“Painting: The Task of Mourning”
Painting: The Task of Mourning
[My paintings] are about death in a way,
the uneasy death of modernism.
-Sherrie Levine
Nothing seems to be more common in our present situation than a millenarianist
feeling of closure. Whether celebratory (what I will call manic) or melancholic
one hears endless diagnosis of death: death of ideologies (Lyotard); of
industrial society (Bell); of the real (Baudrillard); of authorship (Barthes); of man
(Foucault); of history (Kojeve) and, of course, of modernism (all of us when we use
the word postmodern). Yet what does all of this mean? From what point of view are
these affirmations of death being proclaimed? Should all of these voices be characterized
as the voice of mystagogy, bearing the tone that Kant stigmatized in About
a Recently Raised Pretentiously Noble Tone in Philosophy (1796)? Derrida writes:
Then each time we intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to,
and to what ends, those who declare the end of this or that, of man or the
subject, of consciousness, of history, of the West or of literature, and
according to the latest news of progress itself, the idea of which has never
been in such bad health to the right and the left? What effect do these people,
gentile prophets or eloquent visionaries, want to produce? In view
of what immediate or adjourned benefit? What do they do, what do we
do in saying this? To seduce or subjugate whom, intimidate or make
comewhom?
Each time, which means that there is no generic answer to this question: there
is no single paradigm of the apocalyptic, and no ontological inquiry about "its" tone.
Because the tone of their writings is so different, it would be particularly misguided, and perverse, to connectBarthes to Baudrillard; Foucault to Bell, Lyotard to Kojevebut
it is done in the theoretical potpourri one reads month after month in the flashy
magazines of the art world. Derrida's proviso, each time, means that in each instance
one must examine the tone of the apocalyptic discourse: its claim to be the pure revelation
of truth, and the last word about the end.
I will focus here on a specific claim: that of the death of painting, and more specifically,
the death of abstract painting. The meaning of this claim is bounded by two
historical circumstances: the first is that the whole history of abstract painting can be
read as a longing for its death; and the second is the recent emergence of a group
of neoabstract painters who have been marketed as its official mourners ( or should
I say resurrectors? But we will see that it is the same). The first circumstance leads
to the question: when did all of this start? Where can we locate the beginning of the
end in modern painting-that is, the feeling of the end, the discourse about the end,
and the representation of the end? The existence of a new generation of painters
interested in these issues leads to the question: is abstract painting still possible? In
turn, this question can be divided into at least two others: is (abstract, but also any
other kind of) painting still possible? and is abstract (painting, but also sculpture,
film, modes of thought, etc.) still possible? (A third thread of the question, specifically
apocalyptic, would be: is [ abstract painting, but also anything, life, desire, etc.] still
possible?)
The question about the beginning of the end and the question about the (still)
possibility of painting are historically linked: it is the question about the (still) possibility
of painting that is at the beginning of the end, and it is this beginning of the
end that has been our history, namely what we are accustomed to name modernism.
Indeed the whole enterprise of modernism, especially of abstract painting, which
can be taken~ its emblem, could not have functioned without an apocalyptic myth.
Freed from a'.il extrinsic conventions, abstract painting was meant to bring forth the
pure parousia of its own essence, to tell the final truth and thereby terminate its
course. The pure beginning, the liberation from tradition, the "zero degree" that was
searched for by the first generation of abstract painters could not but function as an
omen of the encl. One did not have to wait for the "last painting" of Ad Reinhardt to
be aware that through its historicism (its linear conception of history) and through
its essentialism ( its idea that something like the essence of painting existed, veiled
somehow, and waiting to be unmasked), the enterprise of abstract painting could not
but understand its birth as calling for its end. As Malevich wrote: "There can be no
question of painting in Suprematism; painting was done for long ago, and the artist
himself is a prejudice of the past."' And Mondrian endlessly postulated that his painting was
preparing for the end of painting-its dissolution in the all-encompassing sphere of life-as-art
or environment-as-art-which would occur once the absolute essence of painting was
"determined." If one can take abstract painting as the emblem of modernism, however, one
should not imagine that the feeling of the end
is solely a function of its essentialism; rather it is necessary to interpret this essentialism
as the effect of a larger historical crisis. This crisis is well known-it can be
termed industrialization-and its impact on painting has been analyzed by the best
critics, following a line of investigation begun half a century ago by Walter Benjamin.
