unPainting via The Lost Hightway
We live in a world that is completely captured by photographs. We have all become photographs, and our design is to become one.—Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.
The Imaginary
Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, describes a “feeling” that has a strange circuity to it in a speculative and imaginative paper named “The Uncanny”. Written in the twilight of World War 1 (1919), two years after Marcel Duchamp invented the readymade, Freud recollects a moment, one imbued with feelings of fear, what he describes as “terror” and “intellectual uncertainty”, when he visits a city – a city he doesn’t name, but thought to be Livorno, Italy.
Freud speaks about how, when walking the streets of this city, like Charles Baudelaire before him, and Walter Benjamin after him – he arrives at what is suggestive of a red-light district, where, through the metaphor of what he names “painted women” – Freud is always polite in his wording of objects that signify sex – he stumbles upon a brothel, and quickly moves on. As he walks and walks, he gets lost. To cut the circuit short, Freud realizes, in the loop of being lost and found, he arrives back at the painted women, which was the very sex object that short-circuited his orientation in the world.
We can say that Freud, in his speculative account of the uncanny, is saying that the uncanny itself, an externalisation of the unconscious, visits us as a spectral image, representing the internal drives and desires, like other such objects in the psychoanalytical organism, such as the objet petit a, the fetish and the mirror in the Mirror Stage. Simply put, these are objects, use-objects, that form a limit and veil to what Lacan formulates as the unreachable capital-R Real.
Take, for instance, the competition myth between Zeuxis (zexsees) and Parrhasius (parrashseeus):
The way I like to tell it is:
So what am I talking about when I say small-r representation vs capital-R-Real?
Object-oriented philosopher Tristan Garcia notes that the photographic image was once-upon-a-time perceived as capturing the capital-R Real. He suggests a formula:
the real is what is photographed, and representation is what one does with it.
Garcia’s distinction between the Real and representation is helpful in respect to approaching painting in terms of its nature, presence and indexicality, philosophical filters Garcia uses to outline how the photograph was, over time, perceived to lose its aura and ontology in capturing the capital-R Real, to become just like the other pictorial arts.
Garcia contends the photograph lost its perceived grip on the Real when it was relegated, generation by generation, technology by technology, theory by theory via philosophical notions of naturalism, presentism, and still important to a theoretical pinning down of representation. indexicality, which led to the insight that the photograph itself was the equivalent of “smoke from a fire”, or a “foot-print in the sand”. The photograph left its imprint, its cause and affect on the observer, but was itself, not the thing itself.
Perhaps such smoke, mirrors, foot prints, painted women, are what Susan Sontag meant by an “erotics of art”, in her polemic against the hegemony of hermeneutics in her infamous 1960’s essay “Against Interpretation”. Such an erotics might be mediated via a crop, an ajar door, a blot, objet petit a, mirror, painting, photograph that causes us to lift the veil, but on doing so, no veil exists, but, disappointedly (perhaps) the thing itself.
Again, Tristan Garcia writes in his paper “The Photographic Real”:
Starting in the 1850s, photography became the principal purveyor of the real in our representations. Personal memories as well as the visual arts, cosmology, microscopy, medicine, administrative identity, eroticism and pornography, war reporting, historical reconstruction, legal testimony, and advertising, all developed by relying on a naturalist attitude of ontological trust in the photographic product, ceaselessly furnishing the given real (donné réel) to various disciplines that manipulated representations.
Distrust in manipulative representations formed a philosophical to-and-fro between defining small-r representation vs the capital-R Real as soon as the spectre of the photograph stood beside painting in the awkward family portrait of culture at the close of the nineteenth century and opening of the twentieth. From that moment onwards, photography would leave its trace on painting, by forcing it to over-expose itself as pure abstraction, or end up inhabiting – some might say haunting or incarnating – painting in representational painting. Douglas Crimp and Yve-Alain Bois state very clearly in their pronouncements of painting’s “End” and “Mourning” respectively, that it is painting of the abstract kind, not representational kind that is under the hammer of cultural obsolescence.
Yet painting’s and the painter’s ability to adapt to and adopt new technology, like psychoanalysis’ symbiotic relationships with other cultural forms of production, is what has sustained painting as the parasitic appropriator it has needed to become. But want and need are two very different things: need concerns survival, want, desire.
