A Non-Conservative Defense of Contemporary Painting?—Remarks on Jason Gaiger’s Philosophy of Painting

 

      In his new book Philosophy of Painting, the philosopher Jason Gaiger notes that there has been little writing by philosophers of contemporary art. Gaiger attempts to remedy something of this deficiency with a chapter devoted to contemporary painting. The new book is a lightly edited and re-written version of Gaiger’s earlier book Aesthetics and Painting (2008) with some supplemental material comprising, along with ten pages on the history of vision with reference to the foundational work of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, the entirety of the chapter on recent painting. This new chapter is stylistically and conceptually very much of a piece with the rest of the book. Each chapter surveys fundamental issues and debates in its topic, with Gaiger offering his own distinctive views as a advancement on and remedy for the deficiencies of major earlier statements. In contrast to his earlier chapters on various aspects of depiction, art historical concepts, and characteristics of modernism and the avant-garde, the chapter on contemporary painting has something of a digressive quality in serially treating both a range of issues and particular painters. Whereas the earlier chapters rehearse and criticize the views of major thinkers on painting from Alberti in the Renaissance, through the foundational work in art history of Heinrich Wölfflin, and to the recent philosophers Richard Wollheim and Nelson Goodman, Gaiger simply notes that contemporary art has attracted little philosophical consideration. He suggests oddly that “‘surely one of the reasons why few analytic philosophers have ventured to write on’ contemporary art is that “contemporary art is likely to date quickly, serving perhaps as a useful commentary but without lasting significance” (150), without offering any reflection as to why that is, or why reflection on that alleged possibility would itself date quickly.

     Gaiger offers two distinctive potential contributions to the philosophy of contemporary painting: a brief statement of what sort of relevant issues admit of philosophical treatment (151); and an extended consideration of contemporary painting in the service of giving what he calls ‘a non-conservative defence of painting’ (ibid).

One point that admits of philosophical treatment is the concept of the ‘contemporary’ itself with regard to art. Gaiger notes that some thinkers treat contemporary art as a new period distinct from modern art, and his discussions indicate that he agrees. At the beginning of the chapter he writes that “perhaps the most remarkable feature of what has come to be identified as ‘the contemporary’ is that it is no longer bound—even negatively—by the preoccupations of modernism.”  He adds that this break with modernism “is also the marker of a new-found freedom, initially hard won, but now worn with a certain lightness that is itself a testament to the transformation in critical priorities”, and that contemporary painters are aware of this new conception and practice of freedom as “an informed freedom from constraint.” (145) This suggests that the negative freedom, that is, ‘freedom from’ as characterized by Isaiah Berlin, is on Gaiger’s account a kind of master value of contemporary painting. The contemporary painter is first of all free from the burdens of modernist issues, conceptions, and aspirations, in particular the doctrine of ‘medium-specificty’ associated particularly with the art critic Clement Greenberg, a doctrine that claims that the historical course of modernist painting has a structure of progressive clarification of and insistence upon materials and artistic methods distinctive of the art form of painting.  The question immediately arises as to what this negative freedom is in the service of, what are the positive freedoms, the freedoms-to, of contemporary painting: to what does contemporary painting aspire, and what counts as an artistic achievement in this novel art form? To see Gaiger’s answer one turns to his much lengthier effort in response to the second issue of giving a non-conservative defense of contemporary painting.

     As a preliminary to the defense of contemporary painting as a kind of artistic painting, Gaiger has given in the first chapter a characterization of artistic painting generally and of its distinctive kind of meaningfulness. He writes that there are four ‘basic elements needed for an account of painting; the purposive marking of a surface through direct bodily movement to create a visual image,” (9) and then explicates each characteristic by contrasting it with some characteristic of non-artistic painting; (a) ‘purposive marking’ contrasts with naturally occurring shapes and patterns; (b) ‘surface’ contrasts painting with other art forms such as music and architecture; (c) ‘direct bodily movement’ contrasts with mechanical or nature processes; (d) ‘visual image’ “serves to exclude non-artistic forms of painting, such as painting on a wall or a chair where the goal is to protect the object and perhaps to make it more beautiful, but not to create a pattern of marks that has a discernible meaning.” (9-10; the word ‘discernable’ was added to the statement published in the earlier version of the book published as Aesthetics and Painting).

