published: at that time, few of the 114 emerging painters included in the book were over forty years old, and only two (fifty-one years old at the time of publishing), Bhupen Khakhar in 1934 (sixty-eight years old). VITAMIN P2 arrived nine years later, in 2011. This time, there was a good handful of artists in their early-to-mid-fifties - Stephen Bush, Pierre Dorion, Merlin James, Jutta Koether, Surendran Nair, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl - but still only two who were significantly older, Carmen Herrera (born in 1915) and Nalini Malani (born in 1946). This time around, on the other hand, there has been a real redistribution, a change in the ratio of young, middle-aged, and elder artists whom knowledgeable observers believe have 'emerged' on the international scene in recent years. This time, artists over fifty would be those born in 1965 or earlier. Again, the volume includes a number of artists in their fifties - Dexter Dalwood, Mark Flood, Fernanda Gomes, Yunhee Min, Raul Recio, Henry Taylor - but in contrast to 2002, when there was just one artist any older than that, and to 2011 when there were two, in 2016, VITAMIN P3 includes as many as fifteen artists who are in their sixties through to their nineties: Etel Adnan, McArthur Binion, Juan José Cambre, Mary Corse, David Diao, Peter Dreher, Mernet Larsen, Chris Martin, Marwan, Donald Moffett, Michael Simpson, Arpita Singh, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten and Rose Wylie. By contrast, the young artists most often associated with the label 'zombie formalism' are nowhere to be seen." Indeed the most cursory of glances through the pages of this book reveals the strength of figurative painting made by artists of all ages, as well as approaches to abstraction that are far removed from those of the 'zombies. 

Cannot see how Mary Course , included in this edition, is somehow less of a zombie formalist than Jacob Kassay.  I’ve listed all the abstract painters in P3 at the end of this post. 

What does it mean that the art world is suddenly discovering (or rediscovering) so many artists who have been quietly working away, not in isolation by any means, but with less attention than they deserve? This is not something that is exclusive to painting. There has been a widespread impulse to comb through the archives and explore the peripheries to re-evaluate conceptual art, performance, video art and photography of the last fifty years, as well as painting. It seems to have something to do with a feeling that we may have prematurely settled on a late-modern canon, that the byways of art in the postwar era, and especially since the revolts and rebellions, encompass many more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and that some of these can be of incalculable aesthetic value. 

Has there really been an uptick in the re-evaluation of older artists ?  That would be nice - but since no kind of verification accompanies this assertion, I doubt any exists.  This is just more hot air.

It's no acciden that the greater proportion of the elder artists in this compilation are women, people of colour, or from places marginal to the main axes of the US/Western European art system. I don't think it's wrong to speak of a general awakening to the injustice in the way in which such artists have been sidelined by critics, art historians and the gallery world, despite the evident quality of their art. But that's not all. Beyond the yearning to redress former wrongs as well as to enjoy the untasted pleasures that the work of unfairly overlooked artists can offer, there seems to be a deeper, more inchoate desire at work. It's the feeling, I think, of having taken a false route into the future - of needing to retrace one's steps and see where the untaken forks in the road might lead. An astonishing number of major exhibitions in recent years have half-forgone the conventional task of biennales and similar shows, namely to report on the situation of art in the present by showing recent works, with the at-least-implicit rejoinder that, these days, the only way to report on the present is to rake through the past. And not only. are the curators looking to the past for signs of the present; so are many artists. They have re-envisione themselves as something more like collectors, curato or archivists than makers. In reviewing one of those shows, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, it became clear to me that this was not only nostalgia or postmoder pastiche - though there's still plenty of that around too - and that 'this is more than just retro styling. There must be a terrible feeling abroad that no one but an artist is going to salvage any sense of memor and that since, as Walter Benjamin put it, "the past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption", our stubborn present-mindedness may represent the loss of some last chance.? By immersing ourselves in the works of elder artists whose practices and histories are relatively unfamiliar - not yet over-interpreted or canonized, and more than just another spin on familiar ideas - we put ourselves in the curious position of listening to messages that are new and old at once, immediate and yet from a depth. Our sense of the consistency of the present is shaken, at least a little. For 150 years or more, cultural progress has been built on the belief that our destiny was zooming on a straight course into the future. Today, the path doesn't seem so straight. Painting itself is an old and - it has been repeatedly claimed - outmoded way of making art. So many new art-making technologies would seem to have pushed it into the slow lane. But just as we now feel more willing than we have been for decades to open our eyes to the works of artists who have taken the time to let their work ripen, we should also be more willing to see whether long-familiar modes of artmaking still have secrets to reveal with some bearing on the future, clues to our new trajectories. So let's take another look at what the painters can accomplish.

Better yet, let's allow that conceptual projects are as different from aesthetic painting as fantasy football is from the game that's played in stadiums. Each should be judged on their own terms and fill separate books with their achievements.

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In my discussions of P1 and P2, I showed images of the pieces shown by those books.

But here are my chosen favorites of what the artists have online.

Stanley Whitney, b. 1946

Stanley Witney, 2024 to 2026

Throbs with a love of life.