My neologism unPainting is a word, an idea, as already described, sourced from the feelings and intellectual uncertainty of Freud’s uncanny, a psychic phenomena or apparition that doubles perception and causes involuntary loops in culture, exits and entrances that double back into what Lacan calls the Symbolic, the domain of language that sentences us (pun intended) to something akin to a lost highway.
If we extrapolate “Highway” from The “Lost” for a moment, you might agree that, like David Lynch or Andy Warhol, “Highway” is wholly American. The highway is an object and a mise-en-scene that is big and expansive and mechanical. Whereas the uncanny is a European phenomenon, private and claustrophobic and indebted to the past, like the photograph.
I believe the uncanny is best described and manifested through the camera and its offspring, the photograph, not painting – as a mechanical and dusty trace of the world. The photograph is a haunted image that somehow magically appears to us and reflects back the world as it is—but different, somehow. It is the something that is captured by the camera that can’t be captured by the human eye, and the everything else cropped beyond the camera capture, that is uncanny. The camera has one eye, not two.
The Symbolic
Exiting from the uncanny highway of the camera to only merge with its progenitor, what the psychoanalyst might call its mother, the Daguerreotype, and the tailback of future technological advances and theoretical argument, advancing the idea and belief that painting needed, and forevermore needs to adapt, combine and expand its repertoire, or be buried under the advent of these new and ghostly technologies and uncanny exposures of reality as an image, still or moving, virtual or AI-generated.
Enter critic and curator Douglas Crimp, who supplies the context and definition of what a “Picture” is vs what an abstract painting isn’t towards critical and curatorial ends in the late 1970s and early 1980s:
Picture, used colloquially, is also nonspecific: a picture book might be a book of drawings or photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print is often called, simply, a picture. Equally important for my purposes, picture, in its verb form, can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object.
The idiom a picture is worth a thousand words, or its awkward sibling, a picture paints a thousand words, complicates yet acquiesces to Crimp’s critical recognition of pictures over paintings in his eulogy for “Pictures” as curator of the “Pictures” exhibition (1977), and elegy for painting as the author of “The End of Painting” (1981).
More succinct than his latter elegy for painting (without tears), his line Underneath each picture there is always another picture, bespeaks a denunciation of the aura of the original. As Crimp stated a year previous to the publication of “The End of Painting”:
Against the pluralism of originals, I want to speak of the plurality of copies.
This plurality (dispersal) of copies and picture-beneath-picture theory is psychoanalytic, like Freud being thrown for a loop at first and second sight of the painted women. Psychoanalysis always recognises something beneath the surface (the symptom) of a behaviour or picture, which splits the world into two realities: small-r representation vs the capital-R Real.
This 1980’s cultural breakdown of a shift from unrecognisable images (abstract painting) to “recognisable pictures“ (photography specifically), and verbal breakdance with respect to noun/verb non-specificity in Crimp’s definition of a “picture” helps to dilate the orifice for the verbal diarrhoea to ensue.
It is interesting that the noun/verb breakdance has also been transposed onto painting like a magic trick by some happy-with-themselves critics and painters, as if that is something meaningful or conceptually legitimate, in the seminar room or studio crit.
Painting’s death’s door was ajar for 60-odd years emitting ritual cries of mourning post the picture-machine (the camera) in the theoretical post-medium condition proclaimed by Rosalind Krauss, the founding editor of October Journal, a non-glossy/ non-advertisement white submarine that surfaced in an alphabet ocean after Rosalind (and others) jumped ship from Artforum Magazine at the sight of artist Lynda Benglis wearing a dildo as a centrefold, which, like Freud’s painted women, would come to define and haunt both Krauss and Benglis in their cultural production thereafter.
Both advertisement and artwork (and picture), Benglis as uniform female dildo signified the rift and retreat between what was becoming a mainstream and market-led New York artworld propped up by painting, the commodity fetish par excellence, then and now, and the more recondite and esoteric basement theories with flickering lightbulb insights in the dark arts of jargonistic theory imported from Paris in the late 1970s.
Douglas Crimp extolled the “end of painting” partly (he confessed later himself) as a polemic for polemic sake. And, as Yve-Alain Bois stated in "Painting: The Task of Mourning" in 1986:
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).
