In my previous blog post I sketched the account of contemporary painting offered by Barry Schwabsky in his recent book The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting. Briefly summarized: Schwabsky urges that (a) contemporary painting is first of all distinguished from modern painting by the former’s greater degree of self-consciousness. This heightened self-consciousness is corrosive to the extent that, in contrast to modern painters, the contemporary painter cannot fully commit herself to and identify herself with a particular manner or style of painting. Instead, a central demand of contemporary painting is for flexibility in genre and style (pp. 8-9); (b) contemporary painting has a distinctive content, namely, self-invention (p. 10) This self-invention unfolds in the painter’s engagement with a distinctive project that is extended for years and perhaps decades and is in principle open and unfinished.
But what do (a) and (b) have to do specifically with painting? Schwabsky provides two specifications that link the general points to painting. First, he says that contemporary painting makes a specific contribution to artistic thought generally in cultivating “the tactile dimension of things, . . . a plastic relation to materials that (because of the potential this relation offers for continual feedback between matter and sensation) is also a proprioceptive activity.” (pp. 13-14) Second, he says that in contemporary painting, as previously in modernist and Conceptual art, “every artist’s work should stake out a position,” and that in painting this position should include “the representation of an idea about painting.” (pp. 9-10) All these formulations are from the preface to the volume Vitamin P in 2002. Later in the volume he characterizes this alternatively as a contemporary painting’s containing ‘an allegory of itself’. (p. 256)
How might this general characterization of contemporary painting contribute to our understanding of a particular body of work? Among the two dozen pieces of art criticism included in The Observer Effect, the account from 2010 of the work of the painter Dana Schutz offers the clearest exemplification of Schwabsky’s general account. Indeed, Schwabsky explicitly writes that “Schutz could well be the most contemporary painter of all today.” (p. 257) This is because her work is “perhaps the most salient example” of a contemporary painter’s artistic project that embodies the very ideas that Schwabsky has used to characterize contemporary painting generally, that is, of self-invention arising from the sense of contemporary painting’s ‘gratuitousness’. As I noted in my previous post, Schwabsky claims that the sense of artistic gratuitousness emerges from the recognition of a contemporary artistic genre’s loss of the sense that it embodies solutions to problems. I find Schwabsky’s thought here difficult to explicate, but I take him to be saying that the kind of self-invention characteristic of contemporary painting is marked by a sense of arbitrariness; it is not, as modernist painting thought itself to be, dependent upon the recognition of a prior existing problem, and so is not prima facie a solution to anything. Schwabsky does say that this distinctively contemporary self-invention is paradoxical, seemingly because it represents a response to two demands that cannot be mediated. He writes: “The contemporary artist contends with two contradictory directives. For your work to be significant, and not merely art, don’t be formalist, let the world in! But for your work to be significant as art, it must investigate and criticize its own presuppositions thereby turning whatever comes within its purview into mere grist for art.” (p. 261)
Schwabsky thinks that Schutz mediates these contradictory directives by inventing a peculiarly paradoxical kind of imagery: subjects who eat themselves. From 2003 to 2005 made a number of paintings of figures eating themselves—their eyes, their faces, their chests. Schutz has said that these works represent simultaneously self-devouring and self-creation (p. 256) As such, they are salient instances of the self-allegorization that Schwabsky treats as central to the content of contemporary painting: the dimension of self-eating immediately expresses the ‘formalistic’ dimension of contemporary painting wherewith a painting is always a response to and a continuation of prior paintings; the dimension of self-creation, Schwabsky suggests, expresses a way in which a painting “investigate[s] and criticize[s] its own artistic presuppositions.” Schutz herself puts this latter point differently and aspirationally when she says that “I want the paintings to take into account what’s going on outside them.” (pp. 261-2) Schwabsky summarizes this informally as: “The paintings should be the contrary of what they depict, or at any rate nonidentical with it, rather than tautologically duplicating it.” (p. 262)
I wonder. Schwabsky is well aware that no painting, contemporary or otherwise, is identical to its subject; the appreciative response to a painting necessarily includes an open array of dimensions of at least history, handling, composition, and style, and of which recognition of the subject and its associations is only ever one among many. Perhaps what Schwabsky is concerned with, and concerned to combat, is a tendency to treat the interest in a painting’s subject as exhausting the interest a painting as a whole; one might think that such an impoverished response to a painting is embodied in the contemporary practice of referring to a contemporary painting as a (mere) ‘image’. And so Schutz’s thematization, if indeed that’s what it is, of the difference between subject and painting is a mark of its seriousness and of its enrichment of the practice of contemporary painting. Even so, it does not seem apt to characterize this thematization and the consequent allegorization of the practice of painting as ‘the contrary’ of what’s depicted. Schwabsky’s formulation would assimilate Schutz’s practice to something like a painting consisting of the words ‘this is not a painting’ painted on a bare square of canvas.