This discourse centers around the appearance of photography, and of mass production,
both of which were understood as causing the end of painting. Photography
was perceived this way by even the least subtle practitioners. (" 'From today painting
in dead': it is now nearly a century and a half since Paul Delarciche is said to have
pronounced that sentence in the face of the overwhelming evidence of Daguerre's
invention. ")4 Mass production seemed to bode the end of painting through its most
elaborate mise-en-scene, the invention of the readymade. Photography and mass production
were also at the base of the essentialist urge of modernist painting. Challenged
by the mechanical apparatus of photography, and by the mass-produced,
painting had to redefine its status, to reclaim a specific domain (much in the way this
was done during the Renaissance, when painting was posited as one of the "liberal
arts" as opposed to the "mechanical arts").
The beginnings of this agonistic struggle have been well described by Meyer
Schapiro: the emphasis on the touch, on texture, and on gesture in modern painting
is a consequence of the division of labor inherent in industrial production. Industrial
capitalism banished the hand from the process of production; the work of art alone,
as craft, still implied manual handling and therefore artists were compelled, by reaction,
to demonstrate the exceptional nature of their mode of production. From
Courbet to Pollock one witnesses a practice of one-upmanship. In many ways the
various "returns to painting" we are witnessing today seem like the farcical repetition
of this historical progression. There were, it is true, simple negations: for instance,
van Doesburg's Art Concret (the dream of a geometric art that could be entirely programmed)
and Moholy-Nagy's Telephone-paintings. But it is only with Robert Ryman
that the theoretical demonstration of the hi:Storical position of painting as an exceptional
realm of manual mastery has been carried to its full extent and, as it were,
deconstructed. By his dissection of the gesture, or of the pictorial raw material, and
by his (nonstylistic) analysis of the stroke, Ryman produces a kind of dissolution of
the relationship between the trace and its organic referent. The body of the artist
moves toward the condition of photography: the division of labor is interiorized.
What is at stake for Ryman is no longer affirming the uniqueness of the pictorial
mode of production vis-a-vis the general mode of production of commodities, but
decomposing it mechanically. Ryman's deconstruction has nothing to do with a negation
( contrary to what most of its readers think, what is called deconstruction has very
little to do with negation per se. Instead, it elaborates a kind of negativity that is not
trapped in the dialectical vector of affirmation, negation, and sublation). Ryman's dissolution
is posited, but endlessly restrained, amorously deferred; the process ( which
identifies the trace with its "subjective" origin) is endlessly stretched: the thread is
never cut.
If I insist on Ryman, it is because in his art the feeling of an end is worked
through in the most resolved way. Although he is claimed by some as a postmodernist,
I would say he is more accurately the guardian of the tomb of modernist painting,
at once knowing of the end and also knowing the impossibility of arriving at it
without working it through. Asymptotically, his paintings get closer and closer to the
condition of the photograph or of the readymade, yet remain at the threshold of simple
negation. His position is difficult to maintain, yet it is perhaps, historically, the
most cogent one. To understand this, we ,must look again at the historical development
that preceded him. "If we could describe the art of this, the first half of the
twentieth century, in a sentence, it would read as the search for something to paint;
just as, were we to do the same for modern art as a whole, it must read as the critical
preoccupation of artists with solving the technical problems of the painting medium.
Here is the dividing line of the history of art," writes Barnett Newman, reminding us
of Schapiro's insistence on the importance of touch, texture, and gesture. But the
paradox here, brilliantly enunciated by Thierry de Duve, is that the modernist opposition
to both traditional painterly finish and the mechanical ( which were fused by
academic art .of the late nineteenth century) bore within itself the stigmata of the
mass-produced:
Although tin or copper tubes were already in use in England at the end
of the 18th century for the preservation of watercolor, it was only around
1830-1840 that tubes of oil paints began to be available on the market.
.. For John Constable or the Barbizon painters to leave their studio and
paint outside, directly from nature, the availability of tubes of paint was
a prerequisite. One cannot imagine them carrying along the bulky equipment
that the preparation of paint on the premises would involve. Certainly,
pleinairism was one of the first episodes in the long struggle
between craftsmanship and industrialization that underlies the history of
"Modernist Painting." It was also one of the first instances of an avant garde strategy, devised by artists who were aware that they could no
longer compete, technically or economically, with industry; they sought
to give their craft a reprieve by "internalizing" some of the features and
processes of the technology threatening it, and by "mechanizing" their
own body at work.
