To scroll down to Philip Glahn's essay for Mass Art's show, click here.

written by Karen Kurczynski

Visiting Assistant Professor,

Massachusetts College of Art

Twofold Exhibition, Part I: Tyler at Mass Art

Doran Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art

Feb. 2–14, 2008

            An impressive range of artistic attitudes and tactics makes the exhibition of Tyler School of Art MFA candidates at the Doran Gallery stand out from the average art school exhibition. With work ranging from hand-painted installation to expressionistic painting enhanced by collage tactics, the reworking of the classic dialogue between drawing and painting is a meandering thread that connects these works. A radical variety of sophisticated redefinitions of drawing’s traditionally subordinate role is apparent from Noah Towery’s initial salvo, a type of deskilled drawing with paint, to Matthew D. Ritchie’s insistence on the use of drawing as an explicitly skilled technique to create (or in his work, imply but deliberately leave unfinished) the superficially seamless imagery of Japanimation and manga. The result is a representative slice of contemporary artistic approaches to redefining drawing in a situation where at present, the role of drawing has achieved all of the social significance and potential radicality once attributed to painting, without of course entirely displacing the unique approaches to color, optical space, and sensual texture which ensure painting’s continued relevance.

            Noah Towery expands on a particular recent tradition of ironic pseudo-expressionist semi-figuration exemplified by the work of artists like Philip Guston or Dana Schutz. Intense colors present a powerful visual impact via gestures reminiscent of finger painting with all its associations of unskilled, pre-symbolic, and purely libido-driven expression. Paint becomes scribbling, coloring as in a child’s imperfect attempts to fill in the rudimentary shapes of an image. It also takes the form of erasure, in a De Kooning-like process of creation and destruction, self-cancellation that presents images in constant flux. In The Kids 2008, flesh is interestingly displaced to a distant upper corner. In The Sleeper, the figure manifests as a pile-up of brushstrokes seemingly floating provisionally above the surface of the body which is merely a body of paint—a collection of contours dissolving in the jagged textures of previous paint layers. The representation of another, whose horizontal posture already orients her or him toward the irrational and the bodily, becomes little more than a disorderly collection of libidinal marks whose animation far exceeds that of the subject himself. Subjectivity, the picture implies, is little more than a collection of inherently tentative representations and revisions given meaning by their own emphatic force and liveliness. In The Battle, animated by vivid reds and purples, stick figures literally coming to existence out of paint face off in two groups, the optical space between them crossed by the “lance” of one long ridiculous, riveting brushstroke. The apocalyptic humor evident in this work brings Kandinsky’s breakthrough of abstract gestural force together with De Kooning’s still-relevant insight that “It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it becomes even more absurd not to do it.”

            Rachel Dobkin’s gestural paintings also make use of the sensual impact of color, but in a totally abstract drama of the materials of painting in their most banal form. Their simplicity and refusal of the transcendent which once infused every painterly gesture nevertheless proves that the implications of symbolic meanings remain even in the most seemingly banal or (only apparently) accidental marks. Just as Abstract Expressionism used the gesture of automatic drawing to reanimate painting and propel its primary significatory force, Dobkin’s abstract gestures, while painterly, are animated by an impression of drawing scaled up to the dimension of a public address. Dobkin keeps her paint thin and dirty, messy and human, energetic and playful but also coy. Her colors are glaring and vulgar, sparkles pervading swathes of turquoise that surround, but refuse to frame, a window of fleshy pink. In Guila, vivid red pigment remains undissolved in washes of raspberry paint, disrupting the expectations of pictorial space set up by the vertical blue and green brushstrokes that otherwise appear to overlap them. These pigment deposits counter any residual illusionism and provide an unexpected liveliness to the otherwise flat, liquid surface.

         Sheryl Oppenheim’s large painting also functions abstractly, but instead of the brush gesture, multiple levels of image transformation imbue the hand-printed painting with a less intimate but equally personal history. White distortions barely register a pattern of origami paper photoshopped and photo-silkscreened onto the canvas, while a large purple section of silkscreened stripes actually reworks a prior painting of storage compartments, also photoshopped and then printed. A hollow container becomes a solid pattern, a spatial structure a shifting pictorial element. Oppenheim notes that although drawing does not enter into this process, the bodily gesture it implies remains central: “my admiration of gesture and touch come into the painting in my use of the screenprint. The relatively physically demanding task of screenprinting the large canvas allows me to bring my body back into the painting.” Painting becomes a field of action, as well as a collection of spaces become forms.