     A problem immediately arises for Gaiger’s account of painting with regard to the intended force of the phrase ‘visual image’. He states explicitly with regard to (d) that the production of a visual image in painting distinguishes artistic from non-artistic painting, but this is surely insufficient to mark the distinction: the street sign, for example, that shows a figure walking is not an instance of painting as an art. In a passage that has no parallel in the earlier version, he seems to agree, as he notes that an advantage of the account of representation he favors, a revised version of Richard Wollheim’s views, is that it “accommodate[s] the full spectrum of depiction—including cases such as looking at advertisements and other demotic images” while also accommodating other “kinds of depiction, predominantly but not exclusively art pictures.” (60) This favored account was given by the philosopher Bence Nanay who argues that in pictorial seeing “[w]e perceptually represent both the depicted object and some properties of the picture surface (while we may or may not attend to them).” (59-60, quoting Nanay (2010) with Gaiger’s italics) But this qualification does not go so far as to clarify Gaiger’s views on the distinction between non-artistic and artistic painting, since he notes that the kind of pictorial perception that attends (and not merely perceptually represents) attention to both the depicted object and surface properties in a painting ranges beyond artistic painting; and in any case the relation between this kind of pictorial awareness and the production of a ‘visual image’ is wholly unclarified.

     Nonetheless, Gaiger does claim as part of his non-conservative defense of contemporary painting that his account of artistic painting accommodates this most recent kind of painting; and so we turn to his full account of contemporary painting . The complex presentation and discussion in the chapter can be divided into three parts: the conception of contemporary painting as exhibiting a novel kind of freedom; the defense of contemporary painting; and the question of the limits of what counts as a painting in contemporary art:

     A. Gaiger begins with the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Amy Sillman as examples of contemporary painting exemplifying the ‘informed freedom from constraint’. (145-50) Both “are involved in an ongoing dialogue with earlier forms of art”, but one conducted “on their own terms”: they take what they find valuable in past painting, “but their practice is not determined by opposition to what came before.” Yiadom-Boakye’s figures “are not located in a specific historical moment, but they are identifiably of our own time.” A further feature of Yiadom-Boakye’s works is that they require us to understand individual pieces “in relation to the larger practice of which they form a part.” This is even more true of Sillman’s works, which individually exhibit internal coherence but can also be viewed as stages or moments in the working out of an idea that takes place within and across several works, often heading in multiple directions at once.” Further, Sillman says that her mode of working “refuses to ‘aggrandize’ painting and instead embraces ‘the intimate and discomforting process of things changing as they go awry.’” Gaiger seems to be suggesting that Yiadom-Boakye, Sillman, and their works exemplify informed freedom from constraint above of all in knowing (hence ‘informed’) but dispensing with issues and questions of how to relate one’s work to the past achievements in painting, and knowing but refusing to acknowledge the distinctive features of the medium of painting, whether as traditionally conceived or as conceived in modernist art. His characterizations further suggest that the relevant sense of freedom in contemporary painting involves a freedom from determination, from being one thing or another.