It is this internalization of the mass-produced that led to Duchamp's disgust for paintings and his invention of the readymade. ("Let's say you use a tube of paint; you didn't make it. You bought it and used it as a readymade. Even if you mix two vermillions
together, it's still a mixing of two readymades. So man can never expect to start from
scratch; he must start from readymade things like even his own mother and father. ")
The historical condition of modern painting as a return of the repressed is also
exposed in Seurat's art (Duchamp's favorite), and then deconstructed-not
negated-in Ryman's. Industrialization first produced a reaction within modernist
painting that lead to the emphasis on process-but this reaction had only become
possible through the incorporation of the mechanical within the realm of painting
itself. Seurat's art marks the moment that this condition is recognized. After him, a
long period of analytical decomposition followed-the strongest moment probably
being Pollock:·;--:--which culminated in a conscious incorporation of the mechanical in painting and a reversal of the original reaction to industrialization. Painting had
reached the condition of photography. Ryman is the key figure in this historical
development, but he has been backed up by a host of related practices in the 1970s. rn
Even at the outset, industrialization meant much more for painting than the
invention of photography and the incorporation of the mechanical into the artist's
process through the readymade tube of paint. It also meant a threat of the collapse
of art's special status into a fetish or a commodity. It is in reaction to this threat that
the historicism and essentialism of modernism was developed. There is a tendency
in America to believe that Clement Greenberg was the first advocate of the modernist
teleology. on the contrary, as I have mentioned, the work of the first abstract painters
was guided by the same teleology. It therefore seems more telling here, no matter
how eloquent Greenberg's discourse has been, to seek the absolute beginning of
such a construct: in other words the "beginning of the end." It seems that the first
proponent was Baudelaire who conceived history as a chain along which each individual
art gradually approached its essence. Nobody has better perceived the function
of the threat of industrialization in Baudelaire's work than Walter Benjamin. The
greatness of Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, is to have recognized that the fetishistic
nature of the commodity-form (analyzed by Marx at the same time) was the threat that capitalism posed to the very existence of art. "When things are freed from
the bondage of being useful," as in the typically fetishistic transubstantiation accomplished
by the art collector, then the distinction between art and artifact becomes
extremely tenuous. This tension lies, according to Benjamin, at the core of Baudelaire's
poetry.
Except for the Italian essayist Giorgio Agamben, it has been little recognized
how much the famous chapter of Marx's Capital on the fetishistic nature of the commodity,
its "mystical" or "phantasmagoric character," owes to the German philosopher's
visit to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 where industrial products were
given the kind of auratic presentation previously reserved for works of art: "By
means of this exhibition the bourgeoisie of the world is erecting in the modern
Rome its Pantheon in which to exhibit with proud self-satisfaction the gods it has
made to itself. . . [It] is celebrating its greatest festival." According to Marx, the
fetishistic character of the commodity, what he called its "metaphysical subtlety," is
grounded in the absolute repression of use value and of any reference to the process
of production, or the materiality of the thing. And if Agamben is right in pointing at
the connection between Marx's fundamental analysis and his visit to the London fair,
then another connection brings us back to Baudelaire: Courbet's one-man show, in
the bungalow he had built for this purpose next to the Beaux-Arts section of the
Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, which contained among other works his
famous Studio where Baudelaire is portrayed. As is well known, eleven works by
Courbet had been accepted by the exhibition committee-and not minor ones-but
he was dissatisfied with the way they were displayed: not exhibited together, but dispersed
among an undifferentiated mass of hundreds of paintings exactly as, in the
next building, machines and machine-made products were exhibited, competing for
the gold medal "I conquer freedom, I save the independence of art" are the words
Courbet used to explain the motivation of his parasitic show of some forty works,
which he managed to install only six weeks after the inauguration of the fair and to
maintain until it closed five months later. With these words, Courbet characterized
what is for me the first avant-garde aCt, an act of defiance against _the ever-growing
realm of the commodity.
The universal commodification under capitalism is what, according to Benjamin,
Baudelaire's genius was to perceive as the terrifying and endless return of the
same. I cannot go deeply into Benjamin's extraordinarily complex analysis in this
essay, but only note that beginning with Baudelaire's startling characterization of the
writer as a prostitute, Benjamin sees ~e poet's successive identifications with the ragpicker,
the flaneur, the bohemian, the dandy or the "apache," as the adoption of
heroic roles bearing the stigmata of commodification: roles that were doomed to
failure and were superseded by Baudelaire's final phantasmagoria, his conception
of the new. Benjamin writes, "This vilification that things suffer by their ability to be
taxed as commodities is counterbalanced in Baudelaire's conception by the inestimable
value of novelty. Novelty represents an absolute that can neither be interpreted
[as an allegory] nor compared [as a commodity]. It becomes the ultimate entrenchment
of art." The shock of the new, in other words, is an expression that derives
from Baudelaire's aesthetics. But there is more to it: Baudelaire sees modernity, the
value of novelty, as necessarily doomed by the inevitable process by which the novel
becomes antique. The quest for the absolute new in art becomes a moment that can
never stop, endangered as it is by its devolution into the realm of interpretation or
comparison. "But once modernism has received its due," writes Benjamin, "its time
has run out. Then_ it will be put to the test. After its end, it will become apparent
whether it will be able to become antiquity." This is the banal process that was
called recuperation in the 1960s, but has been better analyzed since then as an effect
of the simulacral.