         Others deal directly with reproduced images, whether media icons or personal snapshots. In Sallie Forrer’s work, an inky sketched landscape contrasts with the flat washes of faces modeled after old snapshots of the artist’s family, partially depicted through graphite contour alone. The figures are carefully placed in discontinuous spaces and varied transparencies and scales in order to evoke transience, the momentary presence of memories. Fleeing moments are made artificially permanent through photography, which gives them visual structure; here the photograph is reanimated as a subjective trace by being re-drawn. Faces are more and less obscured, their specific emotional resonances caught in a flux of fading and transformation. Symmetrical decorative patterns fade under the humanist import of the image of a brother on a bike. Another scene takes place in the overtly decadent, aristocratic, and exotic walls of the palace at Versailles, complete with hanging chandeliers imperfectly drawn. The palace is now populated by semi-nude children and a random collection of variously hued dogs, that perpetual symbol of family loyalty. How the overtly decadent setting, the dogs alternately brashly colored and meticulously drawn in graphite, and the childhood memories relate to each other is left for us to decide. The setting suggests a spectral ruin of a family castle-turned-museum made into a personal museum of memory. Perhaps a fantasy of aristocratic legacy, or of mere material luxury, permeates every child’s perception of family—because otherwise the setting threatens to become nonsensical or just overly grandiose. Bassem Mostafa puts less emphasis on setting, focusing directly on the physiognomy of friend’s faces in his series of portrait drawings. Here, ink washes capture the ambiguous expressions of these compelling but somehow mysteriously impersonal faces. Fantastic elements accompany each figure: small, cartoony creatures which imply an invisible other under whose watch our daily dramas play out. Their existence, whether imaginary or visionary, seems paradoxical—their substantiality underdeveloped, but at the same time undercut by the insistent materiality and mundane messiness of the ink, which works best in conjunction with the embodied reality of the human figures.

         Sarah Kurz’s figural paintings of models engage directly with the media’s role in creating utterly inaccessible images of perfection. Women in eveningwear appear subtly distorted by the vagaries of painterly texture but more or less intact, their power uncontested. Stenciled script across one image reads, “you feel so good”; only here does the sheer artificiality of a font imitating handwriting, and a stencil imitating drawing, suggest a critical distance from the seamless and soulless embodiments of desire (whether desire for possession or for narcissistic identification) that structure our very psyches. The never-ending replication of these purported role models, and the seriousness with which they seem to approach their task, becomes subtly ridiculous in its re-presentation. To some degree, media images also underlie the more abstracted imagery of Tom Gallagher, who interprets images of ranchers and horses in evocative, rudimentary graphite marks and a foundational vocabulary of painterly brushstrokes. The radical reconfiguration of the two panels in My Old Landscapes creates a paradoxical situation of finished unfinish, dependent on the presence of the sketchiest of drawings surrounded by colorful gestures seeking painting, neither cohering into a recognizable image.

         Matthew D. Ritchie presents drawing as painting, attacking any residual conception of finish. In Ritchie’s Hey Get Down From There, Who Taught You to Rock So Hard, a round-headed figure descended directly from Takeshi Murakami’s signature anime style rides a flying guitar out of a futuristic landscape of childlike figures and giant guitar headstocks. The childlike narrative title aptly summarizes the lighthearted mood of this cartoony piece. Formally, an interesting dialogue develops between superflat areas of solid color and the calligraphic excitement of flying contours defining figures and landscape alike, but the sketchiness of those contours also jars with the anime aesthetic. If applied strategically, this sketchiness could insert a much-needed subjective presence into the coded anime universe, rather than appearing literally unfinished.

