Cliché and a lack of feeling: Richard Shiff explains why critics have failed painting

Cliché and a lack of feeling: Richard Shiff explains why critics have failed painting

Painting lives on, but the critical terms stagnate and slacken, the art historian says

Painting is back in style. At the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the exhibition New York Painting (until 30 August)

looks at the work of 11 contemporary artists based in the city, including Eddie Martinez and Antek

Walczak, who are part of the medium’s “recent return to cultural acclaim,” in the words of the art

historian Richard Shiff. Yet critics, who often insist on comprehensiveness, have failed to take

into account the raw power of individual pictures, Shiff argues. In the below essay, which is an
adapted version of his catalogue entry for the exhibition, Shiff surveys the terrain of criticism
and explains why critics have been remiss.

Jack Whitten, Prime Mover (1974). Courtesy the artist.

Repetition and cliché infect art criticism. The art historian Thierry de Duve noted an
irony in 2003: “About once every five years, the death of painting is announced,
invariably followed by the news of its resurrection.”

Like history, criticism is subject to optics—that is, perspective. Critics once opposed
photography to painting, as if the two media were representative of antithetical
psychologies and social orders. This perspective lies within the penumbra of Walter
Benjamin, who associated painting with focused
concentration and photography and film with disruptive distraction. But photography,
film and video are productive technological aids for painters, as are copiers and computers
. Few of us today balk at the juxtaposition
of hand-drawing and digital printing. Each can be manipulated to resemble the other—or
not. It remains an artist’s choice, refined or sometimes reversed in response to
immediate sensation. Critics, with their
comprehensive concepts, shield themselves from such experiential disorder.

The problem is optical: two parties, critics and artists, look past each other with
incompatible expectations. Art critics often typecast painters as committed
“modernists” and, what is worse, “formalists.” But even Clement Greenberg,
who has been maligned for his rigid evaluative standards,
warned of applying conceptual order to aesthetic judgment. Few listened when he
said it: “There’s no theory. No morality.” Feeling comes first. When critics argue
that any emotional or intellectual position must always derive
from an existing cultural construct, they beg the question, and dismiss the
feeling of their own experiences.

Elizabeth Cooper. Untitled (2008). Courtesy Galerie Anke Schmidt, Köln/Cologne
Elizabeth Cooper. Untitled (2008). Courtesy Galerie Anke Schmidt, Köln/Cologne
Consider this common, usually unchallenged, notion: photography constitutes “a phenomenon
from which painting has been in retreat since the mid-19th century”. This is Douglas
Crimp’s phrasing from 1981, put at the service of the argument that painting had died.
Yes, photography depersonalizes imagery. But so does
much modern painting. To avoid “that hand touch,” as he phrased it, Robert Mangold used
sprayers and rollers. Mary Heilmann developed a slapdash technique, “a freeform,
unstretched kind of painting work,” as she has
said, so that her hand might be anyone’s. David Reed arranged paintings in the manner of
film strips, to be animated by an anonymous viewer’s mobility. Jack Whitten combed, raked,
or swept his way across paint layers:
“The idea was to construct a non-relational painting by extending a single gesture to encompass
the entire picture plane,” he once said. “The analogy, symbolically, was to photography
.” Thoughts of impersonal, mechanistic
c photography have motivated many innovative painters. The two media are not at odds unless
willfully put there.

A social critique like Crimp’s operates within limited optics. An artist’s need to engage
in hand-work raises issues apart from the totemic value of handmade objects as markers of
cultural prestige and economic status. The notion that humans have always had the desire
to make paintings should not be dismissed
as an arbitrary element of modernist mythology, as Crimp’s account insists. Academicised
critical formulations—whether they are dialectical, historicist or determinist—have no
bearing on the human need for immersion
in physical acts of creation.

Ruth Root, Untitled (2014). Photo: Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg

Clichéd metaphors

Corpse, zombie, vampire, ghost, mourning and cannibalization: these are among the clichéd
metaphors attached to painting. In his 1984 article Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, the cultural critic Fredric Jameson assessed the society that had
nurtured walking-dead media. His analysis
derived from the prevailing theoretical discourse—the writings of Benjamin along with
other Europeans, such as Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord—only to re-enter the critical
conversation as an authoritative template for North
Americans. Those who argued the case for postmodernism in the 1980s, with its strategies
of pastiche and appropriation, seemed to act their theory out; they cited Jameson
frequently, repeating his array of examples
and mimicking his phrasing.

