Painting 2.

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Edited by Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdorfer, and David Joselit

Museum Brandhorst, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen

mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
Del Monico Books • Prestel Munich, London, New York
This book is published on the occasion of
the exhibition

" Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age"

Curated by Achim Hochd6rfer and David Joselit with
Manuela Ammer
Assistant Curator: Tonio Kroner

Museum Brandhorst
Turkenstrasse 19
80333 Munich
www.museum-brandhorst.de
November 14, 2015-April 30, 2016

mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung

Ludwig Wien
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien
www .mumok.at
June 4-November 6, 2016
Piero Manzoni, Fiato d'artista (Artist 's Breath) , 1960,
Deflated rubber balloon, metal nameplate, lead seal,
and string on wood panel, 7½6 x 71/,6inches (18 x
18 cm). Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan

14
How the World Came in
Achim Hochdorfer

In 1960, Piero Manzoni blew up some balloons, tied a a fragmenting, alienating modern world. Thus in the
string with a seal attached as anchor to each, and then 1950s many art critics celebrated the gestural painting
mounted them individually on square wooden boards of their decade as the last remaining bastion of artistic
with nameplates. In the course of time, the balloons license from which the integrity of individual expression
slowly deflated, leaving only limp blue, red, and white might be defended. It was this hope of securing a purely
rubber shells: the artist's finite breath had transformed aesthetic, autonomous realm for contemplative self-
each balloon into a pictorial object, an informal figure reassurance that was thrown open to negotiation early
reminiscent of a casual, spontaneously applied brush- in the following decade.
stroke or abstract splash of paint. After duly certifying Against the backdrop of a booming economy and an
them, Manzoni proceeded to sell these vestiges of his exploding art market, however, the rhetoric of alienation
own vital presence: "When I blow up the balloon, I am and authenticity began to sound hollow and untrust-
breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal," worthy. It was this very commercialization of artistic
he wrote. 1 While his Fiato d'artista (Artist's Breath) may expression that Manzoni targeted in the certification and
at first seem like an ironic prank, the seemingly banal marketing of his own breath, his own in(re)spiration.
setup in fact alerts us to the role of authorship, figure, and Under pressure from the burgeoning society of the
chance in art, and hence to key problems in the history of spectacle and the perceived threat posed by the flood of
modern painting. That eventful and controversial history- media images, painting theory narrowed to a theory
rich in highs and lows and radical new departures and of media specificity. Whether and how painting could
conservative reactions-had developed in the eyes of be isolated from the surfeit of information to retain its
many of Manzoni's contemporaries into a crisis so funda- autonomy were declared the crucial questions on which
mental that the medium itself was at risk of running out the medium's fate would henceforth turn. From Manet
of breath. and Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism to
Painting's greatest historic encumbrance perhaps Abstract Expressionism, critics and historians presented
resides in its close ties to subject theory, as first forged painting's development as a teleological process of purg-
in the nineteenth century. In the aesthetic theories of ing extraneous influences, and it was vital that this trajec-
modernism-in Romanticism, phenomenology, and criti- tory was not interrupted, if at all possible. Yve-Alain Bois
cal theory-painting was the singularly privileged medium describes this media-specific narrowing as "a deliberate
of self-reassurance. The multilayered implications of the attempt to free art from its contamination by the forms
painterly gesture had been found to provide an ideal of exchange produced by capitalism." 3 The advanced art
metaphoric vehicle for analyzing the complex relationship criticism of the 1960s presented painting with a choice
between mind and body, eye and hand. 2 The canvas, hav- between upholding the integrity of the image and pro-
ing been touched by the brushstroke, had become the site voking its dissolution into performance art, Minimalist
at which the individual met society and hence a place of sculpture, and installation environments.
mediation between subjective and collective experience- The consolidation of art criticism into the two
even while hosting a lament over its own loss. Painting opposing camps that have endured to this day neverthe-
has thus remained linked to the fate of the subject, which less threatens to distort our view of all the rich and var-
is why any talk of the crisis of painting since the late ied painting that has not followed one of these paths. For
nineteenth century has provoked a parallel discussion of a even an expressive mark a la Manzoni remains insolubly
crisis of the subject. The diagnosticians of such crises have linked to the question of the subject's self-reassurance,
tended to appeal to the "authentic" subject who faces irrespective of whether it is authentically communicated

15
Hochdorfer

Robert Rauschenberg, Barge , 1962-63 . Oil and silkscreen on can vas,

6 feet 8¼ inches x 32 feet 2 inches (203.9 x 980.4 cm). Guggenheim Bilbao
Museoa and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , New York, with additional
funds contributed by Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum; the International
Director'sCouncil and Executive Committee members: Eli Broad, Elaine
Terner Cooper, Ronnie Heyman, J. TomilsonHill, Dakis Joannou, Barbara
Lane, Robert Mnuchin, Peter Norton, Thomas Walther, and Ginny Williams ;
Ulla Dreyfus-Best, Norma and Joseph Saul Philanthropic Fund, Elizabeth
Rea, Eli Broad, Dakis Joannou, Peter Norton, Peter Lawson-Johnston,
Michael Wettach, Peter Littman, Tiqui Atencio, Bruce and Janet Karatz,
Giulia Ghirardi Pagliai. 1997

and experienced as a specific historical fact or has turned the surge of media imagery. Littered with images gleaned
out to be a hopeless illusion. Despite-or perhaps by vir- from the popular press, these "action collages" register
tue of-being contaminated by the continuous flow of the the scintillating simultaneity of media events. Barge, for
information society, the many forms of expressive mark example, an over thirty-foot-wide painting produced in
making remained ciphers of this quest for self-reassurance, 1962-63 as part of a painting performance for the CBS
no matter how fragmented and contextualized subject television network, shows images from a wide range of
and subjectivity are conceived. And these emblems are at categories including sports, technology, nature, art, and
their most conspicuous whenever there is a revolution in architecture. Owing to the massive format of the canvas,
the technological-that is to say, media-environment, as the work cannot possibly be taken in a single, summary
following the advent of television and as following now gaze. 4 Nor is there any "totality" in terms of its composi-
the spread of social media. The relevance and vitality of tion; there is no single standpoint from which the disparate
painting since the 1960s therefore rests specifically on its motifs might coalesce into a coherent whole . Rauschenberg
ability to be open to the other-to what is alien to it- instead appeals to the flexibility of the eye and to the
which is also what brought about these upheavals: paint- body's physical mobility, which enables countless changes
ing has proved ready to enter into coalitions and alliances of perspective. The work itself thus undercuts any attempt
with other artistic media and formats that reach far to contemplate its singularity. A silkscreen print after Diego
beyond any merely material definition as "oil on canvas." Velasquez's Rokeby Venus (1647-51) positioned more or
Painting, moreover, has also sought friction with the soci- less in the middle of Barge plays on this effect. The goddess
etal contexts of technological innovation. The complexity of love admiring herself in a mirror is literally beset from
of modern painting and the drama underlying it, in other all sides-by a military vehicle, a rocket, a steel frame, sat-
words, result not from painting's purge of external dis- ellites, and not least a phallic freeway ramp. As ciphers of
turbances but instead from its eager embrace of critique an increasingly techriologized world, these images impinge
as stimulus. not just on Venus pondering her own beauty but also on
viewers looking in the mirror. Rauschenberg insists that
Expression in a World of Spectacle it is no longer tenable to define the aesthetic view as some
dreamy, timeless state; instead the work must assert itself
Robert Rauschenberg's Silkscreen Paintings, the first within the riotous spectacle around it. 5
of which was produced in 1962, stage a programmatic Strewn across the canvas with calculated spontaneity,
confrontation between traditional, expressive painting and Rauschenberg's painterly gestures-the crisscrossing,

