1 Yue Minjun, Inside and Outside the Stage, 2009

About the Author:

Suzanne Hudson is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern
California. She is an esteemed art historian and critic who writes on modern and contemporary art, with
an emphasis on painting, art pedagogy and American philosophy. She received her PhD from Princeton
University.

Hudson’s previous books include Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Agnes Martin: Night Sea and Mary
Weatherford, and she is the co-editor of Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present. She is a regular
contributor to Artforum.
 Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1
Appropriation

Chapter 2
Attitude

Chapter 3
Production and Distribution

Chapter 4
The Body

Chapter 5
Beyond Painting

Chapter 6
About Painting

Chapter 7
Living Painting

Postscript

Glossary

Further Reading

Sources of Illustrations
Index
Introduction

This is a book about contemporary painting from the first two decades of the
21st century. The term ‘contemporary’ refers to art created in the present day
and the recent past; it also specifies a historical period that comes after
modernism’s extension into postmodernism. Departing from the more
ubiquitous sense that art is inevitably contemporary when it is made, this
latter usage is characterized by pluralism and a global purview.
As contemporary painting remains consequential in our time, we might
ask: how does it form, circulate and carry meaning? How does it relate to
contemporary art more broadly, to its expanded geography and
demographics? And to technology and media? Developing provisional
responses to these and to related questions motivated me to write this book,
which treats painting not as an isolated entity, but rather as a medium
productively entangled in the world outside of its proverbial frame. Among
so many other possibilities, a painting now may be outsourced to a village in
Guangdong province, China, or it can be designed on-screen and printed on
pre-primed linen using a commercial machine. A painting might hang on a
wall, slight as a coloured shoestring or monumental as a space-filling mural,
but it could also be used as a prop in a performance or serve as the backdrop
for other actions, at times involving an audience that participates in realizing
the work.
For many centuries, painting was an exemplary humanist object and the
most prized form of Western art, but it needs to be addressed straight away
that some readers might well question the fundamental premise of the book in
assuming painting’s continued relevance under changing circumstances. It has
been contested in the digital age (and perhaps we should also ask what this
tells us about our contemporary culture), though not for the first time. Indeed,
the historical primacy of oil on canvas was reviewed with the arrival of
photography in the 19th century: why labour over a painting when a camera
could deliver an image with even greater verisimilitude? In the following
century, it was opposed more directly by the readymade (the found object
nominated as art by virtue of an artist asserting it as such, transforming it
categorically, if not actually, as though with a magic wand).
Marcel Duchamp’s use of the readymade in the 20th century coincided
with a decisive abandonment of painting, or in his words, ‘retinal’ art. In
fact, the ‘smell of turpentine’ that Duchamp detested did not prove so easy to
leave behind. A great many artists persevered with painting, and, in the years
after World War II, again the medium flourished. Debates about the primacy
and even feasibility of painting picked up in the 1960s, with pop art’s
extensive use of commercial imagery. Artists engaged techniques used in
photographic reproduction, as well as mechanical means of production,
challenging traditional methods of painting and the once sacrosanct
boundaries between media. Later in that decade, text-based practices (often
photographic), performance and other ephemeral actions gained prominence.
Where modernism came to be embodied by abstract painting that shunned
external references, subsequent approaches expanded the idea of what an
artwork could be, encompassing not just images and words but also that
which surrounds them: architecture, the institution itself, the passage of time
and people’s lives. This intersectionality came to be known as
postmodernism. The new priorities seemed to disqualify painting, which was
allegedly outdated and static by comparison, and was perceived as being
divorced from conceptual currency and activist engagement.
Such considerations came to a head in the 1980s, with the triumphant
return of painting. Partly in reaction to the liberation politics that
characterized the preceding decades, a recuperative universalism renewed
focus on ideas with presumed common applicability. This was the perfect
storm for the ascendancy of neo-expressionism, wildly gestural painting that
materialized human touch on the surface and supposedly communicated deep
emotions. For supporters, it evidenced a transhistorical humanism that
connected the entirety of creativity in paint, from works in caves to those
displayed in the white cube. This convinced many that the recent topical
avoidance of painting had been an insignificant blip in a longer, corrective
course.
At the same time, certain eminent artists, writers and curators described
the collapse of modernist painting and advent of postmodern art using the
language of endgame. This is a term borrowed from chess, referring to the
last stages of a game. In art, endgame was used to describe the theory that as
modernist painting collapsed and postmodernism – a heterogeneous set of
practices united in their scepticism regarding collective truths, idealism and
moral authority – took root, painting could not be furthered. Instead, it would
potentially endlessly re-examine ideas that had come before. This was not a
critique of the practicability of the whole of painting, just its production
under modernist circumstances.
In this context, ‘the death of painting’ became glib shorthand for debates
about the meaning of art in general and painting in particular in a free-market
culture. Unable to achieve the weightiness that it once attained, painting lived
on, but – in light of identity politics and war, economic crises and clashes
between generations – it was seen as complicit in conservatism, retrograde
in means and ends. Abstraction was panned for lacking content, and
figuration for wallowing in canned sentimentality. Either way, it was seen as
anachronistic, delivering value only as trifling decor, or so the argument
went.
Of course, most critical stances on modernist painting were underwritten
by historicism: a relativist, as opposed to universalist, approach to art
history, which considers the significance of historical or geographical
circumstance in the development of art. This was used to justify the
timeliness of a reappraisal of medium. In this light, the endgame argument of
the 1980s might be regarded as part of this same story, since it also involved
re-evaluating the logic that had sustained the art practices being called into
question. The idea of genres of art – or even art as such – coming to an ‘end’
point is not unprecedented. Pliny, a Roman polymath who attempted a
consolidated account of art in his Natural History (1st century CE), recorded
that Greek art had stopped for more than a hundred years because the era was
characterized by Hellenistic ‘Baroque’ art that he did not much care for. A
parallel to neo-expressionism resonates here.
So there existed an ideological antagonism when it came to painting: for
or against. This was not contravened in the 1990s; if anything, the
geopolitical events that occurred at the very end of the previous decade –
from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet
Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, to the tumultuous civil protests in
China – begged for more immediate engagement, which often took other
artistic forms.
The 1980s had seen what came to be known as the ‘culture wars’, a
series of social and aesthetic controversies that chiefly played out between
conservatives and liberals in the US, which put representation and the
expression of values at the heart of deeply partisan morality politics. The
struggle to define American culture was driven by extreme suspicion and
paranoia on the part of the political Right about the decline of traditional
Christian religious values, as focalized by the increasing visibility of
homosexuality and availability of abortion. In the wake of this, many artists
demonstrated their positions by taking up abject bodily work, a form that was
also adopted in response to the unprecedented trauma of the AIDS crisis, and
which became typical of identity politics of the time. All of these factors
contributed to a retreat from painting as the dominant medium. Aesthetic
criticism, the return of the language of beauty and painting itself fought
against this. But the ascent of certain kinds of theory, notably feminism, multi-
culturalism and postcolonialism, further fostered pluralism, eliminating the
superiority of any one medium.
The discrete, studio-made object began to smack of nostalgia, if not
outright archaism, within an emergent global exhibition culture; this was
rapidly assimilated post-1989 and encouraged by such factors as festivals
and biennials spread across continents, the peripatetic lifestyle of artists and
the rise of commissioned, site-based multimedia work. This shows no sign of
abating despite evidence of climate change – in response to which Tate’s
directors, as an industry bellwether, declared a climate emergency in 2019 –
and confession of complicity in waste caused by all this travel. Resources
are expended in the construction and demolition of new walls, and through
the air or heat needed to regulate pop-up, circus-like fair tents. Then there is
the energy consumed by engineering to guard against the incursion of flood
waters into cold-storage facilities, or to defend structures housing significant
art collections from the threat of rapidly advancing wildfires.
In any case, travelling between locales became customary, giving rise to
participatory, ‘relational’ art. Artists took advantage of the absence of
conventional institutional frames to facilitate social interaction within the
raw exhibition space – as exemplified in ‘Untitled (Free)’ (1992) by Rirkrit
Tiravanija (b. 1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) at 303 Gallery, New York, in
which the artist cooked curry and shared it with those present in the gallery.
The digital revolution (which also brought about an efflorescence of Internet
art), together with the explosion of social media in the 2000s, allowed for
access to events and installations happening elsewhere. It also precipitated a
further, radical reconfiguration of the art world, predicated upon fluid
distribution of images of art.
 But the problem with the narrative behind departure from the art object is
that it supposes the separation – even incompatibility – of the material and
the conceptual. Conceptual artists believed it was the message that mattered,
not the medium, as if thought could be immaterial. While the concept might
be an idea or a method, either way, such art retains a formal dimension that is
generally unacknowledged. In the 1970s, the common denominator among
media was the supposition that conveying information was the sole or
primary objective of representation. This has recently been revived through
the model of the network: the idea that nothing exists in isolation, so a
painting cannot ever be autonomous. Instead, it is one feature in a network of
interrelated strands, none of which function independently of the larger web.
This model puts a premium on communication while downplaying form,
except insofar as it might expose the system’s workings.
As will be maintained throughout, I regard material experimentation as
inherently conceptual, meaning that painting, too, is capable of manifesting its
own signs. This is to say it is capable of producing meaning from within, not
as merely ‘process’ but as embodied thinking. This position is held neither to
reassert the pre-eminence of painting nor to avow its uniqueness, but to claim
that painting has become more, rather than less, viable after conceptual art,
as an option for giving idea form and hence for differentiating it from other
possibilities. As American writer Glenn O’Brien humorously put it in
conversation with Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool: ‘Why are all the
conceptual artists painting now? Because it’s a good idea.’
2 Patrick Lundberg, No Title, 2019

3 Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost, 2001–13

At issue, too, is terminology. I address individuals as ‘artist’ rather than

‘painter’, a decision based on the enormous transformations wrought by post-
studio practice, among other factors. In short, the term ‘artist’ is generic
while that of ‘painter’ is specific, and the former is now customary in
academic and critical milieus, as well as favoured by many choosing to work
in paint who might also embrace other media, from performance to
animation. Defying predetermined notions of painting, Francis Alÿs (b. 1959,
Antwerp, Belgium) has in one project provocatively walked Jerusalem’s
1948 partition lines, leaving a trail of green paint behind him, and in another
collected hundreds of copies of a portrait of the Christian Saint Fabiola.[4]
Alÿs questions the identity of the ‘painter’ in his collaborations with
Mexican sign painters (rotulistas) to enlarge or otherwise interpret his
paintings. Also building on the definition of painting, Sheila Hicks (b. 1934,
Hastings, NE) is best known for her sensual, vibrantly coloured fibre
sculptures, which often hang from the wall, or, as in Escalade Beyond
Chromatic Lands (2016–17), cascade forth from them.[5] She has adamantly
asserted that these works derive from the perspective not of weaving but of
painting.
4 Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, Jerusalem, 2004. Still from video documentation of an action. In
collaboration with Julien Devaux
5 Sheila Hicks, Installation view of Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, Arsenale, 57th Venice
Biennale, 2017

Moreover, the description ‘artist’ signals a capaciousness, within which

painting becomes a choice. Many instances I cite are not paintings, since
painting is made not in a vacuum but in response to an expanded field that
includes both painting and other kinds of art (not to mention social, political
and other circumstances entirely outside of art and its media). I do not
therefore isolate painting from these other kinds of art, which I include to
make examples of painting more meaningful. By ‘painting’ I mean to stipulate
work that is done with the materials, styles, conventions and histories of
painting as the principal point of reference. This might be seen in the jewel-
encrusted dreamscapes of Raqib Shaw (b. 1974, Calcutta, India), in which
the symbolism of the old masters is applied with new resonance, or in the
immense paintings of Kristaps Ģelzis (b. 1962, Riga, Latvia), which play
with the variables of size and perception. Painting exists in a state of flux,
connected to but exceeding supporting traditions, whether or not the final
artwork consists of a rectangular piece of linen covered in pigment, framed
and hung.[3, 6]
6 Kristaps Ģelzis, Installation view of Artificial Peace, Latvian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011

As already implied, this is not to deny the medium, but, paradoxically, to

defend it as an expansive practice. I also mean to resist modernist notions of
medium specificity, whereby painting was understood purely in terms of its
material limits (to be fair, even Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, two
significant formalist critics known for their circumscribed view of the
medium, were also aware of the potential for a broader definition).
Similarly, I reject postmodernist ideas that deny medium specificity, in
favour of a pragmatic approach in which a painting is tested or evaluated
relative to the histories and traditions of the medium. This means that I do not
rely on received definitions but recommend that each work solicits us to
rethink the applicability and meaning of that definition. I thus focus more on
method than on pictorial imagery, though forms do, of course, recur. And
finally, I avoid clustering artists together on the basis of style, as objects that
look alike might have nothing to do with one another, just as images that look
different might be powerfully related. Eschewing classification, then, the
following chapters are organized by ongoing investigations into, and
conversations about, practice.
Chapter 1: Appropriation addresses the adaptation of images from a pre-
existing source as the basis for a new work. This might be embodied through
incorporation of source materials into the art itself, sometimes in an act of
critique, as in the work of Sofie Bird Møller (b. 1974, Copenhagen,
Denmark), who muddies fashion advertisements and images from
pornographic magazines with smears of paint in subversive acts of
effacement.[7] Though predating the digital revolution, appropriation has
accelerated as a result of the Internet, with the act of borrowing often made
into a subject, or treated as a curatorial act of selection, organization and
framing. The impulse to discover and re-contextualize rather than to generate
a picture reintroduces questions of intention. Why did they pick that? What
did they do to it? To what end?

7 Sofie Bird Møller, Interferenz, 2011

 This curiosity about motive also applies to works that are not recycled,
and Chapter 2: Attitude asks how it might be communicated through the
physical stuff of painting. Can meaning be transmitted clearly from artist to
painting to viewer? Does the handmade object, or the expressive stroke –
once the material manifestation of authenticity and authorial presence – still
impart depth? Or might contrivance of affect be a substitute for true
interiority, and persona for person? Tactics of self-fashioning are conceived
in relation to an art world that shares promotional strategies with the
entertainment industry, using these to frame the artist and their work.
Positioning in the market matters a great deal. Artists’ oppositional stances
might also be entrepreneurial, including the co-opting of ‘bad painting’. This
term can refer to the outmoded or what lies outside the norms of acceptable
taste, as in Dog (2007), offered by Bénédicte Peyrat (b. 1967, Paris, France),
its paw raised, beseeching, against a sketchy sky.[8]
8 Bénédicte Peyrat, Dog, 2007

Also important here is the appropriation of historical painting techniques

and practices for diverging purposes: to extend a tradition, comment on it,
introduce it to a global market, and so on. As these works get shown all over
the world, it becomes harder to fathom the local scenes from which they
arise, and how such scenes inflect works that might share common aspects
despite other incommensurable differences. The complexity of cultural
hybridity was eloquently exhibited at the World Trade Centre, Jakarta, in
2018, in a pairing of Adam de Boer (b. 1984, Riverside, CA) and Jumaldi
Alfi (b. 1973, Lintau, West Sumatra, Indonesia), a founding member of the
Jendela Art Group.[9, 10] The American artist’s work, dealing with his
Dutch-Indonesian cultural legacy through Indonesian craft practices (leather
carving, batik and tile) and colonial motifs, was juxtaposed with the
Indonesian artist’s engagement with aspects of Western painting, notably
landscapes depicting mountains or coconut palms (subjects rejected by
nationalist artists for their Dutch colonial roots).
9 Adam de Boer, Narsisis Mantrijeron no. 1, 2017

10 Jumaldi Alfi, Een Prachtig Landscape #4 (Postcard from My Past), 2005

Moving more explicitly to matters of procedure, Chapter 3: Production

and Distribution focuses on how artists make paintings in studios and on
screens, and then negotiate complex mechanisms of distribution: that is, how
paintings travel (in galleries and fairs, across continents and the Internet),
with or without their makers. Chatchai Puipia (b. 1964, Mahasarakarm,
Thailand) draws attention to these lives of images across time and place, as
exemplified in an updating of Vincent van Gogh’s painting of a vase of
sunflowers: in Puipia’s version, the flowers have blackened and died.[11]

11 Chatchai Puipia, Vase with twelve sunflowers 120 years after Van Gogh, 2009

Many paintings are painted – at least in part – by someone other than the
named author, sometimes far away. This is to say, contemporary painting now
recalls, to a surprising degree, the workshop tradition of apprentices and
skilled assistants; it also inhabits the industrial space of divided labour so
common to conceptual art, as well as to the commercial design studio or
architectural firm. By the 1960s, sculpture had achieved separation of
concept and realization (when fabrication was contracted out, due to material
factors or scale), but painting remained far removed from these changes. This
is no longer the case. Nevertheless, many artists still assert the specificity of
their own hand, and also their individual capacity for imagining. See, for
example, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London, UK), whose personal
interpretation is key as she conjures fictional black women and men in thin,
washy veils, which blur even though they are right there, materialized on a
surface as if from an unreachable dream.[12]

12 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Whistle in a Wish, 2018

Chapter 4: The Body pushes back at notions that critiques of the body and
experience cannot occur in painting. The body has remained central to
painting in many genres, including portraiture and history painting. The
chapter also considers how the body is also, if differently, registered in non-
objective works through vigorous paint handling that visibly records the
physical movement necessary for its achievement. The subject of the body is,
in many ways, the subject of agency, as seen in the work of Michaël
Borremans (b. 1963, Geraardsbergen, Belgium).[13] In his enigmatic scenes,
bodies – often occluded or turned away, and maybe lifeless – are subjected
to external and seemingly malevolent systems, through which they retain little
sovereignty.
13 Michaël Borremans, Six Crosses, 2006

Figurative work has importantly engaged issues of privilege, asking who

has had access to representation (and self-determination), and who still does
not. Many artists redress exclusion of subjects from preceding art on account
of gender, sex or race. In one such example, Drea Cofield (b. 1986, Orange,
CT) provides a platform for the non-binary body in her paintings of colourful
nudes in a rainbow of hues. Many are gender-ambiguous, like in Brimming
(2018), which shows the figure’s breasts and penis hanging down from the
bent-over body, a head with long tresses of hair peering out from under itself.
In Double Spank (2018), a fluorescent pink body and a brown body are
entwined, heads buried, and buttocks marked by matching tattoo-like
handprints; the arms of each figure are yellow, as if producing a third entity
out of the two.[14]

14 Drea Cofield, Double Spank, 2018

Chapter 5: Beyond Painting investigates how the body is commonly

introduced as a complement to a painting from outside its frame. This may
happen in abstraction that registers the passage of the body that made the
lingering marks, or quite differently, painting may be treated as a tool for
social engagement. It also functions in performance or as the hypothetical or
actual backdrop for an event, as in the work of Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977,
Glasgow, UK), whose ‘Slender Means’ installation might be taken to consist
of architectural sketches, theatre scenery or independent paintings.[15]
Artists negotiate questions not only of what a painting is, but also temporal
ones, such as when a painting becomes a prop. This example alone suggests
the ‘beyond’ of the title, but the chapter also studies instances in which
paintings exist in exceptional presentational formats. Karen Kilimnik (b.
1955, Philadelphia, PA), for example, constructs multi-part installations in
which painting serves as one focal element in mise-en-scènes.[16] These
might consist of fog machines, period furniture and chandeliers, or turf,
boxwood hedges and a functioning fountain: lush, immersive fantasies that
serve as environmental extensions of her diminutive canvases.

15 Lucy McKenzie, Installation view of ‘Slender Means’, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, 2010
16 Karen Kilimnik, Installation view of Fountain of Youth (Cleanliness is Next to Godliness), Brant
Foundation, Connecticut, 2012

If the discussion of appropriation begins with an analysis of art about art,

Chapter 6: About Painting loops back to this legacy by way of paintings
about painting. One such example can be seen in work by Florian
Meisenberg (b. 1980, Berlin, Germany), who frames the picture plane with
curtains in a play on bygone expectations of illusionism.[17] The chapter
examines not just artists who bend painting to look at itself, but also those
who foreground the institution as the frame for their intervention: its physical
architecture, but also its power to make meaning of what it authorizes for
display. This is true of Patrick Lundberg (b. 1984, Stockholm, Sweden), who
exaggerates the vastness of the walls on which he appends modest acrylic
paintings on shoelaces (p. 6).[2] Critique of the institution is expanded
further by some artists, who protest its policies and political entanglements.
And still others identify painting as an institution in its own right, the better to
expose its internal logic and the claims for its sanctity. In this vein, Analia
Saban (b. 1980, Buenos Aires, Argentina) engages in a study of substance,
often acting on painting physically: unravelling painted canvases or shrink-
wrapping paintings to distort the paint underneath.[18]
17 Florian Meisenberg, from the series Continental Breakfast, Overmorrow at Noon, 2011
18 Analia Saban, Claim (From Chair), 2013

Some work turned to the analytic deconstruction of painting’s materials

and procedures so utterly that abstraction again came to seem solipsistic. It
was charged as lacking content apart from a narrative of how it was made.
This produced a powerful backlash against abstraction – but this time,
interestingly, it did not bring all of painting along with it. Figurative work
running counter to this strain came to the fore instead, intersecting with issues
of identity politics and social justice. Chapter 7: Living Painting, and so the
book, concludes with painting holding a space for active engagement with
current issues. In one such project, Ana Teresa Fernández (b. 1980, Tampico,
Mexico) first made Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) in 2011,
when she and volunteers took a stretch of the wall dividing the United States
(San Diego) and Mexico (Tijuana) and painted it the colour of the sky so that
it would look as if it had disappeared.[19] She has since painted other
sections in Mexicali, Nogales, Agua Prieta and Ciudad Juárez, imagining a
continuous landmass without borders.
19 Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), 2011

Real as these chapter divisions are, they are artificial barriers that
apportion material in ways that might imply a fixity that they should not. The
rubrics are there for clarity, as provisional containers of arguments and
ideas, giving thematic shape without reverting to older taxonomic divisions
of genre, such as landscape or the nude (although these do pop up as artists
engage with them afresh). Most artists included in one chapter fit just as
readily into others, particularly given their range of work, which in many
cases cannot be accommodated in this volume. All are involved in
appropriation in one way or another. I cannot imagine that any artist does not
think about how their paintings are made and how they will find an audience,
in real life or online, or does not contemplate the nature of painting, even if –
or especially when – moving beyond its traditional parameters. The
frequency with which such inquiries become part of the work’s subject
relates to my claim that the conceptual overlaps with the material: beyond
painting and about painting are two sides of the same coin. ‘Bad painting’
means many things, and countless artists ride the line between abstraction
and figuration, though this also implies a pedantic distinction, a binary that I
do not uphold. I have, however, attempted to keep related artists together
where feasible.
 Attention is inevitably uneven in what aims to be a wide-ranging survey.
My blind spots and biases as a critic, long-based in New York and now
living in Los Angeles for almost a decade, will doubtless be evident to those
whose primary art world is a different city or country; that said, this is not a
disclaimer and I make no disingenuous apologies for partisanship. The artists
included here are singular, though they are also, taken together, generally
representative of the work comprising the art world in the specified period,
and as such give a sense of what one would have seen exhibited in
independent and commercial spaces in such art centres as New York and Los
Angeles, London, Berlin and Hong Kong. Precisely because of their wide
applicability, these chapters offer ways to restart debates around painting that
may avoid the impasses of the 1980s, and that, if successful, will help to
make sense of – even provide a language for – discussion of artists and
paintings not covered in these pages.
Just as globalization is wildly asymmetrical, so is painting, as revealed
by Konstantin Bessmertny (b. 1964, Blagoveshchensk, USSR) in his images
of cultural clashes (in one such example from 2011, E. meets W., he shows
samurai entering a Danish home).[20] My best efforts at international
‘coverage’ are certainly not comprehensive, nor would I pretend or want
them to be. Some precedents or discourses are more ‘live’ in some regions,
cities or art schools than others, and some traditions (‘native’ or otherwise)
resonate where others do not, despite fantasies of a wholly integrated,
accessible and representative art world.
20 Konstantin Bessmertny, E. meets W. Lost in Translation, 2011

What I do wish to make intelligible are the connective threads, between

the works themselves, but also between the cultures in which they exist and
the mechanisms that enable their passage among them. This means I attend to
paintings and their surroundings, be they physical (the walls on which they
hang), institutional (the ways that they are seen, whether in a museum or
gallery, on a screen, in the palm of a hand or in a press release) or discursive
(the aesthetic, social and political conventions to which they belong and
respond). These priorities are manifested in the choice of images, which
comprise single paintings and installation shots alike. These artworks are not
intended to serve as illustrations of my theses, but as motors to generate
them.
 This introduction sketches some parameters of the medium ‘painting’ and
its place. Let me finally return to the other word of the title, the emphatic, if
elusive, ‘contemporary’. As asserted at the outset, the titular ‘contemporary’
designates the time period considered here, which is, roughly, painting since
the turn of the millennium. There are other moments this text might have taken
as its starting point, such as 1989, with its political upheavals that reshaped
the balances of power internationally, or 2008, with the collapse of the
world’s financial markets showing the neoliberal order to be a small,
connected sphere after all. Following the latter, many awaited a corrective
accounting for the bloated and overly permissive art-world system that fed
off the preceding flush years. As it happened, business continued apace, and
there was an odd time lag before the effects of a new arrangement were
slowly and partially born, as art spaces began to close, funding diminish and
sales slacken; then, phoenix-like, others arose even more powerfully in their
place, thanks in part to online viewing and selling of art.
The turn of the century is fundamentally arbitrary, though it does mark the
beginning of a truly global art world; it also allows for the discussion of two
decades across which shifts can be charted. The chapters are not exactly
chronological, though they do express a successive (if overlapping) set of
conditions that underpinned work and interests that motivated it. Some trends
came and went. Some realities have proven more durable. As acknowledged
by Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Veracruz, Mexico) in his 2011 monument to the
events of September 11, 2001, Stream in the Grid, we still live in their
aftermath.[21] All work is anticipated by what has come before, in life and
in other art, and as such, discussion of each painting could feasibly take us
back decades, if not appreciably further. While these instances are alluded to
where practical, and certainly matter a great deal, the point of this book is to
make sense of the just-past and the enduring. It attempts a response, in
medias res, to the recursive and generative contemporaneity of painting.
21 Gabriel Orozco, Stream in the Grid, 2011

It also appreciates the temporality of writing, with the example of

Boomerang, a 1974 work by Richard Serra (b. 1938, San Francisco, CA)
and Nancy Holt (1938–2014), firmly in mind. This is a video in which Holt’s
speech is interrupted by her words played back to her with a delay through a
headset: the now slipping into the past at the moment of its articulation. For
Holt, this audible repetition triggered recognition, a mode of self-analysis.
This precedent helps me to think about how to grasp the contemporary, in that
it not only admits the present as fugitive, crossing into history just as it comes
into being, but also begs for a reflexivity about this process, which hopefully
marks these pages.
Chapter 1
Appropriation

