Painting, History and Meaning

Craig Staff

Description

This compelling new study considers contemporary painting’s relationship with time and with events, ideas and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past.

A unique examination of the relationship that contemporary painting has with history and historical material, Painting, History and Meaning is a timely response to, and discussion of, how contemporary painters and artists have addressed a significant area of concern for both practitioners and theorists in recent years.  

Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between painting and history.

Primary readership will be the fine art academic community, art and painting practitioners, scholars and academics. Will appeal to second and third year undergraduate and postgraduate students of fine art and art  history. Of interest to students of cultural studies, history, curatorial studies and continental philosophy, and to those in the visual arts wanting to develop their understanding of contemporary art.

 

 

 

Introduction

More Memory and More Future

Perpetuating Modernism

Of Absent Bodies

Painting Anachronistically

Re-siting Painting

Bibliography

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Peinture
• Art Plastique
• Arts plastiques
• Techniques
• History of art
• Painting
• Art
• History
• Technique

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 06 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781789383300
• Langue: English

Extrait

Painting, History and Meaning
Painting, History and Meaning
Sites of Time
Craig Staff
First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
In memory of Judith Ann Nosworthy
1931-2020
Contents
Figures
Introduction
1. More Memory and More Future
2. Perpetuating Modernism
3. Of Absent Bodies
4. Painting Anachronistically
5. Re-siting Painting
Plates
Bibliography
Index
Figures Figure 1 : Helen Johnson, Warm Ties. Figure 2 : Joseph Wright, The Corinthian Maid. Figure 3 : Benozzo Gozzoli, The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Figure 4 : Robbie Barrat, AI Generated Nude Portrait. Figure 5 : Pat Steir, The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style) Polychrome. Figure 6 : Cheyney Thompson, Chromachrome. Figure 7 : A. H. Munsell, Scale of Hues. Figure 8 : Tomma Abts, L r. Figure 9 : Dana Schutz, Open Casket. Figure 10 : Gerhard Richter, Tote. Figure 11 : Maria Lali , History Painting. Blue. Figure 12 : Johannes Phokela, Ides of March. Figure 13 : Dutch Room, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Figure 14 : Louise Lawler, How Many Pictures. Figure 15 : Taus Makhacheva, Tightrope. Figure 16 : Cornelius Nortbetus Gijsbrechts, The Reverse of a Framed Painting.
Introduction

Whenever we are before the image, we are before time . 1
The exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 14 th December 2014 used the science fiction writer William Gibson's notion of a-temporality to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn't represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. 2 Through this interpretive lens, the

profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles [ ] sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20 th -century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre [ ]. 3
Echoing such tendentious artistic strategies, Laura Hoptman, writing in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition would claim that what attracts artists to painting at a time when digital technology offers seemingly limitless options with less art-historical baggage is precisely its art historical baggage [ ]. 4 As Hoptman's contention denotes, it would appear that the ecologies of painting today are such that questions of the object's temporality and its relationship to the past or perhaps, more specifically, a past, are for both practitioners and critics alike, a key area of focus.
To begin to unpack why such a concern has recently gained a measure of critical purchase, one would perhaps first have to acknowledge the dissolution of modernist temporalities that were premised on a linear conception of time. For example, writing in an article in Artforum in 1972, Rosalind Krauss compares the historical progression of the modernist artwork to:

a series of rooms en filade. Within each room the individual artist explored, to the limits of his experience and his formal intelligence, the separate constituents of his medium. The effect of his pictorial act was to open simultaneously the door to the next space and close our access to the one behind him. The shape and dimensions of the new space were discovered by the next pictorial act; the only thing about that unstable position that was clearly determined beforehand was its point of entrance. 5
Conversely, no longer beholden to a modernist teleology that promulgated the work of art as being necessarily bound up with a trajectory of aesthetic progression, postmodernism arrested the historical advance of the object. According to Thomas McEvilley:

The formalist view of art as a series of historically necessary developmental sequences was more than discredited; insofar as it had functioned as a kind of cover story for the claim of the superiority of Western culture and the centrality of its history within the whole, that view of art came to seem not merely misguided but positively harmful and, in puritanical abreaction, a kind of force of evil. 6
One corollary of postmodernism privileging historical discontinuity was the tendency for it to adopt a number of appropriationist strategies that worked with any number of styles derived from any number of historical moments. By foregrounding pluralism (as opposed to the uniqueness of the modernist artifact), the claim that there could be a dominant style became increasingly contested. 7
As a way to counter the malaise that postmodernism had originally engendered, certain thinkers have more recently turned toward the concept of anachronism as the means by which the effects of time can be harnessed. In certain respects, anachronism as a key strategy with regard to thinking about time and the work of art provides a third way between the linear model of time associated with modernism and the ostensible temporal arbitrariness brought about by postmodernism's leveling out of various styles. Moreover, and as Keith Moxey has noted:

In weaving what has been with what is, [anachronism offers] us a different conception of time no longer dominated by the linear progression with which art history is so familiar, but one that instead erases the distinction between the observer, on one side of time, and the epoch in which the work was created, on the other. The texture of the past is threaded through an account of the work's reception in the present. 8
Although the relationship between anachronism and contemporary painting will be considered in closer detail within Chapter 4, at the very least it would appear to be the case that not only do instances of contemporary painting configure time differently, painters have different ways, so to speak, of telling the time. For example, beyond the tacit conviction directed toward painting's continued vitality, one salient aspect of Frieze 's article of 2013 8 Painters on Painting was the acknowledgment of the connections individual practices have to art historical precedent. Whether it's Imran Quresh's discussion around miniature painting, Helen Johnson's so-called art-historical conversation with some strategies of postwar German painting, or Henry Taylor's own conversation with the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, to talk of painting today is at the same moment to converse with painting of the past. 9 Johnson, for her part acknowledges a connection with

some strategies of postwar German painting because I think they can be of use in Australia today as a means of addressing this country's fraught and unresolved relationship to history since colonization: for instance, the paintings Martin Kippenberger produced during the mid-80s, when he mobilized painting's complexities in the service of a broader cultural critique. In an Australian context, I see these sorts of strategies in the work of Juan Davila, Geoff Lowe/A Constructed World, Raquel Ormella, and Kate Smith, for example. 10
However, rather than kinship, the artist Mark Sadler acknowledges that the act of painting is a

competition with painters of the past [ ]. You confront art history attempting to do something almost impossible: to interrupt its voracious flow with your own subjective sense of the world hoping to obtain a result that will feel active and not subservient to the past. 11
Although Hoptman's contention was squarely aimed at the medium's proclivity to harness and reimagine aspects derived from painting's history, the temporalities that inhabit painting necessarily exceed those that are bound up with the aesthetic development of the medium. To this end, Marlene Dumas, Dexter Dalwood, Luc Tuymans, and Wang Xingwei have all produced works that seek to engage with events drawn from particular historical moments, be they cultural, political, or otherwise.
In one respect, the examples presented within the five chapters that follow rehearse and in certain respects are premised upon a process wherein, according to Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, two points on a chronological timeline are pulled together until they meet. 12 However, while Nagel and Wood construe such stitching through time with regard to the life (or afterlife) of artifacts, the participation of the past within the present tense of painting can also be discerned with respect to the artifact's or painting's manufacture. To this end, mark making itself has a temporality if we concede that individual brushstrokes have a speed. To this end, they might be applied in rapid succession or arrive at their destination, namely the painting's support, through measured deliberation, if not hesitancy. For that matter, while a painting might be finished in one sitting, it might equally take many months, even years to complete. The latter of the two approaches is certainly applicable to one of the artists we will consider in the second chapter. As James Rondeau has observed with regard to the working m