A quiet crisis: is there a serious breakdown in the dialogue around contemporary painting? Should art critics get back into the business of making value judgments? - Issues & Commentary - painting and the past - Critical Essay

Art in America, March, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein

Painting and the Past

Forgetting the past, or keeping it safely quarantined or never having known it in the first place--much of what's wrong with contemporary painting is, I think, the result of people and institutions adopting those attitudes. "Wait a moment," some readers may cry, "isn't there a lot of historically informed painting being made today? Aren't artists doing all kinds of cultural archeology?"

Well, yes, but to remember the past, to really engage it, isn't simply a question of recycling some old styles, of recuperating, say, Photo-Realism in the manner of Richard Phillips and the recent Jeff Koons, revamping Color Field painting a la Monique Prieto (who really needs to answer to the ghost of Ray Parker) or behaving like one of the countless architecture-obsessed young painters who are channeling the palette and styles of early '70s graphic design. In a revivalist, remake-loving culture such as ours, there's nothing easier than playing the citation game. I'm talking about something else, something more on the order of looking at a painting made in 2002 by Brice Marden and asking how it stands up in terms of visual engagement against a canvas painted in 1952 by Joan Mitchell. Even more, I'm talking about Marden asking himself such a question, or Richard Prince wondering how one of his text-over-abstract-ground paintings compares to one of Archie Rand's "Letter Paintings" from ca. 1970, or Philip Taaffe pondering what would happen if one of his symmetry-obsessed canvases were hung alongside a multi-panel Norman Bluhm painting from the 1980s.

These are certainly questions that have occurred to me as I compare the seeming inexhaustibility of Mitchell's early work, its combination of painterly virtuosity and elusive gestalt, with what I feel to be the empty complexities of Marden's recent tangled-line paintings; as I reflect on how Taaffe's widely praised arrangements of repeating, layered decorative motifs seem underdeveloped, even lazy, in confrontation with Bluhm's architectonically nuanced experiments in symmetrical composition; as I make my choice between the dreary cynicism conveyed by slapping banal jokes over equally banal abstract fields (Prince) and the jubilant cultural realignment of inviting the names of countless jazz and R & B legends into a quirky version of Color Field painting (Rand). Of course, we all have our preferences in art and our own list of heroes and villains. What troubles me, however, is the feeling that I'm quite alone in making such comparisons--alone not merely because some of the bodies of work I'm using for comparison (Bluhm's and Rand's) have become marginalized, but because there is so little interest in making these kinds of qualitative, transgenerational match-ups, among observers, critics and artists alike.

Too few painters seem willing to get into the ring with great artists of the past, to really grapple with their strong predecessors. Instead, we have a lot of shadow boxing and influence without anxiety. Hats off to painters who do take up such challenges directly, as Lisa Yuskavage does with Bellini and Degas (albeit refracted through Playboy centerfolds), Jane Hammond with Oyvind Fahlstrom and Frida Kahlo, Richmond Burton in relation to Pollock and Matisse, Carroll Dunham with Guston, and Jonathan Lasker and Lydia Dona with practically the entire corpus of postwar abstraction. It almost seems as if such ambitions have become inappropriate or irrelevant, a kind of unnecessary encumbrance in an art world that tends to value speedy apprehension and the glamor of new technologies. Even among contemporaries, there's a general unwillingness to get into artistic tussles, or even dialogue.

As a result, new artists emerge, new bodies of work are shown, countless group exhibitions are touted as revelatory, to strangely little consequence. Styles change with seasonal predictability. No one articulates the grounds on which certain artists become famous and others are marginalized. If there were any kind of real dialogue, we would be discussing how Alex Katz and, posthumously, Martin Kippenberger have become the most influential painters of the moment, and what that might mean (more '70s nostalgia and the rediscovery of "Bad painting"? A newfound passion for autobiographical art?); we would not simply pay lip service to the stunning artistic achievement of Chuck Close over the last decade in his grand, retinally overcharged, mosaic portraits but recognize that he has set a new standard of ambition for contemporary painting; and simply be doing more to comprehend the unexpected explosion of interest in painting around the world. But almost no one seems to bother with such questions. Instead, everything seems to happen without explanation, as if the realm of contemporary art were simply following the rule of some natural order. There's no need to spell things out in today's art world, and in any case, value judgments and the quest for historical significance are so yesterday; it's all about spin, about discussing the artist's self-declared subject matter rather than hazarding any potentially invidious comparisons between one artist and another. More often than not, critical and curatorial activity consists largely of gathering works according to theme or genre.