B. Gaiger claims that contemporary painting suffers a ‘legitimation crisis’ in something like the sense that Jürgen Habermas diagnosed liberal capitalist societies suffering in the 1970s. A legitimation crisis involves a decline of confidence in the systems that regulate an area of life. Contemporary painting’s crisis arises largely from “the loss of its earlier position at the vanguard of modern art”, and the resulting sense that engaging “seriously with painting as an art form was to seek to reverse the [artistic] gains made by the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.” (154) Gaiger considers two aspects of this loss of position: (a) the idea proposed in the late 1970s by the art historian Rosalind Krauss that recent sculpture at least existed within an ‘expanded field’ that included other novel kinds of art including earthworks and installations, and this development put an end to the idea that sculpture is the paradigmatic spatial art; the analogous thought seems to be that painting too is no longer the leading and paradigmatic pictorial art, but rather exists in an expanded field of photographic and digital arts; and further, (b) seemingly the leading contemporary pictorial arts are digital, and “contemporary painting has had to come to terms with the pre-eminence of the digital image” (151). In response there has arisen a conservative defense of painting that stresses painting’s characteristics and typical values of warmth and subjectivity, labor and slowness, close observation, sensitivity to materials, and its combined appeal to vision and touch. (159-60) Gaiger rejects the promotion of these “simplifications that sustain the conservative defence of painting” as failing to engage with the ‘currency’ of the digital image. Instead he proposes that one examine what links painting and digital images in the actual practice of art (his examples are Wade Guyton and Julie Mehretu), while allowing “the transformations wrought by digital technology [to] cast a raking light on the traditional practice of painting, helping to bring out saliencies that might otherwise have been overlooked.” (161) The result is a non-conservative defense of painting; instead of the conservative defense’s appeal to the traditional values of expressive subjectivity and handcraft, the non-conservative defense appeals to paintings’ stabile identity (in contrast to circulating and transforming digital images), and painting’s longevity (in contrast to digital media’s rapid obsolescence). (166)

C. What are the limits of contemporary painting qua painting? Gaiger notes that, in contrast to traditional painting, a great deal of contemporary painting is ‘expanded’ in the sense that it treats artistically not just virtual space and the relation between the virtual image presented and its physical support, but also the actual space within which the painting is shown. This recruitment of actual space into the work gives some contemporary painting quasi-sculptural and site-specific dimensions, as in the colossal and crumpled paintings of Angela de la Cruz. By contrast, Olafur Eliasson’s Green River, which consists of dye poured into rivers, turns out on Gaiger’s account not to be a painting because “it is primarily directed towards our understanding of natural processes” and is not in direct dialogue “with the medium of painting, and its long and complex history.” (169) At the end of the chapter Gaiger considers a particularly challenging work, at least conceptually, by Katharina Grosse, Rockaway, wherein “[o]ver a period of several days, she used a crane and an industrial spray gun to transform a former aquatics building . . . spraying paint not only on the interior walls and ceiling, but also on the exterior of the structure and outwards onto the dunes.” (171) Gaiger asserts that the piece clearly meets the first three of his characteristics of artistic painting—“it is the result of a deliberate or intentional sequence of actions; it involves the marking of a surface, even if that surface is extended through three dimensions and out into the surrounding world; and it is made through bodily movement” (171-72)—but fails to evidently conform to the fourth requirement that it be a visual image. Gaiger immediately interprets this as meaning whether it exhibits ‘virtual pictorial space’ and in particular relations of (virtual) foreground and back; and he asserts that it does not, and so on his definition strictly considered the work fails to be a painting. But he nonetheless concludes that it can rightly be considered painting in an expanded sense because of “the sheer painterliness of Grosse’s use of colour and her refusal to relinquish the most basic constituent of painting as an art: the transformation of a surface by marking it with colours. It is this that has awakened a sense of wonder in the viewer since the earliest times.” (172) This thought leads to the last sentences of the chapter and the book, where Gaiger tentatively concludes that the fourth component of the definition, that is, that the activity of artistic painting produce a visual image “is not essential to painting or, more persuasively, that it needs to be understood in a different way.” Rightly considered, it is not the production of a visual image that marks something as an artistic painting, but rather the transfiguration of something that allows us to see that which is transfigured “as belonging to the world of the mind and not just to the material world.” (173)

    With this complex account, has Gaiger given a plausible defence of contemporary painting? And, more broadly, has he given an account that helps us make sense of the distinctive aims, methods, and products of contemporary artistic painting? It seems to me that his arguments and analyses are too riddled with internal tensions and inconsistencies to be fully persuasive. By way of criticism, I shall address each of his three central concerns, and then suggest a major source of the problems endemic to his account.

