5. the value of painting: notes on unspecificity, indexicality, and highly valuable quasi-persons by Isabelle graw (2012)

Introduction

In the following I will first try to develop a medium-unspecific notion of painting that is nevertheless able to capture its residual distinctness even under the conditions that led to its diffuse boundaries. These conditions-often referred to as a "post-medium condition" (Rosalind E. Krauss) —will be addressed in view of their implications for painting. If painting has expanded and tends to be everywhere, as I will argue, then it seems to make little sense to delimit its realm. Yet this is what numerous painting exhibitions, from "Der zerbrochene Spiegel" (Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Kunsthalle Wien, 1993) to "Painting on the Move" (Kunsthalle Basel, 2002), or the notorious publications produced by Phaidon (Painting Today, 2009) keep doing: they treat painting as if it was a clearly circumscribed entity. However, painting has long since left its ancestral home —that is, the picture on the canvas-and is now omnipresent, as it were, and at work in other art forms as well.

We therefore cannot be sure what we are referring to when we talk "about painting."! Do we mean painting in the sense of a medium, a technique, a genre, a procedure, or an institution? As a way out of these semantic quandaries I will propose a less substantialist notion of painting: a form of production of signs that is experienced as highly personalised. This understanding of painting as a highly personalised semiotic activity has several advantages—it is less restrictive, allowing us to see how painting is at work in other art forms as well, and it is able to capture what is specific about painting's codes, gestures, and materiality.

In addition to this, the focus on painting's indexicality enables us to grasp the particularly strong bond that we encounter between the person and the product. This bond has been of particular relevance for anthropology, which tends to regard artworks as equivalents of people? While this view underestimates the fact that the two groups function differently in many respects, I nevertheless find Alfred Gell's definition of artworks as "indexes of agency" very useful.' Painting takes this aspect of artworks —that they are perceived as social indexes-to the very extreme. In order to argue painting's particular ability to suggest social agency, I will investigate the highly personalised nature of this particular sign production and relate it to the way it obtains value.

There are many indications of painting's lasting popularity: it keeps fetching the highest prices on the art market and it survived the manifold historical attempts to declare it finished, dead, obsolete, etc. I will conclude by offering one possible explanation for its tenacity. Granted, there are other, more pragmatic reasons for its lasting popularity that I won't elaborate on here (such as the easy transport and circulation of pictures on canvas). Moreover paintings are usually based on comparatively low production costs, which also contributes to their attraction. But I am more interested here in the powerful suggestion that painting is able to produce as an art form:

I will argue that it is particularly disposed to support the expectation-widespread in the art world-that acquiring a work of art means getting a hold on the artist's labour capacity and therefore owning a slice of her life. Buying artworks indeed comes close to buying people— and this is especially true for painting.

For an Expanded Notion of Painting

I have already hinted at the problems of defining painting. When most artistic practices, not only painterly ones, have undergone massive differentiation and expansion, it becomes rather difficult to pin down painting. How do we determine an "unresolved category"?* I would like to suggest that we work with an expanded notion of painting that breaks with the modernist understanding of it as a clearly delineated practice characterised by given norms and conventions. Since the borders between the different art forms have become permeable, at least since the 1960s, we have found ourselves in a situation where different media relate to, refashion, and remodel each other. This process has been termed "re-mediatization," and occurs when the features that have been ascribed to one medium-for instance, flatness or representational strategies in painting— are addressed by another medium —for instance, large-scale photography.® And sure enough, artists from Jeff Wall to Wolfgang Tillmans have tirelessly demonstrated to us that photography can take up the representational and narrative strategies of painting; that it can aim at creating surfaces that suggest the materiality of abstract painting.

The crucial point remains here that the modernist idea of an art that is defined by the essence of its medium" has clearly lost its relevance. Once the medium can no longer be delimited, then no qualities can be inherent to it. Its character, rather, depends on how the artist will proceed with it.

Good-Bye to Medium-Specificity?

Clement Greenberg was the leading champion of the idea that modernist painting in particular is not only characterised by "essential norms and conventions" such as the flatness of its surface, but that each painting has to ideally criticise these limitations "from the inside." It is interesting to note how the descriptive and the normative levels merged in his notion of the medium. Not only did he essentialize painting, ignoring the fact that it actually shares its supposedly essential condi-tion—the flat surface-with writing, he moreover expected the artist to defend the imaginary purity of her medium by criticising it from within.

Now, this privilege that Greenberg had accorded to the medium became historically untenable once painting lost its purity and expanded into life, as in the Combine paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. Greenberg's position became even more questionable when those Conceptual art practices emerged in the late 1960s that strongly relied on different technologies, such as film photography or diagrams. This was an art that was more generic than medium specific, as André Rottmann has rightly pointed out. One might add to this that the rejection of the privileged status of painting has a much longer history, and regularly occurred in painterly practices as well. As an example of a painting that says good-bye to the tradition of "pure painting," I would refer to Francis Picabia's Nature Morte (1920).