References to works past are widespread in the history of art. Artists will
often consciously evoke major precedents, and indeed, this is even how
painters traditionally learned their craft: by copying or emulating the
exemplars of masters, and reinterpreting specific features or motifs.
Referencing prior works continued in the 20th century, but in addition to this,
artists began to use similar techniques to turn art against itself in an act of
self-conscious borrowing called appropriation. This involves an artist using
a pre-existing item – most commonly, a found object, commercial image or
someone else’s art – to make something new. The strategy consolidated into
what came to be known as ‘appropriation art’ in America in the late 1970s.
To date, it remains an influential critical method that intentionally challenges
received ideas of authorship and originality. This is especially so as the act
of appropriation alters the meaning of the sourced material and exposes the
relation of contemporary practice to painting as a historically esteemed art
form.
Appropriation in the contemporary period relates to conditions outside
art as much as to genealogies within it, and in these, transformations in
technology and media are key. Highlighting technological developments in a
pointed engagement with obsolete equipment, Cory Arcangel (b. 1978,
Buffalo, NY) hacks video games to serve new aesthetic possibilities. In
Super Mario Clouds (2002), Arcangel modified a 1985 Nintendo
Entertainment System (NES) video-game cartridge to erase everything but the
clouds, leaving behind a depopulated and strangely sublime blue-skied
landscape of pixels.[22] Appropriation might involve a translation in kind,
as in Arcangel’s game modifications, or, say, from a photograph to a
photograph; alternatively, it could involve a conversion from one medium
into another, like a painting into a photograph, as in the work of Vik Muniz
(b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil). Muniz remakes famous paintings out of
miscellaneous materials such as diamonds, dust and junk, before
photographing them: he fashioned Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–
6) in peanut butter and jelly, and Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with
Cypresses (1889) with scraps torn from the pages of glossy magazines and
books, transporting and transforming images between media.[23]

22 Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002

23 Vik Muniz, Wheat Field with Cypresses, after Van Gogh (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

In the act of appropriation, material is passed through various

interpretive constructions, showing that meaning may be determined by
context as much as content. This can be seen in the work of Miguel Calderón
(b. 1971, Mexico City, Mexico): beginning with content screened on
Mexican tabloid television, he staged events and photographed them, before
employing a local horse-portrait painter to depict them. These artisan-
produced paintings wound up as part of the set design in Wes Anderson’s
film The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), completing a circuit that returned them,
reconfigured, to moving images. Interpretations of meaning would naturally
differ between viewers who first encountered the original content when it
was initially screened on television, prior to its subsequent stages of
transformation, and those who came across that content by watching
Anderson’s film.
To give a very different example of the movement of material through
multiple frameworks, fashion designers threeASFOUR’s Fall 2019 runway
show involved a re-engagement with patterns from their debut collection
twenty years earlier, together with fabric sourced from rejected paintings by
artist Stanley Casselman (b. 1963, Phoenix, AZ).[24] These geometric
abstractions consist of expertly blurred colours pulled across vast canvases
with squeegees; they were first made as deliberate knockoffs of paintings by
Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, Germany). Casselman’s project began in
2012 at the prompting of art critic Jerry Saltz, who ran a Facebook contest
asking for the perfect fake for $155 plus the cost of materials. Later that year,
Saltz opined in New York Magazine that professional forgers would not work
for such a trivial fee, deadpanning that:

24 threeASFOUR featuring Stanley Casselman, runway show during New York Fashion Week,
February 2019

in the art world, noncriminal fakes aren’t news. We don’t even call them
“fakes.” We prefer the term “appropriation,” whereby a new artwork
incorporates or reproduces another. Copyists lie on a continuum: At one
end, you have extremely original artists (Richard Prince, Elaine
Sturtevant) who use the old to make something new. [Sturtevant learned the
techniques involved in remaking other artists’ paintings, sculptures and films
from scratch.] At the other, you have people deceiving buyers. In between,
you have artists who merely make covers, trying to get attention…

How, then, do new artworks emerge? Through what means, and to what
ends? These key questions serve as the basis for considering the artists
presented in the chapter to come.
Beyond Pictures: A Recent History of Appropriation
As appropriation developed in the United States in the late 1970s, it directly
challenged safeguards against copyright infringement in American law. The
nature of appropriation involved opposition to private property, which was,
more broadly, a critique of the prevailing economic order and the social
order, including the patriarchy. For many artists at the time, buoyed by
student protests, civil rights and feminism, the canon of major works by
Western male artists was to be challenged rather than extended. These artists
took issue with the inequities of gender, sex and race underlying art
production, exhibition and collection – and appropriation aimed to expose
this power imbalance. The goal was to dismantle the institutionalized system
of values that supported the identification of masterpieces and perpetuated
media stereotypes.
At the same time, a dominant force in painting was neo-expressionism, as
discussed on p. 9. These intensely emotive, maximalist works were often
infused – in form and content – with a masculine and at times misogynistic
energy. This was at odds with the increasingly socially conscious views of
many artists, and neo-expressionism – as propounded by David Salle (b.
1952, Norman, OK) and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938, Kamenz, Germany) – was
indicted by its opponents for celebrating sexist clichés and worse. (As late
as 2013, Baselitz held forth in an interview for Spiegel Online: ‘Women
don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.’)
Some artists indulged in large-scale panels given over to adolescent
fantasies of naked women cavorting and permitting unimpeded visual access.
Others perfected renditions of old myths to link their production to a
venerable past, the inheritance of which they claimed. Julian Schnabel (b.
1951, New York, NY), for one, festooned the canvas with broken crockery to
achieve the appearance of spontaneity and to signify emotional catharsis. In
this way he takes on the handmade, invoking women’s domestic labour and
craft, but paradoxically reserving it for male use. Such work sold – often for
great sums – and in so doing it raised these artists to the status of celebrities
(a cult of personality that had its casualties, as with the tragic death of Jean-
Michel Basquiat). For other artists and critics, these market conditions
represented the dispiriting interchangeability of painting and commodity.
This apparent contamination of the canvas meant that during the 1980s
more appropriation occurred in other media: most notably photography, as in
the projects of the American artists Sherrie Levine (b. 1947, Hazleton, PA)
and Richard Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, US). Both Levine and
Prince re-photographed images taken by others and presented the ‘new’
images as their own. Levine, appropriating the work of men, famously
reproduced bookplates of Walker Evans’s government-sponsored Farm
Security Administration images of Depression-era tenant workers and their
dwellings. In a 1981 press release accompanying their first showing, she
wrote:

I am interested in issues of identity and property—i.e. What is the same?

What do we own? I suspect auratic notions about art: “authenticity,” “the
genius,” “the masterpiece,” “the hand.” When every image is leased and
mortgaged, a photograph of a photograph is no more remarkable than a
photograph of a nude.

For his part, Prince captured Marlboro cigarette advertisements of American

cowboys, stripping them of brand logos and copy. This movement has been
dubbed the Pictures Generation after a small but hugely influential 1977
show in New York curated by Douglas Crimp, simply titled ‘Pictures’.
Prince and Levine were exhibited alongside other artists including Jack
Goldstein and Robert Longo. Many Pictures Generation artworks made their
sources clear, for the point was to dismantle and recontextualize the
‘original’ material, not to create an image from scratch. Although these artists
aimed to release the hold of consumer culture on the collective imagination,
their attacks could be misunderstood as repeating the problems inherent in
the material they were critiquing. In distinction from collage, which makes
visually evident that material has been brought together from multiple
sources, a re-photographed photograph looks just the same. How could one
tell the difference between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’? And how could one
assess intent when images were unmoored and perpetually on the move (a
phenomenon that would later be facilitated by the Internet)?
The ahistorical mining of readymade imagery became so widespread that
in 1982, American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson identified ‘pastiche’ as
a central theme of postmodernism in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer
Society’, a talk at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He
defined the term as the disorganized and non-hierarchical circulation of
quotations without regard to their initial presentation and meaning.
Nevertheless, appropriation signified criticality, irrespective of what it
actually depicted or to whom it was directed. It also asserted the activity of
aesthetic transfer as meaningful in and of itself.
In the present day, however, this definition of appropriation is no longer
adequate (Jerry Saltz’s cheeky lambast against noncriminal fakes and mere
covers gives one voice to this position). To be sure, any belief that the act of
appropriation as such would trump the meaning of its content has long since
passed. In retrospect, this assumption of revolutionary politics on the part of
the artist sometimes served as an excuse – even an alibi – for problematic
subject matter and gross instances of cultural appropriation, a form of
privileged authorship that opportunistically adopts aspects of minority
cultures to maintain one’s own power.
Take Kelley Walker (b. 1969, Columbus, GA). Beginning in the early
2000s, he made works dealing with the relation of an artwork to its
mediation: the way in which the idea is presented, but also how the idea is
always already framed prior to that point, acknowledging and addressing the
networks through which it travels before an artwork ever gets made. His
Disaster series (2002) references Andy Warhol’s early 1960s series Death
and Disaster, rife with imagery of car crashes and electric chairs, and exists
on CDs inserted into computers and as digital images running through electric
currents or retrieved from storage clouds. Walker selects images of the titular
disasters as his source material – grim shots of passenger-airline crashes and
earthquake debris – and solicits participation from the viewer by offering
modifiable high-resolution image files to be manipulated, reproduced and
disseminated by the user, in what becomes a succession of palettes and
styles. While none of the customizations diminish the inherent horror of the
images, the ethics of the series were long overlooked. Instead, discussion
lingered on Walker’s process, a focus that his work encouraged: in another
piece, he made a large, freestanding sculptural relief of the universal
recycling logo, an emblem of his own structure of reprocessing.
It was not until 2016, when paintings made a decade earlier were shown
at the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, that Walker became
the target of rebuke. The show opened almost exactly two years after the
police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson: an
event that spurred demonstrations and catalyzed the Black Lives Matter
movement in the United States. (This movement seeks to dismantle
institutionalized racism and violence against black people; it was established
in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of
African American teen Trayvon Martin.)
Walker’s retrospective featured a giant poster-like image of the singer
Kelis smeared with whitening toothpaste, and sensationalizing paintings of
African American teenager Walter Gadsden being attacked by a police dog.
[25] The latter paintings appropriated Bill Hudson’s photograph of the civil-
rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963. Walker’s
versions were inspired by Warhol’s equivocating paintings of police-dog
attacks at Birmingham, which were in turn appropriated from photographs by
a different photographer, Charles Moore. Walker additionally layered pools
of white, light and dark chocolate over the gruesome and dehumanizing
scene. The exhibition was boycotted; the works in question had come to be
recognized as a vulgar instance of a white man co-opting the suffering of
others for the purpose of exhibition and sale.

25 Kelley Walker, Black Star Press (rotated 90 degrees), 2006

Moreover, despite the outsize significance of the practice and theory that
grew around the group of artists working out of New York, the politics of
appropriation in the 1980s that were sketched on pp. 36–37 do not, of
course, apply to many other parts of the world. The same caveat of
geographically specific implications goes for the laws of copyright: for a
show at Warsaw’s Center for Contemporary Art in 2006, Paulina Olowska
(b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland) screened The Neverending Story (1984)
continuously, twenty-four hours a day, for free. This was permissible under
Polish law and so was not subject to copyright violation, but it would not
have been possible elsewhere. Therefore, while appropriation does continue
apace in the American scene, it can also be used as a starting point from
which to consider more global histories of art.
International appropriation is epitomized in the work of Wang Guangyi
(b. 1957, Harbin, China). He scorns communism and consumerism by
reworking icons of the Cultural Revolution in the guise of American pop art.
This is the default reference for Wang and many other artists, despite the
chronological precedence of pop-art movements in other countries, such as
the Independent Group in Britain, or the Nouveaux Réalistes in France. This
says much about the hegemony of American art in the post-World War II
period.
Wang’s Great Criticism series responds directly to the influx of Western
luxury goods into China in the 1990s, and the advertising campaigns that
accompanied this.[26] He places the triumvirate of idealized revolutionary
types – soldiers, peasants and workers – in the frame with products from
iconic foodstuffs (Coca-Cola, M&Ms) or rarefied brands (Porsche, Chanel).
This imagery is often set against saturated backgrounds the colour of Mao’s
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1964), commonly known in the
West as the ‘Little Red Book’. In Great Criticism – Cartier (2002) Wang
gold-plates the figures and, in so doing, shows the imagistic regimes of
Chinese propaganda and Western-style capitalism to be compatible, almost
indistinguishable, despite their antagonism.
26 Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism – Cartier, 2002

The use of appropriation to draw attention to ideological hypocrisies is a

tactic engaged by artists around the world. From 1988 to 1992, José Toirac
(b. 1966, Guantánamo, Cuba) was a member of Grupo ABTV, a radical
artistic collaboration with Tanya Angulo, Juan Pablo Ballester and Ileana
Villazón. His more recent productions include mixed-media work relating to
Walker Evans’s photographs of poverty-stricken Havana in 1933, a video
based on a speech Fidel Castro delivered in 2003, and a series of
appropriated photographs of Cuban history over which he stamped logos of
Western brands. In the latter, the Apple logo floats above Che Guevara in
Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez’s classic shot of the revolutionary, in mockery of the
company’s endorsement of thinking differently, while the emblem of Yves
Saint Laurent’s Opium perfume warps a press image of Pope John Paul II
shaking hands with Castro, none too subtly conjuring Karl Marx’s dictum that
‘religion is the opiate of the people’. Toirac collaborated with critic and
curator Meira Marrero (b. 1969, Havana, Cuba) – the two have worked
together since 1994 – to create a series of portraits of Cuban leaders that was
censored for its political implications when scheduled to debut at the
National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana in 2007. The series, 1869–2006
(2006), presents a pantheon of men who have held the office of governor or
president of Cuba since the time of the first insurgency against the Spanish,
chronologically arranged up to the present; the country’s uncertain fate is
signalled by a lone nail awaiting the next image.[27]

27 José Toirac and Meira Marrero, 1869–2006, 2006

Indeed, appropriation has become ubiquitous across the globe for

reasons besides ‘Pictures’, not least of which is the spread of the Internet.
Those with access to this technology are afforded near-instantaneous access
to information of all kinds: pictures, clips or other materials from almost
every conceivable time and place. Alexander Vinogradov (b. 1963, Moscow,
USSR) and Vladimir Dubossarsky (b. 1964, Moscow, USSR) have explored
our relation to unbounded media in the composite work Total Painting
(2001), a madcap conjunction of subjects drawn from socialist realism and
consumer culture. In 2003, they installed thirty-eight panels of Total Painting
at Deitch Projects, New York, under the title Our Best World.[28] The panels
formed a single ‘endless painting’ that wrapped around the gallery in its
entirety, creating a dizzying total immersion. A comparably absorptive effect
is achieved in The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael,
CA), a twenty-four-hour-long video composed of Hollywood film and
television fragments, with timepieces visible in each frame that mark the
actual passage of time, shot by shot.[29a–d] It is predicated upon an
inexhaustible archive of found, endlessly plastic sources that can be
reassembled according to one’s individual needs and preferences.
28 Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky, Installation view of Our Best World, Deitch
Projects, New York, 2003

29a–d Christian Marclay, Stills from The Clock, 2010

In this world so saturated by the Internet, it is not just a resource but also
a culture. With unabashed fixation on the latter, Sam McKinniss (b. 1985,
Northfield, MN) conjures high-keyed, melodramatically glamorous
renditions of screen grabs of Princess Leia, Whitney Houston, Madonna and
other icons of secular worship.[30] In the course, he muses on the way our
consumption of celebrity culture has migrated from print tabloids to online
outlets. His paintings feature quasi-cinematic stories, cast with characters
resulting from a Google search. In exhibitions, McKinniss clusters these
vaporous captures amidst paintings of art-historical emblems of transience,
such as his imitations of Henri Fantin-Latour’s lush dahlias and fairy roses,
as well as cute animals, imagery native to the Internet culture that is, beneath
all these pictures, his great subject.

30 Sam McKinniss, American Idol (Lana), 2018

Even with this prevalent Internet culture, the history of art remains the
primary point of reference for some artists, whether through first-hand
observation of artworks or their mediation through photography, books and
online resources. Tomoo Gokita (b. 1969, Tokyo, Japan) creates surrealistic
portraits of archetypes from art history, such as the Madonna and child, as
well as geishas and Hollywood ingénues, all recounted in a gradient from
black to white.[31] A comparable absorption of art-historical references can
be seen in the work of Makiko Kudo (b. 1978, Aomori, Japan). She shows
young girls amid traditional Japanese imagery of plant and animal life, in
dreamlike springtime scenes that closely recall the lushly dappled
impressionist landscapes of Claude Monet and the hyper-pigmented, sinewy
fauvism of Henri Matisse, among others, thoughtfully jammed together in
novel hybrids.[32]

31 Tomoo Gokita, Mother and Child, 2013

32 Makiko Kudo, Missing, 2010

Jesse Mockrin (b. 1981, Silver Spring, MD) paints sumptuous worlds in
twilight, spotlighting bits of anatomy for intensity and near-theatrical
emphasis. She appropriates Rococo paeans to love and longing: delicate bent
fingers or arms extending to another figure, in the frame or pointing
elsewhere. Mockrin’s sampling of compositions by Jean-Honoré Fragonard,
as well as Peter Paul Rubens and Hans Baldung Grien, preserves the
cropped details of cited artworks as fragments. These can be recombined
into androgynous subjects, complicating the meaning of these ritualized
gestures. Her Syrinx (2018), composed using elements of Rubens and Noël-
Nicholas Coypel, is an allegory of artistic creation based on a Greek myth.
[33] The namesake wood nymph had to flee from the unwelcome desire of
Pan, an Arcadian deity of fertility and carnal desire. In the course of avoiding
rape, she metamorphosed into river reeds, which Pan – in an act of
sublimation born of his unfulfilled passion – turned into a musical instrument.
33 Jesse Mockrin, Syrinx, 2018

Mythical characters like these course through the history of art, and for
Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984, San Francisco, CA), their reimaging becomes an
implement of confrontation. In Đức Mẹ Chuối (Holy Mother of Bananas)
(2018), she offers a conspicuously yellow Venus, the goddess of love and
beauty, turned Cyclops from a primordial race.[34] The work constitutes a
riposte to a tradition deeply threatened by non-white models. (Witness the
continued disbelief in response to the evidence that Classical statuary was
not, in the days of antiquity, the bleached marble that became a centuries-long
ideal. In fact, it was covered in richly painted and deeply pigmented skin
tones, representing the range of ethnicities across the vast Greek and Roman
empires.) In this near life-size painting, Nguyen reconfigures the central
figure in Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485). Swirling hair and
iconic pose remain, yet the seashell is now a bed of fanning bananas, and the
figure’s crotch – modestly covered by Botticelli – becomes a fertile patch
from which sprouts a thick purple stem, budding into a flower.
34 Tammy Nguyen, Đức Mẹ Chuối (Holy Mother of Bananas), 2018

This is one of many ways in which mediation can re-value source

images, be they paintings, photographs or otherwise. The same wealth of
possibilities applies to documents and historical artefacts, which assume a
different tangibility in a world oversaturated with virtual imagery. William
Daniels (b. 1976, Brighton, UK) and Caragh Thuring (b. 1972, Brussels,
Belgium) have both turned to earlier moments in a rampant conversion of
cultural relics, making claims for their mutability. Daniels reconstructs well-
known paintings as maquettes composed of scavenged quotidian stuff, which
he then puts to use as models for his own painted works. This is well
demonstrated in The Shipwreck (2005), after Romantic painter J. M. W.
Turner’s 1805 painting of the same name.[35] Subdued in tone and flattened
into cardboard planes, Daniels’s works recall the faceting of cubism as much
as their source imagery. Thuring’s five paintings on unprimed linen, 1, 2, 3a,
3b, 4 (all 2009), flirt with legibility as pastoral scenes.[36] On account of
their blank spaces – passages that are left empty in one painting of the series
but not in another – it is only in aggregate, like images brought together
through a search engine, that the images resolve into a whole referencing
their source: Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), which is based
on Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving The Judgment of Paris (c. 1515),
which was made after a drawing by Raphael. The cycle of appropriation
goes on and on.

35 William Daniels, The Shipwreck, 2005

36 Caragh Thuring, 4, 2009

Choice in and as Subject Matter

Chapter 2 addresses the issue of intention and how it is signalled within the
artwork. When it comes to appropriation, artists’ decisions in terms of
source material are consequential (as the Kelley Walker case on p. 38 grants
in the extreme). For Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów, Poland), who for a
time worked in advertising in Kraków, subject matter is momentous and often
political. Alongside mass-media imagery relating to the history of post-
Communist life in his birth region, as well as snapshots of friends and family,
he uses cartoons from Art Spiegelman’s iconic comic strip about the
Holocaust, Maus (1991) – in which Jews are depicted as mice, the German
Nazis as cats and the Poles as pigs – to reflect on Poland’s role in and
experience of World War II. Other subjects have included former United
Nations Secretary-Generals, including Kurt Waldheim, who was complicit in
Nazi war crimes. In an even more explicit painting, Untitled (Choke) (2017),
a photograph from a rally in Oakland, California, taken the day after Donald
Trump’s election, is manipulated into a saccharine pink field.[37] In it,
protesters hold an anti-fascist banner reading: ‘Choke on your silver spoon
you fucking Nazi’.

37 Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Choke), 2017

Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Yevgeniy Fiks (b. 1972,
Moscow, USSR) began to examine forgotten and repressed histories of the
Left – while post-Soviet culture set about eradicating the legacy of those
years. Fiks views this recovery as an activist project, in which
‘interventionist tactics normally applied to physical social space can and
should be effectively applied to history’. For the oil-painting series Songs of
Russia (2005–7), he appropriated stills from World War II-era Hollywood
films about the Soviet Union, which President Franklin D.[38] Roosevelt
sponsored to galvanize favourable public opinion towards Stalin at the brief
moment when Soviet and American interests coincided. During the onset of
the Cold War, these same films became the focus of the House Un-American
Activities Committee hearings regarding Communist infiltration of
Hollywood. Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania), who grew up
under Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, was also drawn to
appropriation as political critique. In Untitled (Ceaușescu) (2010), Ghenie
takes as his source a widely publicized image from the day of Ceaușescu’s
nationally televised execution. He actively blurs the image, which seems to
physically disintegrate, in what might be a nod to an old photograph or, more
grimly, a freighted recollection of the exhumation of Ceaușescu’s body.
Ghenie also disfigures other 20th-century totalitarian leaders: in The Moth
(2010), an insect leaves a purple smear on Joseph Stalin’s face. Other
images cover Adolf Hitler with paint strokes, thick and gooey like custard,
evoking the mischief gag of pie-throwing, and mimicking its ritualistic
humiliation by other means.

38 Yevgeniy Fiks, Songs of Russia no. 10, 2005–7

Others choose more subtle avenues through which to approach politics

and history. Consider Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia):
through meticulous underdrawings of maps, city plans, civic buildings,
palaces and ruins, she examines how architecture is overtaken by history, and
the ways the built environment bears the traces of successive actions. Her
accumulations of ink and acrylic marks function as metaphors; embedded in
strata of translucent acrylic, they both build upon and efface what has come
before. Mehretu expresses the dynamism of contemporary cities, which seem
to explode into shards across the surfaces of her monumental canvases,
leaving certain markers of place intact amidst bands of colour and passages
of geometric abstraction. Such works as these were created before 9/11 and
in the aftermath seem prescient. In Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts)
(2012), a series exhibited at Documenta (13), Kassel, in the year of its
production, Mehretu took on subsequent insurgencies, notably events
surrounding the spontaneous uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square the previous
year.[39] She incorporates architectural drawings of the government building
at the site that gives the series its title, collapsing Egypt’s postcolonial
history and its 2011 revolution.

39 Julie Mehretu, Installation view of Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts), Documenta (13), Kassel,
2012

Where Mehretu buries the image, Maryam Najd (b. 1965, Tehran, Iran)
veils it as a surrogate for the body. These layered, concealed images have
included photographic screenshots of television programmes and a series of
fake self-portraits, in which Najd aligns her identity with images of Margaret
Thatcher, Farah Pahlavi and Osama bin Laden, in a canny take on
stereotyping and mass-projection – e.g. Iranian equals terrorist – in a post-
9/11 world.[40] These last works indicate the priority of appropriated media
images for Najd. Her series Masquerade (2009) centres on images of Iranian
protestors demanding the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office;
under significant threat, they are shown wearing protective masks and
scarves to conceal their identity, transforming theatrical accessories into
tactical disguises. Najd also abstracts from abstractions, as in her Non
Existence Flag Project (2010–12), in which she took over one hundred
national flags and erased each of their lines and contours. Next, she
calculated the percentage of each colour used in a flag’s design and mixed
them, in the same proportions, to achieve a single hue. Najd then used this
colour to paint a monochrome panel for each symbolically deracinated flag.