This urge toward the new, which is at the core of the historicist teleology of
Baudelaire, is doubly a myth, both because of the immanent perishability of novelty,
and because novelty is the very guise that the commodity adopts to fulfill its fetishistic
transfiguration. Baudelaire indeed saw the connection betw~en fashion and death,
but he did not recognize that the absolute new he searched for all his life was made
of the same stuff as the commodity, that it was governed by the same law as the market:
the constant return of the same. Benjamin recognized this blind spot of Baudelaire's:
"that the last defense of art coincided with the most advanced line 0of attack
of the commodity, this remained hidden to Baudelaire. "16 Needless to say it also
remained unseen by the numerous avant-garde movements that followed him. We
must recognize, however, that the insistence on the integrity of specific media that
occurs in every art of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was· a deliberate
attempt to free art from its contamination by the forms of exchange produced by capitalism.
Art had to be ontologically split not only from the mechanical, but also from
the realm of information-it had to be distinguished from the immediate transitivity
of information that amounted to a general leveling of every fact of life. Mallarme is
certainly the· most articulate on this point, and his awareness formed the basis of his
theory against the instrumentalization of language by the press. If he insisted on the
materiality of language, if he claimed, that the poet must remunerate language, if he
spoke of the intransitivity of language, it was because he tried to advocate a mode of
exchange that would not be abstract, nor based on a universal interchangeability through the medium of a single general equivalent, nor reified in a mystifying fetish
split off from the process of its production. I would say that although few artists were
as consistent as Mallarme and Baudelaire, one can certainly read the whole history
of avant-garde art up to World War I as following in their wake.
There were many reasons for a shift in the.situation of the art object to occur
around World War I, and I would be a fool to claim one or two events as the origin
of a complex set of transformations that were sometimes abrupt, sometimes gradual.
But to pursue my thread concerning the market, I would like to consider two pivotal
events, the famous sale of the Peau d'Ours, which occurred on March 2, 1914; and
Marcel Duchamp's invention of the readymade, already mentioned, which happened
at around the same time (I take his Porte-bouteille of the same year as more to the
point than his Roue de bicyclette of 1913, which still involves, although ironically, a
compositional procedure). The sale of the Peau d'Ours marked the astonishing discovery
that far from being laughable, the avant-garde art of the past-novelty as antiquity-
was highly profitable as an investment. Not only works by Gauguin, Vuillard,
or Redon were sold at very high prices, but also paintings by Matisse and Picasso. It
was discovered, in short, that investment in contemporary painting was much more
profitable than the typical investments of the time, including gold and real estate.
Needless to say, the speculative logic that emerged from this sale (buy today the Van
Goghs of tomorrow because the new will become antiquity) was to shape the entire
history of the twentieth century art market.
Now Duchamp. His readymades were not only a negation of painting and a
demonstration of the always-already ·mechanical nature of painting. They also demonst~~<
c:dt hat within our culture the work of art is a fetish that must abolish all pretense
to use vq].ue (i.e., the readymade is an art object through its abstraction from
the realm of utility). Furthermore, the readymade demonstrated that the so-called
autonomy _pf the art object was produced by a nominalist institution (the museum
or art gallery) that constantly buried what Marx called the point of view of production
under the point of view of consumption (as the ethnologist Marcel Mauss noted
once, "a work of art is that _which is recognized as such by a group"). Finally, and
more importantly, Duchamp's act presented the art object as a special kind of commodity-
something that Marx had noted when he explained that "works of art
properly speaking were not taken into consideration" in his account, "for they are
of a special nature." 18 Having no use value, the art object does not have any exchange
value per se either-the exchange value being dependent on the quantum of social
work necessary for its production (Seurat demonstrated this ad absurdum through
his desire to be paid by the hour). What Duchamp was keen to observe is that works
of art-as much as oyster pearls or great wines ( other examples given by Marx)are
not exchanged according to the common law of the market, but according to a
monopoly system maintained by the entire art network, whose keystone is the artist
himself. This does not mean that the exchange of works of art is beyond competition
or any other manifestation of the law of the market, but that their sometimes Infinite
price is a function of their lack of measurable value. Value in the art world is determined
by the "psychological" mechanisms that are at the core of any monopoly system:
rarity, authenticity, uniqueness, and the law of supply and demand. In other
words, art objects are absolute fetishes without a use value but also without an
exchange value, fulfilling absolutely the collector's fantasy of a purely symbolic or
ideal value, a supplement to his soul.