         Equally fantastic and playful, but more monumental, is the acrylic painting Cherryblossoms by Mayumi Nagayama. Vivid pinks, greens, and whites define the rhythmic surface of a landscape populated by cherry trees personified as voluptuous female bodies, baring their high heels and lacy underwear to a phalanx of smaller, comic figures popping up out of the smooth hillside. The sheer visual delight of spring in all its sensuous glory appears as an animated ritual dance of childlike voyeurs whose hands simultaneously reach for and shield themselves from the diminishing rows of regular womanly bottoms. Shape takes precedence over line in the confident depiction of cherry blossoms as flat petals breaking away from a larger field of pink, but a playfully retro calligraphic doodle also lends texture to the grass. Where Noah Towery’s scribbles evoke the raw energy of a very young child, however, these doodles seem lifted from a girl’s notebook—or from the hand-drawn advertisements of the 1950s. Equally synthetic, flat blue shapes become legs in Vincent Strijkan’s On Multiple Accounts of Disturbing the Piece. Here, the inky brown wash of the men’s shoes thrown skyward presents a jarring, interesting contrast with the calligraphic and whimsical legs. Against the rudimentary modeling of the shoes, the rubbery two-dimensionality of these legs sprouting from the bottom of the canvas animates the surface of an otherwise uneventful picture.

         If Strijkan’s scenarios imply a masculinity thrown on its head or otherwise gone haywire, Chris Hall’s Seminal Sacrifice attacks a daily male ritual head on. Hall’s painting has an expressionistic force indebted to the jagged contours and textures of Clyfford Still’s abstraction, including its heavy-handed color which Barnett Newman famously referred to as “buckeye.” Yet far from abstract gestural statements, these mutlimedia works feature a series of overtly symbolic images competing for our attention with more mundane elements. The title of Seminal Sacrifice is painted in imperfect capital letters in a highlighted area of blue, above a giant black shape which partially resolves into a bull, surrounded by areas of vivid gold, blue, green, and white paint applied in variously thick and gooey or flat and diaphanous textures. A crude graphite graffito of a male bird-headed figure engrossed in theatrical self-stimulation overlays the bull’s head. The work’s heavy-handedness is tempered by the banal humor of the attached calendar at lower right, labeled “Masturbation schedule” and appropriately marked with “X”s on certain days. The jarring contrast between those two written messages gives the work its central import (a few additional scrawls start to tip the work toward the maudlin). Hall states that “Humanity, with all its foibles, strivings, successes, and sins, is infinitely more interesting to me than anything that is polished, perfected, theoretical, or removed.” The immediate discomfort of entering the personal world embodied in such a work may be necessary to receiving its humanist message, which is conveyed through the specific juxtaposition of painting and collage with drawing—as writing, as graffiti-like scrawl, as diaristic revelation, and as crude sketch, all in dialogue with each other. It is the hybridity of this process, propelled by the intimacy and openness of drawing, which made the work possible. As Hall notes, “By introducing some the aspects of my drawing into my most recent painting, I have been more willing to take risks not only with materials, but also in subject matter. The process of raw immediacy and play shows in the result, and allows the viewer a sense of intimacy despite the often heavy and dark subject matter of my work.” The pathetic rawness of this work is its strength and its weakness, but the elements of writing and drawing introduce playfulness and humor, saving it from neo-expressionist kitsch.

         Diametrically opposed to Hall’s aggressive intimacy is the subtle impersonality of the historical scene that plays out in Nick Barbee’s untitled collage. Initially, it appears to present a sort of elaborate treehouse, and only secondarily becomes a representation of a colonial fort, given Barbee’s preoccupation with colonial history. The setting is a wooded landscape, the image drawn of elements collaged from magazines, so that images of human or animal hair become tree trunks, a landscape in space turned on its side becomes a solid wood post. Each detail of this macrocosm is a microcosm with its own natural and cultural properties. The scene is enigmatic, but embodies in its very structure Barbee’s assertion that “we are a part of something larger and older than we generally recognize.” Rick Ulysse’s work is also based on a collage process, with the medium’s inherent disjunctures and critical perspective toward appropriated imagery. In this case, a black male figure, or part of one, repeats like a musical note across the pristinely synthetic silver paper surface. Only his back is visible, his suspenders and his gaze lowered. Is he pissing or engrossed in something more noble? His hidden gaze rejects ours, so that all we can know is what we project onto this figure, whose repetition has the empty presence of a stereotype. The delicacy of paper on paper contributes to the work’s experimental provisionality, its existence like a fragmentary map of the social world which will remain perpetually in progress.