16
 How the World Came in

This is indeed the purpose underlying the metaphor of

the freestyle swimmer, since directly below him, on the
edge of the canvas, the artist appended his signature in the
form of a print of his own hand.
Rauschenberg's project of integrating and appropri-
ating both the techniques and the motifs of contemporary
image production is paradigmatic of the many approaches
to the increasing appearance of everyday life in painting
from the early 1960s onward. This transition period-the
timespan between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art,
for which canonical art history has yet to find an apposite
label-was one in which modernism's material and ideo-
logical premises were subjected to radical questioning.
Painting itself was literally broken down into its constit-
uent elements: the ground, frame, and painting process
were studied; the work took on the status of concept; and
the artist-subject was deconstructed and parodied (as in
the case of Manzoni's Fiato d'artista discussed above).
This was also the period when expressionist "mark
making" was analyzed for its semiotic and narrative
functions: Cy Twombly sexualized the practice in works
that teemed with male and female genitalia reminiscent
of those of restroom graffiti (p. 105), Claes Oldenburg
filled his "store" with painted commercial products and
comestibles that fetishized the expressionist vocabulary of
forms, Yves Klein translated the painterly act into a per-
hatching, dripping veins of paint, imprints, smears, and formance spectacle entailing the use of nude female bodies
deletions-play a crucial part in the pictorial event. Many as brushes (p. 38), and Niki de Saint Phalle made painting
have claimed that Rauschenberg was subjecting those a symbol and target of paternalistic repression, when she
same painterly elements to a photographic regime. 6 In took a rifle and shot at a work behind which she had hid-
fact, the exact opposite is true: as a method of super- den bags of paint that "bled" out of the work and onto
ficially applying paint, silkscreen actually prevents the a bread slicer positioned immediately below (p. 32). The
photographs from looking like technologically fabricated transition period, in other words, was the starting point
images floating on an interchangeable media substrate for several strands of painting's development for decades
and, instead, binds them to the haptic realm of painting. to come. 9
Rauschenberg, moreover, either saturates the images with What was seen as the inevitable dissolution of paint-
gloomy hues or waters them down to such an extent that ing as a medium led art critics into what were probably
they take on an immaterial, almost ethereal appearance. their most intense disputes of the past few decades. The
And that is not all: for his expressive markings are also more performance art, Pop art, and Minimal art called
implicated in a tricky interaction with the photographs generic boundaries into question, the more vehemently
to the extent that they illustrate, annotate, and parody the representatives of modernism-most notably Clement
their functions, or, alternatively, take on their own, Greenberg and Michael Fried-propagated the autonomy
independent compositional logic. 7 A sea of bold black of the genres. Meanwhile, far removed from the New York
hatch marks and a waterfall of white streaks surround art scene, the medium's unraveling had even become a
duplicated images of swimmers, stacked one on top of concern of Theodor Adorno. Compared with the polemical
the other in the middle of the work. Other elements are tenor of American art criticism as typified, for example, by
exposed as singular events, as individual assertions of Fried's controversial article "Art and Objecthood" (1967),
materiality, which as abstract signs run parallel to the Adorno's "Art and the Arts" (also dated 1967) was almost
photographs. Rauschenberg thus presents completely conciliatory, yet his essay remained largely disregarded.
different models of expression and demonstrates how they For Adorno, painting's collapse was by no means
become interactively cross-referential in our perception. unprecedented; on the contrary, he argued that the
Following Leo Steinberg, Barge could be interpreted as an phenomenon of a medium's dissolution could be found
attempt to visualize an "inner monologue": as an alle- throughout art history-from the entanglement of
gory of contemporary consciousness navigating its way sculpture and architecture in the Baroque period to the
through the incoming tide of data and media images. 8 Romantics' attempts at synthesis, which Jugendstil later

17
Hochdorfer

Robert Morris, Site, performance with Carolee

Schneemann, 1964. Photo by Hans Namuth

'
adopted. The historical forces driving this process invari- did the translation of art into concrete action result in
abl y followed an inner drive, as if it were the very specific- the abandonment of painting in favor of more aggressive
ity of a medium that triggered the unconscious desire forms of realpolitik. Not only did painting remain the
to transcend it. Adorno's use of the term promiscuity starting point of many spatial works and performances,
points to just such a phenomenon. 10 Adorno might be but it moreover became the semantic matrix on which the
paraphrased by suggesting that at the heart of the genres said works wer e constitutionally premised, as evidenced
is a delight in commingling with, or trespassing into, by Robert Morris's 1964 performance Site, in which
another's terrain. Crucially, the promiscuit y described by the arti st involved a rectangular wooden board, painted
Adorno is not confined to the intermediality of the arts entirely in white, in a finely nuanced game with his own
but rather extends into their relationship to an extra - body. By standing in front of the upright painting, dis-
arti stic realit y. Sign production, says Adorno, is always appearing behind it, and interacting with it in ever-new
infused with a Zusat z van Au(?erkiinstlerischem, or a image-body constellations, Morri s literally concretized
shot of the extra-artistic, and if this friction with other- painting's central topoi. And as if that were not explicit
ness is abandoned, art lapses into empty formalism: "Art enough, Carolee Schneemann then appeared onstage
needs something heterogeneous to itself to become art," in a pose instantly recognizable as alluding to Edouard
he wrote. "In the abs ence of that, the process that every Manet 's Olympia (1863), the work that, as even Clement
work of art is lacks a target and so just freewheels. " 1 1 Greenberg would admit, marks the beginning of modern
painting. At issue here, in other words, is neither the tran-
Protest and Expression scendence nor the dissolution of painting but the poten-
tial for an alternative reading of "high mod ernism"-an
The calls , in the 1960s, for an exit from the picture so as even more radical, phenomenological under standing
to broaden the definition of painting were in many cases of painting that also points to a return to its canonized
motivated by a drive to make art more political. Yet rarely origins.12 The target of most of the rhetorical attacks on

