Contemporary Painting

Suzanne Hudson

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780500776018
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte contemporáneo

Painting is a continually expanding and evolving medium. The radical changes that have taken place since the 1960s and 1970s the period that saw the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist visual language have led to its reinvigoration as a practice, lending it an energy and diversity that persist today. In Contemporary Painting, renowned critic and art historian Suzanne Hudson offers an intelligent and original survey of the subject: a rigorous critical snapshot that brings together more than 250 renowned artists from around the world, whose ideas and aesthetics characterize the painting of our time. These luminaries include Cecily Brown, Theaster Gates, Josh Smith, Jenny Saville, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Gabriel Orozco, Christina Quarles, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Zhang Xiaogang and many others. Organized into seven thematic chapters exploring aspects of contemporary painting, this is an essential volume for art history enthusiasts, students, critics and practitioners.

Chapter 1

Appropriation

References to works past are widespread in the history of art. Artists will often consciously evoke major precedents, and indeed, this is even how painters traditionally learned their craft: by copying or emulating the exemplars of masters, and reinterpreting specific features or motifs. Referencing prior works continued in the 20th century, but in addition to this, artists began to use similar techniques to turn art against itself in an act of self-conscious borrowing called appropriation. This involves an artist using a pre-existing item – most commonly, a found object, commercial image or someone else’s art – to make something new. The strategy consolidated into what came to be known as ‘appropriation art’ in America in the late 1970s. To date, it remains an influential critical method that intentionally challenges received ideas of authorship and originality. This is especially so as the act of appropriation alters the meaning of the sourced material and exposes the relation of contemporary practice to painting as a historically esteemed art form.

Appropriation in the contemporary period relates to conditions outside art as much as to genealogies within it, and in these, transformations in technology and media are key. Highlighting technological developments in a pointed engagement with obsolete equipment, Cory Arcangel (b. 1978, Buffalo, NY) hacks video games to serve new aesthetic possibilities. In Super Mario Clouds (2002), Arcangel modified a 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) video-game cartridge to erase everything but the clouds, leaving behind a depopulated and strangely sublime blue-skied landscape of pixels.[22] Appropriation might involve a translation in kind, as in Arcangel’s game modifications, or, say, from a photograph to a photograph; alternatively, it could involve a conversion from one medium into another, like a painting into a photograph, as in the work of Vik Muniz (b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil). Muniz remakes famous paintings out of miscellaneous materials such as diamonds, dust and junk, before photographing them: he fashioned Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–6) in peanut butter and jelly, and Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889) with scraps torn from the pages of glossy magazines and books, transporting and transforming images between media.[23]

22 Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002

23 Vik Muniz, Wheat Field with Cypresses, after Van Gogh (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

In the act of appropriation, material is passed through various interpretive constructions, showing that meaning may be determined by context as much as content. This can be seen in the work of Miguel Calderón (b. 1971, Mexico City, Mexico): beginning with content screened on Mexican tabloid television, he staged events and photographed them, before employing a local horse-portrait painter to depict them. These artisan-produced paintings wound up as part of the set design in Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), completing a circuit that returned them, reconfigured, to moving images. Interpretations of meaning would naturally differ between viewers who first encountered the original content when it was initially screened on television, prior to its subsequent stages of transformation, and those who came across that content by watching Anderson’s film.

To give a very different example of the movement of material through multiple frameworks, fashion designers threeASFOUR’s Fall 2019 runway show involved a re-engagement with patterns from their debut collection twenty years earlier, together with fabric sourced from rejected paintings by artist Stanley Casselman (b. 1963, Phoenix, AZ).[24] These geometric abstractions consist of expertly blurred colours pulled across vast canvases with squeegees; they were first made as deliberate knockoffs of paintings by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, Germany). Casselman’s project began in 2012 at the prompting of art critic Jerry Saltz, who ran a Facebook contest asking for the perfect fake for $155 plus the cost of materials. Later that year, Saltz opined in New York Magazine that professional forgers would not work for such a trivial fee, deadpanning that:

24 threeASFOUR featuring Stanley Casselman, runway show during New York Fashion Week, February 2019

in the art world, noncriminal fakes aren’t news. We don’t even call them “fakes.” We prefer the term “appropriation,” whereby a new artwork incorporates or reproduces another. Copyists lie on a continuum: At one end, you have extremely original artists (Richard Prince, Elaine Sturtevant) who use the old to make something new. [Sturtevant learned the techniques involved in remaking other artists’ paintings, sculptures and films from scratch.] At the other, you have people deceiving buyers. In between, you have artists who merely make covers, trying to get attention…

How, then, do new artworks emerge? Through what means, and to what ends? These key questions serve as the basis for considering the artists presented in the chapter to come.