         In a much more brash three-dimensional statement, Charlotte Rodenberg’s This is My Playground, 2007, harks back to the hand-painted Pop tactics of artists like Oldenburg and Kaprow to attack the sanctity of the gallery space by introducing the street as a distinct material presence in all its inner-city decrepitude, but also its potential for action and transgressive or enlightening social interaction. Rodenberg depicts the urban imagery of the American street effectively through a dialogue among three different media: hand-painted cardboard structures formed into tires, bricks, signs, stoplights, and a typically run-down and pointedly defunct phone booth, accompanied by two panels featuring on one side a detailed ink contour and wash drawing of street refuse, children, and backyards, and on the other a photocollage of the downtown Philly sidewalks, with a circuitous path of vivid red arrows tracing the artist’s route through the city in search of inspiration. The overwhelming alienation and depersonalization of our contemporary inner cities is insistently personalized through the work’s adamant handmade quality, indicating how the ubiquitous discarded and decrepit objects which populate this landscape are perpetually available for psychological engagement as loci of personal or cultural memory. The work manages to insert a phenomenological experience of the gritty reality of the urban environment still excluded in the rarified space of the gallery, but at the same time function on the entirely symbolic level of a handmade, idiosyncratic expression of realist themes made slightly mysterious and poignant. It is drawing, not painting, which aptly describes the presence of three different manifestations of urban experience in a cohesion based on an explicitly improvisatory, in a way sketch-like, investigation of representational methods each with their own history of engagement with urban life: the sketch as recorder of shifting psychological perceptions, the photocollage as a critical realist technique, and the handmade installation as a phantasmagoric embodiment of material objects.

         In media as diverse as installation, silkscreen, and collage, drawing can only loosely be defined as a basic sort of inherently fragmented or provisional markmaking. But this openness to redefinition is drawing’s very strength. Whereas painting is linked intrinsically to the materials which define it as a medium, drawing has no inherent medium and remains radically open, always potentially hybrid or inter-media. It has the power to insert itself into painting and reanimate a medium repeatedly declared dead and threatened with marginality. Drawing is closer to inspiration, and further from finish (and thus commodity status). It is linked directly to writing, to musing, to sketching, to graphing, to comic books and animation. In its multifaceted and chameleon-like potential, it holds the key to both future evolutions and perpetual revisions of the past in art

For better or worse, the 80s has left its mark. The paradigms that defined a decade not yet historicized are either making a comeback or have never really gone away. As the lack of distance has so far held the processes of historical categorization at bay, continuities manifested in simultaneous attempts at revivals and repressions provide a sense of unease and, if one looks closely, outright embarrassment. Skinny jeans are making an uncanny reappearance, while AIDS has all but vanished from a visual mainstream thriving on novel catastrophes rather than ongoing problems. The spectacle is still spectacular, and the conservative backlash of post–Cold War but post-9/11 America is, again, embodied in an outlandishly masculine Republicanism projecting a pre-modern sense of security. The great rage that was the postmodern has quietly left the academic departments and the pages of theoretically inclined art journals, refusing to await judgment on whether it ever really happened.

            The 80s were a time of fierce debate about the place of politics in culture and culture in politics. While reactionary senators crusaded against the indecent in publicly funded art, art activists fought to support and raise the visibility of social and cultural experiences outside traditional artworld confines. Hyper-theoretical discourses sought to determine the legitimacy, indeed the very possibility of art making, discussing the end of painting, mediums, and the museum. Though alienating and at times nauseating in its jargon of esoteric self-referentiality, the discourse around the “idiocy of painting” was never meant to declare the death of artistic production as a critical engagement with visual culture at large.[2] Rather, it sought to painstakingly articulate the last spaces of resistance at a moment when the history of modern art appeared to have culminated in a self-defying exhaustion of revolutionary fervor. Texts such as Douglas Crimp’s “End of Painting” (1981), Thomas Lawson’s “Last Exit Painting” (1981), and Yve-Alain Bois’ “Painting: The Task of Mourning” (1986) in fact argued that modern painting’s implosion into a defiant assertion of art’s autonomy as a project that would assert its humanist quest through a palpable, handmade materiality was only half, or less than half, of the story. To empty painting of its distracting and depoliticizing illusionism did not necessarily have to result inlead to a defensive inwardness but had simultaneously opened up the space outside the picture plane for scrutiny. Painting’s continuing validity therefore lay with its critical articulation of the mechanisms of image-making at a specific moment in history, of how painting functions in a world that needs its artworks and its institutions to provide a symbolic sense of order and freedom, cohesion and solution. According to Crimp and Bois, the medium’s heroes were Robert Ryman and Daniel Buren, who deconstructed (to stick with the parlance of the time) the maker’s touch and the secluded space of the work’s experience, which reassured modern man in his role as a player rather than a pawn in the game of history.