18
 How the World Came in

painting was an excessively narrow formalism; this was The painter in this work, though closely watching the
the "enemy" against which other aspects of the history of most pressing political events of the day, does not join
painting had to be brought into position. And what this the protesters; rather, he continues to paint. 15
testing of the possibilities and limits of painting revealed The appeal of the title-Where do you stand with your
was that the pendulum swings between the integrity of an art, colleague?-directly refers to the banner the marchers
artwork and the transgression of the modernist bound- in the background display. Such an appropriation of politi-
aries of a work, which Adorno described, can no longer cal slogans can be found in many performances and activist
be made to fit a view of history that pits the avant-garde works of the 1960s and 1970s. If one were to construct
against the conservative and the contemplative against the a genealogy of protest painting, it would start with the
actively engaged. Situationist books and posters of the late 1950s, continue in
The evolution of Jorg Immendorff's work from the performances such as Gunter Brus's "self-painting" Wiener
1960s to the early 1970s illustrates this well: Hort auf zu Spaziergang (Vienna Walk, 1965; p. 42), Adrian Piper's
malen (Stop Painting, p. 45)-an exhortation smeared Catalysis III (1970, p. 43), and Daniel Buren's Hammes
on a canvas in 1966-has the categorical ring of a sandwichs (Sandwich Men, 1968; p. 40) demonstrations,
demonstrator's demand. But Immendorff makes not just and carry on in Glenn Ligon's referencing of an image of
words but signs and images, too: painted on the canvas a protest march by African-American workers in Untitled
is a bed and, behind it, a rack with a hat reminiscent of (I Am a Man) (1988, p. 50), the placards and banners of
that worn by Joseph Beuys, the young artist's celebrated AIDS activists and the Occupy movement, and Jacqueline
professor, perched on it. With two especially gestural Humphries abstract paintings as protest signs (p. 51). As
diagonal lines, Immendorff literally crossed out the different as the political impulses and aesthetic strategies
object and, in so doing, firmly came down on the side of that generated these works might be, they are all expres-
Malerei gegen Malerei (painting against painting)-that sionist outcries against prevailing circumstances. 16
is, in favor of politicizing painting and taking on its The direct link between expressionism and protest
conflict. 13 "In this work I wanted to express my unease was also a point of departure for feminist painting, which
at a painting that has no aspirations beyond itself and began to consolidate into a movement in the late 1960s.
does not take a stand on a single problem .... Anyone Abstract Expressionist works of Helen Frankenthaler,
would think that I wanted to abolish painting altogether. Saint Phalle, and Oldenburg had already thematized the
Even without commentary, this painting takes a stand, male-defined sexualization of "mark making." Susan
the stand of uncertainty. " 14 This deliberately ambivalent Sontag's "Notes on Camp" and Lucy Lippard's "Eccentric
position is distilled in the sign of deletion: the "X" sym- Abstraction" also count among the important precur-
bolizes the limitless interchangeability of extremes and sors of this development. 17 The impersonal aesthetic of
painting's constant alternation between devaluation and Minimal art, however, at first overshadowed these efforts.
potentiality, self-destruction and self-assertion. Invested Underlying the emphatically literal materiality-"what
with such a wealth of connotations, this "X" has since you see is what you see"-was a profoundly masculine
become a recurrent figure of painting-or, rather, of the rhetoric of sharp edges and hard surfaces, of "power"
debate over the status of painting-exploited by artists and "presence. " 18 This is what led Joan Snyder, Louise
from Daniel Buren to Wade Guyton . Fishman, and Mary Heilmann in the early 1970s to
In the early 1970s, lmmendorff turned to a kind of confront Minimal art 's language of forms with a gendered
agitprop painting that systematically explored its relation semiotization of the expressive brushstroke. As Theresa
to its social, institutional, and political context. Wo stehst de Lauretis explained when discussing feminist film, what
du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege? (Where do you stand with the artists wanted from that revaluation was to be taken
your art, colleague?, 1973; pp. 46-47) depicts a reclusive seriously as the "subject of discourse, which also means to
painter sitting quietly at his easel as a political activist be listened to, to be granted authorship over the story." 19
barges in. The door of the studio has been flung wide- Fishman's Angry Paintings (pp. 48-49) are para-
open, affording us a view of striking workers and a factory digmatic of the feminist appropriation of mark making.
with smoking chimney stacks. The pointed finger is an Having already produced Minimalist early works, Fishman
entreaty to the painter-and by extension the viewer-to turned to political activism in the late 1960s. Her Angry
leave the comfort zone of private contemplation and join Paintings of 1973, however, mark an artistic departure.
the protesters. At first glance, the painting seems to posit a The thirty-two paintings bearing women's names-includ-
straightforward choice between painting, as an activity far ing Angry Louise, Angry Jill, Angry Marilyn, Angry Joan,
removed from "real life," and political engagement. That Angry Gertrude, Angry Hillary-together form a kind of
the fault line of this conflict runs right through the paint- protest march of like-minded friends, family members,
ing, however, alerts us to lmmendorff's point: what he is and such cultural points of reference as Gertrude Stein and
really calling for is a painting that derives its integrity and Marilyn Monroe. Unfurled before us in a dazzling array
significance from its origins in the politics of everyday life. of colors is a full range of affective references to be derived