This criticism does nothing to diminish Schwabsky’s sense of Schutz as an exemplary contemporary painter. Nor does it count against Schwabsky’s general account of contemporary painting. There are though, a number of points where Schwabsky’s account needs qualification and perhaps re-formulation. One problem concerns Schwabsky’s characterization of the dimension of contemporary painting that is so to speak within the tradition of painting and so immediately succeeding modern painting. Schwabsky characterizes the concern of painting to embody a response to and continuation of painting as ‘formalist’. But this is an implausibly narrow way of characterizing such a concern. Continuing and sustaining the practice of painting need not involve a concern with ‘formal’ elements, or with elements characterizing ‘formally’, if that means something like with dimensions of space, line, depiction, planarity, etc in determinate relations. It seems to me that what Schwabsky is trying to characterize in invoking the distinction between painting as a formalist practice and painting as something responsive to the wider world would be more accurately, if more academically, put as the distinction between the practical conception of painting as an autonomous activity, and a conception as a heteronomous activity. This formulation requires in turn further specification of what is meant in this context by ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’. (I have addressed this point at length in my forthcoming book Return to Darkness).
One way in which the formulation of the general account of contemporary matters in understanding Schutz’s achievement arises with reflection upon Schwabsky’s rather immediate characterization of the self-eaters as paradoxically embodying the alleged painter’s dilemma of ‘formalism’ vs. ‘responsiveness to the world’. As I’ve suggested, this need not be seen as a matter of contradictory directives. A different way of understanding Schutz’s subject matter and its contribution to her painting practice is to note that the ‘self-eating’ suggests a kind of making (that is, nourishing of the self) which is an un-making (that is, an attack upon the self). Or, put conversely, the self-eating is a making in the sense of something done, with the un-making an undoing of an existing self. Either way, this formulation places the poetics of Schutz’s self-eaters within a long line of artistic practice—a kind of making which is an un-making. One immediately thinks of the work of Eva Hesse, wherein Hesse attempted a kind of doing/making that undoes and unmakes one pole of a binary opposition (light or hardness or planarity) and attempts to partially embody the other pole (darkness or pliability or three-dimensionality). If so, one can then say further that this is an instance of a perennial kind of meaning-making in the arts, wherein a new instance of an artistic practice builds up a sense of historical depth and resonance by creating analogies between itself and prior instances in art, and not only those within the same medium as the newer instance. This would be one instance among a great many in contemporary art wherein meaning does not arise from the practical conception of medium-specificity.
Perhaps Schwabsky’s struggles to give a coherent and unified account of contemporary painting stem in part from the very nature of the project. In attempting to give such an account, Schwabsky has cited the following features: the work is concerned to explore the tactile and corporeal dimensions of experience; the work must be part of a project whose content is self-invention and contains a representation or allegory of itself. Certainly a great deal more needs to be said about each of these features, and what connects them; but also part of what’s striking about this characterization is that not of the features involves painting in even the minimal sense of intentionally depositing pigment upon a surface. If this is to an account of contemporary painting, and not simply a characterization of importance elements of meaning-making in contemporary art more generally, something needs to be said about how these features are distinctively bound to the practice of painting in some sense. Perhaps Schwabsky does not address this point because there is nothing to be said, that is, perhaps there is no such link between the primordial conception of painting as depositing paint on a surface and core characteristics of contemporary art. If so, one can still investigate contemporary painting, but perhaps with a more modest intent of exploring the qualities of ambitious contemporary art. Schwabsky’s analysis of Schutz’s work would then be a contribution to this more modest project, and to my mind not less illuminating because shorn from the attempt to give a general account of contemporary painting.
References:
John Rapko, Return to Darkness (forthcoming from Universidad de los Andes Press)
Barry Schwabsky, The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019)