40 Maryam Najd, Self-Portrait VIII, 2006–7

In this way, artists can stress content as well as form. Indeed, the two are
often rendered inextricable. Many artists have embraced appropriation as a
kind of curation that makes plain the act of having chosen source material.
This can be traced to Marcel Duchamp, who legitimized the acts of finding
and selecting rather than making (through his nomination of a urinal as art by
placing it on a pedestal and submitting it to a space dedicated to art, in
Fountain [1917], and more generally, his identification of the readymade as
art). This lineage is continued in Ruth Root’s (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) press
release for a 2008 show at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, in which
she placed thirty-five heterogeneous sources into the form of a mathematical
equation. Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers and Blinky Palermo were given the
same value as such items as bathmats and ski socks. All of these components
were connected by plus signs, the sum total of which ‘equalled’ the
exhibition. Far from reducing her wafer-thin paintings to a game of sources,
it generously revealed a tendency to accumulate and synthesize: part of
practice that typically remains out of view.
Unlike Duchamp’s readymades, Root’s paintings are carefully crafted
artefacts, but the crux is her acknowledgment of what has come before them.
In this forthright act of authorship, she takes responsibility for those
selections and what they help to generate. In a more recent series shown at
356 Mission in Los Angeles in 2017, Root made such appropriations even
clearer within the paintings themselves.[41] Each work has two discrete but
interlocking physical sections: one of patterned fabric of the artist’s own
design, pulled taut over softly swelling wadding, and the other painted
Plexiglas, which hangs from the first like a giant earring from a lobe. The
fabric is a sort of digital sampler, comprising portraits of Ruth Bader
Ginsberg, textile fragments from Sonia Delaunay and Wiener Werkstätte, the
sharp geometry of a security envelope design, a pizza slice and icons of
Root’s own art, in what becomes a miniature retrospective.
41 Ruth Root, Untitled, 2017

Mamma Andersson (b. 1962, Luleå, Sweden) has also been transparent
about the resources that she consults. Revealing her inspirations in folk art
and cinema, among others, she appropriates photographs and other
mnemonically rich ephemera within her paintings. When exhibiting these
dreamlike Nordic scenes at a show at the Contemporary Arts Center,
Cincinnati, on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018, Andersson hung
the paintings together with their sources.[42] She installed the reference
photographs and book pages on the wall and in vitrines in tight clusters, as
so-called formal ‘memory banks’. (These take their title from her painting
Memory Bank, 2011, in which two ghostlike figures row a boat.) The
presentation of Andersson’s works alongside such an array of materials –
including stacks of books, ready for re-use, a photograph tacked to the wall
and a television set – shows a kind of before and after in terms of the
transformations of imagery and ideas.
42 Mamma Andersson, Installation view of ‘Memory Banks’, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati,
2018

Some artists not only reference their own work and sources but also
expand this referentiality to the institutions of art. In a 2007 show at Maureen
Paley, London, Andrew Grassie (b. 1966, Edinburgh, UK) placed paintings
depicting the gallery’s exhibitions from the previous year during their
installation.[43] Each work hung in the same spot in the gallery as Grassie
had stood in when he took the photograph on which it was based. He has also
made literal the act of curation involved in selecting sources, as in ‘New
Hang’, 2005, when he curated works from the Tate gallery’s collection, by
George Stubbs, Henry Moore and others, in an imaginary display. His
photorealistic paintings of this hypothetical rehang were exhibited in the
same gallery space that they depicted.
43 Andrew Grassie, Installation: Martin Creed, Rennie Collection, Vancouver, 2012

Rather than engaging with an extant corpus, Matts Leiderstam (b. 1956,
Gothenburg, Sweden) assumes the possibility of curatorially reframing the
whole of art history through its newly examined details. Leiderstam
exhaustively researches an image type or artist, such as Nicolas Poussin, and
builds an archive around it. The resulting exhibition might include optical
instruments (colour filters, magnifying glasses, field scopes, slide
projections and computer animations) and his own hand-painted
reproductions of paintings, for use with other items of study (catalogues,
books, light boxes, slides and photographs). Possibly the most complete
realisation of this approach is found in Grand Tour (1997–2007), first shown
in connection with the 1997 Venice Biennale and variously configured in
other locations, including Magasin 3 (Stockholm, Sweden) in 2005.[44]
Inspired by the origins of cultural tourism, Leiderstam discovered that
designated stops along the circuit for wealthy young men of the 18th century,
who were presumably gaining knowledge of connoisseurship in order to
build art collections, match those in modern gay travel guides. Leiderstam
thus highlights the incipient eroticism in abundant images of grottoes,
deserted landscapes and public parks, as well as in specimens of the
classical nude.
44 Matts Leiderstam, Installation view of Grand Tour (1997–2007), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, 2010

Taking physical appropriation still further, some even insist on literal

reclamation, like Uwe Henneken (b. 1974, Paderborn, Germany). He chooses
‘used’ canvases – already painted by someone else and discarded by earlier
owners, perhaps when they fell out of favour – as settings for his protagonists
named Vanguard and Nihil: goofy-looking cartoon heads peeking over the
horizon as if it is a wall.[45] These characters are derived from World War
II-era ‘Chad’ graffiti, which American and British servicemen sketched
wherever they were stationed, leaving residues of occupation in their wake.
Just as public walls became sites to be defiled, already-worked paintings
serve a corresponding role for Henneken, functioning as the prepared surface
on which he superimposes his figures. In so doing, he exaggerates the
delirious tastelessness of art from various eras and locales, showing the
constant shifting of preferences in art to be linked to cultural trends. Instead
of arguing for a history in which events reach a clearly defined endpoint,
Henneken proposes a model of interconnectivity, in which nothing really
goes away.
45 Uwe Henneken, Vanguard #66, 2006

Henneken is not alone in retrieving already-painted canvases as the basis

for his production. In selecting someone else’s art as readymade, artists
highlight their activities as scavengers – curators of a different kind – picking
over the remains of past production. They also point to the potential utility of
actual recycling, with its ethos of ‘reduce and reuse’, to offset the deleterious
effects of commodity production. Dirk Bell (b. 1969, Munich, Germany) also
claims ‘readymade’ paintings – often by anonymous artists and procured at
flea markets in Berlin – as the ground in his work.[46] On these, he builds a
scrim of white paint or washy, swirling overlays to suggest a dream state;
elsewhere, he transplants elements between the paintings, excavating a
section from one to incorporate it into another arrangement. While some
paintings are revised, others remain in their found condition, matched with
companion paintings or supplemented with sculptural components.
46 Dirk Bell, Zitat, 2007

For his series Modern Paintings (1997–present), Pavel Büchler (b.

1952, Prague, Czechoslovakia) cleans discarded canvases before applying
acrylic primer to the surface; thereafter, he peels off the paint, launders the
canvases in a washing machine, reattaches the removed paint, and re-
stretches the work.[47] Recalling Büchler, Lucas Ajemian (b. 1975,
Waynesboro, VA) has treated, soaked and bathed already-painted canvases
donated by friends and students, before cutting them into multiple segments,
adding raw fabric to them or distending the material to accommodate a new
stretcher. [48] While the artists responsible for Büchler’s source paintings
remain anonymous, in Ajemian’s work this is hardly the case; the readymades
– what he designates as ‘hosts’ – have been offered up by such artists as
Julien Bismuth, Anna Craycroft, Tim Harrington, Katja Holtz, Nate Lowman,
Dean Monogenis, Dana Schutz (p. 291) and Cheyney Thompson (p. 241), all
of whom are named. The resultant works are exercises in social practice,
built as they are out of a community of peer engagement. Yet, just as much,
they are exercises in formal judgment, and in this the decisions of the original
artists are obscured by those of Ajemian in terms of what might become a
new composition, fashioned from the old.
47 Pavel Büchler, Modern Paintings No. A45 (cartoon figures in a barn, “Sumie 98,” Manchester,
August 2007), 1997–2007

48 Lucas Ajemian, Laundered Painting (26×26) I, 2014

The social aspect of appropriation is stressed by Radu Comsa (b. 1975,

Sibiu, Romania), who insists that he belongs to a community of viewers in
which appropriation acts as a mechanism for survival. He is pictured by his
friend Ciprian Mureșan (b. 1977, Dej, Romania) in the cartoon animation
Untitled (Eating Trash) (2007), characterized as a bear scavenging rubbish
as a testament to his eclectic range. In 2009, Comsa and colleagues began to
work in the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj, Romania, a collective space for
contemporary artists. For a 2010 show at Sabot Gallery (located in the
Paintbrush Factory), titled ‘Being Radu Comsa’, he referenced his peers
directly, installing wooden constructions as supports for inset circular
paintings.[49] These works reproduce details and whole images made by his
colleagues: Ghenie (p. 51), Victor Man, Marius Bercea and Serban Savu (p.
174). As Comsa painted them by his own hand, he never achieved an exact
replica of those works he incorporated. Comsa capitalized on the recent
success of the peers whose work he appropriated – they had received
successful promotion since their debut at the 2007 Prague Biennial, and are
now known to a larger art-going public – and, given the exhibition setting, he
made the collective space where the artists laboured a part of the structure of
his work.

49 Radu Comsa, Installation view of ‘Being Radu Comsa’, Sabot Gallery, The Paintbrush Factory, Cluj,
2010

Alex Da Corte (b. 1981, Camden, New Jersey) performed sociability in

a related manner for an early project, ‘Fun Sponge’, at the Institute of
Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in 2013.[50] Using his social
network, he made paintings that condense – or in his words, ‘absorb’ – his
friends’ work, by placing their paintings behind adhesive sign vinyl before
pressing them against Plexiglas, where they remain in perpetuity.

50 Alex Da Corte, Installation view of ‘Fun Sponge’, ICA at MECA, Portland, Maine, 2013

Appropriation after Appropriation

As appropriation, like postmodernism, comes to be understood as an art
practice associated with a particular period in the past (the 1980s) and
cultural context (the US), its history is also being redrawn. As discussed in
the introduction, some characterized photography and painting as antithetical.
But this was far from a decisive binary (and the interaction between them
was not limited to the former serving as a source for the latter); nor was
painting a stranger to appropriation. Testament to this is the oeuvre of David
Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), who worked in appropriation-based collaged
painting and photography as well as music, film, sculpture, writing and
activism, refusing a single medium – above all painting or photography – or
style. He powerfully weaponized painting in the midst of the AIDS crisis and
culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s to give form to cultural
metaphors of marginality and violation.
While painting-based appropriation was often disparaged in the 1980s,
re-examination of the period has reframed its value; it is now deemed not
only viable but also desirable, and even the source of humorous
recapitulation. A 2008 show, ‘Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?’, conceived by
the gallerist Gavin Brown and Urs Fischer (b. 1973, Zürich, Switzerland),
invented a wryly self-conscious exhibition model.[51] Installed at Tony
Shafrazi’s New York gallery, it featured a photographic mural of Shafrazi’s
recent exhibition ‘Four Friends’ (Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf). This captured the installation in its entirety:
guards, gallery infrastructure, walls and artworks. Over this full-scale,
trompe l’oeil wallpaper hung ‘real’ works by twenty-two artists, ranging
from Francis Bacon and John Chamberlain to Jeff Koons (p. 74) and
Christopher Wool (p. 113), each of which had passed through Shafrazi’s
hands for sale on the secondary market. A Rudolf Stingel (p. 138) carpet
covered the floor, while two works by Rob Pruitt (p. 69) bracketed the
whole show: Eternal Bic (1999), an endlessly burning Bic-lighter-turned-
sculpture seen upon entry, and a Viagra-infused waterfall that coursed
alongside the front stairs.

51 Urs Fischer, Installation view of ‘Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?’, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York,
2008. Wallpaper: Urs Fischer, Abstract Slavery, 2008. Works featured on wallpaper, from left to right:
Gilbert & George, MENTAL NO. 4, 1976; Cindy Sherman, Untitled #175, 1987

Peter Halley (b. 1953, New York, NY) has undertaken a different kind of
reconsideration of the role of painting in appropriation. The driving force
behind his work is postmodern philosophy; resulting works propose that
appropriation operates on the level of theory and that theory, too, can be
appropriated. A staunch opponent of the figurative tradition, Halley paints
cells and prisons (squares and rectangles, respectively), and conduits (lines)
in a palette of Day-Glo paints. These are punctuated with passages of Roll-
A-Tex, an industrial paint, the textured appearance of which recalls stucco.
Halley’s diagrammatic paintings expose the use of geometry in the public
sphere as an agent of control, with the individual trapped in social systems,
somewhat literally illustrating the French post-structuralist theory that
underpins their logic. In his 2018 commission for the Lever House, New
York, he realised an architectural environment extending from the circuit-like
compositions of his earlier paintings into actual space.[52] A choreographed
succession of rooms culminated in a gallery with walls covered by an
intricate latticework of diagrammatic prisons, illuminated only by black
light.

52 Peter Halley, Installation view of New York, New York, Lever House Art Collection, New York,
2018

Meanwhile, the re-evaluation of painting has made clearer the

significance of Sherrie Levine’s concerted attention to the medium. Begun a
few years after her better-known photo-based work, her 1980s compositions
(often chequered or striped) recall modernist abstraction, not through
specific antecedents such as Piet Mondrian or Barnett Newman, but as a
generic decorative scheme. Levine’s Knot paintings, made from 1985–2002,
in which she colours in the knots on plywood sheets, are wry meditations on
the painting as readymade. In 2006, she created Equivalents: After Stieglitz
1–18, a grouping of eighteen photographic prints that decompose the
greyscale of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents (1925–34), his series of
increasingly abstract photographs of the sky, into squares of solid hues.
Whereas the Equivalents acted as pathetic fallacy to express Stieglitz’s inner
state, Levine’s was a more intellectual approach. And yet, Levine
subsequently completed two series of eighteen monochrome paintings based
on the same photographs, this time responding to the skies rather than
reproducing them.[53]

53 Sherrie Levine, Installation view of Gray and Blue Monochromes after Stieglitz: 1–36 (detail),
2010

As with Levine, for many younger artists, including Blake Rayne (b.
1969, Lewes, DE) and Wade Guyton (b. 1972, Hammond, IN), the legacy of
conceptualism has prompted painting-based appropriation, often not of a
specific image, object or painting precedent, but of an idea of period style.
Both directly engage with the sense of self-criticality that developed within
20th-century painting. This was a type of licenced introspection regarding the
nature of painting, whether in a historical, material or institutional sense. As
Rayne asserts in an undated artist’s statement titled ‘Totally Over-
Determined Program for a Project With No Plan’:

I see the task of my own practice to be that of putting the beliefs attributed
to the sign “Painting” to the test by subjecting it to the material
conditions of the medium of painting. These material conditions…are for
me: modes of distribution and external framing (context); internal
procedures of formation (process); and relationships to other types of
images, including those constitutive of a “subject” (performativity)…. I
have developed an evolving set of procedures by transforming the
particular conditions of the medium from definitions to operations.
These…include…processes of translation, decontextualization, folding,
superimposition, and the following of “scripts” grafted from other sites of
cultural production.

This strand of thinking runs through Untitled 2 through 8 (Dust of Suns)

(2008), a group of large-scale paintings created by Rayne in accordance with
predetermined steps, which involved exploitation of the properties of
folding.[54] After selecting and cutting fabric, he marked off the pictorial
space and folded the support; he then painted and re-stretched it, before
cutting and re-sewing it into three horizontal registers. The series nods to the
work of Supports-Surfaces, a politically astute group of French artists
working in the late 1960s, who used unconventional materials and
procedures, including folding, to take apart the tools of painting. Another
way Rayne re-examines the ‘beliefs attributed to the sign “Painting”’, as he
puts it, is through his experimentation with the spray gun, through which he
eschews lyrical gesturalism and distances himself from painted marks.
54 Blake Rayne, Untitled Painting No. 3, 2008

Like Rayne – and, to some extent, the artists discussed in Chapter 3 –

Wade Guyton uses production (process) and distribution (context) to test
painting as a medium, similarly referencing or appropriating the interrogatory
stance of 20th-century painting. In 2002, he began using an office-quality
printer to make assisted drawings: computer-generated images (Xs and Us in
Blair ITC Medium font predominate), which at times overlay source material
culled from art, architecture and design magazines, as well as auction
catalogues and monographs. Two years later, Guyton started painting along
these lines, and in 2007 he began producing so-called ‘ostensibly black
monochromes’ with a computer and an Epson large-format photograph
printer that spits ink onto pre-primed linen intended for oil.[55]
55 Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2010

Despite the uniform process, the results vary according to the amount of
ink, overprinting slippages, imperfect syncs or the printer running askew.
Print settings, such as draft, economy, black-and-white or colour, provide
controls. In a 2010 project for the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Guyton
produced entire rolls of linen, which he installed floor to ceiling in a
hiccupping pattern of rectangles. Another group by Guyton, displayed in
2018 at Petzel Gallery, New York, featured knowing images of paintings
drying on the floor, scraps of linen, the remains of lunch and other studio
scenes.
Artists such as Rayne and Guyton deliberately subvert their technical
skills, a manoeuvre referred to as de-skilling. Yet taking away one kind of
skill – traditional draughtsmanship, say, or varnishing – necessitates re-
training in others. Plus, these artists clearly instigate the process, and
evaluate, conclude and legitimize it through the authoring of self-imposed
rules.
 R. H. Quaytman (b. 1961, Boston, MA) goes through the same procedure
for each series, beginning with researching an aspect of the location where
the work will first be exhibited and viewed. Quaytman uses standardized
sizes of wood panels, which she brushes with a traditional primer before
adding layers of other paints and surface items (including Spinel Black, the
oil paint engineered to make the Stealth Bomber undetectable, and crushed
glass); she also silkscreens photographs or abstract patterns. She then
organizes her paintings into thematic series conceived as ‘chapters’, which
she numbers chronologically: The Sun, Chapter 1 (2001), Łódź Poem,
Chapter 2 (2004), Optima, Chapter 3 (2004), and so on, to + ×, Chapter 34
(2018). The latter was made to be shown in conjunction with Hilma af
Klint’s gnomic spiritual abstractions in the 2018 show ‘Hilma af Klint:
Paintings for the Future’ at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.[56] Each
group of Quaytman’s works is interdependent, containing references to its
constituent members – often by means of hall-of-mirror-like repetitions
within the images – and to their site. Her paintings’ bevelled edges also
stress the picture plane and, crucially, emphasize the oblique position from
which they will be viewed after the exhibition, once returned to storage
racks.

56 R. H. Quaytman, Installation view of + ×, Chapter 34, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New

York, 2018–19
 While Quaytman has established a governing framework within which
she operates, her appropriation is still poignantly motivated by personal
inclinations. This is perhaps exemplified in Distracting Distance, Chapter
16 (2010), a group of works created for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which
were partially based on Edward Hopper’s painting A Woman in the Sun
(1961). This painting was made the year of Quaytman’s birth, and it solemnly
depicts Hopper’s ageing wife (and long-time model) standing alone, naked
and introspective in a shaft of sunlight. Quaytman recreated a similar scene in
the gallery space of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and silkscreened
this on wood panels for several works in Distracting Distance. The series
was then hung in that same gallery space. The chapter demonstrates an
element of personal engagement, and a possible emotive connection to the
original.
Contrarily, Rob Pruitt (b. 1964, Washington, D.C.) could be said to
demonstrate hostility towards the objects of his appropriation, as well as
highlighting unseemly claims of taste and sociability. He is known for his
glitter-encrusted paintings of zoo pandas, and for perversely instigating a
range of spectacular actions. These span from offering a buffet of cocaine on
a floor mirror to producing an annual art-award ceremony at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York and a monument to Warhol in the city’s Union Square.
Pruitt’s 2010 show at Gavin Brown and Maccarone galleries was called
‘Pattern and Degradation’, referencing the wonderfully eclectic Pattern and
Decoration movement from the 1970s.[57] The show included fabric patterns
procured from the fashion designer and socialite Lilly Pulitzer (designed by
Suzie Zuzek), along with photos appropriated from the Internet – which led to
a flash-mob demonstration protesting their lack of attribution – and colour-
saturated canvases inscribed with scribbled lines that capture fragments of
human faces and expressions. These items were placed in the proximity of
‘People Feeders’: stacks of tires functioning as giant dishes for sweets and
cookies. Taken together, the works took the hangover of pop art as a filter of
popular culture and extended it into the digital age, envisaged at its most
radically eclectic. In Pruitt’s hands, images, clips and all manner of media
are grist for the appropriative mill.
57 Rob Pruitt, Installation view of ‘Pattern and Degradation’, Gavin Brown’s enterprise and
Maccarone, New York, 2010

To return to the legal issues discussed at the beginning of this chapter, a

pivotal concern has become whether it matters if the appropriated artwork is
seen as visibly altered. This raises the spectre of fair use, which became
topical anew in 2011: a federal court judge in Manhattan ruled that Richard
Prince broke the law when he appropriated the French photographer Patrick
Cariou’s previously published images of Rastafarians in Jamaica for a body
of collages and paintings. In 2013 this verdict was appealed and, with the
exception of five of the thirty works, overturned in Prince’s favour because
his paintings ‘have a different character’ from Cariou’s photographs. This
somehow carried weight despite Prince’s admission that he ‘[didn’t] really
have a message’ and that he was not ‘trying to create anything with a new
meaning or a new message’. Whatever the merits of this judgment, the case
shattered the fiction that all material exists for the taking. This remains a
continuing problem in another case regarding the same artist’s appropriation
of other people’s Instagram posts in a series of screengrabs that he inkjet
printed on canvas, described by one of the subjects, Zoë Ligon, as a violation
of boundaries and a ‘reckless, embarrassing, and uninformed critique of
social media…in 2019 it’s tone deaf’. Beyond Prince, or North America for
that matter, these affairs have become commonplace – so much so that in
2019, the Court of Arbitration for Art (CAfA) opened in The Hague as the
world’s first court devoted to settling these and other kinds of disputes
involving art.
Many have argued for the utopian social potential promised by the digital
universe, or the development of collaborative, open-source systems with less
disciplined and regulated communication; on this basis they have even
founded notions of an interconnected, globalized art world. With the
perpetual shuttling of images, objects, designs, styles, materials and
techniques, however, these same systems have contributed to retrenchment
into single authorship and differentiation of individuated product. In the
world of the selfie, the conveyance of identity is congealed in and
perpetrated through the branded image, in which personal sovereignty is
presented as the upshot of self-actualizing choices. But as in the selfie, which
often masks more than it exposes, neither the artist nor the artwork
necessarily divulges personal content – the truth of the self – even if it
appears to be doing exactly that. In the following chapter we return to
questions of intention and the degree to which it is revealed formally,
whether the painting takes its basis in appropriation or not.
Chapter 2
Attitude

This chapter considers various strategies of self-presentation that artists use

to frame themselves, and their work, by means of stylistic and procedural
devices. The former refers to a work’s physical presentation, whereas the
latter relates to the way in which a work is made; both elements of this act of
framing extend well beyond the apparent completion of the painting as an
object, and are continued through the positioning of both the artist and their
work in the public realm. Stylistic devices range from exaggerated
brushstrokes meant to stand for expressivity (or to parody it) to the anti-
aesthetic stance of ‘bad painting’; procedural devices include the historically
conditioned uses of Western and non-Western painting methods and practices,
for instance to question the privileged place of Western, and especially North
American, painting within the history of modernism.
One such novel procedural device was achieved by Vitaly Komar (b.
1943, Moscow, USSR) and Alexander Melamid (b. 1945, Moscow, USSR)
in People’s Choice (1994–97). Working before the Social Web, the artists
commissioned polls in eleven countries, including Russia, China, France, the
United States and Kenya, to determine the most and least wanted paintings
for each national constituency – which they then created. Effectively
demonstrating how artists can serve a cultural function (rather than sharing
private feelings), the project is provocative in its exploration of certain
forms of populism and for using a crowdsource culture ahead of its time. It
continues to gain in relevance as artists find increasingly sophisticated ways
to exploit the Internet; it also admits the world to be both interconnected and
decidedly local. (How artists negotiate this bifurcation is discussed in this
chapter, as well as in Chapter 3.)
In the years since the unveiling of People’s Choice, artists’ attitudes and
the cultivation of an artist’s persona have become quintessential factors in
contemporary art. Historically coincident with Komar and Melamid’s project
was the appearance of the Young British Artists (YBAs), whose position in
the 1990s – concisely characterized by one art critic as being ‘oppositional
and entrepreneurial’ – was consolidated by their education, exhibition and
patronage by the London-based collector and advertising executive Charles
Saatchi. In a testament to the effectiveness of ego and marketing, they
achieved remarkable traction under the sign of the enfant terrible, as
exemplified by Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the
Mind of Someone Living (1991), a preserved tiger shark swimming in a
minimalist cube of formaldehyde, or Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998), a
rumpled bed, its stained sheets conspicuously littered with condoms and
detritus. Some became household names, a level of renown typically
reserved for media figures with a cultivated persona and a knack for self-
promotion, a description that also applies to star artists such as Jeff Koons.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the shaping of an artist into a public
personality, even a pop idol, through an artwork – or as the artwork – is the
hallmark of mediagenic culture. In one focal acknowledgment of this state of
affairs, Marina Abramović (b. 1946, Belgrade, Yugoslavia) sat silently in a
chair in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for three months
in 2010, performing The Artist is Present. Abramović appeared like a statue
from a distance, though many of the museum visitors who took the invitation
to approach her were overtaken with emotion. So moved were they by this
eye-to-eye encounter that scores of testimonial-like portraits now populate a
website, ‘Marina Abramović Made Me Cry’. Cynics do not see this as
broadcasting sincerity or prompting empathy: for them, these images of tear-
streamed faces parody the modern fancy for achieving self-validation through
art and prove an instance of celebrity legitimizing itself through the faux-
generosity of communion.
No matter how it is interpreted, The Artist is Present confirms a
widespread yearning for the kinds of affective connection apparently lost in
daily lives that now so disproportionally happen on-screen – even in
museums, where people often walk head-down, staring into handheld devices
rather than at the art or one another. Abramović claimed an aesthetic but also
physical space in which this wished-for experience of real-life connection
might occur. This nevertheless also imperils one to the possibility of
interpersonal antagonism. After a book signing at the Palazzo Strozzi in
Florence in 2018, a man carrying a painting attacked Abramović by
slamming the canvas over her head.
 Harnessing this morbid public curiosity with artists, who are alternately
fetishized and reviled, Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary The Price of
Everything (2018) casts Larry Poons (b. 1937, Tokyo, Japan) as the
underdog in his story about a multi-billion-dollar international market. Clad
in paint-splattered clothes, Poons perpetuates the heroic myth of the painter
as lonely genius (a highly codified trope of its own). Portrayed toiling for his
craft, separate from venal commerce and the commodification of creativity,
he discusses having refused a signature style to the detriment of his reputation
and sales. Thus is Poons paired effectually with Jeff Koons (b. 1955, York,
PA), a former Wall Street commodities trader. Koons is shown supervising a
giant painting workshop where a team of technicians produces handmade,
stroke-by-stroke replicas of well-known masterpieces, finished off with the
addition of a spherical gazing ball. Although the shiny blue baubles extend
the illusion of the painting beyond the frame, their mirrored surfaces are also
projective vehicles in the spirit of a Rorschach test.[58] ‘This experience is
about you,’ says Koons, displacing authorial intention onto the experience of
reception as a kind of permissive, ultimately consensual narcissism, ‘your
desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image.’
58 Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Rubens Tiger Hunt), 2015

Who, or What, Does a Painting Reveal?

Koons famously skirts issues of intention. He rejects visions of mythic
inspiration associated with creativity; his concern is with art as an asset
class (a term used with regard to investments, indicating a group of financial
concerns with similar characteristics). The genesis of his work lies in
consumer-oriented market analysis. What will audiences find pleasurable?
What will they deem prestigious, collectable? Koons claims no critical
intent. Hedging his bets, he does offer backstories to works and provides
keys to their symbolism. To the first point, as a nine-year old boy he is said
to have painted and signed copies of works of old masters, which he sold in
his father’s furniture store. To the second, he has announced that his popular
balloon pieces (extending from the blown-up rabbit of his Inflatables series
from the late 1970s to his more recent oversized balloon dogs in mirror-
finished stainless steel) are about breath, and moreover, they are bracing
emblems of life and optimism.
Chloe Wise (b. 1990, Montreal, Canada) mocks the pretensions of capital
upon which Koons trades.[59] Her Bread Bag series (2014–present)
lampoons the language of wealth (think of the connotations of the
‘breadwinner’ and ‘dough’) with handbags acknowledging the perishability
of trends in art and fashion alike. Wise’s version of status ‘it-bags’ from the
likes of Chanel or Fendi are sculpted with plastic urethane and painted with
oil to look like pancakes or waffles; they are further embellished with chains
and dangling charms, plus the requisite luxury-brand logos. Her paintings of
herself and friends – shot with her phone to control the light – feature the
sitters in exaggerated poses. They offer up products (commonly fresh and
processed foodstuffs) on tables or pressed against exposed body parts. As in
17th-century Dutch still lifes, the transactional nature of these arrangements
portrays the sexualized bounty of accumulated wealth, none-too-subtly
showcased in one of Wise’s repeated iconographies: the vaginal slit of ripe
fruit pried open.