Duchamp's discovery led him to a range of experiments meant to reveal the
mechanisms of the art network: I only need mention his 1917 Fountain, his various
appearances as a transvestite, and his Cheque Tzank of 1919, all,of which pointed to
authenticity as the central theoretical construct on which the art network is based.
In Duchamp's wake, artists like Daniel Buren as well as Cindy Sherman and Sherrie
Levine have analyzed the nature of authenticity. This analytical strategy has often
been characterized as the "deconstructive tendency" of postmodernism, yet I am not
'entirely confident with this labeling ( which does not diminish at all the interest I
have for such practices). In so far as I interpret Duchamp's art as a negation, I interpret
his heirs as explicating and radicalizing his negation. Or rather, if one wants to
stay with the term deconstruction, I would say that Duchamp and his heirs are deconstructing one aspect of what they negate (painting): specifically the imaginary aspect
of painting, which these artists consistently associate with its fetishistic nature
(deconstruction means also the sense of inescapability from closure). But there remain, if I am allowed to borrow metaphorically the Lacanian terminology, two
other aspects of painting that must be considered: the real and the symbolic.
Both the Peau d'Ours sale and Duchamp's invention of the readymade had the
potential to spawn a kind of cynical conservatism: if the new was doomed to its transformation
into gold by the market, and the work of art was by its very nature an absolute
fetish, then it might seem that the avant-garde's ideology of resistance was
obsolete. In fact, such a cynical position was undertaken by what is called the return
to order, which started with Picasso's Portrait of Max Jacob in 1915 but which
became a massive phenomenon in the 1920s with Pittura Metafisica in Italy and the
Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany. These movements share a lot with the neoconservative
brand of postmodernism that has recently emerged (whether it's called new
wild, neo-romantik, trans-avanguardia, or whatever), as Benjamin Buchloh has brilliantly demonstrated. 19 The market itself induces this kind of cynicism. The cynical
attitude, however, was not the only one available. The feeling of the end could also
be reclaimed by a revolutionary aesthetics. This is what happened in Russia, where
artists immediately responded to the situation created by the events of October 1917.
In a revolutionary situation, art cannot but sever its ties with the market and its
dependence upon the art institution: it seeks to reestablish its use value and to invent
new relationships of production and consumption: it breaks with the linear, cumulative
conception of history and emphasizes discontinuity. In other words, in such
situations art can open up a new paradigm, something that was eloquently advocated
by El Lissitzky in the brilliant lecture he delivered in Berlin, in 1922, about "The New
Russian Art. "
Of all of these gestures of the Soviet avant-garde, one of the most significant is
Rodchenko's exhibition, in 1921, of three monochrome panels, which he later
described with these words, "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited
three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: It's all over. Basic coiors. Every
plane is a plane, and there is to be no more representation. " If Rodchenko's gesture
is important, it is not because it was the "first" monochrome-it was not the "first"
nor the "last"-and not because it was the first "last picture" (not only does
Duchamp's readymade better deserve this title, but, as we have seen, in a way all
modernist abstract paintings had to claim to be the last picture). IfRodchenko's gesture
was so important, as Tarabukin saw when he analyzed it in From the Easel to the
Machine, it was because it showed that painting could have a real existence only if
it claimed its end; Rodchenko's "meaningless, dumb and blind wall ... convinces us
that painting was and remains a representational art and that it cannot escape from
these limits of the representational." Rodchenko's painting needed to attain the status
of a real (nonimaginary) object, which meant its end as art. Again we are confronted
with negation-not a deconstruction-which accounts, according to me,
for what must be called the failure of the productivist program in painting that followed
Rodchenko's gesture logically (the dissolution of the artist's activity into
industrial production). Or, to use again the terminology I borrowed before, Rodchenko
decof.lstructed only one aspect of painting: its pretense to reach the realm
of the real-a deconstruction that was carried out again, and further elaborated, by
minimalism in the 1960s.
Rodchenko's was still not the only alternative to Duchamp's negation, nor to
cynicism. In August 1924, shortly before he broke with the Dutch movement, Mondrian
published his last article in t/:le magazine De Stijl. Entitled "Blown with the Wind," it is a denunciation of the return to order that was invading the galleries and
had almost led him, three years earlier, to abandon painting altogether. He writes:
If artists now reject the new conception, critics and dealers reject it even
more strongly, for they are more directly exposed to the influence of the
public. The sole value of abstract art, they openly assert, was to raise the
level of naturalistic art: the new was thus a m_eans, not a goal. [And here
I intervene to mention Picasso's remark to a baffled Kahnweiler that his
neoclassical works of the return to order period were better than those
of his precubist naturalistic period. Back to Mondrian's text. This is, he
writes,] an open denial of the essence of the new, which was to displace
and annihilate the old. They too swing with the wind and follow the lead
of the general public. Though quite understandable, this is temporarily
disastrous for the new, for its essential nature is thus lost from sight.