Beyond Pictures: A Recent History of Appropriation

As appropriation developed in the United States in the late 1970s, it directly challenged safeguards against copyright infringement in American law. The nature of appropriation involved opposition to private property, which was, more broadly, a critique of the prevailing economic order and the social order, including the patriarchy. For many artists at the time, buoyed by student protests, civil rights and feminism, the canon of major works by Western male artists was to be challenged rather than extended. These artists took issue with the inequities of gender, sex and race underlying art production, exhibition and collection – and appropriation aimed to expose this power imbalance. The goal was to dismantle the institutionalized system of values that supported the identification of masterpieces and perpetuated media stereotypes.

At the same time, a dominant force in painting was neo-expressionism, as discussed on p. 9. These intensely emotive, maximalist works were often infused – in form and content – with a masculine and at times misogynistic energy. This was at odds with the increasingly socially conscious views of many artists, and neo-expressionism – as propounded by David Salle (b. 1952, Norman, OK) and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938, Kamenz, Germany) – was indicted by its opponents for celebrating sexist clichés and worse. (As late as 2013, Baselitz held forth in an interview for Spiegel Online: ‘Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.’)

Some artists indulged in large-scale panels given over to adolescent fantasies of naked women cavorting and permitting unimpeded visual access. Others perfected renditions of old myths to link their production to a venerable past, the inheritance of which they claimed. Julian Schnabel (b. 1951, New York, NY), for one, festooned the canvas with broken crockery to achieve the appearance of spontaneity and to signify emotional catharsis. In this way he takes on the handmade, invoking women’s domestic labour and craft, but paradoxically reserving it for male use. Such work sold – often for great sums – and in so doing it raised these artists to the status of celebrities (a cult of personality that had its casualties, as with the tragic death of Jean-Michel Basquiat). For other artists and critics, these market conditions represented the dispiriting interchangeability of painting and commodity.

This apparent contamination of the canvas meant that during the 1980s more appropriation occurred in other media: most notably photography, as in the projects of the American artists Sherrie Levine (b. 1947, Hazleton, PA) and Richard Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, US). Both Levine and Prince re-photographed images taken by others and presented the ‘new’ images as their own. Levine, appropriating the work of men, famously reproduced bookplates of Walker Evans’s government-sponsored Farm Security Administration images of Depression-era tenant workers and their dwellings. In a 1981 press release accompanying their first showing, she wrote:

I am interested in issues of identity and property—i.e. What is the same? What do we own? I suspect auratic notions about art: “authenticity,” “the genius,” “the masterpiece,” “the hand.” When every image is leased and mortgaged, a photograph of a photograph is no more remarkable than a photograph of a nude.

For his part, Prince captured Marlboro cigarette advertisements of American cowboys, stripping them of brand logos and copy. This movement has been dubbed the Pictures Generation after a small but hugely influential 1977 show in New York curated by Douglas Crimp, simply titled ‘Pictures’. Prince and Levine were exhibited alongside other artists including Jack Goldstein and Robert Longo. Many Pictures Generation artworks made their sources clear, for the point was to dismantle and recontextualize the ‘original’ material, not to create an image from scratch. Although these artists aimed to release the hold of consumer culture on the collective imagination, their attacks could be misunderstood as repeating the problems inherent in the material they were critiquing. In distinction from collage, which makes visually evident that material has been brought together from multiple sources, a re-photographed photograph looks just the same. How could one tell the difference between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’? And how could one assess intent when images were unmoored and perpetually on the move (a phenomenon that would later be facilitated by the Internet)?

The ahistorical mining of readymade imagery becam...