59 Chloe Wise, Lactose Tolerance, 2017

Invested in crafting a social media presence around this, Wise posts

studio selfies, self-constructed and wholly mediated images of the artist
posing before a matching painted self-portrait. Even artists who operate at
some remove from publicity systems remain implicated in them, if not always
to this degree. And artists are not alone. This might be Koons’s point, as he
encourages the arresting of each viewer’s visage, however transiently or
involuntarily, on his high-gloss surfaces. There, a viewer might seek to
memorialize the encounter, taking photographs of the work and their
reflection as a souvenir, living in perpetuity in the cloud. Spectator-driven
reception is very much in line with cultural tendencies in which consuming
and producing are intertwined: for many, experience counts only when
documented on social media. Notwithstanding Koons’s anecdote of his
precocious painterly exploits, this occurrence may work to drive a wedge
between authorial biography and communicated meaning; the one need not
causally determine the other. At the very least, it is clear that meaning is
remade through each individual’s appropriation of a work for their own
purpose, as Chapter 1 explores.
In terms of an artist’s self-presentation, when it is cleaved from lived
experience, anonymity can be recuperated for gain. Banksy (b. unknown) is
one of the best-known artists in the world, although his identity remains
shrouded in mystery. The artist paints in public sites but manages to stay out
of view. Above and beyond his facelessness, his most dumbfounding exploit
came in 2018 when he sold a version of his 2006 mural Girl with Balloon at
Sotheby’s auction house for a record price – and then immediately activated
its destruction with a hidden shredder built into the frame.[60] The process
stopped partway in what was apparently a technological malfunction. This
begs questions as to the motive behind this act of self-vandalism: it could
have been a gesture of reprimand directed at an overheated industry and its
theatrical sales spectacles, or it could simply have been an example of the
very same thing. There remains, too, the lingering query as to whether
Sotheby’s was involved in the stunt. Regardless, phoenix-like, the work is
now retitled Love Is In The Bin (2018), and memes of its canvas being
sliced into long ribbons were quickly used in ads for fast-food outlets and
spread across many other platforms.
60 Banksy, Love Is In The Bin, 2018

While this was an extreme case, many artists undermine their positions
within an entertainment-industry-like system that expects the artist to play a
certain role, often crudely gendered, or cast along lines of race or class. This
stereotyping is fabulously satirized in the work of Jayson Musson (b. 1977,
New York, NY), more commonly known as Hennessy Youngman. Donning
hip-hop apparel and speaking in clichés, Musson – as Youngman (a kind of
portmanteau from comedian Henny Youngman and Hennessy cognac) – hosts
an Internet series, Art Thoughtz (2010–present). In these episodes, he
introduces concepts relating to art practice. One such: ‘How To Be a
Successful Black Artist’. To this prompt, Youngman supplies the answer to
‘be angry’; in a kind of gallows humour, he also recommends working
oneself into this state by viewing videos of pit bulls fighting, the Rodney
King beating or photos of the brutally murdered Emmett Till in his coffin.
For others, the professed desire to separate self from representation does
not always secure public treatment on these grounds. Yoshitomo Nara’s (b.
1959, Hirosaki, Japan) work is frequently discussed vis-à-vis his life story –
as a product of his latchkey past – despite his use of kowa kawaii (‘creepy
cute’), a popular flat graphic style that has, in part, developed as a
counterpoint to traditional, refined aesthetics in Japanese culture.[61] Rather
than serving as a confessional tool, Nara uses this style to evoke childhood
innocence and a rather more diffuse and broadly relatable condition of
loneliness that is not tethered uniquely to his history. A divergence between
the meaning expressed by the artist and that applied by the viewer is also
evident in the work of Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972, Nairobi, Kenya), whose
fantastic hybrids – warped amalgams of plants and animals, pornography,
medical diagrams and black women – stand in for the human condition.[62]
Although the artist insists on separation between herself and the images she
creates, critics have wondered aloud whether they bespeak rather more
exactly her own experience of the African diaspora. Proponents of this
message may feel that it animates cultural needs, but to this, one might
counter whether, or how, the diminishing of humanist representation into
racial type achieves this.
61 Yoshitomo Nara, Miss Spring, 2012
62 Wangechi Mutu, Forbidden Fruit Picker, 2015

It is therefore understandable that artists do not always intend for their

works to be read as conduits of their own experience. Nedko Solakov (b.
1957, Cherven Briag, Bulgaria) takes issue with the fiction of transparency:
the belief that his pure presence is communicated directly through his work.
At Documenta 12 (2007), in Kassel, Germany, he exhibited Fears, produced
in the same year, a work consisting of a suite of drawings that presented
individual anxieties as depersonalized, even collective. In this way, he
refused to convey specific interiority (a connection between the psyche and a
drawn or painted surface). More emphatically than Nara or Mutu, Solakov
discouraged any interpretation of artistic identity as being exclusive to
personal history or psychological state. This message is furthered in The
Yellow Blob Story (2008), a wall painting completed by a gallery assistant
who was given control over its form – and this person, who remained
unnamed, was just as adept at performing the task as Solakov would have
been, upending the privilege of uniqueness.[63]
63 Nedko Solakov, Installation view of The Yellow Blob Story (from The Absent-Minded Man
project) at ‘Emotions’, Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2008

Continuing this disavowal of art as a purveyor of direct meaning, artists

have taken to exaggerating fictive dimensions of their work and undermining
superficial realism. This follows in the tradition of Adam McEwen (b. 1965,
London, UK), a former obituary writer for The Daily Telegraph who has
exhibited oversized reproductions of fake newspaper obituaries of famous
people (Bill Clinton and Nicole Kidman, as well as Koons) who are in fact
still alive at the time of the work’s production. This is used as a means to
question our knowledge and its sources, as well as what and how a painting
communicates. Is it showing us the ‘truth’ of the author or the viewer, or
neither?
Truth is a prevalent theme in the work of Peter Saul (b. 1934, San
Francisco, CA), known for his surrealist paintings skewering polite society
and the systemic inequities and gross violence on which it is built. In 2017,
he hung six new paintings at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, under the
banner of ‘Fake News’. The reference here is to the propagandistic pseudo-
information campaigns that roiled the United States in the 2016 election; in
its aftermath, the impact of these has extended to self-segregating
constituencies and post-truth politics. In some of the paintings, Donald Trump
is shown shooting firearms, and in others, he melds into a sun-baked lizard.
[64] If Saul turns a critical lens on fiction, focusing on it so as to subject the
unethical practice of spreading lies to fierce interrogation, Toyin Ojih
Odutola (b. 1985, Ife, Nigeria) approaches fiction as an authorial strategy to
produce an overarching fable.[65] Two Nigerian families, connected by
marriage, figure prominently in her pictorial chronicle. In telling invented
family sagas across generations, she claims for her own purposes 19th-
century portraits and historical representations of Blackness, expansively
narrating a past that never was.

64 Peter Saul, Quack-Quack Trump, 2017

65 Toyin Ojih Odutola, Wall of Ambassadors, 2017

Critical Expression
Identity constituted a central theme for Francesco Clemente (b. 1952, Naples,
Italy), a painter who matured through first-generation conceptual art but who
is best known for his leading role in the Transavanguardia, or Italian neo-
expressionist movement, of the 1980s.[66] His self-portraits lay personal
mythology and shifting identities onto bodies that are malleable, often
suggesting a state of becoming gendered or even human. Neo-expressionism
has been attacked for exploiting authorial emotion, yet even a work that is
heavy with nominally personal content, or painted in the gestural style long
associated with it, does not necessarily convey sentiment or authenticity.
66 Francesco Clemente, Self Portrait with and without the Mask, 2005

Through mechanical means and the incorporation of readymade materials

and processes, contemporary artists might dissociate themselves from
production process (think back to Chapter 1, and to Wade Guyton’s use of the
printer [p. 66]). In so doing they can reject preconceived composition, as
well as the role of the hand and technical skills that were once considered
fundamental to the medium. This indicates the different possibilities for
painting and its function within burgeoning economies and viewing sites. At
the same time, many enact comparable critiques using signs for expressivity
in painting – for example, thick, quick brushwork, as though the unconscious
were emerging automatically in the course of making – without believing or
hoping to convince their viewers that those strokes are necessarily a
calligraphic stand-in for their presence.
This distancing is evident in the work of Albert Oehlen (b. 1954,
Krefeld, Germany), who uses gestural painting for his sustained inquiry into
painterly conventions. Oehlen tried to make calculatingly bad paintings early
on in his career, abandoning the project once these works became
indistinguishable from the neo-expressionism he was trying to oppose. Begun
in 2008, his Fingermalerei (Finger Painting) jams together hackneyed
figuration and garish abstraction.[67] He applies paint to the canvas with his
bare hands. This means touch – that would-be guarantee of aura through
direct bodily and, by extension, psychic imprint – becomes the primary agent
in building the painting’s surface. Yet no less visible are the collaged
advertising posters, text fragments and printed, heavily pixelated digital
images that Oehlen often affixes to the white-primed canvases. On these, he
adds oil in drips, globs and murky stains, in a drab palette that recalls the
muddied colour of early American abstract expressionism. Careful to
separate himself from his predecessors’ professed sincerity, Oehlen executes
marks from the playbook of mid-century painting that look spontaneous but
are carefully planned. Jokey inclusions of slivers of bikini-clad girls, playing
cards or sausages, as well as letters or whole words, play against the painted
sections, preventing any sense of continuous tone.

67 Albert Oehlen, FM 38, 2011

A similar equivocation about the painterly act and what it communicates

underlies Charline von Heyl’s (b. 1960, Mainz, Germany) fusion of gestural
painting and conceptual art.[68] Her big, energetic works avoid a signature
style in favour of intense colour and pattern: splashes, stripes, diamonds,
barbed wire and orbs. Visually assertive, they are difficult to analyze,
particularly since she often reverses figure and ground, adding in
backgrounds at the end with a fine brush. Though they are built from sources
traversing literature and pop culture, philosophy and personal memory, the
final works are, above all, self-referential. These pictorial illusions are
based upon paradoxical spaces but nonetheless maintain the surface as a
physical thing. In von Heyl’s words, each becomes ‘a new image that stands
for itself as fact’.

68 Charline von Heyl, Corrido, 2018

Von Heyl frequently makes paintings with protrusions, spikes and

tentacles, and incorporates an image of Medusa, the monster from Greek
mythology with writhing venomous snakes in place of hair. This engagement
with Medusa, whose eyes could turn onlookers into stone, accords with von
Heyl’s refusal to reveal the work’s meaning. This owes much to her rejection
of the cult of celebrity promoted in 1980s Cologne by artists represented by
the gallerist Max Hetzler and, above all, by the jocular machismo of Martin
Kippenberger (1953–1997). Even as she kept hold of painting, she critiqued
it from within. As she later recalled: ‘Neo-Expressionism was seen as a
signifier of stupidity, and the antidote was irony, mostly in the form of really
stupid jokes. I liked the work, I liked the guys, but it wasn’t something that I
could, or wanted to, do. But I loved the idea that you could be aggressive and
cool via painting!’
While he may not have swayed von Heyl’s approach, Kippenberger had a
profound generational influence, and not just in Germany. He is best known
for lampooning the art establishment and its products through his alter-egos:
exaggerated caricatures of the artist, and fictional characters (including the
Spiderman, the Egg Man and the Frog). His wide-ranging practice
encompasses wonky sculptures of lampposts and a petrol station purchased
during a trip to Brazil in 1986. Lieber Maler, male mir... (Dear Painter, paint
for me...) (1981–83), his series of twelve paintings based on photographs,
chronicles the amblings of its subject, from a bar crawl through the streets of
Düsseldorf to a couch abandoned on a New York street corner. Kippenberger
executed this series in collaboration with a commercial artist (‘Mr. Werner’,
a Berlin-based film-poster painter), thus opposing the romance of the
painterly gesture that is characteristic of neo-expressionism and, in the
course, creating new parts for his protagonists (with Kippenberger himself
reprising the role of a movie star throughout the series). Revelling in excess
that contributed to his death from alcohol-related liver cancer at the age of
forty-four, Kippenberger believed that one’s life should be the basis for one’s
art, a credo that embraced self-invention as artistic lifestyle.
Günther Förg (1952–2013) is still recognized for the sensuous, rough-
hewn paintings of monochromatic bands on lead that he produced when the
predominantly male Hetzler cohort’s bad-boy antics were at their most
pronounced (Hetzler also bears the distinction of introducing Jeff Koons to
the German public).[69] Förg’s later abstract canvases are unencumbered by
his relation to this group but remain in tune with Kippenberger’s
preoccupation with selfhood in the 1980s. With their prominent signature
displayed in the top corner of each panel, these newer works investigate
identity, and, more significantly, in their riotous colour swatches and facture,
they embrace the elemental act of painting. Förg’s atomistic marks evoke the
activity of artmaking under the banner of the named maker as an arrangement
of colours and shapes. But, like Cy Twombly’s asemic scrawl (a wordless
open semantic form of writing), in which calligraphic skeins that could be
doodles or vines approximate but do not inhabit language, Förg’s marks
refuse to cohere into a legible composition or analogous statement.
69 Günther Förg, Untitled, 2008

Also inspired by Kippenberger, Cosima von Bonin (b. 1962, Mombasa,

Kenya) began her career by proclaiming herself ‘the artist’ among her circle
of friends. This act – a declaration that she has spent the last decades
fulfilling – manifests her interest in the social field that surrounds the artist
and her objects. In the 1990s, von Bonin collaborated with critics, musicians
and other artists, inviting them to contribute photos, paintings or
performances to her solo shows, and in a 2010 exhibition at the Kunsthaus
Bregenz, she hosted, among other things, a concert by Moritz von Oswald
and his Trio, and screened a series of films on the Austrian writer and poet
Thomas Bernhard. Just as Sigmar Polke (equally well known in this circle)
had famously refused to attend his own openings, insisting that his paintings
existed independently of him, von Bonin’s withdrawal into her peer group
and away from the public sphere constitutes a deliberate act of removal.
 Collaboration can be understood as implicitly challenging single
authorship, but von Bonin has also made artworks under her own name that
include used textiles. She sources printed fabrics, felt, dishcloths and wool
blankets to manufacture her so-called Lappen (rags) – collaged, painting-like
panels emblazoned with appropriated images – as well as to tailor costumes
for performances and to fabricate oversized plush toys. Yet she shies away
from using these enigmatic objects to directly articulate meaning, instead
allowing it to be conveyed through such framing mechanisms as text, social
norms and codes of display. A 2011 show at Friedrich Petzel, New York,
featured a sculpture of Pinocchio, a recurring character in her work,
positioned facing the canvas almost as if it is he who is the artist.[70] She
uses this as an emblem of exaggeration and deceit, themes that she then
enacted by subtitling a dark-fabric wall work with a fictional Web address.
70 Cosima von Bonin, Installation view of ‘The Juxtaposition of Nothings’, Petzel, New York, 2011

Kippenberger’s assistant, Michael Krebber (b. 1954, Cologne,

Germany), has commandeered components of other painters’ signature styles:
Polke’s readymade surfaces, Georg Baselitz’s inverted figures and even the
manufactured textiles favoured by von Bonin, to name a few. (In Krebber’s
case, patterned bed sheets and blankets are attached to stretchers without the
addition of paint, though at times they also provide the background for such
motifs as a prancing horse, evocative of German Romanticism.) A show in
London at Maureen Paley in 2007, ‘London Condom’, recalled Kippenberger
in its use of canvases produced by a professional sign writer. The uniformly
sized black-and-white panels were imprinted with text from a recent lecture,
‘Puberty in Painting’, and form part of a larger series first shown at Daniel
Buchholz, Cologne, under the title ‘Respekt Frischlinge’ (Respect
Fledglings), and at Chantal Crousel, Paris, as ‘Je suis la chaise’ (I am the
chair). Krebber titled the works in the official language of the country in
which they were shown.
Krebber turned to painting in the early 1990s, although these works are
only part of his heterogeneous output, which is often less about the nature of
personality than its institutional framing. Yet Krebber frequently withholds as
much as he produces. At the Secession, Vienna, in 2005, he disregarded
exhibition conventions and left a sizeable space vacant, thereby calling
attention to the architectural envelope that organizes the display of artworks.
(His titling of the aforementioned body of work in multiple languages to
reflect its transit through the international art system also might be considered
to achieve this.) In a text accompanying a 2010 show at Daniel Buchholz,
Berlin, Krebber further challenged custom:

“Miami City Ballet” [the Berlin show] shall be the first stop in, or the
downbeat of, a series of “new” exhibitions following a lengthy period of
inactivity.... I should like to perform in this exhibition that it doesn’t
matter what I do, whether it is good or bad, or that it conforms however to
whatever criteria—the fact that I call myself an artist is enough here.

Krebber courts failure by limiting production and shunning a consistent

approach. In producing anything at all, however, he opens himself to the
possibility of it being deemed good or bad – whether or not he cares one way
or the other (his reference to ‘performance’ vacillates). In ‘Miami City
Ballet’ he included a history painting, Das politische Bild (The Political
Picture) (1968/2010), which he made as a teenager and salvaged the year of
the show, meaning that it was created before Krebber became an ‘artist’.[71]
71 Michael Krebber, Installation view of Das politische Bild (1968/2010) (The Political Picture),
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2010

John M. Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva, Switzerland), whose vertiginously

eclectic practice has employed everything from flower-encircled scaffolding,
abstract painting, wallpaper, fluorescent lights, mirrors, silver Christmas
trees, limbs, stuffed animals, piles of coal and disco balls, has also exhibited
grade-school doodles, including a mountain landscape that he made at
fourteen.[72] Armleder was once involved in Fluxus, an international
movement inaugurated in the early 1960s, primarily in Germany and the
United States, that questioned the separation between art and life by
dramatizing the banalities of the everyday and elevating them to the level of
theatre. (This often took the form of performances or events, which were
categorically ephemeral, to challenge the monumentality of the art object –
especially painting.) He was also a founding member of the Groupe Ecart, a
collective based in Geneva, Switzerland.
72 John M. Armleder, Installation view at Almine Rech, Paris, 2018

Where Armleder has long accommodated all media without concession

to coherence of style, or distinctions of good and bad, Anselm Reyle (b.
1970, Tübingen, Germany) has spoken of his own rebellion against good
taste. He frames this as an Oedipal act against his parents, particularly his
mother, an amateur artist who painted abstract works in the mid-century
tachiste style, described by some as the European equivalent to the American
abstract expressionist movement. Known for his subversion of modernist
formalism, Reyle produces lavishly oversized, shiny, bright paintings
composed of abstract stripes and silver foil, as well as mixed-media
sculptures, neon installations and paintings alluding to other bad art. A recent
example of the latter depicted a forlorn Yorkshire terrier, in a reference to
Jeff Koons’s giant flowering topiary Puppy (1992).[73]
73 Anselm Reyle, Little Yorkshire, 2011

A rebellious spirit is also present in the work of Dan Colen (b. 1979,
Leonia, NJ), who in 2016 began, in a flippantly adolescent gesture, to stick
saliva-slick chewing gum to oversize canvases, on which these lumpen wads
swarm in viscerally colourful visual fields. In another rejection of
conventions of taste, André Butzer (b. 1973, Stuttgart, Germany) draws upon
Edvard Munch and Walt Disney to create garish landscapes populated with
grotesque characters: manifestations of his ‘science fiction expressionism’.
[74] Then there is The Museum of Bad Art, founded in 1994, which collects
and showcases amateur art both online and in its Boston galleries: the
criteria for inclusion is that these works have ‘a special quality that sets them
apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent’.
74 André Butzer, Blauer Schlumpf (Blue Smurf), 2009

The moniker originally derives from a 1978 show at the New Museum,
New York, ‘“Bad” Painting’ – curated by Marcia Tucker, founder of the
museum – and was more recently revived in the 2008 exhibition ‘Bad
Painting, Good Art’, held at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. The
Vienna show brought together over twenty artists, including Francis Picabia,
René Magritte and Asger Jorn, who had rejected the assumption of good taste
decades earlier. Tucker argued that despite the show’s name, the exhibited
works were, in fact, good painting: they simply thwarted conventional taste
by mixing high and low references and savouring a preference for irreverent
content. The work stopped short of conveying orthodoxies, whether the
standards of academic painting in the West – with values that stem from
academic training in Europe and consequently the United States, such as the
relationship between colour and contour, and the creation of space – or the
more immediate classicizing tendencies of minimalism; it was faux-naive,
but neither subservient nor deliberately bad (like Oehlen’s efforts at aping
neo-expressionism, or Krebber and Armleder’s more catholic assaults).
Ultimately, taking up a disparaged style could provide the freedom to
dismantle traditional value systems.
Objects under consideration for qualification as ‘bad painting’ are not
consistent in type, as the terms that are used – kitsch, vernacular, amateur –
and their application change over time and even within a single situation, as
seen in the Vienna show above. Mutability of taste – bad bad paintings as
opposed to good bad paintings – became the subject of Thrift Store
Paintings by Jim Shaw (b. 1952, Midland, MI), a curatorial project-cum-
artwork begun in 1990, which championed the outmoded.[75] Shaw scoured
flea markets and junk shops for paintings suitable for his ersatz pantheon of
art. Already rejected – hence their being lost to second-hand shops and yard
sales – these paintings reveal the ephemeral predilections of American
middle-class taste, as well as painting as folk art. While Shaw, a
consummate insider, has also faked his own thrift-store paintings, most of his
specimens were initially made without awareness of the legitimizing
institutions and standards that his collection explicitly set out to question.

75 Jim Shaw, Oist Children Portrait (Girl & Dog), 2011

The American artist Mike Kelley (1954–2012) also displayed an

irreverence that did not disqualify sincerity. Eschewing easy condescension,
Kelley preserved the meaning of the wretched, outdated or discarded, using
figurines and mass-cultural materials that referenced his blue-collar Detroit
childhood. Shaw and Kelley were friends (both were members of the 1970s
band Destroy All Monsters, together with another University of Michigan art
student, Lynn Rovner, and filmmaker Cary Loren); Shaw made down-market
excursions for cast-off stuffed animals and handmade throw blankets to
populate Kelley’s found-object assemblages. Although much of his work took
the form of performances, installations and films, Kelley returned many times
to monochrome painting. His Timeless Paintings (1995) reveal an interest in
mid-century imagery, which he extended a decade later in a denunciation of
the banal brutalities of family life and the social landscape. A 2009 show at
Gagosian Gallery, New York, called ‘Horizontal Tracking Shots’, comprised
substantial, multi-part polychromatic panels that evoke television colour bars
while also looking and functioning like a stage set (thus breaking down the
boundaries between supposedly high and low art).[76] These works
seemingly avoided cultural references, but behind the facade of one
freestanding panel, three monitors alternated monochrome screens showing
videos depicting ungainly and often merciless childhood footage found on
YouTube. Like a return of the repressed, the work remains tied to pop
culture.

76 Mike Kelley, Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, 2009
 In his challenge to normative values, Kelley deconstructs notions that
established compositional structures are inherently ‘better’ or more correct,
and that systems of representation are infallible or apolitical. Something
similar might be said of Carroll Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven, CT), whose
work – from early cartoon-like paintings on wood veneer to later raunchy
compositions of figures with phallic noses and gaping orifices – contrasts the
cloying colours of pop with the baseness of its subjects.[77] Differently
engaged in contesting the politics of representation and the authority that
underpins it, Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) paints luscious canvases
and makes stop-action animations (in which a camera records still, painted
images sequentially, wiped and created, frame by frame) depicting hirsute,
barely clad men who objectify themselves and each other and engage in
rituals of torture and idolatry.[78] Oleaginous paint slips in and out of
coherence as material and the bodily fluids it depicts, be that urine, faeces or
semen. Paintings shown at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, collected
under the heading ‘Shit Moms’ (2019), conjure female bodies smeared in, or
made of, paint evocative of excrement. They are manipulated by small
children in tableaus that recall the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who sculpted
and fell in love with a statue of a woman, which then dramatically came to
life – a tale that is here scatologically recast.
77 Carroll Dunham, (Hers) Night and Day #1, 2009
78 Tala Madani, Projections, 2015

The Intentionality of Style

There are plenty of artists working in local traditions who have not been
assimilated into a ‘global’ art system: the kinds of artists Miguel Calderón
employed to paint his pictures, as discussed in Chapter 1 (p. 33), or whom
Jim Shaw discovered after they were gone (p. 94). For Fruit and Other
Things, a project for the 2018 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, Lenka Clayton (b. 1977, Belper, UK) and Jon Rubin (b. 1963,
Philadelphia, PA) recalled artists lost to history in a different way.[79]
Taking archival records of paintings submitted for the open calls that
characterized the International between 1896 and 1931, they compiled a list
of some 10,632 rejections, their records detailing artists’ names as well as
works’ titles and dates. The artists hired sign painters to sit at facing easels
in the gallery, where they painted every title in alphabetical order, before
drying each painting on the adjacent walls. There they formed a horizon of
language that conjured vistas for which no visual correlate survives.
79 Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin, Fruit and Other Things, 2018

If bad painting is good painting so long as the viewer knows that the artist
knows the difference, what happens in cases in which the artist’s attitude, or
critical stance, cannot be presumed? This might happen for many reasons,
chief among which is cultural difference. However vital cities including
New York, Berlin, London or Beijing might be, there has been a deep
structural change regarding the nature of borders, travel and the global
economy. This renders the model of a centre, or even multiple centres, all the
more contingent, and the artwork produced in any one of them harder to
gauge on its own terms – and then there is the matter of how the same work
communicates differently to different audiences.
Although the fractured planes and off-kilter geometries of murals by
Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966, Enugu, Nigeria) seem non-objective, they often
reference the textiles, clothing and landscape of his native Nigeria. Equalizer
(2007), a site-specific project that inaugurated the Project Space at the
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, takes the interactions of colours and
shapes as the basis for what Odita calls a conceptual journey, based on the
transatlantic slave trade and more recent waves of emigration from Africa to
the Americas.[80]

80 Odili Donald Odita, Installation view of Equalizer, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2007–
8

Imran Qureshi (b. 1972, Hyderabad, Pakistan) takes substantial public

spaces – the courtyard of Beit Al Serkal for the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, a
former dry dock on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour for the 2012 Sydney
Biennial and the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, for a 2013
installation – as ground for the application of paint in often blooming coverts.
[81] Qureshi studied at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, a
school founded in the 19th century by Lockwood Kipling, father of The
Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling, to train local artists. There Qureshi
was steeped in miniature painting, which he has used as a means to comment
on contemporary politics in the region. Both the artist’s miniature and large-
scale painting projects respond to the fragility of life in Pakistan, which
remains subject to conflict between different religious and ethnic groups,
particularly militant Sunnis and Shiites. Qureshi’s use of paint the colour of
dried blood, applied in an ornamental, flowering pattern, splashed or
allowed to seep in viscous pools, might be seen as a response to the cruelty
of everyday life, one that differs in meaning relative to the site of its display
across different continents and incommensurable milieus.

81 Imran Qureshi, Installation view of They Shimmer Still, 18th Biennale of Sydney, 2012

The highly technical Indian and Persian miniature painting at the National
College of Arts in Lahore also formed the foundation of the studies of
Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan), and her subsequent work,
which juxtaposes Hindu and Muslim iconography, and has included
performances exploring issues of cultural typology and dislocation.[82] (One
such piece entailed Sikander wearing a veil in public, something that she did
not do prior to living in the US.) In her paintings, murals, digital animations
and installations – like that exhibited in the 2013 Sharjah Biennial in the
United Arab Emirates, based on the silhouettes formed by the stylized
hairstyle of worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna – Sikander emphasizes the
effects of wider ideological systems, whether the imperial legacy bequeathed
to a region or the inherited history of an art form.
82 Shahzia Sikander, Still from Disruption as Rapture, 2016

Artists can use elements of style and media to refer to their individual
contexts, giving the viewer clues as to how the works should be interpreted.
The Indian artist Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London, UK) makes glorious
abstractions out of, and covers sculptural forms with, a multitude of discrete
bindis (the decorative forehead dots worn by women in South Asian culture),
as signs for the bodies to which they refer.[83] Playing a game of double
signification, they also knowingly reframe a tradition of autonomous
geometric abstraction: whereas this style once referred only to itself, Kher’s
use of these materials introduces another kind of content, pointing elsewhere,
beyond the frame. In a different marriage of media and content, Meena Hasan
(b. 1987, New York, NY) uses acrylic on handmade Khadi paper sourced on
trips to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where her family is from, to paint the vibrant
petals of marigolds – flowers that are closely associated with weddings in
Bangladesh – and subjects including a series of women depicted from close
range, at the nape of their necks.[84] The use of Khadi paper relates to the
textile traditions of that country: the paper is made of recycled cotton rag,
with a soft, absorbent texture and thick weight.