Postmodernism signaled the collapse of the modernist ideology and the dissolution of
modernism’s foundations in authenticity, individual subjectivity and emotional expressiveness.
Jameson noted “the waning of affect ... the imitation of dead styles ... the random
cannibalization of all the styles of the past.”
Such strategies and effects served a consumer’s “appetite for a world transformed into sheer
r images of itself”—life removed from living, feeding on the corpse of life. Gone was the
integral subject, the authentic experience,
the expressive self. Gone was easel painting.

Joe Bradley, Maag Areal (2015). Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Photo: Thomas Müller

The emerging consensus already troubled Max Kozloff in 1975: “A whole mode, painting, has
been dropped gradually from avant-garde writing.” Arthur Danto added a wrinkle in 1993:
“It was ... ‘handmade’ art that was dead ... the easel picture.” Despite painting’s recent
return to critical acclaim—or marketplace
enthusiasm—metaphors of its demise persist, as if this art, when revived, were still half-dead,
an aura lacking a body. As David Geers wrote in 2012: “[We] re-live a myth of a ‘wild,’
unmediated subjectivity welded
inextricably to the primal medium of paint ... nostalgic and mystified.”

Today, painting lives on while the critical terms pale. In 2014, Laura Hoptman organised an
exhibition of recent painting, The Forever Now, for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her
ingenious title generated unwanted echoes of Thomas Lawson’s vilification of Barbara Rose’s
analogous exhibition at New York
University’s Grey Art Gallery, American Painting: The Eighties, staged in 1979: “a corpse
made up to look forever young.” At the time, Rose’s artists—among them, Elizabeth Murray,
Mark Lancaster and Mark Schlesinger—were
condemned wholesale, despite the variety of their methods. They shared only the misadventure
of painting. To greet an exhibition like Rose’s or Hoptman’s with bias for or against the
medium is to miss all the informative nuances.
When critics harp on rising commercial values or restrict their analysis to social critique, they
deny life to the medium, so that painting appears vampiric. But such a response derives from
critical concepts
that are projected onto the art. It ignores the work’s manifest energy.

Ross Iannatti, Hysteresis/Large no. 2 (2014). Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery,
New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

Generating generalities

The politics of art keeps generating generalities. Within American universities, the case against
painting has hinged on the belief that Western culture is morally bankrupt; that it is inherently
sexist, racist, colonialist, imperialist and authoritarian. Because Western nations sponsor museums
packed with
paintings—many of which are commissioned or owned by oligarchs and dictatorial leaders—the medium
can appear complicit with corruption and oppression. Yet such induction is faulty: an artist may
be complicit, but painting
itself exercises no agency.

In 1974, Rose warned against “the skepticism of any criticism based on distinctions of quality.”
As she wrote: “weakening public trust in art may as easily pave the way to fascist counterrevolution,
for a mass culture in the service of totalitarian ideals.” When Crimp quoted from Rose’s essay in
1981, he actively
excised that sentence. Her overt fear of “fascist counterrevolution” would have muddled his
argument, which required opposing his “cultural” and “historical” interest to her “natural”
and “mythical” aestheticism.

Antek Walczak, Envy (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Real Fine Arts, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse
Antek Walczak, Envy (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Real Fine Arts, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse
According to Crimp, Rose failed as a critic because she never challenged “the myths of high art”
or “the artist as unique creator.” If these “myths” continued to inform Rose’s optics, we merely
witness a conflict of systems of belief. Neither Crimp nor Rose is more ideologically progressive (although Crimp
attacked Rose’s values as regressive, implying that history had a trajectory and had left
both her and the medium of painting behind).

To call Rose’s belief a myth, as Crimp did, is either trivial or inherently extreme—extreme if
it implies that one’s own belief is not also a myth. All beliefs, which instigate aesthetic
strategies, amount to myths; if not, they would be facts or laws of nature. But even laws of
nature are subject to
irregularity and exceptions to their presumed invariability; they are also therefore mythical.
The “death of painting,” as a widely held theory that its adherents fail to question, i
s another myth. We cannot escape
our myths simply by accepting alternative beliefs. To suppress general beliefs and
principles altogether would be more effective—a state worth seeking, even if impossible
to attain.

Artists devoted to painting believe in it, but they also doubt their belief.
Their doubt opens painting, as well as its artists, to living.

Richard Shiff is professor and the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art
at the University of Texas at Austin.