There was also this sense that with death, or with such diagnoses of death, that pens (ideas) were willing themselves into swords that decapitated the medium in a theoretical parade and will to power for the critic:
Death to the painter, long live the critic.
These cultural diagnoses of death also synchronise and swim with the advent of the Neo-Expressionists and Julian Schnabel et al – whom Craig Owens, also an Octoberist – diagnosed as a “pseudo-expressionist,” implying a kind of ZEROXed angst, while critically supporting appropriation artists like Sherrie Levine, and postmodern and post-medium “picture” theorists who were engraving Ends of things on the stark white sandwich boards of October Journal.
Douglas Crimp’s “End of Painting” was dramatic, written in the trenches of art theory obscurity, but direct enough in symbolic language (“End”) that it, like the Batman-signal from the cave, somehow projected itself onto the art school library shelves. Including My art school 20 years later when painting’s death was pronounced (with glee and irony) by the sculpture lecturers (aka social-practice lectures), new-media lectures (but perhaps not the print lecturers).
Sherrie Levine and the NPC’s
There was something about the artists and artworks the Octoberists wrote on, and aligned with, that was very external to the self-referentiality of painting (to itself) and the self-referentiality of the painter (to himself). In a sense, pictures could absorb and produce the high theorising in a way that painting couldn't absorb or produce.
Unintentionally, female non-painter Cindy Sherman became a lapdog of psychoanalytic gaze theory; whereas Sherrie Levine’s knot-paintings (another p-un) intentionally and uncannily doubled themselves as copy, as mime, in both her conceptual artworks in their erasure of the aura of originality instrumentalized through mechanical reproduction and appropriation, as Howard Singerman writes re Sherrie Levine:
…ideas of originality, creativity, and beauty–painting is the medium against which the work of appropriation performs its critique, or its refusal.
But the artist’s own words in this respect are more rewarding, less will to power, Sherrie Levine:
The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter. –Sherrie Levine, 1981
Even when it wasn't intended by such artists to conjure such theory in the minds of those with a vested interest in theory, the critic’s will to power and death to the author, and the artworld’s Symbolic expansion in education and the market, meant theory entered the fray as soon as the painter exited the highway via the spaghetti junction of self-expression, leaving the Pictures Generation, who – as the late Gary Indiana wrote in 2017, were being dismissed as being merely “brainy”.
Painting was the establishment, historically and institutionally. Abstract painting was anti-language, except for Daniel Buren’s stripes, which ingratiate themselves into the Symbolic by simultaneously interrogating the art institution and sleeping with the enemy in an ironical meta-critique of what Craig Owen’s named the frame of art. Owen’s frame included a feminist reading of painting as particularly masculine. Sherrie Levine and Andrea Fraser (a student of Owen’s) would go on to critique painting through a male-genius oriented lens perpetuated and programmed by the institutions and agents of art, including the museum and herself as an artist.
Looping back to the brothel, In both Freud’s and Picasso’s painted-women allegories, there is the allure and terror in the mask of the opposite sex, always painted and gendered female, compliments of art history, except for what German art historian and critic Isabelle Graw terms “exceptional” woman-painter cases, which creates its own problems with respect to artistic value based on quality among the many, many men vs quality among the very, very few women.
For instance, Cindy Sherman was making big abject photographs in the 1980s, closer to painting than photography. Robert Longo, Sherman's boyfriend at the time, and an original P-Gen, said her abject photographs came out of another type of personal polemic, in relation to how women artists were being represented and paid unequally with respect to their male counterparts in the New York artworld. Female artists, like Cindy Sherman in America, and Rosmarie Trockel in Germany, as critic Isabelle Graw notes in a round table discussion on the death (and “Mourning”) of painting conducted in 2003 for Artfourm.
[Trockel] deliberately didn’t paint, because it would have been too easy to exclude her work with arbitrary references to ‘quality.’ This happened in Germany with many women painters who were pushed to the margins of the Jungen Wilden and never arrived at the ’centre’ until today. One of the few exceptions was Rosemarie Trockel, but again, she deliberately decided not to paint. [and instead make pictures]
Gary Indiana writes, with history on his side, and compounding the asymmetry with respect to a gender in terms of visibility:
If we are to think of the Pictures Generation as an art movement, then it was the first one in history that included a substantial number of women artists.