83 Bharti Kher, Blind matter, dark night, 2017

84 Meena Hasan, Wedding Marigold 2, 2018

Although so many of the artists discussed earlier in the chapter

deliberately hamper their facility, skill – based on learning particular ways
of thinking and making – is still taught and prized at schools around the
world, from Lahore to Boston. Benjamín Domínguez (b. 1942, Ciudad
Jiménez, Mexico), for one, has spent a long and noteworthy career using
Renaissance painting techniques to depict the contemporary human body.[85]
Moreover, the continuity of style can help an artist to cater to an international
market; highly motivated uses of past techniques can allow an artist to retain
a deep connection to a local history and to the history of modern and
contemporary art. Through an inventive approach to the calligraphy in which
he was classically trained, and by experimenting with contemporary graphic
design, Mohammad Ehsai (b. 1939, Qazvin, Iran) manipulates Islamic texts
and script into visual motifs that resonate with Shi’i symbolism and Western
abstraction: notations can turn into a dense and almost illegible thicket of
form.[86]
85 Benjamín Domínguez, El Sueño II, 2013
86 Mohammad Ehsai, Loving Whisper, 1973–2008, 2008

The US-based artist Tsherin Sherpa (b. 1968, Kathmandu, Nepal) studied
traditional Buddhist thangka painting (tools for meditations and components
of religious festivals, thangka paintings customarily depict Buddhist motifs
such as the Wheel of Life, mandalas and images of the Buddha and other
deities) under the guidance of his father, Master Urgen Dorje, a renowned
artist from Ngyalam, Tibet.[87] Although he went on to paint monastery
murals in Nepal, Sherpa’s work now depicts less-obvious subjects given this
pedigree: spirits transplanted to new-age Buddhist centres in California. In
contrast, Dedron (b. 1976, Lhasa, Tibet) remains in Lhasa, where she was
born and trained, and preserves the structure and sometimes the iconography
of traditional Tibetan art while rejecting its aesthetics, which she revises
according to modernist principles.[88]
87 Tsherin Sherpa, Peace Out, 2013
88 Dedron, Down below the Snow Mountain, 2009

Lest this wielding of skill as a vehicle for preserving and critiquing

traditional cultural values be seen as only happening relative to non-Western
histories of form and practice, Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962, Philadelphia, PA),
John Currin (b. 1962, Boulder, CO) and Will Cotton (b. 1965, Melrose, MA)
are also invested in upholding painting as a site of expertise, albeit for
entirely different reasons. Though capable of painting photorealistically, they
tend to distort reality, mixing technical facility with risqué subject matter. But
their facility in creating compositions, modelling forms or building up glazes
confuses when used to depict figures with bulbous protrusions, nudes
fondling one another or sugary landscapes, and raises the question – also
broached by Shaw and Kelley, Dunham and Madani – of whether
transgressions of taste are, in some parts of the world, more disturbing than
sexual deviation.
Yuskavage’s coupling of technical mastery with anatomical boldness
results in pneumatic female nudes, who, despite their over-developed breasts
and swollen abdomens, resemble pubescent, doe-eyed children.[89]
Carefree in their self-absorption – so total that they grope themselves
unselfconsciously or spread their legs with abandon – her characters inhabit
homey interiors or quixotic theatrical landscapes. But for all Yuskavage’s
attention to detail, the scenes do not resolve within the frame; they point
elsewhere, to the long history of representation of the female figure in art –
so often fixed as saint or sinner, goddess or witch – and to the viewing
subject, whom she provokes into imposing or refusing moral judgment.
Implicit in her portrayals is the issue of whether making women available to
the gaze promotes lasciviousness, and whether spectators become complicit
in this, even if they are not misogynistic.

89 Lisa Yuskavage, PieFace, 2008

 Yuskavage’s classmate at Yale University, John Currin, shares her
sympathy for misshapen physiognomy, though his strangely proportioned
figures are more obviously deformed by a skewed formalism – the attempt to
draw badly but paint perfectly – rather than just a cruel act of nature.[90]
This obtains despite his use of his own face and body as well as live models
to flesh out scenarios taken from pin-ups, mid-century films, stock-photo
catalogues and Internet porn sites. His early works – anodyne yearbook-style
faces that double as veiled self-portraits, sick girls languishing in bed,
women with water-balloon breasts barely contained by tight sweaters,
posing with or without older male companions – raised objections that have
been partly quelled by Currin’s mastery of paint and flaunting of art-
historical sources: old master and mannerist works were particularly
essential to him, as were those by Gustave Courbet and Norman Rockwell,
among countless others.

90 John Currin, Hot Pants, 2010

 Currin’s first show in 1992 elicited a now-infamous review in the
Village Voice, urging readers to boycott it on account of its sexism. His
exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2006, only furthered the cause
when he titled several paintings of group intercourse after Northern European
cities – Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Malmö – designating the nationality of the
nudes. He has since pulled back from these prurient fantasies. In the vein of
some of his paintings from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which depict such
subjects as women preparing a Thanksgiving turkey and men making pasta,
he has revisited the theme of bourgeois satire.
In 2009, Will Cotton produced a number of paintings based on Thomas
Cole’s epic cycle of five allegorical landscapes, The Course of Empire
(1833–36), a morality tale that visually instructs that all empires, no matter
how powerful, will necessarily fall. And yet his work has otherwise
disregarded such portentous overtones, tending rather to trumpet a kind of
amorality unburdened by affairs of state. In 1996 he built an arrangement of
foodstuffs in his studio, from which he constructed excessive painted worlds
of molten chocolate, mountains of cake, peppermint hedges and lollipop
trees. This cornucopia of gastronomic desire was conflated with other fleshly
pleasures through his introduction of lanky female models, sometimes posing
supine, like languid salon nudes, on cotton-candy clouds. Because the items
decay so quickly, Cotton bases his works on digital videos of maquettes.[91]
He has since expanded this culinary conceit, producing saccharine portraits
of women wearing meringue and other candy headdresses. Cotton names the
pop singer Katy Perry as a muse; he illustrated her 2010 album Teenage
Dream, and also served as artistic director for the music video of the lead
single from the album, California Gurls.
91 Will Cotton, Cotton Candy Cloud, 2004

A ‘let them eat cake’ mentality pervades this work and aids its
circulation as a luxury good of unapologetic frivolity. Having said this, in
comparison to some works of schlocky opulence – take Jeff Koons’s
seventeen sculptures scattered around the lavish rooms and gardens of the
Château de Versailles in 2008, including a red aluminium lobster hanging
alongside a crystal chandelier in the Mars Salon – Cotton’s ‘bad’ paintings
are decidedly circumspect. Questions of intent, however, registered
differently later that same year, after the collapse of the financial system in
2008 and the market corrections within the art world that left many artists in
a very different financial position than they had been in just months before.
The 2009 recession precipitated a comprehensive accounting of which art
matters beyond its cost and why. The market – itself an abstraction
personalized, the same being true of corporations – became a prime target,
albeit a moving one, in relation to which one might know the price of
everything and the value of nothing.
Still, both before and after 2008, the idea that an artist should be
committed to the work above all else – even if it ultimately (and maybe
always inevitably) was marketed and traded as a commodity – remained key
to the public conception of the artist as individual creator (a consideration
with which this chapter began in underscoring the romance of the serious,
market-averse maker in The Price of Everything [p. 74], as a hedge against
market manipulation). It also remained central to the respect artists might
have for their peers, particularly again in the 2010s as the art market boomed
back. After a 2007 sale at Sotheby’s, New York, of White Canoe (1990–91)
by Peter Doig (b. 1959, Edinburgh, UK) – a painter of dreamlike landscapes
that appear suspended in time, and figurative images that often dissolve into
abstract motifs – for $11,300,000, curator Paul Schimmel exclaimed that
Doig went from being ‘a hero to other painters to a poster child of the
excesses of the market’. This was then the auction record for a living
European artist, but it has since been topped many times over, and plenty of
careers have come and gone in collectors’ speculative games of buying and
dumping the art of emerging talent after inflating and then crashing their sales
records.
Consequently, questions of psychological depth registered in a painting,
and the intentionality or genuineness behind them, still matter – maybe even
more in the face of uncertainties in the world outside the aesthetic. To cite
just one notable example, the writing around the British artist Merlin James
(b. 1960, Cardiff, UK), known for his historical-genre paintings that
frequently picture domestic architecture and flotsam from the past, turns on
the matter of attitude.[92] Is the work a return to a shop-worn humanism or an
ironic critique of this very tradition? The distinction between humanism and
critique matters because irony positions many artists as ‘critical’, in
opposition to the market and its excesses.
92 Merlin James, Two Poplar Trees, 2009–11

This means that irony becomes an act of earnestness and protest. Until it
doesn’t. As with the case of Doig, the market for Christopher Wool’s (b.
1955, Chicago, IL) sign-like paintings – black-and-white compositions
featuring blocky, stenciled words shorn of punctuation (SELLTHE/HOUSE
S/ELLTHEC/AR SELL/THEKIDS) and sometimes vowels (TRBL) – and
non-representational paintings exploded in 2014, helped by a Guggenheim
Museum, New York, retrospective and a ruthlessly promoted Christie’s Post-
War and Contemporary curated evening sale titled ‘If I Live I’ll See You
Tuesday’. Framed in its press materials as ‘encapsulate[ing] the gritty,
underbelly-esque side of contemporary art’, the sale was marketed with a
video featuring a professional skateboarder riding through the backrooms of
the auction house, past staff and the forthcoming lots, accompanied by the
soundtrack of ‘Sail’ by Awolnation. To critics he presented a target, or at
minimum, a cautionary tale: symbols of the rebel fuel the capitalist machine,
after all.
To be sure, one might as well take a more aggressive, oppositional stance
out of a keen entrepreneurial motive, to return to the marketing lessons of the
YBAs (p. 73). To the point of taboo-breaking publicity stunts, witness the
brutal, expressive paintings and installation works of Bjarne Melgaard (b.
1967, Sydney, Australia). Take, for example, his 2012 show ‘IDEAL POLE’
at Ramiken Crucible, New York, which contained live tiger cubs and art
made by psychiatric patients at Bellevue Hospital – to say nothing of his
racist polyvinyl sculpture of a contorted black woman under a chair, stiletto-
adorned feet raised upward, photographed for public consumption for a Buro
24/7 photo shoot with prominent Russian collector Dasha Zhukova gamely
perched atop it.[93]

93 Bjarne Melgaard, Installation view of ‘IDEAL POLE’, Ramiken Crucible, New York, 2012

The imagery was in part appropriated from the sculptor Allen Jones, a
British pop artist whose engagement with explicit sexual imagery and fetish
furniture used fiberglass bodies as domestic props, but Melgaard darkened
the mannequins for reasons that remain unclear. Zhukova, however, offered in
a public reckoning that the chair’s ‘use in [the] photo shoot is regrettable as it
took the artwork totally out of its intended context, particularly given that
Buro 24/7’s release of the article coincided with the important celebration of
the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’ To say the very least,
this raises questions about prevailing conditions of mobility and access,
meaning and the evolving authoring of content. Melgaard and his gallerist,
Gavin Brown, later attempted to wrest control of the story, offering a
statement that included the troubling sentiment ‘that Melgaard has nothing left
to portray but society in its utter decay’. Attitude may be the primary motive
behind a work, then, for better or worse – and it may be used to excuse
decisions regarding production, display and publicity. It is to these factors
that we turn in the following chapter, which examines how paintings are
made, as well as the paths they trace from that point on: how they move from
studios into galleries and magazines, onto servers and phones, through chains
of gossip and discourse, and between white walls, sales floors and cold-
storage racks.
Chapter 3
Production and Distribution

In 1983, David Hammons (b. 1943, Springfield, IL) mounted his Bliz-aard
Ball Sale, notoriously setting up shop as a vendor in downtown Manhattan,
using the street – not the gallery – to sell fast-melting snowballs priced
according to size. In a gesture mocking the covetousness of the collector and
undermining the longevity of the object, the making of the work was
coincident with its unmaking, but also with its exhibition and sale. In the
years since, artists have continued to take on the institutions of art as a
subject of their work, especially those institutions that present art (e.g.
museums and galleries, far-flung and rapidly proliferating biennials and
fairs), in a practice called institutional critique (also addressed in Chapter
6). As these institutions shift in nature and geography, so too do the ranges of
responses to them.
This chapter looks at how art has been produced, exhibited and sold in
the contemporary period, and further, how these conditions become structural
aspects of the art that is created within them. Not all artists picture such
connections in their paintings, though through education and networking,
technology and professionalization, many more internalize institutional
orders. Production anticipates distribution, and so too does distribution pre-
emptively qualify production. This means that an artist might decide from the
outset to compose a painting vertically rather than horizontally to fit the given
dimensions of a smartphone or tablet, and to imagine that same painting as
being, once completed, encountered by most viewers as a high-resolution
photograph backlit on a screen, rather than seen as a physical object in a
room. An artist might decide not to make a painting in a studio, but instead to
fabricate it on-site in an effort to minimize crating fees and insurance costs
across international borders, or to make of that labour an attention-grabbing,
performance-based event. Or the artist might delegate this labour to other
assistants in a separation of concept and execution common to the creation of
architecture. Or the artist might decide not to make work at all, for a time and
a purpose – or, inversely, to flood the market, to make entirely too much.
To say this differently, some artists welcome the behemoth that is the art-
industrial complex, exploiting its potential for large-scale fabrication and
vast channels of dissemination; others resist its demands, citing as the basis
of their critique a system that sees paintings as inert luxury goods. (This now-
familiar line of argument might be regarded as still another moment in a
succession of the debates around painting as commodity – so lively since the
1980s – that are broached in the Introduction and Chapter 1.) Olivier Mosset
(b. 1944, Bern, Switzerland) is committed to questioning the compromised
nature of painting, and does so neither by deliberately exacerbating
conditions, exactly, nor by ceasing production, but by continuing to paint.
Through his affiliation with B.M.P.T., a group of conceptually driven
painters formed in Paris in the 1960s, Mosset and his peers – Daniel Buren,
Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni (their initials are reflected in the
collective initialism) – sought to undermine authorship by signing one
another’s works and repeating compositions. Since then, Mosset has turned
to monochromes on shaped canvases, which implicitly comment on circuits
of production and exchange. A show at Leo Koenig Gallery, New York, in
2011, brought together forty identically sized black paintings arranged in a
grid.[94] Coated with a rubberized polymer commonly used for truck-bed
linings, the canvases absorbed and reflected ambient light, depending on the
position of the viewer. Mosset related these works to the black hole of the art
market, which sucks in everything around it.
94 Olivier Mosset, Installation view of Untitled (2010), Leo Koenig Gallery, New York, 2011

The Studio as Commercial Workspace

If Mosset embodies one critical position relative to the art market, Damien
Hirst (b. 1965, Bristol, UK) contrarily embraces another: he manipulates its
free-flowing capital, seeing in this act the potential to use the market as a
medium in itself. He has remained at the pinnacle of Brit-art notoriety since
the debut of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
Living (1991), mentioned at the outset of Chapter 2 (p. 73). The work was
widely parodied at the time by the Stuckists, an international group founded
to promote figurative art (they called fraud on the shark, noting that East
London electrician Eddie Saunders exhibited a preserved shark on a wall in
his J. D. Electrical Supplies shop in London in 1989), and it still provokes
hostility. For one, the keen social observer I Nyoman Masriadi (b. 1973,
Gianyar, Bali), best known for painting black-skinned figures with savage
acuity, portrayed Hirst’s shark emerging readymade from a digital file, as an
object of scorn.[95] Nevertheless, reclaiming antagonism to his work has
become a pattern for Hirst, and a means for promotion. It has also led to
greater market saturation inside and outside of the art world. Hirst went on to
install a new rendition with a pair of two floating sharks, Winner/Loser
(2018), at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the ‘Empathy
Suite’.[96] His design for the suite boasts, among other luxurious features, a
cantilevered tub that overlooks the Strip. On opening in 2019, it was
available to invitees with over $1,000,000 in credit at the resort, or to the
general public for a cool $100,000 a night.

95 I Nyoman Masriadi, Masriadi Presents – Attack from Website, 2009

96 Damien Hirst, Winner/Loser, 2018

Typifying Hirst’s engagement with the art market, in 2007 he financed and
created an extravagantly priced, platinum-cast, diamond-encrusted skull with
human teeth, For the Love of God, which became an instant icon of the
artist’s moxie – and which he may or may not have bought back himself in a
widely publicized sale to an anonymous investment group that yielded
$100,000,000. In September 2008, in an event entitled ‘Beautiful Inside My
Head Forever’ held at Sotheby’s, London, Hirst auctioned off 223 works
finished within the previous two years, for an astonishing $200,000,000. The
artist’s staging of the sale was a watershed, made even more remarkable by
unforeseen circumstances – by chance, the event coincided with the collapse
of world financial markets mentioned in Chapter 2 – and was also notable
for its management: collection highlights were sent to such outposts as the
Hamptons and New Delhi, and videos were posted on YouTube, in a bid to
bypass dealers and bring the work directly to the sales floor.
Despite the disapprobation that many expressed at the time, these
strategies have become commonplace, with Hirst’s disruption laying the
ground for emergent online auctions, only some of which were tied to
established auction houses or commercial galleries. In fact, businesses at
varying levels are migrating online, using everything from eBay to Instagram
as sales platforms, in an attempt to attract younger buyers and familiarize the
activity of purchasing art at all price points to ever-expanding demographics.
Hirst has long outsourced the assembly of his work and has been frank
about his commercial procedures, even publicly commending employees
responsible for his Spot Paintings, bright circles on white backgrounds; he
also redesigned his website in 2012 to include live footage of his team
making new art during business hours.[97] In 2009, at the Pinchuk Art
Foundation in Kiev, and then the Wallace Collection, London, Hirst exhibited
still lifes and landscapes that he claimed to have painted himself. So total has
been his reliance on others to make his work that critics decried this
proposition as a publicity gambit, or, more generously, considered the return
to his own hand as a bid for atonement. The same dynamic played out almost
a decade later in 2018, when he launched a new series of pointillist daubs,
called the Veil Paintings, at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. The gallery
material and the artist’s own social media postings claimed that this
represented another return to painting by his own hand – what he described
in the press release as the ‘human element’ – but questions on this count
emerged from the moment the show opened. Also troubling was the fact that
the paintings, with their messier, more ‘expressive’ spots, look remarkably
akin to the pulsating fields of overlapping colour painted by Emily Kame
Kngwarreye (1910–1996) and other female Aboriginal artists working near
Alice Springs, Australia: precedents, even flat-out appropriated sources, that
Hirst did not name and claimed not to know of when the story broke.[98]
97 Damien Hirst, Oleandrin, 2010
98 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ntange Dreaming, 1989

Though extreme, Hirst is broadly representative in his use of assistants to

execute his paintings. Few contemporary artists manufacture their own work
from start to finish, and those who can afford to do so employ other artists
who need day jobs to stretch, prepare or even – following their directions –
execute canvases, and to manage their studios. In one such example, Bernard
Frize’s (b. 1954, Saint-Mandé, France) bright geometric paintings are
produced with assistants, among whom he divides the necessary tasks: they
manoeuvre painting implements together across the work’s surface in an
integrated choreography.[99] The paintings are based on systems that Frize
establishes in advance, and achieved with concocted tools and techniques,
like bundling brushes of different sizes together and using them to interweave
colours as the tips glide across a thick, smooth layer of resin. Frize’s
position serves as a reminder that deconstructing authorship does not
preclude physical acts of labour.

99 Bernard Frize, Ledz, 2018

Even given the customary practice of distributing labour, however,

Takashi Murakami (b. 1962, Tokyo, Japan), who has created an entire
corporation with a global phalanx of assistants, is noteworthy.[100] The
assistants make the work and more broadly help him to maintain his brand
identity: a hyper-stylized mix of modern pop, contemporary anime and manga
(respectively, an animation style and a genre of comic books, both originating
in Japan), which also reflects his command of traditional Japanese art
(Murakami has a PhD in Nihonga painting – modern ‘Japanese-style
paintings’ based on traditional techniques and conventions, and differentiated
from Western oil painting – from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and
Music). As Murakami relayed the early stages of the corporation:
100 Takashi Murakami, 727–727, 2006

At the time [after founding Hiropon Factory in 1996], the “factory” was
nothing more than a small workshop-like group of people assisting me with
my sculptures and paintings.... As I took on new projects, the scale of my
production grew, and by 2001, when I had a solo show at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the Hiropon Factory had grown into a
professional art production and management organization. That same year
I registered the company officially as “Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.” To this day it
has developed into an internationally recognized, large-scale art
production and artist management corporation, employing over 100 people
in its offices, studios, and gallery spaces in Tokyo, Saitama, and Long
Island City, New York, as well as an animation studio in Hokkaido and an
upcoming gallery space in Taipei, Taiwan.

Through Kaikai Kiki, Murakami also manages the careers of younger artists,
like Aya Takano (b. 1976, Saitama, Japan), who re-imagines 1970s shōjo
manga, a genre of Japanese comics marketed to girls, as empowering
fantasies of release from social burdens of the contemporary city.[101]
Additionally, Murakami curates exhibitions promoting Japanese art and
organizes an art fair in Tokyo named GEISAI. One lavish instalment of the
fair, in 2008, occurred the day before the aforementioned Hirst sale took
place and the bubble burst; subsequent iterations have been constrained by
more modest budgets.

101 Aya Takano, All Was Light, 2012

Murakami’s 2007–8 retrospective ‘©MURAKAMI’ at the Los Angeles

Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brooklyn Museum, New York, featured
a functional Louis Vuitton boutique within the exhibition space. This sold
handbags and merchandise emblazoned with logos that the artist redesigned
for the luxury-goods company: jellyfish eyes, red cherry clusters and cherry
blossoms alternated with the requisite ‘LV’ insignia in limited-edition
patterns commissioned by the fashion designer Marc Jacobs. These appeared
on accessories and wall panels, stretched like paintings. Lower-end items,
such as cheerful flower-head plush toys, pillows and eraser heads, were
available in the gift shop, while figurines and diminutive Kaikai Kiki goods
in display cases were included in the curatorial content. This blurring of art
and commerce led some critics to damn the concept for apparently mocking
high culture. Others, more favourably, compared Murakami’s varied goods to
the painted screens, ceramics and lacquer boxes that Japanese artists
historically held in high esteem and often created alongside other facets of
their creative practice. In this way, he could be said to use the performance
of his national identity as a positive means of differentiation.
Murakami is hardly alone in targeting a wide range of consumers by
providing products at different price points, or in embracing fashion. His
merchandise could be seen as an exuberant reframing of the Bauhaus
philosophy of mass-producing design. Moreover, his collaboration with
Louis Vuitton is not unique: the company’s Spring 2008 runway show
featured supermodels dressed as nurses from Richard Prince paintings,
sporting handbags emblazoned with the paint streaks and cartoon vignettes
that feature in the American artist’s joke works; in 2012 it unveiled its Yayoi
Kusama collection of polka-dot-covered garments and bags; and Cindy
Sherman, the Chapman brothers (Jake and Dinos) and others have also
collaborated.[102] Yet, like Hirst, Murakami’s engagement with commercial
enterprise is pervasive and self-referential; he constantly issues editions and
maquettes, and sells small panels and preparatory drawings to lure new
buyers.
102 Louis Vuitton and Richard Prince, runway show ‘Nurses’, Paris Fashion Week, October 2007

Recognizing the role of his work within these broader economies,

Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles, CA) lent a painting to Art Production
Fund’s 2011 collaboration with New York City taxicabs, for use as
advertising on their vehicles. In the vein of Murakami, Wiley has kept studios
around the world – the US, China and Senegal – and has executed three-
quarter-length portraits of young men, his signature works, for corporate
clients. He began his career by portraying tracksuit-wearing African
American men he encountered on the street, depicting them in poses adopted
from European paintings. As an illustration of the workings of the global
network, Wiley has shifted from using his primary surroundings as his source
of subject matter and site of production to using sitters from different
continents and making paintings in various locations. This is exemplified in
the ongoing series The World Stage, begun in 2007, which incorporates youth
from Nigeria, Senegal, Brazil, China, India, Sri Lanka and Israel. His wide
travels ultimately led to his 2019 announcement that he was launching a
multidisciplinary artist-in-residency programme, Black Rock Senegal in
Dakar, claiming a desire for a more personal means of connecting to West
Africa.
Wiley addresses skin colour and local details of costume and background
(take his China paintings, which reference propaganda posters from the
Cultural Revolution, or his Israeli subjects – Ethiopian and native-born Jews
and Arab Israelis – whom he encircles with intricate patterns inspired by
folk paper-cuts and ceremonial art). The result of his systematic approach
across subject matter is one of stylistic sameness penetrated by the intensity
of the sitter’s personality. This was forcefully evident when Wiley unveiled a
presidential portrait of Barack Obama at The National Portrait Gallery,
Washington, D.C., in 2018, alongside Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus,
GA), who debuted a monumental depiction of Michelle Obama.[103] Wiley
depicts Obama in a wooden chair, facing forwards with crossed arms resting
upon his knees, in a pose that echoes other presidential portraits, including
George Peter Alexander Healy’s 1869 rendition of Abraham Lincoln and
Elaine de Kooning’s 1963 homage to John F. Kennedy. But true to Wiley’s
style, the background is a thick tangle of lush foliage and blooming flowers,
symbolic of where Obama has lived (chrysanthemums for Chicago, jasmine
for Hawaii and Indonesia, African lilies for Kenya). The representation is
attuned to a life lived amidst many geographies and cultures.
103 Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, 2018

This sense of globalism is echoed in the attitude of Subodh Gupta (b.