A’. It is difficult to attach any determinate sense to Gaiger’s claim that ‘informed freedom from constraint’ is a distinctive feature of contemporary painters and/or painting. What seems important to Gaiger is rather the claim that contemporary painting is not rightly understood as continuous with modernist painting, and, correlatively that contemporary painters are not rightly understood as ‘neo’ anything (“there is nothing ‘neo’ about the return to figuration when it is informed by recognizably contemporary concerns and commitments” (147)), that is, are not rightly understood as re-doing some past style or movement. But this seems false on the face of it: from the fact, if it is one, that some contemporary painter is not rightly characterized as, say, ‘neo-expressionist’, it does not follow that the relevant contemporary painting is not illuminatingly characterized as ‘expressionist’, and that part of what such a characterization means is that aspects of the painting share some stylistic features with works by Beckmann or Kirchner or whoever. Gaiger’s way of stating the claim is so broad that it entails treating contemporary painting as utterly novel and unique, sharing nothing with any of the world’s previous art. Now, it would be a further claim, and one perhaps suggested by some of Gaiger’s remarks, that it is not a feature of contemporary painting that painters knowingly or with self-awareness explore, model themselves on, or otherwise relate themselves to the achievements of past painters, and make such self-awareness part of the content of their work. But, despite Gaiger’s indications, while this might be true of, say, Yiadom-Boakye, it is again surely false with regard to contemporary painting generally.

B’. Gaiger claims that (i) contemporary painting suffers a legitimation crisis; and that (ii) in contrast to digital images and their art, contemporary painting exhibits stability in its products and longevity in its practices, and noting these two characteristics amounts to a non-conservative defense of such painting. But the broad recognition of the seeming fact that painting is not longer widely viewed as the ‘leading’—the most dynamic, innovative, experimental, etc.—art form does not plausibly amount to anything like a ‘legitimation crisis’ in Habermas’s sense; it just means that currently painting is widely viewed as one among many contemporary art forms. The old idea that ‘painting is dead’ was common enough in the 1970s and 1980s, but is not to my knowledge a living topos in contemporary art discourse. And in any case Gaiger’s defense, if successful, does nothing to restore painting to its leading role; it could only serve that ideological aim if he showed that stability and longevity were more central artistic values than whatever values digital art exhibits.

C’. Gaiger argues that appeal to his mode of the four characteristics of artistic painting provides criteria for determining whether some non-traditional contemporary work of art is or isn’t a painting. But as Gaiger himself notes with regard to the work of Katharina Grosse, his fourth characteristic, that paintings exhibit a ‘visual image’, fails to provide the key mark whose presence or absence determines whether something is a painting. He claims rather that the work exhibits ‘painterliness’ and a transformative character that mark it as a painting. But his model, and his discussion throughout the book up until that concluding analysis, do nothing to prepare his judgment, which seems in the context ad hoc and as if arising from a quite different style of thought.

    So none of Gaiger’s central claims and analyses survive unscathed. Where does he go wrong? As my criticisms suggest, it seems to me that a major problem is his reliance upon an inadequate account of painting. It is not just that he leaves the key mark of a ‘visual image’ unanalyzed, and then abandons it in a conceptually unmotivated manner at the moment when it should have been put to work. One might think that a basic problem is the very attempt to give a ‘definition’ of artistic painting in terms of four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. For what use could such a ‘definition’ be, other than to serve as a police-concept for a museum that claims to show art and only art? Gaiger himself notes two key features of painting and art forms generally that are not well accommodated by such an account. First, there are levels of relative basic-ness, and so relative secondariness, in the characteristics of artistic painting. As Gaiger notes, the transformation of something through color is basic to painting. Second, painting, like all art forms, is a historical phenomenon, and there is no reason at all to think that a simple definition can capture the expansions, contractions, developments, and mutations of what counts as a painting. A more flexible model of an art form would be one that treated the practice—painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.—as exhibiting certain basic features, an ever-shifting and -changing array of secondary and tertiary features, as well as historically varying relations to other arts and indeed other non-artistic practices. It seems to me that Gaiger would do well to abandon the unworkable definition here and devote his prodigious philosophical mind to working out an account that acknowledges his own better insights on the historicity and strata of art forms.

   

References:

 

Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Four Essays on Liberty (1969)

Jason Gaiger, Aesthetics and Painting (2008)

-----Philosophy of Painting (2022)

Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis

Expression (2005)

Bence Nanay, ‘Inflected and Uninflected Experience of Pictures’ in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. Abell and Bantinaki (2010)