            But what is the legacy of this awareness, this debate? If the 80s was a decade of determining the possibilities of artistic production, what was the consensus? What positions are available or, more crucially, which positions are being taken? Or are we left with the often-lamented after-taste of postmodernism, the cynical devil-may-care free-for-all embodied in the paradox of idiosyncratic historicism? A show such as Twofold could be understood either way: as a conscious group- effort investigating painting’s function within contemporary visual culture, or as a relativist potpourri of individualist expressions that obtain certain formal and contentual commonalities solely based on a passively shared zeitgeist. But to assume the latter would be not only dismissive but also highly unproductive. The simplistic readings of postmodernism and the “end” of art have only led to a false notion of tolerance that holds neither the artist not the critic accountable for their practice. To confront contemporary painting with the tasks assigned to it just over 20 years ago is to revisit a formative moment in the development of contemporary practice, and argue for its continued relevance.

            The main challenge posed by Crimp, Bois, and their colleagues was how to keep painting from symbolically resolving the ambiguities of art and life, how to have it problematize rather than virtually solve the complexities of contemporary experience. Leaning heavily on Walter Benjamin’s notion of “allegory,” the discourse demanded that painting become the very experience rather than the illustration of modernity and its sense of transition, fragmentation, and arbitrariness. Truth could not be represented but only articulated as the traditional mechanism of art’s attempt to find closure and synthesis where contradiction and the unresolved determined extra-aesthetic, everyday experience.

            What unites the works in this exhibition is their participation in an ongoing investigation of the materials and forms of image-making, a critical self-examination of painting as a means of communication that is approached by its viewers as a space where pictures provide us with a sensual and subjective mediation of objective truths. In many of the works on view here, these expectations are foiled, or at least challenged, as painterly surfaces present the reciprocal dissonance of such binaries as space and flatness, line and color, abstraction and representation. Michelle Carter’s Purple Water, Low Tide and Maine Morning (both 2007) are at first glance precisely what their titles announce them to be—landscapes. But the lack of spatial resolution brought about in part by a graphic use of colored lines and black outlines turns these small oil paintings at times into aerial perspectives, resembling scientific surveys rather than a more prosaic immersion into nature. Furthermore, the landscapes’ small size and panel board support recall the painter’s palette, lending these pictures a certain technical explicitness, de-romanticizing not only the landscape but the very process of creation.

            Guhapriya Ranganathan’s series of woodblock prints, Burned In Her Memory I-IV (2007), similarly literalizes an otherwise empathetic inscription of memory and loss. The intricate lines of automatic writing, the traces of a distracted compulsion to fill an emptied space are set off against more violent marks and cuts. Without its title, the works have an overwhelming formalist quality as they measure surface against depth, deep imprints into the paper against thinner and more illustrative lines. As a personal contemplation of experienced events, the print, by its very nature, reverses what the viewer seeks via the title: what is cut into the plate of remembrance does not show itself as black, hence, charred or burned, but white, precisely where the woodblock did not hold the ink. Here, the indexical mark is emptied of its negative connotation.

            Among Amanda Lohnes’s drawings and prints, two works stand out in their attempt to complicate a confoundingly enduring trend in portraiture. Bobby Joe (2007) and My Grandfather Was Caught Returning from His Mistress (2008) both invoke the voyeuristic look-at-my-fucked-up-friends-and family of Nan Goldin and Tim Gardner. Like Gardner’s reappropriation of watercolors as an art form from the dustbin of charter- bus coloring tours through Tuscany, Lohnes’s drawings on silk employ seemingly outdated materials to great effect. The silk’s simultaneous transparency and shiny reflection both underline and undermine the gaze’s proverbial insight into the miserable private lives of others that makes us feel much better about ourselves.