I give you this long quotation for its insistence on the momentary nature of the return
to order phenomenon: the whole article is suffused with a kind of optimism that
would sound utterly incomprehensible if the role of the new were not laid down at
the end of the article:
Abstract art can evolve only by consistent development. In this way it can
arrive at the purely plastic, which Neo-Plasticism has attained. Consistently
carried through, this 'art' expression [ the quotation marks are
Mondrian's] can lead to nothing other than its realization in our tangible
environment. For the time will come when, because of life's changed
demands, 'painting' will become absorbed in life" (again, the quotation
marks are Mondrian's).
For anyone who is familiar with the voluminous writings of Mondrian, this
sounds typical, and indeed, as I already noted, the myth of the future dissolution of
art into life is one of his most frequent themes. Far from being a compulsive quest
of the absolute new, structurally doomed to failure, as in Baudelaire's formal teleology,
Mondrian's affirmation of the new is geared toward a definite telos, that of the
advent of a classless society, where social relationships would be transparent and not
reified, and where there would be no difference between artists and nonartists, art
and life. The new art must be, within itself, the model and augury of such a liberation:
this future liberation, or socialist state, is envisioned through the principle of neoplasticism,
of which neoplastic art can only be a "pale reflection," albeit the most
advanced possible at the time. This principle, which Mondrian also called the "general principle of plastic equivalence," is a sort of dialectic whose action is to dissolve
any particularity, any center, any hierarchy. Any entity that is not split or constituted
by an opposition is a mere appearance. Anything that is not determined by its contrary
is vague, particular, individual, fragile: it is a cipher of authoritarianism, and it
does not take part in the process of emancipation set forth by the "general principle
of equivalence." Hence the complicated task that Mondrian assigns the painter is the
destruction of all the elements on which the particularity of his art is based: the
destruction of colored planes by lines; of lines by repetition; and of the optical illusion
of depth by the sculptural weave of the painterly surface. Each destructive act
follows the previous one and amounts to the abolition of the figure/ground opposition
that is the perceptual limitation at the base of our imprisoned vision, and of
the whole enterprise of painting. There is no doubt that Mondrian sets a task of the
highest order for art: he prescribes a propaedeutic role. Painting was for him a theoretical
model that provided concepts and invented procedures that dealt with reality:
it is not merely an interpretation of the world, but the plastic manifestation of a
certain logic that he found at the root of all the phenomena of life. In an article he
wrote under the shock of the Nazi-Soviet mutual nonaggression pact, Mondrian says:
"The function of plastic art is not descriptive .... It can reveal the evil of oppression
and show the way to combat it. ... It cannot reve~l more than life teaches, but it can
evoke in us the conviction of existent truth" ; "the culture of plastic art shows that
real freedom. requires mutual equivalence. "
Arthur Lehning, an anarchosyndicalist leader of the 1920s, said that his friend
Mondrian was a child in politics, and nothing could be more evident. 27 However, this
naivete, which appears to have been the only possible alternative to Duchamp's
negation and to the cynical strategies of the return to order in Western Europe,
should not blind us to Mondrian's remarkable position. One is struck by the fact that
he never feh,any compulsion toward the monochrome, which could easily have provided,
so it seems, the kind of absolute flatness he was striving for. But as an iconoclast
readymade, the monochrome could not have fun_ctioned for him as a tool to
deconstruct painting or more specifically to deconstruct the order of the symbolic
in painting (of tradition, of the law, of history). Mondrian felt that within the economic
abstraction engendered by capitalism, painting could only be deconstructed
abstractly, by analyzing, one after the other, one against the other, all of the elements
that (historically) ground its symbolic order (form, color, figure/ground opposition,
frame, etc.). This painstaking formal analysis was for him the only way painting could
reach its own end. Because it was conceived of as an abstract model, painting could
resist the abstract commodification that is the fate of every (art) object; it had to post-pone its own dissolution into the real until the symbolic order on which it is
grounded had been "neutralized." Painting was therefore engaged in the necessarily
interminable task of this neutralization. It might seem strange to speak of Mondrian,
whose system of thought owed so much to !:fegel's dialectic, in terms of deconstruction,
yet unlike any dialectician he never expected any leap, never paid any tribute
to the modern ideology of the tabula rasa: he knew that the end of painting had to
be gained by hard labor.