I could live with any these

(If I could afford them)

Julia Rommel. ( b. 1980). Morrocan Boy

Cool and meditative 

More decorative than expressive 

but definitely not crapstraction

Maria Taniguchi, b. 1981

An enjoyable contrast 

though not s piece i would travel to see

MacArthur Binion, b, 1946’

Probably  more engaging in person,

but maybe not 

Serge Alain  Nitegeka, b. 1983,,Barricade, 78 x 99 “

A strife that’s too dynamic/disorienting to be European

 

Yunhee Min, b. 1962, Up close in distance, enamel on glass, 2018, 31x 26’

Aggressively,  sensually alluring

Joe Bradley, b. 1975, Country Heel, 2025

The comforting, exciting, clumsy world of children.

Helena Popova, b. 1961, 2013, 30 x 22

Dull enough to be zombified

Sarah Cain, b. 1961,  SF Rays, 2017

An exciting day in the city

Matt Connors, b. 1973, Location in English,  2020, 23x 20

The colors are having a party

Mary Corse, b. 1945, 2022

Defiantly boring

Even zombies have more life

Jennie C. Jones, b. 1968

Might be more engaging in person 

Gray enjoys hints of yellow 

Prabhavathi Meppavil, b. 1965

Might be meditative 

Ulrike Muller, b. 1971, Some, 2017, 15 x 12”

Nice variation on a yin-yang symbol

Ulrike Muller, 2017

Good for the cabin of a yacht

Dexter Dalwood, b. 1960, The Crash, 2008,  59 x 81”

Unsettling but beautiful 

A vision that’s more than just clever composition

Elizabeth Mcintosh, b. 1967

Cheerful, disruptive,  and goofy play with grids.

Elizabeth McIntosh, Dazzle, 61 x 69

Well named

Elizabeth Neel, b. 1975, March to May, 2024, 61 x 79”

Elegance.

A calligraphic event that seems to have lasted for weeks

Julia Dault,  b. 1977,The Comet, 2014, 44 x 36”

Possibly quite delightful in person

David Diao, b. 1943

Love this guy.

Perfect for a daycare center

Makes me wish I had young children

Julia Rommel, b. 1980,  Suburban Kids,  39 x 31, 2019

Very nice arrangement I could live with

Julia Rommel, 2019

Mary Ramsden, b. 1984,  Icon 6,  2019,13 x 10

The exciting attack of the border against the center

 

Mary Ramsden, Wall Up, 2019, 79 x 102” 

So much wanton humor and diversion 

Amy Sillman,b. 1955,  Split 2, 2020, 72 x 60”

Really like the indefatigable Ms Sillman,

 wrote about her here

Here’s what she has to say on the MOMA website:

I was trained in the 70s when the goal of making art was to question the art that you were making while you were making it. We weren’t even supposed to be making paintings so the only way to make a painting in that decade in that environment was to unmake the painting while making the painting. I grew up in the time where a certain kind of struggle and dissatisfaction and desire to sort and keep pushing and overturning something that’s beautiful right away was the goal of how I was trained and also in a way how I would naturally approach anything as a material criticality or a material questioning - to always not know what the thing should be. It’s partly analytic process and a partly irrational process or responsive or almost instinctual process where you may undo something or refined something or make something tenser where you’re seeing what’s appearing before you and then you’re trying to push it somewhere. The longer I’ve been making paintings in this slow developmental way the more I realize that what I’ve been interested in partly is always the issue of time, that the work changes and changes and changes and changes again and that the real idea behind making a painting is not to make a static image or to stay with that image, but to change it and the pleasure of seeing it change is partly the pleasure of painting. It’s a kind of film, but only for one person because the viewers only see the final scene 

Sounds like a good exercise for art students - but apparently it’s still how Sillman works - and as she says,  the viewer only gets to see the final scene. 

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P3 is my favorite volume so far in the series, -  probably because I ignored images in the book, and made some effort to search online for something better.

Here are the older artists that I liked:

David Diao, b. 1943

Stanley Whitney, b. 1946

Amy Sillman,b. 1955,

Henry Taylor, b. 1958

Dexter Dalwood, b. 1960,

Sarah Cain, b. 1961

Yunhee Min, b. 1962,

  Elizabeth Mcintosh, b. 1967

…so I appreciate that this series is now including earlier generations - though it doesn’t seem to have helped with selecting  figurative painting except for Henry Taylor.

“Zombie formalism” , as identified by Jerry Saltz,  does seem like an insightful critique of one corner of the artworld that I think has been around at least since Cubism proliferated beyond Picasso and Braque. Many buyers want things that are identifiable as new, progressive, cutting edge- but also are pleasant and decorative.  Others want pieces that look nasty, and that’s not really any better. It’s good that art critics occasionally offer biting aesthetic judgments.

But even if old is now OK - non dysfunctional representations of people or the world are still excluded. And the series still calls itself “NEW  trajectories”

Hopefully future editions will cast an even wider net to hunt for what's visually exciting instead of what's new.

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 

**************************

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
• Vitamin P2, 2011

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 - and typical of the artists he selected.

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 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 thrill, passion and conviction.

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.