19
Hochdorfer

from writing, color, and form. And what shines through the brought with it the threat of capital infiltrating even the
vigorous hatching and strident grid patterns-in addition to last remaining havens of subculture and counterculture.
outrage-is a sense of solidarity. In painting after painting, But if opposition and transgression no longer constituted
Fishman sought to inscribe herself in a language of expres- adequate responses, and if protest and spectacle, authen-
siveness, to appropriate it, and to communicate different ticity and pose, had becom e inextricably intermingled,
moods and temperaments, her ultimate aim being to follow then the modernist project of painting as self-reassurance
through a narrative that is at once personal and cultural, had clearly degenerated into farce-or so the simulation
harmonious and cacophonous. "At the height of the Pop theory that had come to haunt the aesthetic debate of the
and Minimal movements," wrote Snyder in retrospect, 1980s argued. Hence Craig Owens's 1983 prediction that
"we were making other art-art that was personal, autobi- Neo-Expressionism would transform subjective expres-
ographical, expressionistic, narrative, and political. ... They sion into a "simulation of passion" with "everything ...
called it neo-expressionist. Except it wasn't neo to us. " 20 bracketed in quotation marks. " 24 Whereas historical
Expressionism had still been able to translate its "attack
Painting as a Discursive Arena on convention" into images, by the 1980s painting no
longer had recourse to such a strategy. Expressive gestures
The expressionistically inspired broadening and politiciz- were liable to dissolve into "illusions of spontaneity and
ing of painting in the 1960s and 1970s was by and large immediacy" so that "everything reverses into its opposite;
ignored by the most advanced art criticism; that is, it was opposites reveal mirrored identities. " 25
interpreted as an exit from painting and as a development With its references to simulation theory, painting's
beyond painting's principles, and not even the feminist most recent crisis to be diagnosed reached its high-water
revaluation of the expressionist tradition was able to mark in the 1980s, when authentic painting was deemed
puncture this way of seeing. For all the hostility between a thing of the past-whether that of the 1960s or of early
Minimal art and modernism, which from 1965 onward modernism-to be played off against an utterly corrupt
was to transform painting discourse with lasting effect, present. At its best-in the early works of Albert Oehlen,
the two camps were at least united in their condemna - for example-the expressive painting of the 1980s was able
tion of the expressionist legacy.21 The new wave of Neo- to articulate this ostensible auto-corruption of the medium
Expressionist painting that took the art world by storm in and the existential loss of orientation to which it had given
the early 1980s was thus bound to seem like a grotesque rise in ruinous painting that consistently negated the very
reversal of the whole developmental logic of the most foundations of its own self-reassurance, becoming irredeem-
recent history of painting. Historical styles were crossed, ably ensnared in the cliches of its own history. The motifs
themes and motifs that art critics had regarded as passe in Oehlen's paintings-the masks and mannequins, the
rediscovered, and motifs from pop culture integrated. And animals wrapped in barbed wire-are all rendered in shades
this provocative "revaluation of all values" (per Nietzsche) of brown, as if the neoliberal optimism of the 1980s, with
that reversed the established categories of advanced all its cynicism and boastful slogans, had become hopelessly
painting was celebrated as a postmodernist triumph. The mired in the triteness of latter-day West Germany.
question of the rules according to which certain styles Oehlen's Auch Einer (Another One, 1985; p. 53)
might be declared good or bad, progressive or reactionary, shows the head of a stag, its mouth agape as if bellowing,
critical or affirmative, was posed with polemical acuity and squeezed into a blue suit as the uniform of convention and
caustic irony. Jean-Francois Lyotard demanded a new "age commerce. Oehlen draws on a motif of regressive animality
of experimentation," an "age of satire" in which the mod- found in the kitsch adorning the walls of countless living
ernist stock of forms would be rethought and implicated in rooms of that era, which seemed to satisfy a petit bour-
a carnivalesque game. 22 geois desire for "art." Art has repeatedly tried to tease out
The real scandal of Neo-Expressionism thus lay what the motif conceals: from Edvard Munch to Francis
less in its restoration of modernist categories such as Bacon, the scream symbolizes the lamenting, protesting,
authorship and the autonomy of the work than in its despairing subject. Oehlen takes this emblem a step further
celebration of their utter, irredeemable corruption. In the by showing how the avant-garde's hopes for liberation
late 1970s, there was talk of the end of the avant-garde: and emancipation from convention have also proved to
the postmodernist search for "intensities" without any be kitschy aspirations. Significantly, the stag's antlers are
utopian dimension and the loss of art's revolutionary broken and the pieces have been arranged to look like a
perspective. The established models of criticality suddenly hammer and sickle. Interpreted as a crypto-self-portrait, the
seemed formulaic and were no longer a match for the work shows Oehlen rejecting all the aesthetic and political
paradoxes of postmodernist experience. "Shock, scandal, options available to him, yet behind the sarcasm is a hint
estrangement," wrote Hal Foster, "these are no longer of Oehlen's sense of solidarity with the wretched creature:
tactics against conventional thought-they are conven- the humanoid eye gazes at the viewer from the center of the
tional thought. " 23 The advent of rampant neoliberalism picture, blue paint flowing like a tear. 26

20
 How the World Came in

Oehlen's painting thus becomes an allegory and swan assistant to design the paintings, Heavy Burschi was a
song for the yearning, contradictions, and polemical kind of curated retrospective, a view from the outside
posturing that informed painting in the 1980s. For by that reconfigured Kippenberger's working methods and
the middle of the decade, the wave of Neo-Expressionist expressive palette. 29 In this respect, following his logic,
painting was already ebbing, and relentless critique had the exhibition of the work could be read as a profound
turned a carnival parade into a funeral procession. The reflection "on painting," whose myths and polemics
problems raised, however, remained as virulent as ever: of the past few decades it reviewed: 30 the proclaimed
how could anyone continue painting once all subjects, death of painting and its resurrection in photography,
all means of expression, were infected with cliche; once all the play of originality and authorship, the integration
things authentic were contaminated by their surrogates? of nonpainting techniques into painting practices, and
And how could artists find their place in history once the exploration of styles and genealogies from Francis
all historically binding categories and front lines were Picabia to the Situationists to appropriation-the list
lost? How could one continue, once the death of the could continue. Yet Heavy Burschi is not confined to a
author was proclaimed, to think about what the process detached analysis of painting's categories; this "retrospec-
of becoming a subject might mean? It was questions like tive" stages-on a vast scale-the autodeconstruction of
these that prepared the ground for the conceptualization the self. Thus the dumpster at the heart of the work is
of painting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it is on another cryptoportrait, a physical corpus filled with the
these grounds that the origins of the recent development detritus of Kippenberger's art of whose copies (or simula-
known as network painting can be found. 27 The image tions) are displayed on the wall behind it.
concepts derived from this process can be considered part Heavy Burschi grew out of Kippenberger's inten-
of a discursive arena in which all the labyrinthine con- sive engagement with a younger generation of artists
flicts and contradictions of painting history inform a new and marked the beginning of a strategic integration of
concept of painting. Different approaches and traditions painting in an expressionistically inspired analysis of the
were viewed in relation to one another, dropped threads social dynamics of creative processes. This task was then
picked up again, and imaginary encounters between his- taken up and established by Michael Krebber, Carpenter,
torical constellations initiated. The many blockades and Stephan Dillemuth, Cosima von Bonin, Heimo Zobernig,
"No Entry" signs erected by the supposedly advanced art and Stephen Prina, whose painting practices could thus
theories of the 1960s could now be explored with analytic be described as parergonal; that is to say, they are by-
acuity. Such a painting concept is not unlike a battle- products of, commentaries on, and critiques of what
field in that it, too, provides an arena in which artistic Isabelle Graw once called the "institution of painting." 31
and societal conflicts might be fought in full view of the Apart from these endeavors, a host of practices sought
public. The metaphor of painting as arena calls to mind to conceptualize the discursive arena by establishing new
Harold Rosenberg's existentialist description of the act of forms of the autonomous tableau, which effectively inter-
painting as the self-assertion of the modern individual in nalized the potential conflicts of recent painting history:
a world of spectacle. 28 Of crucial importance, however, is alongside Oehlen's "post-abstract paintings" of 1988, the
that the potential for conflict must not be confined to the later works of Christopher Wool, Jutta Koether, Charline
act of painting alone but extended to painting's broader von Heyl, Monika Baer, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and
discursive field. Nicole Eisenman, among others, spring to mind. 32
Martin Kippenberger's 1989/1990 installation Heavy If postmodernism degraded all the great themes and
Burschi (Heavy Guy, pp. 28-29) provides a good example: narratives of painting history into cliche, von Heyl has
originally conceived for a solo exhibition at the Kolner since the 1990s taken these existentially laden cliches as
Kunstverein, it consists of imagery from Kippenberger's the starting point for her paintings: "Everything about
own catalogues and invitations, assembled and painted painting actually incorporates all the platitudes you can
by the artist's assistant, Merlin Carpenter. The result, a possibly think about. And you live with those platitudes.
kaleidoscope of Kippenberger's motifs, interests, hang- Platitudes that you kind of sacrifice your life for, that
ups, and humor, included self-portraits, political slogans,, make you believe nothing else is important anymore. " 33
slapstick, company logos, pop icons, and portraits of ' The platitudes in question range from motifs like the
artist friends. Photographs of the finished paintings-in a sad-faced clown as a symbol of artistic self-reflection to
nod to the monumental photographs of Thomas Struth, exploding stars scattered across the canvas like confetti.
Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff, which at the time But the creative process is such that these cliches appear
were laying claim to painting's legacy-were printed at not as extraneous, "bolted-on" applications but on the
the size of the original paintings and framed. Finally, they contrary as elements absorbed by painting. Thus von
were trampled on, and the torn canvases and twisted Heyl's sprawling tangles of lines look like tentacles and
stretchers were tossed into a wooden dumpster like a her jagged points like the mandibles of some voracious
heap of garbage. Because Kippenberger had left it to his creature. The image becomes a corpus that not only