            In the spirit of further pressing the analytic framework of continuous methodological self-examination, one of the show’s most theoretically and discursively inclined works is Soi Shin’s Waiting For a New Life (2007). Here, the artist surrounds two pod-like, sprouting shapes with a shimmering glow, a source of light amid an otherwise gloomy surrounding. The theme of progressive change and post-apocalyptic renewal lies at the very core of modernism, and along those lines one can catch a glimpse of van Gogh’s shoes rendered on top of Mondrian’s early exercises in spiritual dialectics. This is the hopeful deconstruction of the epitome of the modernist paradigm, of the enduring belief in art’s new life, in the continuity of a utopian task. It recants postmodernism’s cynicism and historicism with a critical awareness of rather than blind faith in the history of the avant-garde.

            Using painted versions of variously colored labeling dots, Michael Zachary’s Rip It Up and Start Again (2007) is a collage of abstraction. Unlike the revolutionary cut-and-paste of the Dadaists and Constructivists, or, more recently, Martha Rosler and Romare Bearden, Zachary does not recombine visually disparate elements in order to articulate socio-political structures. Instead, he rearranges the components and patterns of abstraction itself, effectively questioning the formalist doctrine of opticality and medium-specificity by disintegrating the integrity and originality of the painting’s space.

            Next to Zachary’s semiotics of abstraction one finds a single drawing by Stephanie Costello, a small gouache on paper titled My Hide-Out (2007). It shows an architectural structure consisting of three boxes, the smallest one on the bottom, the largest on top. The inverted tower comes complete with doors and windows and a ladder leading directly to the highest level. This sanctuary’s walls are embellished in a graffiti-esque manner, and the letter “A” (for art?) looms over the façade. Costello has given the house of art, or art school—a respite from the world outside (and maybe even one’s inside world)—an ironic, even bitter implication. One is reminded of another influential 1980s text, Otto K. Werckmeister’s Citadel Culture, which describes the arts as well as the entertainment industry as providing just such a fortress—one that not only defends against outside enemies but is constructed to tightly control and survey its constituency on the inside.

            On several levels the most graphic work in this exhibition is Owen Rundquist’s large Curses From the Wasteland (2007). Hung at the most prominent space in Tyler Gallery, the work is bold and demands attention. It combines many of the show’s investigative strategies in one work. Curses is composed of binaries and literalizations: it is at once deep and flat, gestural and graphic, abstract and representational, personal and commercial. The abstract, expressionist background is overlaid with seismographic lines and outlined shards, while the wolves’ mythical, Beuysian suggestion is countered by the animals’ schematic rendering. The sign confronts its elements: the rational faces the irrational, the intuitive meets the calculated, the wild encounters the static.

            A similar layering of pictorial elements can be found in Jeremy Roby’s small and intricate oil paintings. Zooey (2007) stands out, juxtaposing a photorealist depiction of a girl, licking a lollipop and showing much décolleté, with stenciled letters, red ray-like marks, and a ghostly figure penciled into the background. In this work Roby manages to literally off-set notions of sexual as well as aesthetic seduction. Another such demystification can be found in Untitled (2007), a small trompe-l’oeil, surrealist painting of a torn canvas behind which the viewer finds the waste and wiring that lies beyond, or behind, every work of art. While Lucio Fontana’s slashes had a literal as well as spiritual dimension, Roby clutters the once- metaphysical wound.

            Catherine Stack’s series of small etchings, sometimes combined with chine-collé and thread, present an intricate, personal, and up-close, yet webbed, inorganic organicism. Hovering between registers of repetitive, compulsive production (the works bear titles such as November and March 3 [both 2006]), and scientific records of biological networks, these systems are the beautifully bankrupt “rhizomes” of an apolitical and ahistorical postmodernism. They assign neither points of origin, nor goals, nor qualitative relationships between points of convergence. Stack’s webs poetically expose the rhetoric of a disinterested heterogeneity that still reigns supreme in many of art’s institutions.