But is the end ever to be gained? Duchamp (the imaginary), Rodchenko (the
real), and Mondrian (the symbolic), among others, all believed in the end-they all
had the final truth, all spoke apocalyptically. Yet has the end come? To say no (painting
is still alive, just look at the galleries) is undoubtedly an act of denial, for it has
never been more evident that most paintings one sees have abandoned the task that
historically belonged to modern painting (that, precisely, of working through the
end of painting) and are simply artifacts created for the market and by the market
(absolutely interchangeable artifacts created by interchangeable producers). To say
yes, however, that the end has come, is to give in to a historicist conception of history
as both linear and total (i.e., one cannot paint after Duchamp, Rodchenko, Mondrian;
their work has rendered paintings unnecessary, or: one cannot paint anymore in the
era of the mass media, computer games, and the simulacrum).
How are we to escape this double bind? Benjamin once noted that the easel
painting was born in the Middle Ages, and that nothing guarantees that it should
remain forever. But are we left with these alternatives: either a denial of the end, or
an affirmation of the end of the end (it's all over, the end is over)? The the01y of
games, used recently by Hubert Damisch, can help us overcome this paralyzing trap.
This theory of strategy dissociates the generic game (like chess) from the specific
performance of the game (Spassky/Fisher, for example), which I will call the match.
This strategic interpretation is strictly antihistoricist: with it, the question becomes
"oμ.e of the status that ought to be assigned to the match 'painting,' as one sees it being
played at a given moment in particular circumstances, in its relation to the game of
the same name." Such questioning has the immediate advantage of raising doubt
about certain truisms. Is the "alleged convention of depth"-rejected by the pictorial
art of this century because, according to Greenberg, it is unnecessary-necessarily
of the order of the match more than of the game? Or rather, should we speak of a
modification of this convention within the game? Without thereby becoming a theoretical
machine encouraging indifference, since one is obliged to take a side, this
strategic approach deciphers painting as an agonistic field where nothing is ever terminated,
or decided once and for all, and leads the analysis back to a type of historicity that it had neglected, that of long duration. In other words, it dismisses all
certitudes about the absolute truth upon which the apocalyptic discourse is base_d.
Rather, the fiction of the end of art ( or of painting) is understood as a "confusion
between the end of the game itself (as if a game could really have an end) and that
of such and such a match (or series of matches)."
One can conclude then that, if the match "modernist painting" is finished, it
does not necessarily mean that the game "painting" is finished: many years to come
are ahead for this art. But the situation is even more complicated: for the match
"modernist painting"· was the match of the end of painting; it was both a response to
the feeling of the end and a working through of the end. And this match was historically
determined-by the fact of industrialization (photography, the commodity,
etc.). To claim that the "end of painting" is finished is to claim that this historical situation
is rio longer ours, and who would be naive enough to make this claim when
it appears that reproducibility and fetishization have permeated all aspects of life:
have become our "natural" world?
Obviously, this is not the claim of the latest group of''abstract" painters, whose
work, as Hal Foster has rightly remarked, has been presented as either a development
of appropriation art (which is supported by the presence of Sherrie Levine in
the group) or as a swing of the pendulum (the market having tired of neoexpressionism
was ripe for a neoclassical and architectonic movement: the "style" after the
"shout," to make_ use of an old metaphor that art criticism proposed to distinguish
between two tendencies within the realm of abstract art: one whose emblem was
Mondrian and the other, Pollock)." The work of this recent group of painters wishes
to respond to our simulacral era, yet paradoxically in their very reliance upon Jean
Baudrillard, emphasized by Peter Halley who frequently writes critically about these
issues, they all admit that the end has come, that the end of the end is over (hence
that we can;.:start again on another match; that we can paint without the feeling of the
end but only with its simulacrum). As Foster writes, "In this new abstract painting,
simulation has penetrated the very art form that resisted it most." Starting with
a critique of' the economy of the sign in late capitalism, Baudrillard was driven, by
the very nature Of his millinarianist feeling, to a fascination for the age of the simulacrum,
a glorification of our own impotence disguised as nihilism. It seems to me
that although the young artists in question address the issue of .the simulacral-of
the abstract simulation produced by capital-they have similarly abandoned themselves
to the seduction of what they claim to denounce: either perversely (as in the case of Philip Taaffe who refers- to Newman's sublime while he empties it of its conflict); or unconsciously (as in the case of Halley who seems to believe that an iconological rendering of simulacra-through his pictorial rhetoric of "cells" and
"conduits"--could function as a critique of them). Like Baudrillard, I would call them
manic mourners. Their return to painting, as though it were an appropriate medium
for what they want to address, as though the age of the simulacral could be represented,
comes from the feeling that since the end has come, since it's all over, we can
rejoice at the killing of the dead. That is, we can forget that the end has to be endlessly
worked through, and start all over again. But this, of course, is not so, and it is in flagrant
contradiction to the very analysis of the simulacral as the latest abstraction produced
by capitalism (perhaps this illusion is rooted in the abuse of the term
postindustrialism, whose inveterate inadequacy to describe the latest development
of capitalism has been exposed by FredricJameson). Appropriation art-the "orgy
of cannibalism" proper to manic mourning-of which this movement is obviously
a part, can then be understood as a pathological mourning (it has also its melancholic
side, as noted by Hall Foster about Ross Bleckner and Taaffe in their fascination
for the "failure" of op art). Bleckner writes about Taaffe: "Dead issues are
reopened by this changed subjectivity: artists become transvestites and viewers voyeurs
watching history become less alien, less authoritarian. " I would correct the
latter assertion this way: " ... viewers watching oblivion become more alien, more
enslaved." For "simulation, together with the old regime of disciplinary surveillance,
constitutes a principal means of deterrence in our society (for how can one intervene
politically in events when they are so often simulated or immediately replaced by
pseudo-events?)."
