R. G. Collingwood argued that historical understanding requires us to understand what questions the utterances of historical agents were asking. Collingwood thought this point was quite general, so it is not just verbal utterances that must be understood as answers to typically unstated questions, but also historical artifacts such as works of art. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested, one particularly valuable way of beginning to reflect on the character of an ideology, a practice, or an institution is to ask oneself what sort of questions aren’t asked within the relevant world of thought. Perhaps one route towards understanding contemporary art is to ask: To what question is contemporary art an answer? And we might ask the question with varying degrees of scope: To what question is this particular work an answer? To what question is contemporary painting an answer? And adjusting for art, we might also follow MacIntyre’s maxim: ‘Ask about the art of your time what it needs you and others not to know’. (MacIntyre, p. 194)
The recent publication of a collection of the art critic Barry Schwabsky’s The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting provides an opportunity to put these questions to recent art in a determinate way. This volume collects approximately thirty of Schwabsky’s writings on painting from the past 23 years. The presentation is structured by Schwabsky’s three prefaces to editions of Vitamin P, an influential survey of contemporary painting published with markedly different contents in 2002, 2011, and 2016. The preface of the first edition is followed by reviews of shows of abstract paintings, the preface of the second edition by reviews of figurative painting, and the preface of the third by reviews of shows that notably exhibit (according to the volume’s editors) a ‘coexistence’ of figuration and abstraction. The book concludes with the text of a talk on the ontology of art from 2010 and an interview from 2017. Schwabsky’s account of contemporary painting is stated largely in the first preface, with only very partial re-capitulations and elaborations later. The most sustained application of this account with regard to a particular body of painting is given in the third section in a review from 2010 of the work of Dana Schutz. Accordingly, I focus on these two pieces in the following while drawing from elsewhere in the volume as needed to explicate Schwabsky’s account.
‘To what question is contemporary painting an answer?’ Schwabsky’s reply is: to none at all! Contemporary painting is not an answer to any question; rather, it is ‘knowingly gratuitous’ (p.10) in the sense that it rejects as a delusion the modernist assumption that ambitious art generally is the answer to a question or the solution to a problem. What questions, what problems? Schwabsky does not say explicitly, but he does contrast the concern the question of what painting is “the fundamental question for Newman, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, and Daniel Buren”) with the more contemporary concern “with how to make a painting.” In the more contemporary painting, “What it is will then emerge from how it is.” (pp.12-13, italics in original) Schwabsky seems to accept a version of Arthur Danto’s that modern art, insofar as it had an intelligible structure organized by the pursuit of a serious aim, was fundamentally an attempt to pose and answer the question ‘What is art?’ So though the late modern painting of Newman et alia posed and offered answers to the question ‘what is painting?’, this self-understanding was a delusion. From our enlightened contemporary standpoint “we can now also see and accept the gratuitousness that lurks even within the most rigorous modernist works as well.” (p. 9)
The question immediately arises as to why Schwabsky thinks that this modernist self-understanding of serious art as a response to a question is a delusion, rather than, say, a piece of poetics that has been abandoned. He offers nothing explicit on this point, but perhaps something of his answer is contained within his equation of the sense of gratuitousness with the contemporary painters’ emphasis upon style. Schwabsky likens the relationship of contemporary to modernist painting to that of Mannerism to the Renaissance (p. 11). Mannerism arises out of the sense that an immediately prior artistic period is essentially complete (“when a period of clear progress had played itself out”) and artists “seek out the new techniques’ most extreme stylistic and expressive potential.” (ibid.) On the face of it, this formulation contributes nothing to explaining why the earlier period would eventually be revealed as unwittingly marked by gratuitousness; why isn’t Modern art also “a period of clear progress [that] had played itself out”? Perhaps what Schwabsky is gesturing towards is the thought that part of what contemporary painting reveals about modernist painting is that the latter is also highly marked by a concern with style. A needed claim missing from Schwabsky’s formulation, then, would be: a particular style is not a unique answer to a question or the sole possible solution to a problem. So a modernist artist’s claim that a particular style, say Analytic Cubism, is the only compelling response to the challenge posed by Cézanne’s late style would in principle be wholly implausible. Accordingly, the modernist self-understanding of a painting’s alleged non-gratuitousness would be delusory.
Schwabsky’s central characterization of contemporary painting is better put in stating that whereas the modernist painter understands herself as committed to her style, the contemporary painter calls for ‘flexibility’ (p. 9) in her painting. This flexibility has two aspects: it involves a kind of anti-essentialism (ibid) in refusing to treat whatever is within “the traditional pictorial rectangle” (p. 8) as exhaustive of the focus of the artist’s and viewer’s engagement with the work. Alternatively, one might say that contemporary painting is non- or anti-autonomous. Secondly, contemporary painting involves the recognition of a basic pluralism of viable artistic styles (this point was widely voiced in the 1970’s, and Danto again insisted upon it in the 1990’s). On this latter formulation of Schwabsky’s, the point is not that modernist art was self-deluded, but rather that with regard style contemporary art possesses a relatively heightened self-awareness.
Schwabsky does insist upon one fundamental continuity between modern and contemporary painting: for both the central concern is the artists’s creation of and carrying out of a project. But what is a project? Schwabsky explicitly struggles with this question, and acknowledges that “‘[p]roject’ might not be the right term; perhaps, following Richard Foreman, better would be the “one thing” or “obsessive theme.”” (p.287) While Schwabsky further notes that the it is of the essence of a project that it be ever incomplete and unfolding (p.289), it is hard to see how this distinguishes artistic projects from my attempts to clean out my basement. Still, something of the distinctive character of projects in contemporary painting emerges in the assertion that “[t]he specific content of contemporary painting is self-invention.” (p. 10) In other words, part of the distinctive content, and so part of the aim of a contemporary artistic project, is for a potential artist to invent (a persona of) an (actual?) artist for themself.
But how does someone do this in an artistically compelling way? In the forthcoming second part of this piece, I’ll consider Schwabsky’s fullest answer to this question in his account of the work of Dana Schutz, and ask MacIntyre’s question of what Schwabsky’s formulations might be hiding from us.
References:
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939)
--An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)
Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (1997)
Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social structures and their threats to moral agency,” in Ethics and Politics; Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
Barry Schwabsky, The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019)