21
Hochdiirfer

Charline von Heyl, Alastor, 2008 , Acrylic on linen,

82 x 78 inches (208.3 x 198.1 cm)

embraces cliche but also actively incorporates it. The possible to reconstruct the complex and contradictory
aggressive visuality of today's codes reverberates in von history of painting without reigniting the same old trench
Heyl's lyrical linear constructs and geometric patterns. warfare between it and Conceptual art, between the work
Painting after painting, series after series, is subjected to and its larger context.
complex processing; each is contrasted, superimposed, There are several reasons for this turning point in
undercut, and recombined. Viewers find themselves impli- the recent history of painting. That the dawn of a new
cated in a debate, a visual dialogue in which the condi- century saw an increase in critical self-analysis on the part
tions and contexts of aesthetic verdicts are thrown open of the Neo-Conceptual artists who shaped the discourse of
to negotiation. To exaggerate only slightly: if cliche is to the 1990s is surely significant. After all, this same stirring
be overcome, it cannot be sidelined but must be tackled of the waters brought to the surface a range of themes
head-on. The aesthetic view, as even Adorno was aware, and issues, including forms of melancholy and romantic
"does not thrive in Elysian fields beyond the commodity approaches to Conceptualism and revaluations of formal-
but is, rather, strengthened by way of the experience of ism, affect, and emotion. Themes with strong historical ties
the commodity. " 34 to painting were once again high on the agenda. To cite just
one example among many, the exhibition "Formalismus.
Expression in the Network Moderne Kunst, heute" ("Formalism: Modern Art,
Today") of 2004, curated by Yilmaz Dziewior in dialogue
Over the past fifteen years, the narrative of the end of with Michael Krebber, explicitly distanced the media spec-
painting has lost much of its urgency. Whereas many ificity that theorists from Greenberg to Bois espoused by
monographs published since the 1960s had examined the developing a new definition of formalism that incorporated
development of an oeuvre and the historical context of and processed the discourse of institutional critique. 35
individual painters, male or female, the putative death This new interest in painting, moreover, coincided
of painting instantly eclipsed any discussion of the with a historicizing-or to be more exact, a revitaliz-
medium in general. Only with hindsight does it seem ing-of the history of the 1980s. The result was the

22
 How the World Came in

institutionalization and archival study of pop-culture landing. Benetton's art director, Oliviero Toscani, used a
discourses such as punk and New Wave, which after all press photo of the stricken aircraft-as he had used images
were closely tied to Neo-Expressionist painting. It also of AIDS sufferers, boat people, and accident victims-in
became more and more apparent that there were more an advertising campaign for Benetton, thus laying himself
overlaps between the painting of the 1980s, appropria- open to the charge of exploiting feelings of sympathy,
tion art, and Neo-Conceptualism than was first apparent. shock, and political engagement. Walker, in his turn,
Thus the magazine Texte zur Kunst, founded in 1990, appropriates the Benetton poster and thus incorporates
viewed painting in direct relation to institutional critique. the whole complex of mutual dependencies into his work.
Reflecting on this later, Isabelle Graw, a founding editor The multiply scanned, reconfigured image of a tube of
of the magazine, wrote, "I would say that this editorial Aquafresh toothpaste superimposed onto the original
policy amounted to a programmatic assertion on our part press photo suggests a spontaneous, expressionistic act
with which to break down the opposing camps that had betokening both moral protest and regressive disrespect-
become such a permanent feature of US discourse: in one with all the attendant sexual connotations. It is as if the
camp the good guys promoting institutional critique and whole drama of the event were discharged in the gestural
post-conceptual praxis, in the other the bad guys pro- abstraction of the white, red, and turquoise streaks of
moting 'neo-expressionism."' 36 Discursive networks thus toothpaste quite literally being expressed.
emerged-among them Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a New Schema: Aquafresh plus Crest with Whitener (2003)
York gallery founded in 2003-that embedded painting was exhibited in Walker's first solo show at Paula Cooper
in a network of different discourses, including fashion, Gallery, where it was displayed in a light box, a form
activism, queer performance, and cool capitalist critique. of presentation that well reflected the tension between
This superimposition of disparate genealogies and contemplation and promotional message. 38 A detail of the
techniques is clearly apparent in Kelley Walker's Benetton/ work was then used for the cover of the April 2005 issue
Artforum light boxes. Created over a period of three of Artforum. And in a final stage, Walker turned that
years and passing through various stages, the light boxes same detail into a new light box, which he included in his
provide a good illustration of Walker's working method: second solo show at Paula Cooper in 2006 (pp. 76-77).
a "process of recording-by-collecting-through-marking, There, the new untitled piece was hung in exactly the
followed by disseminating, and then waiting for the image same place on exactly the same wall as the light box dis-
to be co-opted in a new way. " 37 The starting point was a played there three years earlier. "Here was an artwork,"
1988 press photograph of an airplane in Hawaii, which wrote Scott Rothkopf, "simultaneously materializing the
the pilot had miraculously managed to land despite losing, journey of an image through the art system, through
in midflight, the top half of the fuselage just behind the the broader media universe, and through the broader
cockpit. One flight attendant was sucked out of the plane, media universe on which they depend." 39 By incorporating
but the rest of the passengers survived the emergency the career boost afforded him by the Artforum cover into
the work itself as a central aspect of the media circulation
of images, Walker was able to present art-historical mean-
ing and commercial success, subjective expression and
self-promotion, passion and simulation of passion, as two
sides of the same coin. To put it another way, authenticity
Kelley Walker, Schema: Aquafresh plus Crest with no longer was walled off in a zone of media specificity but
Whitener, 2003 . CD-ROM, scanned image, and
toothpaste, digital print on archival watercolor
instead could be found only in the uncompromising