This notion of not-painting is very close to the uncanny; un forms a bridge, not binary, between home and unhomely, life and death, as in ‘undead’, neither dead nor living. Isabelle Graw’s claim that Rosmarie Trockhel “deliberately decided not to paint”, whereas Sherrie Levine did, albeit in a possessive way by appropriating other male painters like Monet, Malevich, Yves Klein etc, says something about the death of painting being mediated by female NPC’s through appropriation (Levine) and not-painting (Trockel).
The Real
If the photograph rids itself of itself, the painter rids themselves of everything else. Philip Guston’s, or John Cage's quote (it’s unknown), about entering and exiting the studio is helpful in this respect:
I believe it was John Cage who once told me, ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.’
When this almost too famous line is spoken aloud by painters, or in the presence of painters, it is never elaborated upon. There is no need to elaborate: it is understood, absolute, tout court. It is a line that stages a possibility. The line unburdens the painter of all their fears, their past, their friends, their enemies, their artworld, “and above all” else, their ideas, releasing them to do the doing of painting, before the verb of painting inevitably, and sometimes regrettably, becomes a noun, an object.
In theories like this there is an active displacement of subjectivity away from the object, and an active displacement of responsibility away from the artist. The art object, inside and outside the studio, is independent from the constraints of the Symbolic. That painting and the painter is always elsewhere, else being a very strange prefix when you extract it from where.
If you take Isabelle Graw’s notion of painting as an index and compare that with Roland Barthes’ notion of photography as an index, you realize they mean the same thing for two different mediums. Of course, Barthes, in Camera Lucida, speaks of the world that the photograph traced as existing elsewhere.
Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.
Whereas Graw positions indexicality in relation to, almost literally, the indexes of the fingers – the hands, the touch of the artist. Somehow, painting is, due to these signature traces, a quasi-person. And this is why, in the market discourse, it is valued as such a fetishistic object. It possesses the human, giving it an ontological value outside of itself.
Not looking down can be as tricky as not looking up. In our uprightness, the median-horizon line is the optimum viewpoint to take in the world as painting, as picture, as mirror. Looking down we see our own end, our own death. If we think of the grave, and high above, the Octoberists in their white tower placed on a flat earth, all holding white flags of black Sharpie protest, there is a diametric between death and the drive, what Freud named the “death-drive” — looping us back to highways of the Lychian lost kind that detours into an American suburbia of highs and lows.
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet splits the world in two, between high and low, plain sight and hidden, mirrors and monsters. We are presented with white picket fences, well-attended and watered lawns, daytime TV, a Dalmatian dog, fire engine, children’s crossing with an attendant lollipop woman. And then, from this median-horizon mirror of small-r reality, we are pulled underneath into the dirt and dark and noise of an orgy of cockroaches scrummaging and rummaging with excess pleasure and self-containment.
This is what Slavoj Žižek describes as the Lamella, something elsewhere (indexical), and here, present, lively and underfoot, what Lacan defined as a spill-off from the Imaginary and the Symbolic into the space of the Real.
If we now live in the digitally mirrored and algorithmic lost highway of technology, overrun with exits and entrances, where does the physical object of painting live?
Lacan’s most clinical piece of theory, the Mirror Stage, is, in one sense, a mirror of the Zeuxis/ Parrhasius competition myth described earlier. The child sees itself in the mirror and then falls into language, falls into the Symbolic, and the trouble begins. The mirror image is not the Real, and neither is the language the baby adopts or inherits from culture. These are all specular images, illusionistic and whole, a whole that is always anticipated but never fulfilled, inadequate, and, that most famous of Lacanian words, lacking.
A photograph possesses many things, but it doesn’t possess itself. A painting on the other hand possesses itself, because it continually refers to itself, and jettisons everything else, like in Guston’s studio. A painting is the world, as I wrote in a recent review of Fergus Feehily’s solo exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios.
Yet, I wrote in the same review, surprising myself, that:
a Fergus Feehily painting embedded in a catalogue raisonné or Instagram post, are deliciously introverted, not extroverted: they are the world. But by being the world, compounds and compresses them into diamonds, although beautifully faceted, have a low fidelity reflection of the world without (which the Pictures Generation were doing when painting was proclaimed dead.) Feehily’s paintings are not read as surfaces, but as objects with fronts, sides and backs. They are phenomenology not epistemology, objects not illusion, and not what Plato named mimesis. Further, they are removed from photography and thus the illusion of politics.