1964, Khagaul, India). He has remarked in a statement of cosmopolitanism:
‘Art language is the same all over the world. Which allows me to be
anywhere.’ His lavish work and its passage through so many international
exhibition sites support this truism, which is underpinned by an intense
privilege, despite the fact that his imagery pointedly explores economic
transformations taking place in India. (To be sure – like Murakami and artists
discussed in Chapter 2 [pp. 99–107], who use national style and traditional
materials or techniques to position themselves in a global market – Gupta’s
is a specifically Indian iconography, ready for export.) Using vernacular
materials – steel tiffin lunchboxes, bicycles, milk pails and cow dung – to
erect such massive sculptures as Line of Control (2008), a mushroom cloud
assembled out of kitchenware, Gupta embraces markers of place and custom
while simultaneously disseminating them in the wider sphere. His early
paintings explored ideas of emigration and return, presenting imagery of
luggage, jerry-rigged parcels and travellers mid-transport; more recent
paintings show a culture in thrall to consumerism, as in his fetishistic
photorealist paintings of kitchen utensils, which depict them as both mundane
and aspirational.[104]

104 Subodh Gupta, Saat Samunder Paar VII, 2003

If, like Wiley, Gupta responds to and portrays globalization, he also

manipulates it by using select symbols of national identity as international
currency, in an individual strategy that represents larger patterns. The transit
and consumption of artwork internationally both symptomizes and
perpetuates globalization. This is exemplified in the nexus of interests that
affected Dafencun, also known as Dafen Oil Painting Village: an entire
factory town in China (just outside the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in
Guangdong) churning out handmade oil painting for international trade.
Within the space of a few blocks, galleries, overflowing with wares, sell
paintings of many genres and subjects. These are yielded on an industrial
scale by regional artists, some of whom are trained in academies. Although
local expertise in copying Western styles has contributed to tourism to the
area, many more of these oil-on-canvas paintings are outsourced from
elsewhere; they are made on request, commonly from JPEG images, for
private destinations or bulk orders to hotels, cruise ships and offices. This
type of demand dropped off after 2008, and domestic buyers have since
outnumbered those from overseas, contributing to a shift to manufacturing
paintings from Chinese sources and cultural touchstones (e.g. portraits of
Mao Zedong). In May 2017, the Shenzhen government cited almost 150 sites
as fire hazards, leading to the destruction of many workspaces and rendering
the village’s long-term viability uncertain.
From the Easel to the Wall: the Artist and the Global Economy
In the meantime, Dafencun, its organization and its labour practices have
become the subjects of other projects. For example, for the Second
Guangzhou Triennial in 2005, Liu Ding (b. 1976, Changzhou, China) raised
the question of exploitation in the Pearl River Delta, the event’s regional
focus. Liu hired thirteen painters from Dafencun to copy a factory sample of a
landscape with a rose sky, waterfall and pair of cranes, during a four-hour
performance. With easels and folding chairs arranged in rows on a tiered
platform before a live audience, the artists painted for a standard factory
wage, attempting to make as many copies as possible in the allotted time. Liu
later showed the paintings (which remained in various states of finish), set in
uniform gold frames, in a mock 19th-century European interior at L. A.
Galerie, Frankfurt, in 2006.[105] In repeating the same banal image, the
artists promulgated stereotypes of workers toiling in post-Mao China, while
hinting at the opportunity for social advancement that was offered to them by
their display of aesthetic refinement. Liu underscores the lingering exoticism
that still colours perceptions of China in the West, and vice versa, and
highlights the mutability of value of these images, especially when
transposed to a German gallery replete with upholstered furniture to assist
contemplation.
105 Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition – Products, Part 2, 2005–6

In Liu’s Store, started in 2008, he takes a different approach to

questioning the role of the artist in the new global economy. An ongoing
project that explores systems of valuation under advanced capitalism, Store
is both an online outlet for selling work – sorted according to ‘product lines’
– and a platform for organizing events. One such product line, Take Home
and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart, consists of a series of
landscape paintings custom-made in a factory, but signed by the artist to
ensure their symbolic, if not actual, value. By contrast, in The Utopian
Future of Art, Our Reality – a group of vitrines, each of which holds
thematically linked objects, products and works of art – the differences in
value between the objects are levelled out, with items priced equally as a
division of the total value of each cabinet and its contents.
‘China Painters’ (2007–8), by Christian Jankowski (b. 1968, Göttingen,
Germany), was first exhibited in the Guangdong province (where the painting
village is located, as well as the state-run Dafen Art Museum) before
travelling to New York, Vienna, Stuttgart and lastly Guangzhou for the
eponymous triennial.[106] Jankowski asked Dafencun painters to create
paintings of the as-yet unfinished interiors of the nearby Dafen Art Museum, a
modernist shell then under construction (the architects of which were
unaware of what kind of art the building would later house). The Dafencun
painters were asked to add to each of their portrayals the artworks they
would most like to see displayed in the museum. The selections made in their
paintings, with ‘fantasy’ artworks gracing the partially constructed walls of
the museum interior, extended from 17th-century Dutch still lifes of flower
arrangements to history paintings, including Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty
Leading the People (1830), in addition to family portraits and nudes.
Although Jankowski includes the artists’ signatures on the backs of the
canvases – important, given the painters’ designation as artisans – his
authoring of the project is paramount. As with Liu, this depends on
appropriation of the Chinese painters’ work on the project, despite the
authorial role they inhabit within it.

106 Christian Jankowski, China Painters (Still Life), 2008

These instances also point to the ways in which large-scale exhibitions

encourage event-like, multimedia and collaborative projects, which are
commissioned for the occasion. These shows solicit site-specific
interventions that account for not only the architecture, but also the cultural,
geopolitical and commercial contexts surrounding specific objects and
installations. Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976, Reykjavik, Iceland) is noteworthy
for his understanding of the biennial as a flexible format that allows for a
range of possibilities under its broad umbrella. Like Liu, he proposed a
scenario in which paintings would be made before an audience, but, unlike
Liu, the project he envisioned took place for the duration of the show,
effectively marking the passage of time through the actualization of paintings.
For The End, performed during the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009,
Kjartansson spent six months making easel paintings inside the 14th-century
Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa on the Grand Canal.[107] The resultant works
show artist Páll Haukur Björnsson in a Speedo swimsuit, drinking beer and
smoking cigarettes. Kjartansson paired the tableau vivant (living picture) of
his act of creation with a video projection of two men playing music in a
dramatic snowy landscape. This was in part inspired by a Caspar David
Friedrich painting, which depicts two men gazing in rapture at the moon: a
paean to friendship and the notion of how representation, including in art, can
surpass the rational and reach the sublime. Unlike the Romantic vision
proposed by Friedrich, however, The End resulted in a space littered by
studio debris, including the paintings, which Kjartansson conceived of not as
autonomous panels but as props.
107 Ragnar Kjartansson, The End – Venice, 2009

When the measure is time, and the goal is to accumulate lots of pictures,
quantity rather than quality rules. Josh Smith (b. 1976, Okinawa, Japan)
exploits the possibility of exhaustion through excess, churning out prodigious
numbers of artworks based on his name, which is used as an abstract, formal
trope, and, more recently, figurative motifs including fish, insects, skeletons
and leaves.[108] Smith has admitted to completing the work for a show in a
week. His output exposes the unhampered possibilities and excesses of
contemporary production, pantomiming the superfluity of the billions of
digital images circulating each day.
108 Josh Smith, Installation view of ‘Emo Jungle’, David Zwirner, New York, 2019

Smith’s output imitates its setting, including, on a more local scale, the
commercial gallery and its seasonal sales cycles. For his first solo exhibition
in New York, ‘Abstraction’, at Luhring Augustine in 2007, he hung paintings
in standardized sizes, upon which pricing was based: sizeable gestural
compositions featuring the repetition of letters, and smaller palette paintings,
which constitute palette boards painted with colour fields that were left
behind when Smith used them to generate other paintings. During the
exhibition, he also switched paintings and reconfigured the installation with
new works, some painted midway through the show. This challenged the
viewer to remember differences between comparable canvases and ask why
they should matter.
Smith is also known for his collages of printed images of previous
works, sometimes downloaded from his own website, which interrogate art
as an iterative process, hypothetically without end. In turn, Eliza Douglas (b.
1984, New York, NY) made a series of large-scale paintings called Josh
Smith, depicting a 2016 opening of his work at The Brant Foundation Art
Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, in which his giant paintings are
shown dwarfing the collectors who mill about them.[109] (Smith took up
residence there for nearly a month, converting it into a studio where he made
the work on view.) For her part, Douglas relies on Dafencun painters to
fabricate some of her paintings.
109 Eliza Douglas, Josh Smith, 2019

In the early 2010s, Parker Ito (b. 1986, Long Beach, CA), like Josh
Smith, created art quickly to simulate better the mass production and
consumption of images on the Internet.[110] As he put it: ‘I heard that
Picasso made around 250,000 works in his lifetime. I could make that many
JPEGs in five years…. And when I say five years, I mean five minutes.’
Assistants (and even, on occasion, his gallerists’ children) help him to make
and install digitally edited canvases and sculptures, and he pumps out work
in considerable volume, in distinctive and often-evolving installation
scenarios. These entail the migration of elements to multiple sites, across
which they are transformed and layered. Adding yet another facet to the
work, Ito sometimes uses pseudonyms and media personas, including Deke
McLelland Two, Creamy Dreamy and Parker Cheeto.

110 Parker Ito, Installation view of ‘A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night’, Château Shatto, Los Angeles,
2015

While these artists have embraced producing en masse, others have taken
the opposite approach, ceasing production as a form of critique. In the
Cologne scene of the 1980s and 1990s (examined in Chapter 2, p. 86),
interruptions in production were embraced as institutional critique and a
refusal to undergo commercial validation. Subverting the idea that production
of cultural goods is automatically uncritical, Josef Strau (b. 1957, Vienna,
Austria), an artist, curator, gallerist and writer now based in Berlin, has
questioned what he calls the ‘non-productive’ attitude. His catalogue essay
for the 2006 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, ‘Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne’,
challenges the Cologne group’s approach.[111] For Strau, turning to sociality
and away from object-oriented practice was a manifestation of a ‘narcissistic
cultivation of insignificance and meaninglessness’, an approach that was
ultimately recuperated as style in the sense of both attitude and the formal
properties of the resultant work.
111 Josef Strau, What Should One Do, 2011

Since closing Galerie Meerrettich, a small space he ran out of a former

box office in a Berlin theatre from 2002 to 2006, Strau has focused on his
writing, found-object sculptures and paintings. Many of the latter consist of a
monochrome ground washed with a dirty white paint that serves as the base
for texts penned by himself and others. His work moves from projects like
the ones he examines in his writing – conversations, performances,
ephemeral comings together – to those that take the form of room-bound
objects. The refusal of the object that marked his earlier career does not
persist in his current practice. In a 2010 interview published in Mousse 23,
Straus expounds:
I have explained works in economic terms, like I make texts, but I organize
a trade system for it, which maintains the practice and writing financially,
like transforming flea-market lamps into a system of meaning and
narratives and producing financial value through this.

In this way, while his work now is more bound to the object, Strau still
enacts a kind of critique of the commodity, achieved by transforming what is
essentially detritus – such as secondhand lamps – into something that can
move within the market.
Correspondingly reliant upon the art system, Aaron Young (b. 1972, San
Francisco, CA) digests production differently, by transforming it into
spectacle. For the inaugural contemporary-art exhibit at the Park Avenue
Armory in New York in 2007, Young staged Greeting Card with the help of
the Art Production Fund.[112] Taking its title from a 1944 Jackson Pollock
painting of the same name, Young enlisted a gang of motorcycle riders to act
out the gestures of Pollock’s action painting. In the enormous, Coliseum-like
space of the Armory, hundreds of invited art-world guests, donning gas-
masks, looked down on the performance in the central arena: for seven
deafening and noxious minutes, the bikes criss-crossed a 21.9-by-39-metre
(72-by-128-foot) plywood stage, their lights cutting through the exhaust
fumes and darkness. The wheels burned arabesques in the black surface that
revealed layers of fluorescent yellow, pink, orange and red paint beneath. In
the aftermath, the floor remained intact as an installation before being
dismantled and sold as single or multiple tiles, thus following the trajectory
of Pollock’s paintings from horizontal, floor-bound panels to completed
paintings tacked to walls.
112 Aaron Young, Greeting Card (Armory, quadriptych), performance at the Park Avenue Armory,
New York, 2007

Rudolf Stingel (b. 1956, Merano, Italy) has likewise employed a variety
of strategies to make and circulate his work, such as having viewers walk
across floors that are then cut up and sold as discrete paintings. A long-time
painter of commissioned portraits, in the 1980s Stingel began work that
provoked the fundaments of painting as both a medium and a set of
conventions. For instance, in 1989 he published an instruction manual for
creating an abstract painting. The silkscreen print Instructions treats this
‘how to’ process as a composition, showing paint being squeezed from a
tube and applied to a support. For his first show in New York in 1991, at
Daniel Newburg Gallery in SoHo, Stingel covered the entire floor with plush
orange carpet, which, in an optical contrast, tinged the walls pink, thereby
turning the whole room into a painting. Successive undertakings have also
moved painting beyond the canvas in order to interrogate it: formally (from
carpets adorned with pink-and-blue floral motifs, as installed at the Walker
Art Center in Minneapolis and even in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central
Terminal in New York City, to other monochromes that found their way onto
the walls, which had begun as studio drop-cloths), and theoretically, through
viewer involvement (later works comprise wall-mounted silver Celotex
insulation boards on which people can leave graffiti-like marks, and
Styrofoam ‘footprint’ paintings that register the marks of bodies).
Stingel maintains his works’ materiality, while asking how a painting, as
both image and object, moves through institutional and commercial spaces.
This passage can also encompass conversion by other media, such as the
compression of electronic files when images are spread through media-
sharing and social-networking sites. In Dispersion, an influential manifesto
drafted in 2001–2 for the catalogue of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art,
later published as an artist’s book illustrated with clip art and posted online
as a free download, Seth Price (b. 1973, East Jerusalem) discusses the
circulation of art by mass-media technologies, which have had an
incalculable impact on painting. He writes:

With more and more media readily available through this unruly archive
[the Internet], the task becomes one of packaging, producing, reframing,
and distributing; a mode of production analogous not to the creation of
material goods, but to the production of social contexts, using existing
material.

Price’s use of appropriation in his work, which often redistributes pirated

music and texts in addition to archival footage and data from the Internet,
interrupts the functioning of commodity culture and the information systems
on which it depends. Much of Price’s work, therefore, avoids permanence, as
the permanent risks ossifying. This is addressed literally in his Vintage
Bomber pieces, wall-hung polystyrene panels that bear the outline of their
namesake bomber jackets: garments frozen in form by consumer packaging.
[113] Yet his point is that even these works remain mobile, circulated
through a constant network of objects, images and ideas; they also assume
new meaning through their relationship to the legacies of painting, to which
they refer most obviously in their wall-bound orientation.
113 Seth Price, Untitled, 2008–9, from the Vintage Bomber series

Networks of presentation and display, and the shift in meaning that these
lend to images, are a key concern of German artists Kerstin Brätsch (b. 1969,
Hamburg, Germany) and Adele Röder (b. 1980, Dresden, Germany). The
two have worked together since 2007 as DAS INSTITUT, a so-called
import/export agency (typically, this service would assist a business in
transporting and/or selling their products in a foreign country), and they have
collaborated with such groups as the UNITED BROTHERS (Ei Arakawa
and his brother Tomoo Arakawa) for a project at the Kunsthalle Zürich in
2012. Brätsch and Röder maintain their own individual art practice, and
additionally, they collaborate to funnel work back and forth, importing and
exporting files, while also playing with the tools of the digital systems
through which data is transferred. Röder makes abstract digital motifs, such
as ‘Starline-Necessary Couture’ and ‘COMCORRÖDER’, using programs
like Adobe Photoshop. These are applied as patterns for a host of products,
including wearable and non-usable textiles, a digital knitwear collection,
dinner napkins, DAS INSTITUT advertisements, books and Brätsch’s
paintings on Mylar. In the latter, Brätsch inverts and manipulates her sources
in the service of the final composition, and continuing this circuit of
production, Röder often uses these alterations in her digital prints. While
interrogating presentational conventions across media, the artists also exploit
the consumer’s desire to express uniqueness through purchase. In an artist
statement, Röder exclaims, ‘MY FORMS BECOME A MANIFESTATION
OF YOUR DESIRE’. Flexibility becomes an expression of economic and
creative boundlessness.
As DAS INSTITUT proposes, transitivity can be positive: in artwork
relating to digital transformation, software can be employed as both an
instrument and a metaphor. Their work is all-encompassing, transforming the
immaterial images of the Internet into tangible materials – the aforementioned
paintings, textiles and napkins – through which it might become a
Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art in which all art forms are embraced
and synthesized). This is by no means the first combination of painting and
digital media: both were prominent strands in the work of Michel Majerus
(1967–2002), who saw the manipulability of the latter as a way to
reconfigure the former. He also extended the space of his large-scale
paintings into the room, making a virtual space tangible, and in 2000 he made
a functional painting in the form of a skateboard ramp at the Kölnischer
Kunstverein.[114] For his last piece before his untimely death, he covered
Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with a digital rendering of the Schöneberg
Sozialpalast, a 1970s Berlin housing block now covered by graffiti.
Analogous to the swift and continual feedback offered by the Internet, graffiti
tests mechanisms of call and response, and could be considered a forerunner
of the digital forum.

114 Michel Majerus, if we are dead, so it is, 2000

Machine Painting
As these artists propose, post-studio practice involves an intersection of new
technologies – alongside the media theory, information science and
philosophy that theorizes them – as the basis for rethinking painting digitally.
The American artist and critic Tom Moody (b. [unlisted], New York, NY)
carried out bright, imagistic paintings earlier in his career, but abandoned
these following a bout of turpentine poisoning; he now adapts the animated
GIFs on his blog for display and since the 1990s has made cyber art with
obsolete programs and equipment, such as MSPaintbrush (the earlier version
of MSPaint), photocopiers and consumer printers.[115] Corinne Wasmuht (b.
1964, Dortmund, Germany) procures images from the Internet for
manipulation via Photoshop, before using them as the basis for multi-layered
paintings on wood panels, which acknowledge their source in their backlit
intensity – an echo of the computer monitor glow.[116]
115 Tom Moody, sketch_i7a, 2012

116 Corinne Wasmuht, Brueckenstr., 2008

Harm van den Dorpel (b. 1981, Zaandam, The Netherlands), based in
Berlin, appropriates original images and alters them via algorithmic
recombination online to make new artworks.[117] Other works are
commissioned images that look painterly online but are printed out. Van den
Dorpel is best known for running an online gallery in 2008–9, ‘Club
Internet’, which offered a stage for emerging artists to share their work. Now
outmoded compared to other social media sites, it nonetheless emphasizes
artists’ relations to one another. More recently, he has created an online
platform on which visitors can view his works, as well as the means by
which he finds and aggregates source images for his layered compositions.

117 Harm van den Dorpel, On Usability, 2011

Van den Dorpel’s ‘Dissociations’, an online-only exhibition, is hosted by

the New Museum, New York. Posing the question of how an artist’s work
might be presented to a public, the museum notes on the webpage for
‘Dissociations’ that:

Possibilities run the gamut from the “white cube” aesthetic donned by
gallery websites to the more free-form, anarchic expressions of a Tumblr
page, or a simple, home-brewed interface. Through such projects, we can
generally see the work in some form (whether sculpture, video, or a Firefox
plug-in) as well as what an artist persona looks like online (as opposed to,
say, that of a corporation). We can even approximate what an artist’s
brand might be amid the digital swell of marketing and self-presentation
(for instance, evasive user interfaces instead of clean, user-friendly ones).
In more experimental modes—think collectively built archives or an
artist’s blog that doubles as a public sketchbook—artist websites flout
individual authorship and singular finished products that are closed to the
public. And yet the question remains of whether it is possible to evince
more than the artwork itself, to reveal the whole practice: the research, the
influence, and what it’s like to make work over time.

Like the large-scale exhibition system, the Internet acts as a platform to show
works, events or documentation, while also performing as a secondary
system of distribution. This establishes an alternative audience that may have
nothing to do with the narrowly conceived ‘art world’.
As van den Dorpel’s example evidences, artists may also use in-machine
technology to design a composition and print it out (recall here Wade Guyton,
discussed in Chapter 1, p. 66) or they may even harness technology to do the
work of painting. David Hockney (b. 1937, Bradford, UK), the great
chronicler of domestic intimacies and the California leisure class, returned to
the East Yorkshire of his youth in 2005 to paint landscapes en plein air,
which he then worked up on the computer in the studio. He also began a
corpus of iPhone paintings in 2009, made with the Brushes application on his
handheld device. Dragging his finger across the screen, Hockney composed
diminutive scenes – self-portraits, portraits, flowers and sunrises – which he
modified by hue and the application of details; he then archived the images
and passed them on to friends.[118] He has also made paintings without paint
using a stylus on his iPad, created sizeable prints with a digital inkjet printer
and, applying the playback feature in the Brushes app, turned out videos that
reveal their underlying process. While some of these works have moved into
physical space, the iPhone paintings remain wholly digital in their generation
and presentation, especially as the luminosity of the images is achieved
solely by means of the screen.
118 David Hockney, No. 522, 2009

Joshua Nathanson (b. 1976, Washington, D.C.) also uses computer

drawing software.[119] ‘Labor Day’ at VSF, Los Angeles, 2015, featured a
series of paintings based on the beaches of Los Angeles and a popular
outdoor shopping mall with a public green and animated fountain. These
scenes of small freedoms from labour recast George Seurat’s A Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) in a Microsoft Paint
aesthetic through a process of outdoor sketching, digital working over, inkjet
printing and, finally, painting, which takes a cue from Hockney. Decoy-like,
the resulting paintings on canvas preserve the textures and Technicolor
palette of their digital forbearers in the image-making process.
119 Joshua Nathanson, David Gets a Cupcake, 2015

It is therefore clear that painting on-screen and off are not mutually
incompatible; indeed, a combination is often desirable for contemporary
artists engaged in process as a concept. This is true of Michael Williams (b.
1978, Doylestown, PA), whose work in this vein can be traced to his Puzzle
Paintings (2010–17). These emerge from a comparatively traditional method
of drawing and painting based on sketches. Williams uses a photocopy of a
drawing he already made and sections it into interlocking pieces with a
pencil, before cutting it apart and redrawing it, and then sometimes using it as
the basis for an oil painting. If these oil paintings physicalize process, the
inkjet-printed paintings on pre-primed canvas that Williams has made since
2012 propose another model of genesis. Decisions are made on a computer
or digital-drawing pad and then printed, at which point Williams sometimes
layers hand-applied strokes onto the print and sometimes leaves it unaltered.
In Middle Game 1 (2018), the result is a prostrate towel-draped man who
appears to merge with an oversized rotary telephone the colour of his skin.
Face down in overstuffed pillows, his delineated body hovers off-kilter, an
illusionistic mass without weight capable of denting the covers: a wry
meditation on the lightness of being in a painting without paint. Another work
from the year before, Truth About Painting 2 (2017), takes another approach
to allegorizing the creative act, by showing a group therapy session for paint
tubes taking place in chairs in the artist’s studio.[120]

120 Michael Williams, Truth About Painting 2, 2017

In a 2018 show at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, Williams

framed his engagement with the long history of painting as if his works are
prosthetics, bolstering, rather than undermining, the authority of analogue
painterly practices. He appropriated a quote from futurist and computational
neuroscientist Anders Sandberg as the show’s epigraph:

In the truly long run stars burn out and cease to form (in a few trillion
years), so that is the end of normal planet-life. We can likely make
artificial heating lasting much longer but over time energy will become
scarce. Living as software would give us an enormous future in this far,
cold era but it is finite: eventually energy runs out. If not, we still have the
problem that matter is likely unstable due to proton decay on timescales
larger than 10^36 years—one day there is not going to be anything for
humans to be made of. That is likely the upper limit.

Sandberg’s analytical appraisal of humankind prolonging a finite existence

through adaptation – living as software – is a continuation of the already
symbiotic relation between species and technology. Rather than revel in the
eschewal of the analogue for the digital, Williams keeps hold of the analogue
but tactically re-motivates it, adapting to and embracing the digital age.
In his longstanding engagement with painting and computer science,
Simon Ingram (b. 1971, Wellington, NZ) has made numerous painting
machines, ingeniously fashioned from consumer-grade robotics kits,
industrial robotic arms and other custom hardware and electronic
components.[121] He frames this as an act of collaboration between himself,
an apparatus and lived experience. He does not paint directly, but rather
builds machines to do this tactile work: his Radio Paintings, exhibited as
early as 2011, powerfully express forces channelled through a radio
telescope that Ingram developed (and which he displays for viewers, as at
ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, 2017–18). A 4.2-metre-
tall horn antenna collects spectral emissions from atomic hydrogen in space,
and this data is interpreted by electronics and software as a series of brush
routines for a painting robot to carry out in oil on canvas, harnessing and
visualizing otherwise invisible cosmic radio energy.
121 Simon Ingram, Radio Painting Station: Looking for the Waterhole, 2017–18

Among his many projects, Siebren Versteeg (b. 1971, New Haven, CT)
also shares the artist’s mark with the computer, using algorithmic programs:
one trawls for images online, distorting and compiling them into abstract
compositions; another generates randomized gestural marks and colours, a
process that Versteeg pauses at a certain point to print out the result onto
canvas. Those achieved by A Rose (2017) reveal variations on Jay DeFeo’s
The Rose (1958–66): a silvery mixed-media painting that consumed the artist
for the better part of eight years and weighed more than a ton.[122]
Versteeg’s canvas prints are made more quickly and are comparatively
buoyant. Far from hidden in a studio, he, like Ingram, chooses to reveal the
mechanisms at play: he exhibits an active program in the gallery together
with the rest of the work.
122 Siebren Versteeg, A Rose, 2017

Alongside artists working with technology, the emergence of neural

networks has resulted in art made separately from the human. Beginning with
the swirling, psychedelic art coming from Google DeepDream (a computer
program that uses a neural network to find and enhance patterns in images),
technicians and artists have fostered new applications for emergent
technology, raising the question as to whether this art is a tool or its product.
The latter was claimed in 2018, when, for the first time, a piece created by
AI came to auction; it sold at Christie’s for $432,500, well over the estimate
of $7,000 to $10,000. The Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille
de Belamy (2018) appears to be a portrait of an aristocratic man, but the
pictured figure is one in a group of portraits of the Belamy family – a
fictional creation of Obvious, a Paris-based collective anchored by Hugo
Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier.[123] Using generative
adversarial network (GAN) machine learning systems that do not find and
enhance but rather generate images, the artists fed the system with a data set
of 15,000 portraits made by human artists between the 14th and 20th
centuries. The GAN machine learning system then generates the image itself,
based on this data. The artists feed the portrait back into the same system, to
see if it mistakes its own work for a historic portrait. The goal is to create,
from scratch, a portrait so convincing that the system thinks it is real.