-
paper, 29 x 41 inches (73.7 x 104.1 cm) integrity required to reveal and reflect on the potential
of one's own work and the conditions underlying it.
The gaze, meanwhile, cuts through all the media and art-
historical references and again and again takes us back to
the press coverage of an aviation disaster. And no matter
how we view the existential distress of the "unhoused"
survivors, the commodifying impact of the media's
circulation of images inevitably contaminates our gaze-
indeed, one is tempted to take Walker's advice and smear
toothpaste all over the stunt.
Walker's Benetton/Art/arum light boxes brings
together different media and formats in digital works
that, even with all the photoshopping they have under-
gone, do not detach from the specific discursive condi-
tions of each of those media and formats. The smears of

23
Hochdiirfer

scanned toothpaste thus retain their ties to the tradition paintings these days are less and less likely to owe their
of action painting. The light box as screen nevertheless relevance to their mimetic representation of reality, just as
causes the boundaries defining certain forms of produc- no one picture these days can be considered in isolation,
tion to blur. After all, the screen is actually just an empty since it will always be part of a larger referential system.
space where anything can appear and disappear; it is a Thus he has seen in recent painting a tendency "to suture
surface on which painting, photography, film, and other spectators to extra-perceptual social networks rather than
visual media interpenetrate to such an extent that they merely situating them in a phenomenological relationship
can no longer be pulled apart. This breaking down of the of individual perception. " 41
barriers defining specific media categories is very much a Against this backdrop, the bodies of work that Josh
consequence of the simultaneous aging of analog methods Smith began developing in 2001 can be described as noth-
of reproduction. Formerly painting's archrivals, analog ing less than a wide-ranging attempt to identify expressiv-
photography and film could now slip into that very same ity as both mode and motif of painting within the logic of
position that was once reserved for painting: in other just such a network. In the Name Paintings, for example,
words, they became mimetic techniques that retain their the signature of his quite-ordinary name becomes a brand
direct physical contact with their points of reference. As that is at once interchangeable and individual; in his
a result of this shift, painting no longer has to justify its Announcement Paintings, he exposes art's institutional
status as a premodernist, outdated technique. Rather, it context for the interpretation machine that it is; in his col-
has become a kind of external screen, a place where the lages, he examines everyday printed matter, ranging from
analog can enter into dialogue with the digital and vice menus to subway tickets to calendars, flyers, and even his
versa. Thus the painting of the first decade of this century own exhibition posters; in his Palette Paintings, he focuses
no longer concerned playing one cultural technique off on the incidental movements of the hand when mixing
against another or defending positions that were simply paints; while in the monochrome and abstract series, he
no longer tenable-at least not from the point of view tries to broaden the art-historical horizons of his own
of media history. On the contrary, new life was breathed output. And that is not all, since the paintings and series
into painting's existence alongside other media; and rather are all interlinked in several ways. For example, Smith has
than assuming the position of guardian of the analog been known to press together still-wet canvases so that
world, painting was employed to actively defy the sim- two paintings leave an imprint on each other; elsewhere,
plistic polarity on which that same identity was premised: he appliques posters and printed matter from the cata-
between the mimetic, corporeal, and contemplative analog logues of previous exhibitions onto canvases; images are
on the one hand and the immaterial, dissipated, abstract duplicated without becoming identical, parrot each other
digital on the other. This situation is as evident in Wade without becoming repetitive, interpenetrate without being
Guyton's paintings generated on a digital printer as it is in subsumed. Thus the symbolic capital of one body of work
Laura Owens's scanned newspaper clippings interwoven is transferred to the next. The result is a radical exposure
with the ciphers of gestural painting and in the works of of accrued meaning interacting with subjective expression,
Josh Smith, who avails himself of a whole gamut of repro- a discursively defined style, and the social conditions of
-duction techniques from silkscreen to photocopying, from art. In this multiplication and serialization of images, the
monoprint to ink-jet and laser. individual painting is no more than a single component
The painting as a medium has thus become what Leo of an open structure, which is especially evident when his
Steinberg, talking about Rauschenberg, called the "flat- paintings are displayed in blocks so that they appear not
bed picture plane ... in which the painted surface is no in isolation but rather as unavoidably and inextricably
longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of interlinked-as in some of the exhibitions for which
operational processes. " 40 Thus the digitization of every- Smith himself does the hanging. A presentation of Smith's
day life has resulted in a radical revamping of the fac- works, therefore, ensures that his oeuvre is always viewed
tors that shaped painting from the 1960s onward, from from different angles. What comes to the fore, moreover,
the concepts of the "transition period" to those of the is that painting for Smith is not so much an act of produc-
"discursive arena." And it is precisely because painting tion as a discourse, which is what it has always been. It is
seemed so hopelessly out of date-precisely because of its through this discourse that the work of art is less and less
own historicity-that it has been able not only to survive a fetishized object and more a nucleus of crystallization
all attempts to modernize it but even to emerge from on which meanings can accrete and mutate.
them stronger than ever, becoming a valuable lodestar in This revaluation of the work of art can be traced back
the chaos of images in the most diverse formats, materi- at least to the transition period of the early 1960s if not
als, and media that now surround us. For David Joselit, beyond. Painting is especially important in this transition,
therefore, the painted work lends itself to the visualiza- since its production-not least owing to its discursive
tion of today's networked-image-production mechanisms potential-is charged with subjectivity as is that of no
as does no other medium. For as he has pointed out, other genre. After all, the painting's act as a cipher and

24
constitutive factor of subjectivity has not disappeared but
in fact remains central, no matter how much production is
serialized-as in Smith's case-and no matter how many
nonpainting elements are injected into it. The essence of
painting is no longer defined by the manual application
of paint onto a canvas or some other support; rather it
manifests itself in the fact that paintings are no longer
understood as self-contained, hermetically sealed objects
but are instead hubs of much larger referential networks.
In this respect, painting has kept pace with those changes
to which the subjectivity of the individual, following cul-
tural necessity and the imperative of the times we live in,
has had to submit. The goal of such subjectivization can
be scarcely the act of an individual turned in on him- or
herself and constantly trying to fend off the outside world
but rather the act of individual who, by transcending
boundaries, seeks and finds him- or herself in the other.
This is something that painting knows all about, and it
understands its role not as denouncing but as enabling
just such an experience.

