Painting, History and Meaning: Sites of Time

By Craig Staff

This compelling new study considers contemporary painting’s relationship with time and with events, ideas and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past.

A unique examination of the relationship that contemporary painting has with history and historical material, Painting, History and Meaning is a timely response to, and discussion of, how contemporary painters and artists have addressed a significant area of concern for both practitioners and theorists in recent years.  

Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between painting and history.

Primary readership will be the fine art academic community, art and painting practitioners, scholars and academics. Will appeal to second and third year undergraduate and postgraduate students of fine art and art  history. Of interest to students of cultural studies, history, curatorial studies and continental philosophy, and to those in the visual arts wanting to develop their understanding of contemporary art.

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Aug 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789383300

Craig Staff

Dr. Craig Staff is currently Reader in Fine Art at the University of Northampton, where he has worked since 2003, having completed his Ph.D. in Fine Art (Painting) at Nottingham Trent University and his MFA (Distinction) at the University of Ulster. In addition to having published on the intellectual histories of modernism, the broad focus of his recent research has considered how time is written into the work of art. His study Retroactivity and Contemporary Art, published in 2018 by Bloomsbury, considers contemporary art’s relationship with both history and historical materials. His next monograph, forthcoming on Intellect, seeks to examine the notion, following Jean-François Lyotard, that paintings function as ‘sites of time’.

Book preview

Introduction

Whenever we are before the image, we are before time.¹

The exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 14th December 2014 used the science fiction writer William Gibson's notion of a-temporality to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn't represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes.² Through this interpretive lens, the

profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles […] sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre […].³

Echoing such tendentious artistic strategies, Laura Hoptman, writing in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition would claim that what attracts artists to painting at a time when digital technology offers seemingly limitless options with less art-historical baggage is precisely its art historical baggage […].⁴ As Hoptman's contention denotes, it would appear that the ecologies of painting today are such that questions of the object's temporality and its relationship to the past or perhaps, more specifically, a past, are for both practitioners and critics alike, a key area of focus.

To begin to unpack why such a concern has recently gained a measure of critical purchase, one would perhaps first have to acknowledge the dissolution of modernist temporalities that were premised on a linear conception of time. For example, writing in an article in Artforum in 1972, Rosalind Krauss compares the historical progression of the modernist artwork to:

a series of rooms en filade. Within each room the individual artist explored, to the limits of his experience and his formal intelligence, the separate constituents of his medium. The effect of his pictorial act was to open simultaneously the door to the next space and close our access to the one behind him. The shape and dimensions of the new space were discovered by the next pictorial act; the only thing about that unstable position that was clearly determined beforehand was its point of entrance.⁵

Conversely, no longer beholden to a modernist teleology that promulgated the work of art as being necessarily bound up with a trajectory of aesthetic progression, postmodernism arrested the historical advance of the object. According to Thomas McEvilley:

The formalist view of art as a series of historically necessary developmental sequences was more than discredited; insofar as it had functioned as a kind of cover story for the claim of the superiority of Western culture and the centrality of its history within the whole, that view of art came to seem not merely misguided but positively harmful and, in puritanical abreaction, a kind of force of evil.⁶

One corollary of postmodernism privileging historical discontinuity was the tendency for it to adopt a number of appropriationist strategies that worked with any number of styles derived from any number of historical moments. By foregrounding pluralism (as opposed to the uniqueness of the modernist artifact), the claim that there could be a dominant style became increasingly contested.⁷

As a way to counter the malaise that postmodernism had originally engendered, certain thinkers have more recently turned toward the concept of anachronism as the means by which the effects of time can be harnessed. In certain respects, anachronism as a key strategy with regard to thinking about time and the work of art provides a third way between the linear model of time associated with modernism and the ostensible temporal arbitrariness brought about by postmodernism's leveling out of various styles. Moreover, and as Keith Moxey has noted:

In weaving what has been with what is, [anachronism offers] us a different conception of time no longer dominated by the linear progression with which art history is so familiar, but one that instead erases the distinction between the observer, on one side of time, and the epoch in which the work was created, on the other. The texture of the past is threaded through an account of the work's reception in the present.⁸