            Jackie Silva’s convulsively thick paintings nicely tie back to the start of the exhibition and Michelle Carter’s cartographic palettes. Silva’s small canvases are both volcanic islands and open sores, as well as Clement Greenberg’s abject-formalist nightmare. It is as if the historical project of the flattening of the picture plane resulted not in the high art of Minimalism and Pop but in an amorphous and informe mass that has turned the rational philosophy of the medium’s materiality into its absurd other. This is Cézanne’s doubt on tranquilizers, questioning not the border between picture and object but paint’s inability to render itself sensible.

            Even the show’s most painterly paintings play beautifully into this story of meta-criticality. Victoria Jacob’s relatively large Untitled (2007) penis painting complements Carter’s very vaginal Big Red (2007). Hung in separate rooms, these works provide a gendered approach to the investigation. Covering her canvas with multiple phallic strokes and signs (there is even a penis-for-nose figure), Jacob follows artists such as Lynda Benglis or Shigeko Kubota in emphasizing the patriarchic underpinning of painting as practice and history. The painting is as much penises as painting is phallic. Carter’s Big Red is a somewhat ambiguous meditation on a similar subject: here, painting is wrested from its masculine grip to contend a different kind of image and sensibility in big, bold fashion. At the same time, the work throws in the viewer’s face its own objectness (art history is men staring at women) as well as the objectifying function of art that has driven much of the feminist and postcolonial reevaluation of image-making as a form of power over history and identity.

            These artists have taken up a legacy that has burdened them with much responsibility and certainly much aggravation. The joyful, and more often than not naive, carelessness of past expressionisms has been replaced by a complex negotiation of pictorial practice. But as a specific critical discourse that matured in the 1980s left us with many unresolved issues, two questions must be addressed: one, are we at a point when painting’s self-critique has become symbolic; and, two, if the allegorical investigation of modernism opened up the space outside the picture plane for contemplation, where is that space, and what are its issues?

            The examination of how art and images function in our culture has to address the experience not only of making, but of viewing pictures. Rather than presenting the viewer with a synthesis of conflicting ideas, of the spiritual and material discrepancies that constitute modern life, within the picture plane, the experience of dissociation and estrangement has to manifest itself in the sphere between the work and the spectator. This is what Benjamin calls “truth is form”: it is the “representational impulse” that is real as truth is “bodied forth [vergegenwärtigt] in the dance of represented ideas.”[3] Truth is our desire to solve things and give form in art. This attempt to contain, to symbolically forge harmony and thereby present a psychological as well as social and political sense of stability in an unstable culture, is precisely what drives Crimp to decry art’s idiocy. To Crimp and Lawson, the artist’s task is to make explicit these imaging conventions. But have we arrived at a point where the efforts prescribed in the 1980s have again become an image rather than an action? Have we yet again securely confined our creative and analytic dissent to the haven of aesthetics? Has deconstruction become a symbolic rather than a political act?

            The question of the open space and its issues are closely related to this dilemma. Benjamin’s own laborious contemplation of allegory was at first marked by an overwhelming sense of melancholy. After all, if knowing the truth means knowing the mechanisms of knowledge, one is left with a disenchanted world where poetry and beauty are mere tools in a larger scheme of ideological oppression. But Benjamin’s observations soon gained a sense of urgency as his allegorical method found practical application in Marxist dialectics, hence, inscribing those mechanisms of knowing and making with a very real sense of struggle. Representations were no longer just a cultural conundrum but a chance to critically engage with the rearticulation of identities, the picturing of selves and others in a given environment. Via Bertolt Brecht, allegory grew into a system of reflection and reflexivity, reference and self-reference that gave individuals the chance to situate themselves socially and historically. War and class struggle, urbanization and alienation, romance and mortality all became a very real part in modernism’s fight against empty representations on convoluted pictures.

            The 80s left art, and especially painting, with a critical possibility whose full potential has yet to be realized. The knowledge of how images and signs work is bound to historical specificity, a reflection on where we’re at, what works, and what doesn’t. As what Lawson called a “truly conscious practice,” painting needs to not only display its consciousness but turn it into a practice, demanding an active, rather than a symbolic place in the world and its pictures.[4]