NOTES Installation view, "Josh Smith," Luhring Augustine,

1. Piero Manzoni (1960), quoted in Piero Manzoni (London: Serpentine New York, February 10-March 18, 2011
Gallery, 1998), 144. Regarding the metaphor of the breath in modernist
painting, see Richard Shiff, "Breath of Modernism (Metonymic Drift)," in
In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press and Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1996).
2. Painting, wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was predestined to embody
the "extraordinary overlapping" of "interiority" and the "object-in-
general": "It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes
the world into paintings. To understand these transsubstantiations we in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT
must go back to the working, actual body-not the body as a chunk of Press, 2002), 70.
space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining 7. Rauschenberg was struck by how the paintings of Oyvind Fahlstriim
of vision and movement." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," responded "to the openly established dramatics of the picture map.
in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. They are free to operate, cooperate, incorporate, collide or collapse,
Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), always responding locally without a tasteful sense of the compositional
123-24. Richard Shiff analyzes the semiotics of the expressive mark in four sides of the canvas, which seems to serve only as the sheet of paper
numerous books and articles, including "Performing an Appearance: needed to record any information"-an observation that seems to apply
On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism," in Abstract Expressionism: to his own works, too. Robert Rauschenberg, in Oyvind Fahlstrom
The Critical Developments, ed. Michael Auping (London: Thames and (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1982), 37.
Hudson, 1987), 94-123. 8. In his book Encounters with Rauschenberg, Leo Steinberg writes of
3. Yve-Alain Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning," in Painting as an inner monologue in which "the outward symbol of the mind [is]
Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 235. Bois contends that art a running transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting
"had to be distinguished from the immediate transitivity of information incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field....
that amounted to a general leveling of every fact of life." Ibid. The consistent horizontality is called upon to maintain a symbolic
4. See Joan Young with Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: A continuum of litter, workbench, and data-ingesting mind." Steinberg
Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 563. quotes from an interview with Jasper Johns in the same context: "What,
5. In an interview with Gene Swenson, Rauschenberg said, "I realized I think, he invented was a pictorial surface that let the world in again."
that the details should not be taken in at one glance, that you should Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (Chicago: University
be able to look from place to place without feeling the bigger image. I of Chicago Press, in association with the Menil Collection, Houston,
had to make a surface which invited a constant change of focus and an 2000), 45.
examination of detail. Listening happens in time. Looking also had to 9. See my "A Hidden Reserve: Painting from 1958 to 1965," Artforum
happen in time." Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in "Rauschenberg Paints 47, no. 6 (February 2009): 153-58.
a Picture," Artnews 62, no. 2 (April 1963): 45. 10. "The artistic genres appear to revel in a kind of promiscuity that vio-
6. Rauschenberg's interweaving of painting and photography could be lates some of the taboos of civilization." Theodor W. Adorno, "Art and
taken a stage further, hence the use of brushstrokes that are at once the Arts," in Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader,
both compositional and gestural for such single motifs as the freeway ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Stanford,
on-ramp, the steel frame, and the "X" of the satellite. Douglas Crimp, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 371. Elsewhere, Adorno writes:
however, describes Rauschenberg's use of photography in painting as an "This erosion of the arts wishes to escape from the ideological bias of
attempt to enact painting's destruction: "Although it is only with slight art, which reaches down into its constitution as art, as an autarchic
discomfort that Rauschenberg was called a painter throughout the first sphere of the spirit." Ibid., 3 84-85.
decade of his career, when he systematically embraced photographic 11.Ibid., 375. The conflict between "art" and "the arts," Adorno con-
images in the early 1960s it became less and less possible to think of his cluded, could not be decided by the one asserting hegemonic claims over
work as painting." Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins" (1980), the other. Ibid., 375-77. Elsewhere he writes: "The constellation of art