Although the relationship between anachronism and contemporary painting will be considered in closer detail within Chapter 4, at the very least it would appear to be the case that not only do instances of contemporary painting configure time differently, painters have different ways, so to speak, of telling the time. For example, beyond the tacit conviction directed toward painting's continued vitality, one salient aspect of Frieze's article of 2013 8 Painters on Painting was the acknowledgment of the connections individual practices have to art historical precedent. Whether it's Imran Quresh's discussion around miniature painting, Helen Johnson's so-called art-historical conversation with some strategies of postwar German painting, or Henry Taylor's own conversation with the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, to talk of painting today is at the same moment to converse with painting of the past.⁹ Johnson, for her part acknowledges a connection with

some strategies of postwar German painting because I think they can be of use in Australia today as a means of addressing this country's fraught and unresolved relationship to history since colonization: for instance, the paintings Martin Kippenberger produced during the mid-80s, when he mobilized painting's complexities in the service of a broader cultural critique. In an Australian context, I see these sorts of strategies in the work of Juan Davila, Geoff Lowe/A Constructed World, Raquel Ormella, and Kate Smith, for example.¹⁰

However, rather than kinship, the artist Mark Sadler acknowledges that the act of painting is a

competition with painters of the past […]. You confront art history attempting to do something almost impossible: to interrupt its voracious flow with your own subjective sense of the world hoping to obtain a result that will feel active and not subservient to the past.¹¹

Although Hoptman's contention was squarely aimed at the medium's proclivity to harness and reimagine aspects derived from painting's history, the temporalities that inhabit painting necessarily exceed those that are bound up with the aesthetic development of the medium. To this end, Marlene Dumas, Dexter Dalwood, Luc Tuymans, and Wang Xingwei have all produced works that seek to engage with events drawn from particular historical moments, be they cultural, political, or otherwise.

In one respect, the examples presented within the five chapters that follow rehearse and in certain respects are premised upon a process wherein, according to Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, two points on a chronological timeline are pulled together until they meet.¹² However, while Nagel and Wood construe such stitching through time with regard to the life (or afterlife) of artifacts, the participation of the past within the present tense of painting can also be discerned with respect to the artifact's or painting's manufacture. To this end, mark making itself has a temporality if we concede that individual brushstrokes have a speed. To this end, they might be applied in rapid succession or arrive at their destination, namely the painting's support, through measured deliberation, if not hesitancy. For that matter, while a painting might be finished in one sitting, it might equally take many months, even years to complete. The latter of the two approaches is certainly applicable to one of the artists we will consider in the second chapter. As James Rondeau has observed with regard to the working methods of Tomma Abts:

Her methods of construction belie the standard order of operations in painting. The imprimatura is not a thin monochromatic wash in which to sketch out forms but rather a slowly improvised and fully realized composition of boldly colored shapes that Abts will repurpose, obscure, and restructure. Her compositional road map is temporal, intuitive, and, above all, responsive […]. Over the course of days, months – sometimes years – she creates her compositions through a process that is, at first, both spontaneous and deliberate, then largely editorial.¹³

Either way, a painted surface is an aggregation of time as much as it is an aggregation of marks upon a given surface. As the artist Ellen Altfest has observed, painting is a handmade process built over time and has a physical presence. It is an accumulation of gestures, colours and textures.¹⁴ What Altfest's statement attests to, namely the temporality involved in a painting's production is an example of what Jean-François Lyotard has described as a site of time, a site that necessarily inheres within painting.¹⁵

Originally published in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Time: looking at the fourth dimension and reprinted in the journal Po&sie in 1985, Newman: The Instant begins by positing a heterogeneity of sites, all of which denote particular temporalities that inhere within and work to configure both the production and subsequent interpretation of painting. Accordingly:

A distinction should be made between the time it takes the painter to paint the picture (time of production), the time required to look at and understand the work (time of consumption), the time to which the work refers (a moment, a scene, a situation, a sequence of events: the time of the diegetic referent, of the story told by the picture), the time it takes to reach the viewer once it has been created (the time of circulation) and finally, perhaps, the time the painting is. This principle, childish as its ambitions may be, should allow us to isolate different sites of time.¹⁶

Notwithstanding Lyotard's own stated ambivalence, the principle and the distinctions it affords will act as an interpretive framework that, to a certain extent, will work to delimit and frame the argument as it has been presented here.

The focus for the first chapter, More Memory and More Time works outward from Georges Didi-Huberman's text of 2003 Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism, wherein a fresco painted by the Renaissance artist Fra Angelico for the San Marco convent in Florence during the 1440s was used as the basis to reflect upon how time is written into the work of art.¹⁷ Through relevant examples, the first chapter will seek to respond to the fundamental question Didi-Huberman posits, namely how are we to be equal to all the temporalities that [painting], before us, conjugates on so many levels […] how are we to account for the present of this experience, for the memory it evoked, and for the future it promised?¹⁸

The aim of the second chapter is to approach particular instances of contemporary painting that appear to incorporate styles or approaches that appear to be derived from modernist abstraction. To this end, the work of both Tomma Abts and Cheyney Thompson will be examined in relation to the possibility, following David James's admission, that artistic modernism is regarded as unfinished and irrepressible, a keyword that re-surfaces afresh […].¹⁹ Moreover, and as James's statement appears to suggest, although for several commentators the likes of Zombie Formalism merely proffer returns that are increasingly diminishing, artists’ fascination with this period in painting's history continues unabated and is suggestive of the fact that despite what has been claimed to the contrary, the project of modernist abstraction has yet to run its course.