Yet mourning has been the activity of painting throughout this century. "To be
modern is to know that which is not possible any more," Roland Barthes once
wrote. But the work of mourning does not necessarily become pathological: the
feeling of the end, after all, did produce a cogent history of painting, modernist painting,
which we have probably been too prompt to bury. Painting might not be dead.
Its vitality will only be tested once we are cured of our mania and our melancholy,
and we believe again in our ability to act in history: accepting our project~ of working
through the end again, rather than evading it through increasingly elaborate mechanisms
of defense (this is what mania and melancholy are about) and settling our
historical task: the difficult task of mourning. It will not be easier than before, but my
bet is that the potential for painting will emerge in the conjunctive deconstruction
of the three instances that modernist painting has dissociated (the imaginary, the
real, and the symbolic). But predictions are made to be wrong. Let us simply say that
the desire for painting remains, and that this desire is not entirely programmed or
subsumed by the market: this desire is the sole factor of a future possibility of painting, that is of a nonpathological mourning. At any rate, as observed by Robert Musil
fifty years ago, if some painting is still to come, if painters are still to come, they will
not come from where we expect them to.
Yve-Alain Bois, Painting: The Task of Mourning – Questions. Group Work – Assessment Task II.
I
For Bois the feeling of the ‘end of art’ or ‘end of painting’ is historically determined by industrialization, the birth of photography, and the rise of commodity fetishism. How do these things precipitate the ‘end’ of painting, and how have artist’s responded?
II
How does Ryman, according to Bois, deliver painting to the conditions of photography?
III
What does Duchamp’s work (the readymade most notably) have to do with commodity fetishism? Secondly, why is Duchamp’s deconstruction of the imaginary aspect of painting considered by Bois as ‘conservative’ or ‘cynical’?
IV
What does Rodchenko’s deconstruction of the ‘real’ and Mondrian’s deconstruction of the ‘symbolic’ aspects of painting have to do with the impending sense of the end of painting? How do these artists respond to this end? Secondly, what do their responses have to do with a supposedly ‘revolutionary aesthetics’?
V
What is the ‘apocalyptic myth’ that Bois believes characterizes modernism? How might Duchamp, Mondrian, and Rodchenko be seen to embody this this apocalyptic myth, this ‘millenarianist feeling of closure’?
VI
Bois offers Hubert Damisch’s theory of games as a means of escaping overly affirmative and overly negative attitudes toward the end of painting. How does Damisch’s theory of games provide Bois with an alternative to these reductive interpretations of ‘the end’? Be sure to tell us what Bois proposes as the ‘game’ and alternatively as the ‘match’?
VII
Bois is critical of post-modernism’s ‘manic mourners’, but he recognizes also that modern painting involves a ‘difficult task of mourning’ as a means of working through the end of painting. What is the nuance here in his argument? Why is the ‘mourning’ of the eighties less preferable than that of artists such as Duchamp, Rodchenko, Mondrian or Ryman?
VIII
We have seen that Bois and Danto provide two different ways of conceiving the ‘end of art’ and/or the ‘end of painting’ – compare and contracts these different positions, and argue for one over the other.
IX
In Painting: The Task of Mourning Bois explores three models that respond to the impending sense of paintings ‘end’ or ‘closure’ – namely, the imaginary (Duchamp), the real (Rodchenko) and the symbolic (Mondrian). Compare and contrast each of these three models.