25
Hochdorfer

and the arts dwells within art itself. Substance finds itself stretched out de Kooning and Pollock, he closes his article by declaring the develop-
between two poles: the one unifies and is rational, the other is diffuse ment to have run its course: "Unfortunately, in this post-war American
and mimetic. Neither pole can be eliminated; art cannot be reduced to painting, the pressure put upon execution itself, more provocative and
one of the two, or even to its dualism." Ibid., 383. At the same time, yet more ingrown than ever, stained the Expressionist covenant beyond
Adorno insists that the amalgamation of the media is a temporary repair .... By forcing itself to be taken too seriously, Expressionism
phenomenon that will not lead to any major breaching of the generic committed a rather magnificent suicide." Max Kozloff , "The Dilemma
boundaries; were it to do so-in the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, of Expressionism," Artforum 3, no. 2 (November 1964): 32-35.
for example--then in Adorno's eyes it would have fallen victim to a 22.Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their
purely illusory loss of identity. To put it another way, while the tradi- Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity ," trans.
tional genres may indeed enter into new constellations, which in turn M. Minich Brewer and D . Brewer, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew
may develop traditions of thei r own, the complete removal of generic Benjamin (Cambridge , MA: Blackwell, 1989) , 181-95.
boundaries would negate art's very identity. 23. Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York:
12. In an interview in Nov ember 2009, Robert Morris emphasized that Bay Press, 1985) , 26.
the importance of painting to his artistic practice had been systematically 24. Craig Owens, "Hono r, Power and the Love of Women," in "The
underplayed. Richard Serra's steel plates in space can also be seen as Expressionism Question, II," special issue, Art in America 71, no. 1
folded-up paintings and, hence, as a further radicalization of the phe- (January 1983): 9-11.
nomenological theory of painting. Yve-Alain Bois's recourse to the "pic- 25. Ibid., 11. Remarkably, critics of painting in the 1980s rated this
turesque" in Serra's work seems to hint at such a perspective, even when same simulation of reality ("everything is bracketed in quotation
he talks of a spatialized pictorialism. See Yve-Alain Bois, "A Picturesque marks") as negative in the case of painting and positive in the case of
Stroll around Clara-Clara," October, no. 29 (Summer 1984): 32-62. photography. In his 1986 essay "Signs Taken for Wonders," for
13. See Isabelle Graw, "Malerei gegen Malerei? Yorn Anti-Essenzialismus example, Hal Foster wrote: "Today the argument that painting can be
zum Subjekt-Bild," in The Happy Fainting of Painting, ed. Hans-Jiirgen used deconstructivel y as a form of camouflage for subversion or other
Hafner and Gunter Reski (Cologne: Walther Konig, 2014), 32-38. beliefs reads somewhat dubiously. " In his discussion of Ross Bleckner
14. Jorg Immendorff, quoted in Immendorff's Handbuch der Akademie and Jack Goldstein, he continues: "For the most part, the new abstrac-
fur Adler (Frankfurt am Main: Portikus, 1990) , 33. tionists do not appropriate modern abstraction so much as they simu late
15. Immendorff appositely describes this tension as "healthy schizophre- it." Hal Foster, "Signs Taken for Wonders," Art in America 74, no. 6
nia" and is convinced "that art cannot be separated from politics, from (June 1986): 83.
everything going on around it. It is not just an aesthetic mission, but a 26. The interpretation of this as a crypto-self-portrait is suggested
kind of healthy schizophrenia: On the one hand you are upset and on by the title, which is a reference to the novel Auch Einer. Eine
the other you feel this urge to express yourself in whichever medium Reisebekanntschaft by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, published in 1879,
suits you best. In small, in large, in private, in public: the political as whose chief protagonist is called Albert Einhart. In 1987, Oehlen
antiauthoritarian behavior ." Jorg Huber, "Situation-Position . Ein selected the work as part of a stage set for a production of Richard
Gesprach mit Jorg Immendorff iiber seine politische Malerei," in Wagner's opera Tannhiiuser in Bremen, where he suspended it in the
Immendorff (Zurich: Kunsthaus Ziirich, 1984), 40. air high above the stage . Having experienced free love on the pagan
16. The tradition of protest painting makes for an interesting com- Venusberg, Tannhauser finds it impossible to return to the world of
pari son with painting 's destructi ve strategies. See Target Practice: bourgeois morality . It is not hard to recognize the allusion to the disap-
Painting under Attack 1949-78, ed. Michael Darling (Seattle: Seattle pointing failures of the bourgeois revolutions.
Art Museum, 2009). On the political understanding of German 27. See David Joselit , "Painting beside Itself, " October, no. 130 (Fall
Expressionism, see Seth Taylor's outstanding analysis in Left-Wing 2009 ), 125-34.
Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920 (Berlin: 28. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters, " Art News
de Gruyter, 1990). 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 22. Reprinted in Harold Rosenberg, The
17. See Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," in Against Interpretati on Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 28-39.
and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), and 29. In retrospect, Merlin Carpenter was critical of his role as
Lucy Lippard, "Eccentric Abstraction," Art International 10, no. 9 Kippenberger's assistant: "I gave Kippenberger all my ideas from art col-
(November 1966): 28, 34-40. On the complex painterly implications lege and just after, my entire first wave of enthusiasm. The myth is that
of Post-Minimalist sculpture and performance art, see Jane Blocker, I worked from collages. Partly true-but they were my own collages!
What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minnea polis: Kippenberger was away and I coughed up my previous three years work.
University of Minnesota Press, 2004). And this was legitimised by the idea that there was this thing called the
18. See Anna Chave, "Mi nimalism and the Rhetoric of Power," Arts 'Kippenberger assistant' which somehow made it all cool. But look-
64, no. 5 Uanuary 1990): 44-63. For an account of the multifaceted ing back on it, one wonders if it wasn't all just exploitation based on
painting discourse of this period, see also High Times, Hard Times: New charisma." Merlin Carpenter, "Back Seat Driver, " in Gitarren, die nicht
York Painting 1967-1975, ed. Katy Siegel and David Reed (New York: Gudrun heif?en. Hommage a Martin Kippenberger, ed. Thomas Groetz
Independent Curators International, 2006). (Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2002), 26-29; online at http://www.merlin-
19. Teresa de Lauretis, "Strategies of Coherence: Narrative Cinema, carpenter.com/backs.htm .
Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer," in Technologies of Gender: 30. Martin Kippenberger, quoted in Jochen Becker, "'Ich war ja auf
Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University der ersten documenta'. Martin Kippenberger mit 'Heavy Burschi' im
Press, 1987), 113. Kolnischen Kunstverein," taz. die tageszeitung, November 21, 1991. See
20.Joan Snyder, quoted in Ha yden Herrera, "Joan Snyder: Speaking also Isabelle Graw's review, "Martin Kippenberger. Kunstverein," Flash
with Paint," in Joan Snyder (New York: Abrams, in association with the Art, no. 163 (March-April 1992 ): 120.
Jewish Museum, New York, 2005), 38. In her essay on feminist painting 31. See Isabelle Graw and Andre Rottmann, foreword to Texte zur
in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Helen Molesworth writes, Kunst, no . 77 (March 2010): 4. On the concept of the parergon, see
"So too the struggle to interpret these works (what do they 'mean '?) is Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting (Chicago: Universit y of Chicago
part and parcel of a simultaneous inhabiting and disavowal of the modes Press, 1987).
or languages of painting under patriarchy and then, more to the point, 32. The German artist Jutta Koether used the arena metaphor as a
of patriarchal painting under the siege of feminism." Helen Molesworth, programmatic means of making contact with the New York art scene.
"Painting with Ambivalence, " in WACK!: Art and the Feminist In the spring of 1992, shortly after moving from Cologne to New York,
Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 439. she staged a show called "The Inside Job" at her West Village studio
21. A good example of the damning criticism of expressionism that apartment, in the course of which fellow artists, gallerists, critics, and
was published in the mid-1960s is Max Kozloff's "The Dilemma of curators were invited to view and comment on The One one, the mon-
Expressionism": "Expressionism," he wrote, right at the beginning umental canvas spread out on the floor that she was then in the process
of his article, "no longer constitutes fashion." After discussing the of completing. Koether described these social interactions-as well as the
"critical problems in Expressionism" from van Gogh and Kandinsky to financial problem s, personal anxieties, and moods that likewise informed

26
 How the World Came in

the work-in both her drawings and a notebook that became an integral
part of the project. The influence of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings was
not confined to the horizontal working method or to formalist notions,
such as the allover composition. Koether's main target was rather the
existential potential of subjective self-localization, which in her case-
unlike Pollock's-implied the whole complex of social interaction.
33. Charline von Heyl, "Painting Paradox," interview by Claire Barliant
and Christopher Turner, Modern Painters 21, no 5. (Summer 2009): 46.
34. Theodor W. ·Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 298.
35. In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Yilmaz Dziewior cites
Juliane Rebentisch's hypothesis "that the contextual reflexivity of insti-
tutionally critical, site-specific art does not, as is often assumed, question
the idea of aesthetic autonomy as such, but only an objectivist misunder-
standing of the same, as expressed in the notion of art as independent
of both viewer and context." Dziewior, foreword to Formalismus.
Moderne Kunst, heute (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, in association with
the Kunstverein Hamburg, 2004), 4. In an interview published in the
same catalogue, Rebentisch is critical of the topicality of the exhibition
in light of the growing interest in painting (199-200).
36. Graw, "Malerei gegen Malerei?," 32.
37. Kelley Walker, "Support Failure! Kelley Walker with Bob Nickas,"
in Kelley Walker (Zurich: JRP Ringier, in association with Le Magazin-
Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2007), 73-74.
38. A typical advertising tool since the 1970s, the light box is used in
bus stops, train stations, airports, and other public spots. Since the late
1970s, artists, notably Jeff Wall, have also frequently employed it.
39. Scott Rothkopf, in Kelley Walker, 120.
40. Leo Steinberg, "Other Criteria," in Other Criteria: Confrontations
with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 84.
41. Joselit, "Painting beside Itself," 132.

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