123 Obvious, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy, 2018

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this work has engendered a robust conversation

about what creativity is, to whom it belongs and from whence it originates.
For the algorithms are effected by programmers, and a GAN can only
perform a certain task using the data through which it was trained.
Counterintuitively, then, rather than negating human agency, these changes in
technology – to say nothing of information access, retrieval and transference
– position the subject, or human agent, at the centre of real and virtual
worlds. The artist must not only make sense of this, but also decide whether
and how to put it to use, and what they hope to achieve in doing so.
In some ways, the computer age is one of increasing disconnect, as
demonstrated by the discussion in Chapter 1 of the problems wrought by
taking materials from online sources that are not one’s own, and the trumping
of interiority for self-presentation that is explored in Chapter 2. Yet the
digital revolution still offers a profound possibility for personal connection.
In one such example of this being provided through, and not despite,
machines, Manuel Solano (b. 1987, Mexico City, Mexico) uses an app to
connect with sighted people who can help the un-sighted artist to see
paintings in progress. Solano, who at first painted highly detailed oil-on-
canvas paintings, became blind in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related
infection, and marked a return to painting that same year with a series of
deeply personal portraits entitled Blind Transgender With AIDS. Memories
of 1990s pop culture seen before this event thread through the series,
suggesting an ever-widening historical lag.[124] The versions of these
personalities in the works emanate from what is for Solano a finite image
bank, accessed only in the mind, even as the recognizable people and events
abet the possibility of collective recognition. To make the paintings, the artist
works by hand, feeling the surface of the canvas and indicating sections with
a felt marking system of pins, string, tape and pipe cleaners. Solano relies on
someone in the studio (often their mother) to confirm the rightness of a colour
or the legibility of a pictorial aspect, and if no one is present, connects to ‘Be
My Eyes’ to establish a video call with a volunteer to accomplish the same
thing. Solano’s work engages with what it is to be human in a world awash in
images, whether experienced first-hand or internalized from elsewhere;
either way, we access and interpret these images through the body and
subjectivity, memory and consciousness.
124 Manuel Solano, Fairuza I, 2014, from the Blind Transgender with AIDS series
Chapter 4
The Body

This chapter attends to the body, both imagined and real. In art, observations
of the human form can be presented through figure painting or portraiture.
The first takes the human form – clothed or naked (elevated in art to the
‘nude’) – as its primary subject, and the second narrows in on a subject’s
face or head and shoulders. Such works would ordinarily reveal the subject’s
form, and also the hand of the artist, but in a period so thoroughly
transformed by technology, figurative art is no longer solely the dispensation
of humans. The mechanically produced imagery introduced late in Chapter 3,
the GAN (generative adversarial network) that contributes to the domain of
portraiture by mimicking the data distributed to it (p. 152), announces this
profound and extraordinary shift. With myriad forms of mediation now
available, when contemporary artists continue to favour observation and the
representation of a person, the decision takes on new meaning.
Alongside realism, this chapter explores the refusal of verisimilitude.
Such positions are arrived at through various means, including photographic
appropriation, the direct scrutiny of a live model and the conjuring of a form
from fantasy or memory. The last importantly implicates the lived experience
of the artist: think back to Manuel Solano, presented at the end of Chapter 3
(p. 153), who became blind due to illness, and resumed painting – newly
reliant on physical cues and the sightedness of others – by recollecting
memories of things once grasped first-hand. The artist’s body may also be
illustrated within the frame, or conversely, registered in indexical traces
resulting from the physical procedures of painting. This point holds true even
in abstraction (as covered in Chapter 5), which aestheticizes marks of
process as part of the composition: an action and its result. But equally,
abstraction may help artists to avoid anthropocentrism, instead passing
agency to bodily surrogates. In a 2010 series, Pamela Rosenkranz (b. 1979,
Sils-Maria, Switzerland) made body-prints on bright, monochromatic
Spandex grounds, grimly stretched on the wall as if they were flayed hides.
[125] She made use of the synthetic fabric – ordinarily used for form-fitting
exercise clothing that, more than concealing any corpulence beneath, expands
to meet it – to conjure ideas of an otherwise non-existent body. Smeared with
flesh-toned residue that evokes makeup, these works sum up figurative
painting as so many surfaces of skin.

125 Pamela Rosenkranz, Installation view of ‘The Most Important Body of Water is Yours’, Karma
International, Zürich, 2010

Rosenkranz’s layering of bodily signs atop single-coloured panels rather

literally overlaps traditions long held apart. For much of the 20th century,
figuration and abstraction were posed as mutually exclusive propositions in
Western art. Figurative art had previously primarily been concerned with the
Renaissance standard of mimetically reproducing the visible world, stroke
by stroke. With the 20th century, this goal of lifelikeness was diverted by the
philosophical and aesthetic adventures of cubism. Abstraction even more
decisively broke from figuration, rejecting the genres of the studio portrait,
nude, still life and landscape – upon which cubism had relied – in favour of
formal experimentation with colour, shape and volume. Moreover, figurative
art was contaminated in the 1930s by the uses of the idealized body for
Fascist politics, notably in Germany and Italy. Movements including
surrealism and pop were the exceptions that proved the rule of abstraction’s
triumph: after its rise, little figurative art was assumed to count as ‘high art’
until neo-expressionism. Figurative work persisted throughout, of course,
before and after the 1980s; the issue is not one of the category’s existence,
but rather of its significance.
In a talk titled ‘Renaissance and Order’, delivered in New York in 1949,
abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning claimed: ‘Flesh was the reason
why oil painting was invented’. His work – particularly his Woman series of
the early 1950s, comprising paintings of women emerging from oily strokes,
with bared teeth and ardently outlined breasts – is a counterpoint to
absolutist arguments for a breach between figuration and abstraction.
Nevertheless, this sense that the ideas oppose has deep roots in superstitions
and religious traditions fearing idolatry and graven depictions, or images that
are worshipped like gods (for example, Islam is thought to be an aniconic
religion, meaning figurative images are prohibited; iconoclasm in 8th- and
9th-century Byzantium opposed religious images or icons, a stance that was
later revived during the Protestant Reformation). This is an important
reminder of the coexistence of different genealogies and the beliefs that
underpin them.
Throughout, the body has repeatedly proved a site of strife, and
contestation of its social and political agency extends to its images. While in
the past figurative work had often reinforced the status quo, it has also
become a tool to deconstruct it: one such example is through feminist
rejoinder to the likes of de Kooning by artists including Jenny Saville (p.
184) and Cecily Brown (p. 185), checking the misogynistic fantasies that he
and his colleagues perpetuated. Figurative work has served a great many
agendas, including as a vehicle for expressing political sentiment and
disparaging regimes, challenging generally accepted history – often crafted
by the oppressor – and posing alternate futures.
Amoako Boafo’s (b. 1984, Accra, Ghana) portraits assert agency in the
face of potential dissolution.[126] His quietly dignified, luminous tributes to
diasporic identity emerge from an encounter with European racism. Specific
to Vienna, Austria (where the artist has lived for several years), and the lives
of his peers there who he renders, Boafo’s project further connects to a
broader history of slavery and migration. Racism persists, enacting a terrible
violence on the body, even as race is something more societal and
constructed – a product of and justification for subjugation – than inherent to
the body itself. (For this reason, whilst referenced in this chapter, it is in
Chapter 7 that this subject is regarded more fully, through the forceful
interventions of a number of those artists who actively address race in their
work by revealing the actualities of lived experience.)

126 Amoako Boafo, Reflection 1, 2018

Thus is the space of representation now taken by subjects who have long
been excluded from the privilege of being portrayed in figurative art on
account of their gender, sex or race. Such priorities have served as an
antidote to the process-based minimalist paintings, conspicuously absent of
content, that were popular in the 2010s (as discussed in Chapter 6, p. 270).
This shift moreover relates to the late acknowledgment on the part of so many
cultural institutions in the West of the narrowness of their collections – and a
compensatory desire to redress these oversights, through offering (in some
cases for the first time) a less exclusive range of perspectives. For
institutions, this means turning a lens on the vested interests that led to their
formation; it also means considering for whom they continue to exist and
why.
Painting History
Bias against representational practices was shaped by Cold War propaganda
in the former German Democratic Republic, yet artists from what was the
Eastern Bloc have claimed this legacy, whether as the basis for bad painting
(see Chapter 2) or otherwise. Artists in Leipzig, in particular, were
championed in the mid-2000s for their preservation of academic figurative
traditions within a reunified Germany. At the time, many equated their arrival
on the international scene with the neo-expressionism flooding galleries in
the 1980s: kindred instances of a return to order in the face of pluralism and
globalism. Collectors aggressively promoted artists such as Neo Rauch (b.
1960, Leipzig, Germany), David Schnell (b. 1971, Bergisch Gladbach,
Germany), Martin Eder (b. 1968, Augsburg, Germany), Christoph
Ruckhäberle (b. 1972, Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, Germany), Tim Eitel (b.
1971, Leonberg, Germany) and Matthias Weischer (b. 1973, Elte, Germany)
under the banner of the New Leipzig School, since they studied painting at
the esteemed Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst and remained in the city
thereafter.
There are differences in their work, yet the Leipzig artists are affiliated
in education, age and painterly orientation. They formed a league in 2000 and
a gallery of the same name, Liga, in Berlin in 2002. Rauch has been singled
out for his nostalgic paintings, which juxtapose political posters, forsaken
monuments and consumer products in surreal landscapes populated by
enigmatic figures.[127] These appear psychologically estranged from one
another, despite their physical proximity. Meanwhile, Schnell paints
landscapes fractured by perspective, teetering on the edge of decomposition;
Eder offers darkly symbolic and often perverse pictures of naked women and
fluffy house pets; Ruckhäberle develops a folksy faux-primitivism suited to
his single- and multi-figure compositions, in which subjects enact inscrutable
scenarios; Eitel places spectators in museums, absorbed in acts of hushed
reverie; and Weischer empties rooms, the better to highlight their uncanny
illusionism and anticipatory function as stage sets awaiting human presence.
[128]
127 Neo Rauch, Die Lage, 2006

128 Christoph Ruckhäberle, Nacht 32, 2004

 A similar recuperation of figurative work evolved at the same time in
China. Following the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, a
number of well-known Chinese artists left the country and began to live and
show elsewhere, including Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Zhang Huan (who
worked in more conceptual modes). Although many of the artists who
remained worked across all media, there was a marked turn to painting
people, encouraging the visibility of certain individuals in art as a means to
improve conditions in general. Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958, Kunming, China), a
member of the avant-garde South West Art Group (a group active in the
1980s, known for frank explorations of personal experience), became
interested in representing national character. Beginning in the early 1990s,
after traveling in Europe, he completed fictional portraits of Chinese citizens
– bespectacled girls in braids and fathers in party attire, all with porcelain-
smooth complexions and hauntingly glistening eyes – inspired by the sort of
quasi-patriotic studio portraits that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s and
largely lost during the Cultural Revolution. Each discrete work in Zhang’s
Bloodline series is connected to the others by a thin, meandering red line of
paint that roams across the sitters’ faces and torsos in ironic solidarity (a
testament to Mao Zedong’s ‘revolutionary family’ of the state), with some
also bearing blotches of the same red, or patches of shaded imperial yellow.
[129]
129 Zhang Xiaogang, Lovers, 2007, from the Bloodline series

Yue Minjun (b. 1962, Daqing, China) has also made portraiture central to
his practice. He uses his own appearance as the template for repetitive
paintings of grinning men, their faces contorted into frozen masks that evoke
the Laughing Buddha. These pink-fleshed caricatures reference the icon
worship associated with Mao, but instead it is the artist whom they elevate to
the status of hero and logo, easily commodified and instantly recognizable on
the surface of related merchandise available across multiple platforms.[130]
The political implications of the forced smiles – so maniacal in their zealotry
– here remain allusive, but they gain in significance due to the explicit charge
of the work that precedes them: The Execution (1995), Yue’s post-civil-
protest updating of Edouard Manet’s 1867 painting of the death of
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, and his generals, which was itself an
updating of Francisco Goya’s The Third of May (1808).
130 Yue Minjun, Inside and Outside the Stage, 2009

Yue’s work can be read in parallel with that of Fang Lijun (b. 1963,
Handan, China), who produced his own emblems: a bald man engulfed in
water or buoyed by clouds, and babies endowed with Fang’s face. Fang and
Yue were associated with what became known as cynical realism, an artistic
movement sparked by the events of 1989 in China, in which parodic
appropriation of the figuration that was key to socialist realism is used as a
form of critique.
Although the events of 1989 were also experienced by Liu Xiaodong (b.
1963, Liaoning, China), and had an irrevocable impact on him, too, his art
occupies a radically different position to that of the cynical realists. In his,
social and material changes – and their effects on human lives – are
addressed head-on, rather than through irony. His realism is one of
collaborative experience, predicated on an attempt ‘to see people as they
really are’. Liu embraces the particularity of his subjects, whom he travels to
meet and paints on site, in a ‘social experiment’. After setting up camp, he
records the sessions through other means of documentation (photographs and
video), which he archives online alongside the completed works. Among the
subjects of his paintings are a blue-green algae infestation of a lake caused
by industrial pollution, and group portraits alluding to the aftermath of the
massive 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. One trip to Hotan, a town in
the Xinjiang region of China, resulted in a series of portraits of Uyghur jade
miners in a landscape misshapen by centuries of excavation for emperors and
the wealthy.
In Time (2014), Liu images the 1980 South Korean student uprising in a
painting that encompasses twenty canvases, arranged edge to edge in a grid
and overlain with a unified composition: a dead man lies rigid on paving
stones, red clouds like smeared blood clots looming overhead.[131] The
pictured site, now known as the 18 May Democracy Square, is one of the
locations selected for Liu’s subsequent Weight of Insomnia (2016), for
which an automated painting machine translated a digital video feed of
intersections, public plazas and assembly lines into canvases painted by a
robotic brush (Chapter 3 considers related works; pp. 151–52). This way,
time can be traced without the exhaustion of documentary labour, and
locations – in Gwangju, as well as Beijing, Shanghai, Jincheng, Berlin,
Karlsruhe, Sydney and London – captured without further intervention. Liu
sees the works that emanate from this current idiom as types of history
painting.
131 Liu Xiaodong, Time, 2014

History painting is a genre that developed in the 15th century and

remained central to Western art until the 19th century, notably in France,
where it was used as a tool in attempts to manage a growing empire of
insurgent colonies. These paintings tend to depict an important historical,
religious or mythical event by isolating a moment of high tension and
emotional impact. (See, for example, Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading
the People [1830], in which the artist commemorates the same year’s July
Revolution against King Charles X of France through the female
personification of Liberty, traversing a barricade, tricolour in raised hand.)
Typically monumental in size, history paintings were displayed in vast public
spaces and were intended to educate the general population about themes
including civic virtue and heroism, and sacrifice for a better world to come.
This tradition of highly manipulative machines for swaying public opinion
has in recent years been transformed: many of these newer works neither
inspire patriotism nor exalt heroism, and are instead outwardly antagonistic,
focusing on the unsavoury consequences of inept leadership and misbegotten
nationalism, or of exacerbating ideological conflict. Not all such works aim
to replicate the scale of their precedents, nor are they stylistically consistent
or centred on a single, defining image. As evidenced by Liu, neither are they
specific to Europe.
Once a sign painter, Chéri Samba (b. 1956, Kinto M’Vuila, DRC)
reconfigures history painting for the modern Democratic Republic of the
Congo.[132] He incorporates traditional artistic forms and such popular
materials as sackcloth into his paintings, alongside fantastic images, word
bubbles and depictions of his own face as ‘conscience’. A founding member,
with Pierre Bodo, of the School of Popular Painting in Kinshasa, he has long
been dedicated to exposing the inequities of daily life, political corruption
and the ravages of AIDS. Similarly committed to the stories of her people,
Swarna Chitrakar (b. 1974, Banpura, India) is a narrative painter and singer,
who retains the traditional West Bengali artform Patachitra, a combination of
scroll painting, song composition and performance, to communicate
contemporary events.[133] Chitrakar uses customary materials in her scroll
painting (pat) – yellow comes from saffron, rice and clay create white and
cow dung makes brown – and the scrolls and the songs she composes about
them encompass religious themes, as well as the atrocities that followed in
the wake of 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami, the wreckage wrought by
deforestation and the neglect of female children in rural India.
132 Chéri Samba, Problème d’eau, 2004
133 Swarna Chitrakar, HIV, 2004–5

Pablo Baen Santos (b. 1943, Philippines) is known for a mode of social
realism that he developed in the 1970s as protest against Ferdinand Marcos’s
corrupt, authoritarian regime in the Philippines. In 1975, Baen Santos was a
founding member of Filipino artist group KAISAHAN, members of which
aimed to effect social change through their art during a period of martial law.
While his critique has therefore been directed at the government – as is clear
in Baboons in Session (2008) – it also indicts society’s injustices, especially
pertaining to labour.[134] By using figuration, he reminds us of the human
hand in enacting injustice, and the bodies that bear the brunt of it.

134 Pablo Baen Santos, Baboons in Session, 2008

Although Carla Busuttil (b. 1982, Johannesburg, South Africa) has

claimed that the content of her work is secondary to its formal aspects, which
she evidently relishes, she uses found images of conflict to enact political
satire that mocks charismatic leaders in pointed condemnations. For her 2013
show ‘Post-National Bliss’ at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, which featured
a series of distorted, seemingly historical figures in lurid colours, she issued
the following statement in the press release: ‘This world is flat, and its
inhabitants are a generation lost: unhinged aristocrats, powerless lawmen,
scoundrel children, otherworldly victims—all lurching towards some
unrecorded fate. It is a time after history.’[135]

135 Carla Busuttil, No Country for Poor People, 2013

Even more truculent, Vasan Sitthiket (b. 1957, Nakhon Sawan, Thailand)
denounces Thai politics and problems in Asia after the economic crash, and
the cruel misadventures of American foreign policy, through crudely
fashioned, furious and overly sexualized imagery on brightly coloured
canvases. One installation, Thai Nukes (2012), contains 108 phallic carvings
fashioned from wood recovered from the 2011 floods in Northern Thailand,
while paintings like Bomb for Liberty (2017) equate the phallus with
missiles and bombs, often wielded by a US president or, in this instance, the
Statue of Liberty.[136] The phallus has long been used as a visual metaphor
for power, and when included in such clearly lampooning works, such power
is rendered comical and grotesque. Earlier works depicted George W. Bush
– himself now recognized as an ‘outsider artist’, through his painted portraits
of dogs and others – but Vasan also indicted Barack Obama for his perceived
greed.

136 Vasan Sitthiket, Bomb for Liberty, 2017

Engaging with violence in a different manner, Teresa Margolles (b. 1963,

Culiacán, Mexico) has spent years researching morgues in Latin America,
trying to understand the crimes that lead to the deaths to which her research
bears witness – mostly of people belonging to lower classes – and the
implications of these deaths for those left behind. In one particularly
arresting piece, Flag I (2009), a large piece of fabric, soaked with blood and
stained by soil, limply hangs from atop a tall flagpole.[137] The form
obliquely suggests a deposition from the cross in its swathes that might
cradle a body, or a loosened painting, suspended by its vertical frame. It
more obviously memorializes those murdered near the northern border of
Mexico: an anti-monument to the human cost of drug cartels that control
smuggling routes and passage to the United States.

137 Teresa Margolles, Flag I, 2009

From the other side of that border, Kara Walker (b. 1969, Stockton, CA)
lays open the intractable legacy of the American antebellum South in shaping
the country’s politics of race, immigration and incarceration, among so many
others. She often works with the populist art form of the cut-paper silhouette,
a black profile of the sitter against a light background. Walker has met
serious critique for her work, including (but not exclusively) from within the
art world and African American communities, with detractors accusing her
of perpetuating the circulation of representations of the injured and indignant
Black body, an enormous archive of which is already a part of popular visual
culture. Rather than attempt to rectify this record by explaining her decisions,
Walker powerfully made an argument about the disproportionate effect of
catastrophic events on precarious populations through an exhibition, ‘After
the Deluge’, which she curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, in 2006, in which she interspersed pieces of her own with art from the
museum’s collection.[138]

138 Kara Walker, Installation view of ‘After the Deluge’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
2006

As has become even clearer in the last decade, political and social crises
are ever-more commonly precipitated by environmental causes as the planet
warms: water rises, drought entrenches and fire rages, causing mass
migrations of people fleeing the impossible conditions of changing climate
(including food shortages, sectarian violence and limited access to care).
‘After the Deluge’ was created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
in response to the media that circulated following the storm’s landfall,
showing profound abjection. Alongside these images of ‘water, sewage, and
excrement’ – which for Walker re-inscribed ‘all the stereotypes about the
black body’ – she selected others that connect centuries of art picturing
poverty and race and their deep-seated, seemingly intractable connections,
the dispossession and brutality of which the hurricane again exposed.
Mediating Presence
The discomfort inspired by images of violence is countered by some, who
tend towards creating positive images, posing these as tonic. The issue is that
these actions can lead to the erasure of the brutal truths of history and,
indeed, the present. Refusing the consolation of moralism, the Dutch artist
Ronald Ophuis (b. 1968, Hengelo, The Netherlands) paints horrific scenes of
brutality, often presented from the perspective of the perpetrator. Sweet
Violence (1996) was one of a group of canvases he exhibited at the Stedelijk
Museum Bureau Amsterdam in 1999, under the title ‘Five Paintings about
Violence’: deemed pornographic for its depiction of a child rape scene and
removed from the exhibition, the painting was reinstalled following a
petition spearheaded by the artist. Though not subject to the same level of
censorship, other projects have been equally challenging, especially given
Ophuis’s tendency to situate gruesome acts of sodomy and torture in
contemporary surroundings (in contrast to his early paintings, which
followed the model of 19th-century history painting, with subjects donning
antique clothing in some indeterminate past). Travel to Srebrenica in 2003
yielded the Srebrenica series (2004–8), which memorialized the genocide
there, while a 2010 trip to Sierra Leone resulted in portraits of child
soldiers.[139] Ophuis also stages scenes in his studio; this use of actors and
reconstruction of events on makeshift sets serves as an extension of his
interest in ideas of fictitious testimony and the way in which, while based on
falsehood or misremembered detail, it nevertheless triggers emotion.

139 Ronald Ophuis, The Death of Edin, Srebrenica July 1995, 2007
 While some artists commemorate historical moments, it is this process of
memorialization and collective memory that is examined by Pablo Alonso (b.
1969, Gijón, Spain), who has used the technique of frottage to transfer the
surfaces of public monuments to other supports. This repossession of public
sculptural and architectural markers characterizes Illegal Settlement (2004)
– a reconstruction of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, erected to mark
the conquest of Jerusalem and the Jewish diaspora that resulted – and other
works that question the relationship between power and representation.
These imply the presence of the body: through the actions involved in
rubbing the surface, or as a result of the viewer being forced to crouch under
the arch’s diminutive bow to view it. Other works, such as the series You’ve
Never Had it So Good (2003), use cut-out, skewed or decapitated images of
the body as a way of undermining the realism of their source materials (these
paintings originate in German newspaper excerpts: FAZ, Der Spiegel,
Süddeutsche Zeitung), which Alonso photographed, projected onto canvas
and then painted.[140] While the content of the clippings influences
interpretation, their inclusion also raises questions of piracy and
manipulation; some instances of this can be more obvious than others, given
Alonso’s tendency to force multiple elements into a single frame.
140 Pablo Alonso, You’ve Never Had it So Good 1, 2003

Many of the artists discussed in this section build paintings around found
images. Following the important archive-based example of Gerhard Richter
(b. 1932, Dresden, Germany) – specifically his Atlas series (1962–present),
an encyclopaedic collection of over 4,000 photographs, drawings and
diagrams that spans post-war German history and frequently provides the
sources for Richter’s photo-based canvases – Miguel Aguirre (b. 1973,
Lima, Peru) has amassed a personal repository of his own. This consists of
images obtained from CCTV, home videos and the printed press, all of which
are used for reproduction as paintings. The resulting series, DD/MM (2007–
10), brings together diverse acts of malice, from children being kidnapped to
public slaughter. Bearing down on a single event, In Memoriam (2008) is a
series of twenty-two paintings of the victims of the 2004 Madrid commuter
train bombings.[141] Aguirre selected snapshots revealing their private lives
from the Spanish newspapers La Vanguardia and El País, maintaining the
newspapers’ formatting while deleting the texts. In carefully preserving each
image but presenting it out of context, Aguirre proposes that an image’s
legibility does not equate with clarity of meaning – historical, political or
otherwise.
141 Miguel Aguirre, Ana Martín Fernández, 2008, from the series In Memoriam

Since the late 1970s, Luc Tuymans (b. 1958, Mortsel, Belgium) has used
comparable sources for his pale, thinly layered paintings that are reminiscent
of faded, colour-leached photographs and film stills, and often register a
missing body. In part due to the artist’s rule of completing each painting
within the course of a single day, Tuymans’s works look unfinished, though
this trait lends them a banality all the more discomfiting for his grave subject
matter. If history painting once condensed narrative into a decisive moment,
Tuymans alights on seemingly insignificant, even innocuous details that are
anything but: a swatch of floral embroidery comes from a chair on which a
man was murdered; an empty room discloses itself as a gas chamber traced
with faeces and blood; a hazy grey field swallowing a lamppost is the
concrete-become-ash of the World Trade Center. Even when the reference is
clear, as in The Secretary of State (2005), a cropped headshot of
Condoleezza Rice wearing an intense expression, Tuymans’s position is not.
A headline for The Art Newspaper, detailing his 2019 installation at the
Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy, proves an exception: ‘Luc Tuymans: “People
are becoming more and more stupid, insanely stupid.”’[142] The
accompanying text discusses a large-scale floor mosaic of pine trees based
on a painting Tuymans made outside a German labour camp at Schwarzheide,
north of Dresden, and, more generally, themes of memory and history and the
deceptions of both; he is quoted as saying that ‘the consequences of that
specific era [stretch] all the way to what we are living now.[143] The fact
that anti-Semitism is cropping up in France; that there is a parade in Belgium
that portrays Jews like they were portrayed in Nazi Germany.’

142 Luc Tuymans, Installation view of Turtle (2007), Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2019
143 Luc Tuymans, Installation view of Schwarzheide (2019), Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2019. Marble
mosaic realized by Fantini Mosaici, Milan

The question, for Tuymans, is what the role of art might be in relation to
this. For Bracha L. Ettinger (b. 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel), an artist, theorist,
analyst and psychologist, the answer is nothing short of a moral imperative:
‘the artistic has a potential for humanizing because only there aesthetics
breeds ethics’.[144] She herself paints coruscating fields of colour within
which figures – often mothers and children – emerge, like holographs or
phantoms. Through this process of remembering at a distance, Ettinger more
viscerally accesses emotions relating to atrocities from her family history,
notably the massacre of Jews in the Ponary forest in Lithuania in 1941. She
also uses World War II and Holocaust images, through which she sees, feels
and materializes suffering.
144 Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice n. 53 – Pieta, 2012–16

Other European artists, particularly those from the former Eastern Bloc,
have created paintings that stylistically resonate with their source materials,
photographs. They use photography to reanimate the legacy of social realist
painting, and likewise to acknowledge and stylize the ways political
propaganda and information spread in the Eastern Bloc. Serban Savu (b.
1978, Sighişoara, Romania) confronts the present legacy of past trauma in
scenes of daily routines, lives lived in public plazas and derelict spaces.
[145] He works from photographs, some sourced from the media and others
taken himself, which he then manipulates in Photoshop to form the visual
basis for his paintings. Source photography is also significant in the work of
Alexander Tinei (b. 1967, Cäuşeni, Moldova), who takes a photo found in
the media as his starting point each time he sets about making a new painting.
[146] He depicts figures, often tangled in awkward embraces, with blue
paint running across their limbs and elsewhere, like viscous tattoos. Tinei
equates bodily graffiti with degraded environments, and allies subjects with
their surroundings, portraiture with landscape.
145 Serban Savu, Blue Shadow, 2010

146 Alexander Tinei, Uncle J, 2006

 Thus can source imagery be combined with figuration to provide insight
into a subject, and it can also offer the possibility for rich layers of meaning
to accrue within an image. Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Enugu,
Nigeria) makes paintings of people in interior spaces, using collage and
photo-transfer to create a hybrid space of combined references to
contemporary life in Nigeria, where Crosby was born, and the United States,
where she now resides.[147] The resultant works offer a glimpse into
personal relationships and moments of intimacy, in a life lived across
borders.