Anecdotal Ends and Beginnings
In 2017 I interviewed the British painter Phillip Allen, who was a big influence on me as an art student. I don't know what the question was, because we never recorded the conversation, but it came up that Phillip had recently learned a painting of his, sold to a collector, had lived in a shipping crate for years. He was visibly disappointed at this discovery, even though he understood how the artworld worked when it came to collectors and financial investment in artworks, especially paintings. He asked himself aloud: “Who was he doing this thing called painting for? For you? Himself?
Is painting, beyond its surface, its edge, just an indexical excess or causality, an orgy of cockroaches in a shipping crate, or bank vault? Perhaps the Real is the market, is an image on your smartphone.
Are Baudrillard’s Simulacra, copies that no longer point to any underlying real object or truth, evolved from mere imitations into independent entities, more influential or real than the reality the copy purports to represent? This is where we are at in relation to art mediated through the veil of technology. Yet like the competition myth between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the veil is the real thing.
As a teenager, I first wanted to become a painter after opening an art book with poor resolution black and white images of Renaissance paintings. This bad simulacra conjured imaginary and fantastical excess in my formation of my ideology around painting, and my fascination with it as an object out there in the world somewhere, rather than here. There is something excessive in the image of an object – the mediation of an object – that holds more fantasy. That excess could be based on the hope that the Real object is more than can be contained in reality, even if it isn’t, ending invariably in disappointment …
As an art student, Gerhard Richter was someone who overwhelmed me. I read his diaries in my second year of art school. I’d never seen a Gerhard Richter in person, but I knew— via the images of his paintings and his words, that he was presenting something both seductive and critical in his bipartisan absorption and expression of photography apropos painting. His catalogue of images from the 60s onwards – some forty years of painting at that time – was a survey of painting’s relationship with the age of simulacra.
Soon after absorbing Richter’s words and his paintings through images — some ten years later — I got to see some 140 paintings at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin in 2012.
The fantasy had become real.
The scale.
The diversity in approach.
The abundance.
I felt invigorated and deflated all at once, as if I had touched The Real, and by touching it, exorcised all the fantasies I had built up over the years. It took me another year or more to relive and retell that experience of Gerhard Richter in Berlin – not in positive terms, but in terms that seemed to say that painting is most alive when it exists as a copy, like cockroaches beneath the surface of the median- and mediated horizon line of our point of view.
While walking with my nine-year-old daughter Lucy through a forest that looked out upon a wide river, the River Suir and the river banks, hills and fields beyond, and thinking about this question — the death of painting — and the day after reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and the line: A photograph is always invisible; it is not it that we see, Lucy looked and pointed beyond the trees, beyond the river, onto the hills that caught the light like a brush stroke of Naples yellow. She said, That looks like a painting. It’s really beautiful.
Perversely, I gave Lucy my phone to take a photograph. I said, Point at what you see as the painting. She took loads of pictures. Each one was a disappointment. No, that’s not it. That’s not it. She kept trying to capture something that couldn’t be captured with the photograph. She gave up. You know what I mean—it’s there, but not with that. It’s different.
Lucy, at 9, was trying to articulate what she saw as a painting—something that was not being captured by the phone.
Marx wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935):
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, diminished through the proliferation of copies.
Whereas Isabelle Graw, the art historian, who has come to be known as an art critic that criticises the artworld marketplace through the fetishistic veil of painting, writes:
Marx insisted on the relational, metonymic (displaced) quality of value, thereby reminding us that value has no substance and is always elsewhere.
And yet, after all the exits and entrances and double-backs from the highway of mechanical reproduction, painting’s fate and existence, like everything else, is to become a photograph on our phone. And that’s okay. There’s something nice about lived experience becoming something inanimate and embalmed. A bad photograph of a painting was enough for me to want to become a painter. Whereas painting in reality as something forecasted as dying or dead made me want to stop. Sure, we initially need a painting to become a photograph. But we want the fantasy and fetishism that a photograph contains because of what it does not contain, the painting.
Finally, I still wonder, after repeated retellings and refashionings, if Zeuxis was happy or disappointed at the moment of touching the Real of Parrhasius' (parrashseeus) veil?
Thank you.
P.S. context for Mad Men clip.
