painting
Literally, painting is regarded as a medium
in that it is a physical substance used to picture. There is a dichotomy where
painting is framed as a use of a material (paint), as in "the result of
applying paint or color." [1] And in another
sense painting is defined as a vehicle for "the representing of objects
or figures by means of colours laid on a surface; the art of so depicting
objects." [2] This dichotomy is succinct with
the literal outlines of a medium itself, understood as a "pervading or
enveloping substance; the substance or 'element' in which an organism lives," as
well as "an intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel." [3] In
this light, painting is considered as if synonymous with the meanings if
not the uses of such ideas as 'picture, work of art, image, canvas, oil,
watercolor, and print.' This list exemplifies the duality of painting
as a medium conditioned both as a form (oil, canvas) that representation is embedded in and as means that representation moves through (picture,
work of art). As well the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics lists
discussions of painting through movements in historical categories: Abstract
Expressionism, Abstraction, Classicism, Contemporary Art, Expressionism,
Formalism, Impressionism, Landscape, Pop Art, Portraiture, Renaissance
Italian Aesthetics, Romanticism and articles on Visual Art, Russian Aesthetics,
Suprematism, and Surrealism.
Historically, the ability to picture, or signify by likeness, was the chief
identifying characteristic that guided painting in conception and practice. The
culmination of this ability to represent is steeped in the advent and subsequent
implications of perspective; which "refers generally to the devices used by
painters to represent space on plane surfaces...The earliest written account
of perspectival projection is found in the treatise De Pictura (1435)
of Leon Battista Alberti, a Florentine humanist and architect. Alberti
defined a painting as 'the intersection of a visual pyramid at a given distance,
with a fixed center and certain position of lights, represented by art with
lines and colors on a given surface.' This conception of painting as
the transcription of an imaginary 'picture plane' suspended between the beholder
and the viewed scene was revolutionary. It linked the art of painting
to the sciences, in particular to medieval optics and to Euclidean geometry
(p.478)." [4] Additionally, "In twentieth-century
thought, painterly perspective, with its hypothesis of a fixed and stationary
beholder, its respect for the evidence of the senses, and its endowment of
a subjective point of view with objective validity, has in turn been repeatedly
enlisted as an emblem for Western empiricism, rationalism, individualism, anthropocentrism,
or relativism (p.480)." [5] These conditions of
picturing hinged on historical contentions of the collapse between the subjectivity
of the beholder and the objectivity of that which is pictured. The agent
of picturing (Becoming) was considered to be one in the same as reality (Being). In
this model, the fundamental identity of 'painting' is entirely engrossed in
that of 'picturing.' In "The Age of a World Picture," Martin Heidegger
posits, "the word 'picture' (Bild) now means the structured image
(Gebild) that is the creature of man's producing which represents
and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position for
which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the
guidelines for everything that is (p.134)." [6]
This system of rationalized picturing posits aspirations traditionally understood
to be aligned with a conception of medium as an instrument to uncover knowledge. In
this vein, Plato's interest in the mimetic status of images laid the philosophical
platform for painting to be regarded as a vehicle for transmission of such
truths. With Parrhasius, "Socrates starts from the premise that painting
is 'imaging/modeling of the visible world' (eikasia ton horomenon)
and moves to overcome the painter's initial doubt whether visual mimesis can
depict 'character 'through' its physical expression (p.101)." [7] Plato's
sense of doubt lies in the capacity for painting to move beyond the realm of
appearances to the realm of truth. "Socrates' questions to the artists
focus on how we get, or whether we can get, from the design of a
visual field ('shapes and colours') to the representation or expression of
non-material properties (p. 101)." [8] For Plato, this
'expression of non-material properties' is equated with an image of truth and
leads him to dismiss writing and painting for the more transparent form of
spoken word. "I cannot help felling Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately
like painting; for the creations of the painter have attitude of life, and
yet, if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence (p.278)." [9]
Certainly, the epistemological claims of perspective in painting instigated
elaborate challenges and redirections serving broader aspirations centered
on painting as founded on matters of visual perception. Arnheim, dependent
on Gestalt thinking, characterizes a dynamic transaction between the subjective
through and the objective in of painting. "When it depicts three-dimensional
space, it squeezes depth into surface, thereby obtaining a dynamic effect. This
effect is perceived as the effort to unfold distances where none are actually
given. The compressed surface pattern, however, has a compositional organization
and meaning of its own, and this surface image interacts in a dynamic counterpoint
with the composition of the objects occupying the three-dimensional arena (p.113-114)." [10] Moreover,
Goodman, posited a thorough effacement of the objectified subjective; "In general,
he maintained that 'no degree of resemblance is sufficient' to establish a
relationship of reference between picture and an object (p.50)." [11] Panofsky
instigated (through Cassirer's 'symbolic form' and Kant's notion of "category")
a process of "iconographic analysis" of the picturing in painting. For
example, questions of the Last Supper are revealed on conscious literary
precedents and unconscious intrinsic insinuations. "On this level, the
subject of the painting is identified: its moment and place of enactment, the
names of its actors, its historical precedents, and so forth.... The Last
Supper might be read not only as a 'document' of Leonardo's personality
but also as an expression of the worldview of the Italian High Renaissance
(p.437-438)." [12] Cultural and historical painting
categories like Pastoral, Genre, Portraiture, Religious, and Epic typify this
contingency of the object and the subject. Merleau-Ponty organized the
phenomenology of painting in relation to the structures of history and institutions
on paintings capacity to liquefy the threshold between the "visible" and "invisible." "Painting
is an intentional, nonetic-noematic act, and therefore referential, but a painting
is not about itself as formal elements and relations on a canvas, nor is it
about the history of painting, but about the visible world that is all too
often invisible (p.205)." [13] Painting as holding
the subject to be perception is epitomized in classifications systems reliant
on form: Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism for example. Hence, contentions
of perceptual picturing have saddled on aims to be defined in relation to other
sign systems, sparking ontological considerations.