In light of the renewed interest in the cultural practice of memorialization, the third chapter will specifically consider paintings that, following Arthur C. Danto's own writings on the subject, function as so-called special precincts whereby they are beholden to signify the reality of ends.²⁰ To this end, the analysis of Dana Schutz's Open Casket (2016) and Stern by Marlene Dumas (2004) will work outward from the following admission, namely, that we are historically removed from a body that the artist is seeking to depict as much as we are removed from the event it is indelibly bound up with and connected to. Moreover, as artistic responses to both, the affective dimension of the paintings will be considered in relation to the extent at which they foreground the historical realities they are seeking to revisit.

Within the last ten years, a number of artists have sought to deploy anachronism as a strategy for artistic production. With respect to painting, this encompasses working with historical techniques or materials, as in the case of Lisa Yuskavage and Maria Lalić or adapting iconography derived from historical works, an approach evident within the work of, among others Raqib Shaw, Glenn Brown, Kehinde Wiley, and Johannes Phokela.

The fourth chapter, Painting Anachronistically, will seek to examine the implications that such an approach brings, an approach that, following Didi-Huberman, brings with it a fundamental plasticity with respect to, in this particular case, paintings’ temporal differentiation.²¹ Analogous to the philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Michel Serres who, as Amelia Groom has noted, deploy anachronism in order to find unrealised potential in the archaic and obsolete, suggesting that old objects, techniques and ideas might just be waiting, unsatisfied with the limits of their epochs, this chapter will examine the potential of anachronism as a strategy for painting today.²²

The fifth and final chapter will approach the idea of painting as a site that, analogous to an archaeological site, functions as the means whereby specific paintings that derive from the past can be, as it were, excavated in toto and by extension, mediated, if not reinterpreted. For example, whereas Taus Makhacheva's Tightrope (2015) is premised upon the permanent collection of the P. S. Gamzatova Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts, Francis Alÿs's Fabiola operates somewhere between the found object and the readymade by way of over 300 portraits of a fourth-century Christian saint. Be that as it may, what all of the examples marshaled within the context of this chapter share is the strategy wherein by approaching painting as a site, and moreover, as a particular site of time, the artist can begin to disentangle the work from the historical coordinates it has become enmeshed within in order to, as it were, re-site the work and by extension, recast the ostensible set of meanings it carries.

As these chapter outlines have educed, and counter to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous assertion, painting today is foregrounded by a complex network of connections with chronology, time, and tense. First published in 1766, the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry famously asserted that poetry, rather than painting, was an art of time. According to Sarah J. Lippert, Lessing's text

offered a systematic differentiation of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of two categories of art defined as poetry and painting. These labels were used to refer to textual versus visual media. Supposedly so that they could peacefully coexist, Lessing endeavored to equitably carve out spheres for visual and textual media, in support of Horace's ut picture poesis tradition. Painting and poetry were divided based upon the notion that poetry belonged to the realm of time and painting to the province of space […].²³

With Lessing's assertion in mind, the overarching aim of this study is to ask what temporalities or sites of time inhabit painting, how they might be discerned, and what particular ends they serve with respect to the ostensible meanings they engender.²⁴

If, in the broad sense and according to Nagel and Wood, the time of art is marked by a series of densities, irruptions, juxtapositions, and recoveries, what follows is an attempt to determine how they configure the topology of contemporary painting.²⁵

NOTES

1.Georges Didi-Huberman, Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism, in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 31.

2.The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, accessed February 26, 2019, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1455.

3.Ibid.

4.Laura Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (New York: MoMA, 2014), 22.

5.Rosalind Krauss, A View of Modernism, in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 2nd edition (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 978.

6.Thomas McEvilley, The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5.

7.Alison Pearlman, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 33.

8.Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 45.

9.Jennifer Higgie, 8 Painters on Painting, Frieze, January 11, 2013, accessed January 4, 2019, https://frieze.com/article/8-painters-painting.

10.Ibid.

11.Ibid.

12.According to Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, writing in Anachronic Renaissance: "The model of linear and measurable time was hardly foreign to the Western historical imagination before modern times, as many medieval chronicles attest.