The painting contaminates the alleged purity of its medium by drawing on different formats: the readymade (in the form of the stuffed animal attached to the surface that "stubbornly clings to the domain of painting," as George Baker so adequately put it )' and text (the written names of "great" male artists like Cézanne, Rembrandt, and Renoir, whose portraits we are meant to see and who turn out to be nothing but a dead animal, natures mortes). Cézanne, for one, whose work was always considered to be the epitome of pure painting, is declared to be as dead as the stuffed ape. The status of painting as a higher art form and the correlating belief in its purity and essence are doubly threatened here: not only by the incorporation of a readymade that enforces the external logic of the commodity and productive labour into the painting, but also by the textual elements, which equally threaten to bury painting's alleged essence.

Are we then obliged to deduce from this that there is nothing medium specific about painting anymore? I believe that we have to concede at this point that some artists, and painters in particular, do indeed encounter problems in their practice that they ascribe to the specificity of their respective medium.

But it is one thing to acknowledge a certain degree of medium-specificity at this level of artistic production, and another to derive a highly questionable general norm of medium-specificity from it.

Painting and Indexicality

So, how to define painting once it has merged with other procedures —from the readymade and linguistic propositions to the insights of institutional critique? How to determine a prac-tice that renders impossible the rigorous distinction between what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to it? I want to propose that we conceive of painting not as a medium, but as a production of signs that is experienced as highly personalised. By focusing on painting's specific indexicality, we will be able to grasp one of its main characteristics: it is able to suggest a strong bond between the product and the (absent) person of its maker.

This is due to the way indexical signs actually operate: According to Charles S. Peirce, an index shows something about a thing because of its physical connection to it.'º Since he mentioned photography as an example for this "class of signs," art historians tend to mainly treat photography as the indexical art form par excellence." But I would argue that painting suggests such a physical connection even more strongly. Someone has left her marks.

Frank Stella's observation that painting is a sort of handwriting was actually quite to the point.' Its signs are indexical insofar as they can be read as traces of the producing person. Now even if we opt for a deconstructionist approach, insisting how the trace equally addresses "the formal conditions of separation, division, and deferral," we are still dealing with the ghost of a presence. This is also true for those paintings that avoid hand-writing by using a technical device, as in Gerhard Richter's ab-stract paintings produced with a squeegee. By moving the squeegee up and down the painting in a particular way, Richter inscribes his own body movement into the painting. In other words, attempts to eliminate the subjectivity of the artist from the painting usually lead to a reentering of subjectivity into painting."* And the more negation there is of handwriting, the more this negation will be considered to be the handwriting of the artist.

Yet linking indexicality to painting does not imply that we ignore the split that occurs between the artwork and the authentic self. What we encounter in painting is not so much the authen-tically revealed self of the painter, but rather signs that insinuate that this absent self is somewhat present in it. As a highly mediated idiom, painting provides a number of techniques, methods, and artifices that allow for the fabrication of the im-pression of the author's quasi-presence as an effect.

For this indexical effect to occur, the artist does not need to have literally set her hand on the picture, or to have brandished a brush, or to have thrown paint on it. A mechanically produced silkscreen by Andy Warhol, who often delegated his work to his assistants, or a printed black painting by Wade Guyton, is no less capable of conveying the sense of a latent presence of the artist—by virtue, for instance, of imperfections deliber-ately left uncorrected, selected combinations of colours, or subsequent improvements. Painting, then, would have to be understood as the art form that is particularly favourable to the belief-widespread in the visual arts more generally-that by approaching or purchasing a work of art, it is possible to get a more immediate access to what is assumed to be the person of the artist and her life.

Painting as a Thinking Subject

There is one feature of the indexical sign that I have not yet mentioned: according to Peirce, the indexical sign is able to capture our attention because it is affected by the power of its object. 1 Now, in the case of painting's indexicality, this object is a subject—the person of the artist. This is why painting can be potentially experienced as being intriguing in a way that only an intriguing person could be. You might object that sculpture is able to do exactly the same thing. Isn't sculpture marked by a similar kind of indexicality and it therefore also suggests that it is a quasi-person?"

Yes, it does, but to a lesser degree. Only painting has many historical arguments pointing to its subject-like power-argu-ments that I believe do reach into our present. The very first systematic treatise on painting produced in the modern era, for instance, Leon Battista Alberti's Della pittura (1453), already aimed to raise the reputation of painters in order to advance their emancipation from the larger class of craftsmen.

Indicatively enough, Alberti based his preference for the painter over the sculptor on his view that the former worked

"with more difficult things," and thereby implying that painting possesses a challenging materiality and that to paint is an intrinsically intellectually demanding activity.