In the Preface to his Laocoon (1766), Lessing, before arguing for
the distinction of painting from poetry, states that both "present us with
appearances as reality." Lessing's distinction of painting and poetry
as separate forms insinuates a relational definition not entirely suspending
questions of reality but as well not levying the means for the ends. Underlining,
Lessing's argument is the simultaneity intrinsic in painting as opposed to
a linguistic system of notation; "It is an intrusion of the painter into the
domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction, when the painter combines
in one and the same picture two points necessarily separate in time... It is
an intrusion of the poet into the domain of the painter and a squandering of
much imagination to no purpose when, in order to give the reader an idea of
the whole, the poet enumerates one by several parts or things which I must
necessarily survey at one glance in nature if they are to give the effect of
the whole (p.91)." [14] The complex relationship
of image and text has poignant grounding in the positioning of the 'through'
with respect to the 'in' of medium. This comparison method suggests a
reorientation of the implications surrounding appearances of reality. The
disposition of Being is not beyond appearances, but in Aristotelian fashion,
between or in them. Hence investigations of knowledge, turn to examinations
of language. And painting is grounded within the language of the iconic
(resemblance) generation of meaning [see symbol, index, icon]. This model acts like a model of
models with great difficulty in equating the picturing capacities of one process
of signification from another. "No method--semiotics, iconology, discourse analysis--is
going to rescue us from this dilemma. The very phrase "word and image," in
fact, is a way of signaling this. It is not a critical "term" in art
history like the other concepts in this collection, but a pair of terms whose
relation opens a space of intellectual struggle, historical investigation,
and artistic/critical practice (p.56)." [15] In
this regard, the tradition of abstract painting has come to be postured as
holding its primary project as repressing or overcoming verbal language.
The ultimate aesthetic retort to the promises of Renaissance perspective
is found in the promises of twentieth-century pure abstract painting. This
is the reverse side of painting as picture, and the over embellished zenith
of the perspectival revisions/upheavals perpetuated by theorists like Goodman
and Merleau-Ponty. As Greenberg wrote in "Avant-garde and Kitsch;" "Picasso,
Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Bancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cezanne
derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement
of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with invention
and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion
of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors (p.9)." [16] These
claims exaggerate a dialectical relationship between different forms (painting
and photography) and arenas of cultural production (avant-garde and kitsch),
as well as dichotomies within painting such as: abstract versus representational,
figural versus geometric, and intuitive versus rational.
Subsequently,
the aim of Abstract Expressionist painting was to distinguish its process of
signification from that of other forms of art (as well as verbal language)
through an extreme focus on the inherent materiality of the act of painting. Intrinsic
to the extinguishing of the picture (external signification) is his declared
affirmation "to reject the purist's assertion that the best of contemporary
plastic art is abstract. Here the purist does not have to support his
position with metaphysical pretensions (p.23)." [17] This
aimed to reorientate the very action of picturing (making) as encapsulating
the notion of the essential nature of a picture itself. The painted object
acts as an indexical trace signifying the conditions of itself as constituted
by it's making: personifying McLuhan's dictum "the medium is the message."
Reshuffling
Greenberg, Fried in his own rigid dialectic of "Art and Objecthood," attempted
to establish the criteria of painting (art) as defined by a disposition of
shape oppositional to minimalism and theatricality (objecthood). "Roughly,
the success or failure of a given painting has come to depend on its ability
to hold or stamp itself out or compel conviction as shape - that, or somehow
to stave off or elude the question of whether or not it does so (p.14-15)" [18] [see objecthood]. Notably,
in a theoretical wake of Benjamin's notion of the "aura" external and surrounding
an artwork, Greenberg attempts to characterize the conditions of painting as
contingent on the making of the work (before), while Fried shifts the emphasis
to the literal reception of the work (after): "it is concerned with the actual
circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work (p.15)." [19] Ironically,
Fried and Greenberg were attempting to stave off ubiquitous relationships of
media while reserving a similar, if not the same, exuberant philosophical allocation
of subjective Being (in paint) as accessed through claims of an objectified
transparent Becoming (through picturing). These formalist propositions
marked the necessary and dire circumstances of painting to hold onto the authority
as the figurehead of art by aiming to crystallize the facility to represent
postured as total denial of pictorial convention.
Marcel Duchamp put forward a wider scope, conjecturing pictures as well as
the paint as "readymades:" mere conventions. Practitioners like Mondrian
and Ad Reinhart served to lay a foundation of painting systems that sought
to make manifest the inherent conventionality of picturing: albeit with quite
different strategies. In their own suggestions, these processes of systematization
instigated the "death of painting," with the deployment of conventions not
bound to the paint itself. Frank Stella's desire to "preserve the paint
on the canvas as good as it is in the can," turned the locus of painting to
the can itself framed as an industrial mass produced commodity of circulatory
exchange instigating a reorganization of painting as a medium embedded in a
field of cultural production. As Joesph Kosuth in "Art After Philosophy" wrote "With
the unassisted Readymade, art changed its focus from the form of
the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the
nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function (p.842)." [20] In
this light, currently painting takes a rearguard position negotiating itself
as a system of media, within a system of media constituted by an abundant and
dynamic matrix of images and corporeal realities. The most current debate
of the viability of painting contends it as a critical post-mortem activity
dealing with its own death and on the other hand as it reveling in its own
frivolity ignoring prescriptive historical paradigms that both killed it and
continue to define its potency.
Dustin Larson
Committee on the Visual Arts
Winter 2002