Thinking through painting: Reflexivity and agency beyond the canvas

Although this is a diminutive volume it is densely packed. While I have been thinking a lot about post-digital art lately, I haven’t looked very much at painting. This new-found interest has in part been inspired by my turn to painting during lock down and the sometimes physical need to apply paint to paper as a means of release. The concepts in the book come thick and fast and I suspect it will warrant several readings to unearth them all.

‘Thinking through Painting’ (Graw et al., 2012) is divided into two parts with Peter Geimer reviewing painting and atrocity, followed by Isabelle Graw on the value of painting. I do wonder why the chapters are that way around, I think Graw’s more wide-ranging proposals would have served as a useful opener. I suspect actually attending the conference from which the papers have derived would also have given more context. At the end of the sections each author poses the other questions about their respective pieces. I like the sense of dialogue this creates and think it could have been longer.

…contemporary painting is marked by a notion of constant transition rather than stasis. Instead of constituting self-contained entities, painterly works explicitly establish relations to the broader social, technological, and economic networks within which they come into existence and circulate. (Graw et al., 2012: 11)

Given all my recent reading around New Aesthetic and Neomateriality it is curious to think about painting as a networked technology in its own right. The early part of Geimer’s chapter focuses on the work of Wilhelm Sasnal, an artist who makes works in response to media photographs and other imagery. It has been argued that these are ‘pictures about picture making.’ (Germer, 1999) In this vein Geimer also refers to the works of Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Halley, David Salle and Ross Bleckner. In each case it could be argued that the meaning of the work goes beyond the canvas.

Moving on to Luc Tuymans from Sasnal, Geimer points out that in his view Tuyman’s paintings do not reproduce the source photograph but ‘work against the spatial logic of both.’ There is a suggestion that with these forms it might be better to replace the title of ‘painter’ with that of ‘artist.’(Graw et al., 2012: 22) The text highlights a question about whether this combination of mediums nullifies the original photograph or indeed gives it a new vitality.

Using ‘Der Architekt’ as an example Geimer shows its initial banality until it is linked with the fact that this was Hitler’s architect and Minister of Armaments. Developed from a film still, highlights the metaphorical nature of the painting and inquires as to whether the painting’s reflexive and aesthetic potential can be attained. This intermingling of mediums also raises a question of hierarchies and whether one is regarded as superior to another.

The section moves onto another image “Gaskamer,’ that was based on a watercolour made by the artist at the former Dachau concentration camp. In this instance it is the relationship between the image and its title that evokes meaning, for at first glance it looks like little more than a desolate, empty room.

Geimer uses this as a mechanism to discuss issues of what is representable and quotes views that argue for and against what can be represented. Tuyman’s work, it is argued, is therefore about the ‘representability of horror rather than its representation.’ (Graw et al., 2012: 33) It put me in mind of the debate about ‘aftermath’ photography, where it is not the event itself that is captured but the remnants, which then stand metaphorically for the act of horror.

The stronger the removal of meaning is visually evident, the more emphatic the search for profundity becomes. (Graw et al., 2012: 39)

He makes an interesting point about ambiguity in artworks not being a given and that it is something that must be consciously produced. The finishing point seems to be that reflexivity and self-reflexivity in painting has not been fully covered to date and is worthy of more exploration.

The value of painting: notes on unspecificity, indexicality, highly valuable quasi-persons

Painting has long since left its ancestral home – that is, the picture on the canvas – and is now omnipresent, as it were, and at work in other art forms as well.

This opens up a philosophical debate about whether painting is medium, technique, genre, procedure or institution. Graw proposes that painting is highly personalised semiotic activity that encompasses the bond between person and product.

Graw takes this thinking through several stages:

1. Expanded notion of painting: definitions of painting are now problematic as the modernist notion based on medium has lost its relevance. Graw talks about different media interacting and informing each other in a process of ‘re-mediatization’ and cites the work of Jeff Walls, Wolfgang Tilmans and Rauschenberg
2. Goodbye to medium specificity:  Conceptual art practices shifted the norms and conventions of painting, but such contestation goes further back e.g. Picabia’s Natures Mortes. She acknowledges that artists may assign medium specificity at the level of production but that this does not make it a norm
3. Painting and indexicality: strong bond between product and the (absent) person of the maker. The argumentation being that this highlights indexicality because of the physical connection. Photography has traditionally been associated with semiotics and indexicality but Graw is proposing that it is even strong in painting, ‘someone has left her marks.’ Even in more recent mechanical productions, such as those by Wade Guyton, there is a ‘sense of the latent presence of the artist.’ (Graw et al., 2012: 51)
4. Painting as a thinking subject: linked to Hegel’s view of painting having a subjectivity. As Graw puts it ‘we see in paintings what is at work and what is operative in ourselves.’ (Graw et al., 2012: 53) this gives rise to the question about whether paintings are able to think, paintings are indeed producers of discourse, but I wonder if it is a step too far to suggest they are able to come to their own insights
5. Painting as a highly valuable quasi person: for a painting to have a value it has to have a provenance and that should link it to the artist, a person. Painting could be said to satisfy the ‘longing for substance in value.’ (Graw et al., 2012: 54) Graw links it to Marxist notions for value wherein it is a purely social phenomenon. Value also represents human labour. In painting the labour is not hidden but evident – it is visible through its surface and its gestures.

Painting’s capacity to appear particularly saturated with the lifetime of its author makes it the ideal candidate for value production. (Graw et al., 2012: 56)

Much of this notion of painting having agency is not new, and many artists have described the experience of the painting telling them what to do. Claiming agency, it appears, has now become intertwined with notions of value.

All artworks can be described as ‘indexes of agency.’ (Graw et al., 2012: 63)

The point that caught my attention is the notion that painting is now removed from the pressure of its own justification. I would agree with the need to keep discussing painting as a ‘constellation of problems.’ (Graw et al., 2012: 64)

References

GERMER, S. 1999. Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten. Zum Umgang mit deutscher Geschichte bei Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorf und Gerhard Richter. Germeriana. Unverdffentlichte oder iibersetzte Schriften von Stefan Germer zur zeitgendssischen und modernen Kunst, 39-55.

GRAW, I., BIRNBAUM, D. & HIRSCH, N. 2012. Thinking through painting: Reflexivity and agency beyond the canvas, Sternberg Press.