Once painting was declared to be intellectually challenging, it was only a matter of time before it would be claimed to have the intellectual powers of a subject. Hegel defined painting as a mode of artistic representation into which the "principle of finite and inherently infinite subjectivity" had forced its way.'' Everything that is fundamentally part of a subject accordingly urges towards painting's surface. Subjectivity, however, is here not that of the artist but a universal faculty-"the principle of our own being and life.

"According to Hegel, we see in the artefacts of painting what is "at work and operative within our-selves." And it is precisely because we believe we recognize in it a familiar potential that we at once feel "at home" in it. In other words, painting, in Hegel's view, moves us also because it stages principles that strike us as familiar and that constitute us. The decisive point of this argument is that Hegel aligns painting with the subject by ascribing a capacity for it—the capacity of subjectivity-which is, properly speaking, the exclusive privilege of subjects. Only subjects possess the ability to evolve an independent mental life. By according a subject-like power to painting, Hegel laid the ground for what I would describe as the central trope around painting in the twentieth century—namely, the assumption that there is thought in painting, that painting itself is able to think. French painting theorists like Louis Marin or Hubert Damisch in particular have put forward this argument—that painting is a sort of discourse producer that arrives at its own insights. Once it is declared to be able to think it becomes subject-like.

vI Painting as a Highly Valuable Quasi-Person

But how does painting's capacity to evoke the sense of a subject-like force—its power to suggest that it actually operates like a person—relate to the value that is attributed to it?

For an artwork to be considered valuable, it first of all has to be attributable to an author-one could say that it thereby gets loaded with intentionality. This process gets intensified in the case of the indexical signs of paintings. Here, someone has left her traces (even if mechanically produced, this suggestion of a handwriting persists) and this enhances the impression of an intentional artwork, of an artwork that itself has agency. While all artworks have to function as an index of the one who brought them into existence in order for value to be attributed to them, painting seems to go further by suggesting that it is a quasi-person. Or to put this slightly differently: painting is particularly well equipped to satisfy the longing for substance in value. It indeed seems to demonstrate how value is founded in something concrete—the living labour of the artist.

Let's recall how Karl Marx conceptualised value. While it is certainly true that his reflections on value were bound to the commodity and that he did not consider artworks commodities of a special kind, his notion of value has two undeniable ad-vantages: it does not confound value and price, and therefore it prevents us from equating the value of an artwork with its market value. Even more importantly, Marx insisted on the relational, metonymic quality of value, thereby reminding us that value has no substance and is always elsewhere.

Indeed, Marx on the one hand emphasised that no commodity is valuable in itself, that value is a "purely social" phenomenon?

This is also true for artworks: No artwork is valuable per se— its value is the result of an ongoing and never-ending social negotiation. If the symbolic value of Damien Hirst's work, for instance, is considered questionable because of his general strategic attitude towards the market, then his overall project will start to lack credibility and its price will eventually fall.

But the worth of his practice is never fixed and is always open for reconsideration.

On the other hand, Marx pointed to how value represents "the expenditure of human labour in general." This would mean that value eclipses concrete labour and turns it into its opposite— abstract human labour. Now, painting seems to be one of the last places where the desire for a concrete foundation of value seemingly gets fulfilled. Not only does it generate the illusionary impression that it is possible to grasp a fibre of the lived labour that was mobilised for it, but it moreover promises the existence of an imaginary place where labour actually remains private and concrete, detectable in the concrete materiality of its surface and the gestures that it displays. The process of labour is not hidden but seemingly exposed, as if the lived labor of its author was something we could hold onto, as if it had not been transformed into "objectified labour (vergegenständlichte Arbeit, Marx) during the process of exchange. Painting's capacity to appear particularly saturated with the lifetime of its author makes it the ideal candidate for value production.

It is important to note that this search for value within lived labor gets even more pronounced in the current context of ongoing devalorization. One of the effects of the 2008 financial crisis is that more and more desperate searches for value take place. The belief in the "personality" of the artwork and painting in particular is of course not a solution to the crisis, it is rather a way of both delaying and extending it.

Let me conclude by saying that the topos of painting as a quasi-person has historically turned up in many different guises— starting from painters themselves, who have either seriously (like Francis Bacon or Charline von Heyl) or ironically (Albert Oehlen) referred to the idea that painting tells them what to do." The belief in the self-activity of painting is one of its central myths, a myth that is of course closely interwoven with the experience of production. I have mentioned already how several French art historians like Marin or Damisch have made a slightly different claim for a metapictorial "thinking" of paintings, demonstrating how it is able to produce its own discourse.? While I wouldn't deny the possibility that a painting can occasionally deliver its own interpretation, I find it nevertheless important to realise that by claiming agency for painting (or for artworks in general), by treating them as quasi-persons, as I have aimed to show here that we tend to do, we become somewhat implicated in the process of value at-tribution, a process that has in any case already been fired up by our propositions regarding the nature of the artwork.