147 Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Ike Ya, 2016

Others use source imagery for different ends, to express different kinds of
body politics. To this point, Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Cairo, Egypt) enforces a
defensive barrier between viewer and viewed.[148] Her nudes are sewn
rather than painted, their tangled threads hanging from canvases in dense,
colourful masses of knots and bundles that obscure the erotic subject of her
images (including kissing, coitus and masturbation). While Amer’s
reclamation of craft nods to a feminist prehistory (she eschews paint for its
identification with maleness and mastery), these pornographic images present
challenges to that lineage from within, as is also true of formative works
concerning domestic chores of childcare, cleaning and cooking. Equally, the
prevalence of nudity, especially in the service of female pleasure, will to
many viewers seem at odds with the artist’s Arab Muslim background.

148 Ghada Amer, The Woman Who Failed To Be Shehrazade, 2008

Amer confronted this reaction in an earlier installation, Encyclopedia of

Pleasure (2001); she created a set of cream-coloured fabric boxes,
ornamented in gold embroidery with quotations from the erotic medieval
Islamic encyclopaedia of the same title, which concerned the sacredness of
sex. With the text translated into English, the piece hints at concerns over
censorship, intimating that taboos still resonate in Western culture and are
illicit, even criminal, in other parts of the world. Indian filmmaker and
painter M. F. Husain (1915–2011) spent the last years of his life in voluntary
exile in Doha and London after he received death threats from religious
zealots for his nude paintings of Hindu goddesses. And indeed, diminishing
censorship in one area is no guarantee of acceptance elsewhere. Weaam
Ahmed El-Masry (b. 1976, Cairo, Egypt) worked during the rule of Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt, who enforced a law allowing for the censorship of the
press: prohibited images included those featuring poverty, corruption and
sexuality.[149] In the wake of the 2011 revolutions, part of the wider Arab
Spring, these policies were loosened, and Mubarak fell from power. As a
result, work by such artists as El-Masry, who paints superimposed figures in
lustful embraces, was no longer so strongly restricted at home – and yet even
then, she was rebuked when an issue of Newsweek Asia in which she was
featured was deemed offensive by Malaysian censors.

149 Weaam Ahmed El-Masry, The Embrace, 2011

 Thus does context matter, particularly where the body is concerned. For
Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965, Danbury, CT), an artist who did much to
revitalise the genre of portraiture in America in the mid-1990s, the fact that
her work arrived during the country’s AIDS epidemic lends new meaning to
her recovery of pure, adolescent desire. In thinly washed, colour-saturated,
small-scale works, she transforms the looked-at or wished-for subject under
her gaze. Without irony or apology, or the need for exegesis, but with a self-
conscious romantic idealism, she paints friends, artists, musicians, actors and
public figures, both contemporary and historical (eclectically ranging from
Marie Antoinette and Abraham Lincoln to Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sid Vicious,
Susan Sontag and Andy Warhol), the images of whom she often sources from
found images and photographs.
Others’ engagement with their source imagery is more conceptual; Anna
Bjerger (b. 1973, Skallsjö, Sweden) remains most interested in working
through the ethics of appropriating material that is not one’s own,
foregrounding the role of authorship in claiming others’ familiarity. Bjerger
paints from found family snapshots, which she engages as access points to
memories that are both irretrievable and affectively potent, and obsolete
sources of information, such as antiquated reference books, magazines and
instruction manuals. In Toxic/Rock (2018), time and physical appearance
fluctuate from reality, just as they do in our memories.[150] The solid,
ancient rock formations are rendered in pink, and the seated couple
emphasize the scale and stillness of the image, as though outside the realm of
time.
150 Anna Bjerger, Toxic/Rock, 2018

Source imagery is also vital to the work of Chantal Joffe (b. 1969, St
Albans, VT), who culls photographs of women from various contexts –
pornography, fashion magazines and the history of art – for use in
compellingly awkward portraits fashioned in thick impasto, in the tradition
of Alice Neel’s astute, sometimes raw, observation.[151] While strikingly
perceptive, and at times forthrightly empathetic, Joffe’s paintings are rarely
faultless or sentimental.
151 Chantal Joffe, Blonde in a Black Sweater, 2015

Artists like Joffe challenge ideals of beauty and the crude use of women’s
faces and bodies to sell products, lifestyle and sex. This stance stands in
stark contrast to that forged in the work of Richard Phillips (b. 1962,
Marblehead, MA), a painter of glossy, high-key celebrity portraits, who has
spoken of an infatuation with ‘wasted beauty’. One subject who has engaged
his interest is the actress Lindsay Lohan, with whom he has collaborated, and
whose bikini-clad presence in an art video and a suite of paintings serves as
an endorsement for his other endeavours: a smug hawking of product, for
both artist and muse. More egregious still is the art-world sexism so
flagrantly on display in Phillips’s Frieze (2009), a realistic interpretation of
a visibly wincing woman on her back, legs parted, with a thick issue of the
art magazine Frieze awkwardly inserted into her vagina.[152]

152 Richard Phillips, Frieze, 2009

Kathe Burkhart (b. 1958, Martinsburg, WV) has challenged power

dynamics and gender roles in male-dominated culture for decades, both in
her paintings and public persona. Her Liz Taylor Series (1982–ongoing)
comprises a self-portrait project in which the violet-eyed, raven-haired
actress, who passed away in 2011, operates as the artist’s double.[153] In
2019 Burkhart posted a Facebook comment, which she also allowed to be
published elsewhere online. She was fed up, not only with salacious imagery
such as Phillips’s, but also with outright discrimination against women in the
art world. Foremost in her mind seems to have been a spate of shows
unscrupulously retrieving careers of older women – like the Whitney
Museum of American Art’s 2016 retrospective of Carmen Herrera (b. 1915,
Havana, Cuba), her first museum exhibition, granted at the age of 101. This
kind of recognition comes far too late, and is an attempt on the part of
museums not only to save face but also to capitalize on years of labour
performed by these artists. As Burkhart posted:

153 Kathe Burkhart, Fuck Off, 2015, from the Liz Taylor Series (Raintree Country), 2015

It‘s international women’s day. I’m asking all curators and gallerists today
to step it up and make some change, by not making women artists wait too
long for the support that they deserve. Don’t treat older women like “old
ladies” and pit them market wise against young women with lower prices
and more estrogen. In so doing, you reify discrimination and oppression.
Don’t dump women artists into a mass grave between the ages of 35–65
and then fish them out one by one if they survive. Don’t wait until the artist
is so sick, or old and frail that you make it a strain for them to enjoy their
success. That is cruel. Don’t wait until you’re in the know about someone’s
terminal prognosis to do something for them…don’t let your institution
become known for that—there is no glory in chasing ambulances. And
finally, don’t give your highly valuable “cookies” out to the same few over
and over and over again…. And the rest of us? Don’t make us fight for
crumbs. It’s gross.

Retribution and Inclusivity

In the years since 2009, and especially since 2017, with the viral spread of
#MeToo and the testimony of so many survivors of sexual violence, the art
world has experienced a belated awakening on issues of sexual and gender
discrimination. This has led to the resignation or firing of certain prominent
museum professionals and utter intolerance for predatory acts perpetrated by
artists. Chuck Close (b. 1940, Monroe, WA), whose photorealist portraits
are usually based on gridded photographs that he translates and aggregates
into massive panels, has been the subject of critique as a part of the still-
growing movement. In 2018, media reported that the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., was to postpone an exhibition of Close’s work indefinitely
because of allegations of sexual harassment involving potential portrait
models. The accusations were not as yet heard in a court of law, though the
jury of public opinion was swiftly accusatory. Framed within a cultural
conversation around issues of benefit, entrée and allowance for breaches of
conduct on the part of those in power, the discussion around Close was also
distinctly industry specific.
Some trying to support Close noted, one cannot help but feel
unconstructively, that Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
was accused of murder, or that Pablo Picasso was a prodigious womanizer –
as if to normalize their behaviours. The mythology around the white male
artist as genius has held tenaciously despite the criticisms raised by feminism
and appropriation art (as discussed in Chapter 1); so too have the accused’s
obligatory defences often been bolstered by a performed contrition,
irrespective of the injurious act. It is important to register the extent to which
these private studio activities involving female models and male artists
historically exploited the least privileged bodies.
More publicly, the tradition of history painting was predicated on male
models in life-drawing classes, which also kept women from an education:
obstructed from the outset, left to forms of amateurism and craft kept apart
from the precincts of high art and its institutions. In what is considered a
founding document of feminism in art history, Linda Nochlin’s
groundbreaking 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?’, she argues that the drawing of the male nude, which was
considered an essential skill to master from the Renaissance through to the
19th century, was critical for the achievement of the highest art forms. (It
structured the ranking of genres, with history painting at the apex above
portraiture, genre scenes, landscape and still-life painting, respectively.)
As Jenny Saville (b. 1970, Cambridge, UK) remarked, looking back on
her own training in the late 20th century: ‘When I got to art school I just
naïvely didn’t realize that there were not great female artists—in the past I
just didn’t know it.[154] I had an epiphany in the art school library and said,
“Well, where are the girls?”’ Propped (1992) was her response to this
realisation. It formed part of her degree show in Glasgow the same year, with
a mirror hung opposite the work, but it was most publicized in collector
Charles Saatchi’s 1997 exhibition, ‘Sensation: Young British Artists from the
Saatchi Collection’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in which the
mirror disappeared but the potency of the image remained. In the nude self-
portrait, the artist sits uncomfortably atop a tall stool, pendulous breasts
squeezed together by the crossed arms that grip and knead her fleshy thighs;
she gazes out, veiled by a quote from the French feminist Luce Irigaray
theorizing that women function as mirrors for male narcissism.
154 Jenny Saville, Fate I, 2018

Since this debut, Saville has worked from live models in her studio,
photographing them in numerous poses and painting them, with exaggerated
physicality, later. These subjects have included people undergoing plastic
surgery, women pregnant or deflated after childbirth, transgender bodies and
her own children, in paintings of mutability and selfhood that analogously
look to be left unfinished in perpetuity. This is especially true of ‘Ancestors’,
her 2018 show at Gagosian Gallery, New York. She described it as a
response to #MeToo and an occasion to contemplate her own decades of
production: she finally understood so much artwork of her own to be part of
a usable past, which she mines alongside the historic images made by other
artists.
Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London, UK) also responded to the legacy of
traditional figure painting with a fierce drive for self-determination. She has
said: ‘My male painter friends…. say they spent their art school years trying
to paint [Willem] de Koonings, but they could never get away with what I
did. As white American males they couldn’t paint like an Abstract
Expressionist because it was too close, too recent, too American and too
macho, but as an English girl I could.’ Much of Brown’s early work involved
imagery of sexual acts: less pornographic than evocative of preceding erotic
analogies between oil paint and flesh. This is a convention-become-
misogynistic cliché: take Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who crudely conceived the
paintbrush as a penile extension, or Wassily Kandinsky, who dramatized the
act of painting as a rape scene, all the way to de Kooning’s Woman series,
and far beyond.
In Brown’s repertoire, which is marked by numerous examples of art-
historical appropriation, she inverts this centuries-old dynamic of women
being the cipher for male artists. In her Black Painting Series from the early
2000s, she has women experiencing pleasure for themselves: modelled after
Francisco Goya’s nudes, now consumed in orgasm, winged phalli swarming
around like angels or bees. Fleshy forms emerge from the dynamic field of
colour in Paradise to Go 1 (2015), made the year she returned from New
York to her native England.[155]
155 Cecily Brown, Paradise to Go 1, 2015

In Mickalene Thomas’s (b. 1971, Camden, NJ) tactile paintings – formed

by the layering of oil, acrylic and rhinestones – she uses art history to
address the politics of representation, in magpie-like overlays of modernist
idioms. Initially working from photographs that she takes of her muses in
fantastic built environments, which recall both the fabric backdrops of West
African studio photography (exemplified by Malick Sidibé and Seydou
Keïta) and patchwork redolent of period decor from her childhood, Thomas
makes oversized portraits of accessorized and painted black women. Her
Odalisque series (2007) recasts the artist-model relationship, so crucial to
her project, as a function of – and positive expression for – same-sex desire,
elsewhere the exclusive purview of the male gaze. Thomas’s multiple
versions of Gustave Courbet’s infamous painting of a female model lying
with legs splayed open, exposing her crotch, L’Origine du Monde (1866),
feature herself and her female partner as the recumbent figure swaddled in
dirty linens, while her tendency to plaster genitalia with glittery encrustations
– sparkly fig leaves – simultaneously converges on and conceals markers of
sex.[156]

156 Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe 1, 2012

Where Brown and Thomas dissolve bodies into paint or assemble them
in an accumulation of materials, Ellen Altfest (b. 1970, New York, NY)
upholds painterly verisimilitude, built by looking incredibly intently at the
thing to be transcribed. Altfest paints from life, concentrating on the minutest
details – single strands of hair, individual pores, follicles or fine veins – and
framing them at near range. She lavishes equal notice on her male subjects,
often presented in poses that mimic those of classic female nudes, or single
body parts presented for inspection or delectation, as in the trompe l’oeil
The Penis (2006).[157]
157 Ellen Altfest, The Penis, 2006

Since 2016, Ivy Haldeman (b. 1985, Aurora, CO) has been exhibiting
proxy nudes: crisp, absurdist acrylic renditions of anthropomorphic hot dogs,
resting like pin-up girls between pillowy buns.[158] These phallic sausages
with exaggerated lips and femme attributes originate from an advertisement
the artist saw in Argentina, showing a hot dog donning high heels and
eyelashes. Haldeman has since extended the critique of sexual persona into
the realm of sartorial trends, taking the 1980s power suit and high heels as an
emblem of the codes through which women entered the corporate workforce.
In this, her work connects to the stiletto-heel imagery in the paintings of
Ulrike Müller (b. 1971, Brixlegg, Austria), who examines the body within
social structures, critiquing the trope of a professional woman and her
costume.[159] Müller has worked in important collaborative contexts,
including New York’s LTTR, a feminist, genderqueer artist collective. She
also initiated the Herstory Inventory, a project through which she engages
feminist history by re-drawing archival images. (The contemporary embrace
of collectives and collaborative practice is explored more fully in Chapter
5.)

158 Ivy Haldeman, Full Figure, Open Book, 2018

159 Ulrike Müller, Exhibition view of ‘Container’, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen,
Düsseldorf, 2018–19

Working from life models is another example of interactivity in art.

Paradoxically, perhaps, given social media’s fostering of intimacy at a
distance, the Internet has aided the organization of life-painting groups and
hiring of models for a group to work from, together, as it were, in the flesh.
The set designer and artist Mark Beard (b. 1956, Salt Lake City, UT) runs a
longstanding drawing salon that attracts gay artists. He works via alter egos
including Bruce Sargeant, a play on John Singer Sargent, in an attempt to
make the homoeroticism implicit in his work the subject of un-closeted
analysis. Seeking to redress the absence of pre-Stonewall LGBTQ history
within histories of art, Beard perpetuates an academic realism through
muscular bodies of gymnasts and wrestlers, and shows the centrality of the
idealized male nude, from Greek statuary through the Renaissance, to
sublimate homosexual desire.[160] Creating backstories and networks for his
personas, and adopting the style of the moment in history at which he
conceived each of them living, Beard’s resultant works are fictitious
documents from a painter who never existed. They nonetheless heuristically
pose important practical questions about how contemporary art might come
to include non-heterosexual or non-binary positions. To this end, Beard
supports the work of those in his salon, promoting it to collectors.

160 Mark Beard [Bruce Sargeant (1898–1938)], Seven Gymnasts on The Ropes, n.d.

The American artist Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965, Verdun, France)

signposted this method of working from the model in the company of others
when she organized a figure-drawing atelier for the 2012 Whitney Biennial,
with workshop exercises for sketching shadow, contour, shape and finding
the essence of forms; and, in 2014, Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington,
OH) spent a week at The Drawing Center, New York, teaching Suzanne Lacy
(b. 1945, Wasco, CA) to draw, in lessons that were in part performed with
life models. Eisenman has staged important interventions into Queer
aesthetics (since 2005 she has worked with A. L. Steiner [b. 1967, Miami,
FL] on the curatorial initiative Ridykeulous, convening conversations as well
as organizing projects involving exhibitions, performances and publications),
and her inventive and often mordantly funny paintings harbour historical
references, while addressing themselves to current concerns, chief among
them the characterization of women as ‘butch’ or ‘femme’ and the trials of
motherhood. Public sites of sociability – beer gardens and barrooms –
additionally offer moments of affection; in Sloppy Bar Room Kiss (2011), a
lip-locked couple slump on a wooden table.[161]

161 Nicole Eisenman, Sloppy Bar Room Kiss, 2011

Although Eisenman has been clear about her hesitancy to define or speak
for others, she has served as a key mentor for younger artists who too
understand, as Eisenman has put it, that ‘representing bodies is complex.
What looks masculine in a painting could be a self-determined gender
mutineer, or trans, or something completely off the spectrum.’ Figures by
Christina Quarles (b. 1985, Chicago, IL) consist of rubbery limbs and
liquefied bodies, pieced together from quick lines and washes of acrylic
thinned to the consistency of watercolour, or thickly applied to be carved
with a paintbrush handle or comb.[162] In their mutability of conjuring they
perform an expansive, polymorphic sensuality and its process of becoming.

162 Christina Quarles, Moon (Lez Go Out N’ Feel Tha Nite), 2017

Louis Fratino (b. 1993, Annapolis, MD) is regularly compared to

Eisenman on other grounds, namely the expression of openly gay experience
(more so than the presentation of non-binary bodies, as in the case of Quarles
as well as Drea Cofield, who is discussed in the introduction on p. 23). He
paints quotidian scenes of men eating breakfast or getting a haircut, or more
evocatively, gathering on a moonlit beach or sharing a sleepy moment in bed,
attending both to the overall mood and to the details – an earlobe or patch of
hair, a softly swelling paunch or contoured cheek – that give each canvas a
specific gravity. They are odes to friendship and sexual understanding, the
latter often explicit in visualizing penetration or detumescent aftermath.
Andrea in Gambara (2018) poses the nude in a position of recline, dreamily
looking elsewhere.[163] While some of Frantino’s pieces depict personal
experience, others appropriate source material; Andrea in Gambara
additionally references the Milanese nobleman in the short story Gambara
(1837) by Honoré de Balzac, who attempts to save a misunderstood genius,
seducing and growing tired of his wife in the process.

163 Louis Fratino, Andrea in Gambara, 2018

Jonathan Lyndon Chase (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) also works with
expressionist figuration, painting queer black men. His points of reference
include the 1990s fashion and pop culture of his youth, afrofuturism and
science fiction – all of which he applies to Black and Queer narratives. The
bodies he renders blend into one another in orgy and union, punctuated here
and there by accoutrements like sneakers, athletic apparel and heavy crosses.
Many of the paintings – fashioned on cotton bedsheets, as if to materially
redouble the ground of the depicted scenes – afford glimpses of unbridled
pleasure, some with erogenous zones simultaneously and improbably turned
up to the picture plane (as in those with a mouth and anus facing the same
direction). Yet there are many others that admit the complexities of
negotiating identity relative to social norms. The figure in a blue dress in
dimonds all over my body (2018) is notable in this regard, their face –
frozen confronting the viewer – belying the seeming exuberance of the
rhinestone-dappled picture.[164]

164 Jonathan Lyndon Chase, dimonds all over my body, 2018

Didier William (b. 1983, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is even more explicit

about the aggression of the gaze in a series of works that were partly inspired
by the artist’s immigration to the United States and the circumstances of
diasporic identity as a queer Haitian man. For a 2018 double-presentation of
mixed-media paintings in ‘Curtains, Stages, and Shadows, Act 1’ and
‘Curtains, Stages, and Shadows, Act 2’ (at James Fuentes Gallery, New
York, and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, respectively), William exhibited
paintings filled with amorphous bodies blending into others and extending
into curtains, and left their titles untranslated in Haitian Creole, as in M vle
santi w andelan m (2018). Through an intricate technique involving
woodcarving, collage, ink and acrylic, William offers bodies without
identifiable race or gender, filled edge to edge with small, accusatory eyes
that unblinkingly stare back at the viewer.[165]

165 Didier William, M vle santi w andelan m, 2018

Chapter 5
Beyond Painting

The claims for representation explored in the previous chapter parallel the
rise of participatory art in the 1990s and 2000s (a strand that became all the
more acute within the burgeoning ‘experience economy’ of the 2010s: just
like businesses that operate within this economy, participatory artists place
emphasis on experience over product). Relational aesthetics, as this
participatory art is known, is a concept developed by French art critic
Nicolas Bourriaud to give form to a radical opposition to traditional object-
making and attempt to reorient interactions between artists, viewers,
institutions and collectors. Bourriaud defines relational aesthetics as
comprising a ‘set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and
practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social
context, rather than an independent and private space’. The ensuing
experiential art aims to precipitate a makeshift community, the camaraderie
and agency of which might productively outlive any brief event.
Yet the fact that Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked Thai food in the gallery (see p.
11), instead of making a standalone artwork and leaving it behind for display,
did not mean that the meal was a social service destined to reach
underserved populations. In short, his shows were not soup kitchens, but
rather were performances for a self-selecting audience, just as Carsten
Höller’s (b. 1961, Brussels, Belgium) Revolving Hotel Room – an art
installation in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, for
‘theanyspacewhatever’ (a 2008–9 survey of relational work), which took the
form of a hotel room in which guests could stay overnight – was not intended
as a homeless shelter.[166] Commentators quickly challenged the validity of
art created for such selective social contexts. Art by Thomas Hirschhorn (b.
1957, Bern, Switzerland) and others was further maligned for being made
using unpaid labour sourced from the under-resourced communities in which
artists increasingly extended their efforts, as in Hirschhorn’s 2013 Gramsci
Monument, an outdoor sculpture at the Forest Houses (a New York City
Housing Authority development in the Bronx) that was primarily fabricated
by its residents.

166 Carsten Höller, Installation view of Revolving Hotel Room at ‘theanyspacewhatever’, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008–9

Relational art projects might therefore mimic, without altering, the

implicit hierarchy of production: the artist remains in charge, and benefits
disproportionately from the exertion of the unnamed parties. This resonated
with neoliberal policies; creativity was being applied to industry
‘disruption’ yoked to capitalist expansion. Social practice picked up where
relational aesthetics left off, with a turn to more explicit activism and
community-based art. These transformations – both outside and within art –
have confirmed and precipitated certain ways of working within painting.
Furthermore, they have led to explorations of the way the artist exists within
networks of ideas and information, and less abstractly, across widespread
geographies.
This last point is also tied to the increasing number of large-scale
exhibitions that attempt to address the artistic and cultural phenomenon of
globalization. The expansion of biennials and triennials across the globe –
something unheard of before 1989, with the exception of the Venice Biennale
(established in 1895) and the São Paulo Art Biennial (established in 1951) –
made many artists peripatetic travellers who created site-specific
installations (as introduced in Chapter 3). Making-on-demand has been
extended to the now ubiquitous art fairs that pop up around the world every
month, in the course becoming less distinct from non-commercial biennials in
that they regularly feature curated sections, commissioned projects,
performances and talks. Such transformations have also led to questions
regarding the status of painting: not just what a painting is, but where and
when it becomes one or ceases to be a singular object.
The idea of the prop is predominant, in that it indicates a move away
from understanding painting as a discrete and complete entity, even when it
looks to be exactly that – a vital point raised in the Surrogate Paintings that
Allan McCollum (b. 1944, Los Angeles, CA) began in the late 1970s. Some
are fabricated from wood and museum board, others from plaster cast from
rubber moulds, and all have black centres where there could be an image. As
McCollum stated in 1982: ‘My paintings are designed as “signs” for
paintings, or as surrogates; they are meant to function in a way similar to that
of a stage prop, but in the normal world of everyday life.’
Extending this line, Richard Aldrich (b. 1975, Hampton, VA) emphasizes
that his mostly abstract paintings reflect on their own genesis. A 2011 press
release for his show ‘Once I Was…’ at Bortolami Gallery features a 2007
quote from the artist:[167]
167 Richard Aldrich, Installation view of ‘Once I Was…’, Bortolami Gallery, New York, 2011

These paintings are meant to become props in an ongoing production that

aims to present a series of systems that interact with one another. They are
not metaphor, nor allegory, but prop. The objects created are specific in
themselves, but that specificity is not pertinent to the workings, that is the
form of the interactions that can take place, of the systems. These systems
are not about a balance or a thought, a final idea or an idealized end, nor
a perceived direction, but rather a body in which things are happening….
What is important is that the work sets up a sort of stage in which the
viewer is responsible for navigating themselves around.

Aldrich is keen to supply his paintings with a written component, something

like a caption situating it from without; the above is an example of his
manipulations of the format for the obligatory gallery press release (and the
jargon writing spied therein, an industry-specific dialect that David Levine
and Alix Rule dubbed ‘International Art English’). In so doing, Aldrich
registers how meaning can be extraneous to the material object of the
painting, a condition of this chapter’s titular ‘beyond’, as typified by
installation, performance and social engagement.
Painting in and as Installation
Installation comprises temporary, three-dimensional works that are designed
for a particular place, usually for a show. After the exhibition closes, such
projects might be destroyed, or they might be recreated elsewhere,
reconstituted in response to the altered context. Although this manner of
working may seem at odds with painting’s boundedness and relative material
stability, artists have used painting to make installations. They have also used
spatial situations – immersive environments that call attention to the three-
dimensionality of paintings as objects – to foreground the very thing-ness of
painting, denaturalizing the idea that a painting is an immaterial image.
This consideration of the painting as object is critical in the work of
Robert Ryman (1930–2019). He was long involved with the pragmatic
testing of materials, especially their mutually determining relationships:
primer and paint, paint and support, support and edge, edge and wall, wall
and room, room and institution, and so on. Though Ryman’s paintings are
often described as ‘white’, his work is in fact rich with colour, found in the
range of matte and reflective surfaces and on the paintings’ grounds, each
with a different texture, resulting in an endlessly oscillating appearance. He
painted directly onto walls, moved fasteners – tape, staples, steel and other
brackets – to the front of canvases, and projected paintings outwards from
their wall planes at right angles, incorporating the shadows that these table-
like paintings produce as part of their compositions.
Ryman insisted that his works were realist, which is to say that they were
materially honest. He did not make images or illusions, nor did he paint
people or narratives, revelling instead in the physicality of painting as a
made object that existed in an institutional and material ‘situation’. He once
avowed: ‘My paintings don’t really exist unless they’re on the wall as part of
the wall, as part of the room… and once it’s down from the wall… the
composition is lost and the painting is not alive.’ When No Title Required 3
(2010), a single painting composed of ten individual panels, was hung in the
Pace Gallery in New York, the squares were spaced at regular distances,
traversing a corner.[168]
168 Robert Ryman, Installation view of No Title Required 3, Pace Gallery, New York, 2010

Alongside and after Ryman, there has been a preponderance of work that
takes apart the fundamental components of painting, showing them to be
simultaneously self-referential and entrenched within the sensory world.
Pieter Vermeersch (b. 1973, Kortrijk, Belgium) forgoes the support
altogether and annexes the wall as a paint surface for murals of colour
gradients that seem to dissolve the wall plane even as they cling to it, while
Clément Rodzielski (b. 1979, Albi, France) leans his structures against the
building, and Adrian Schiess (b. 1959, Zürich, Switzerland) lays his ‘flat’
paintings – large and reflective aluminium panels – on the ground.[169, 170]
But as with Ryman’s example, these projects illustrate that in moving off the
wall, painting does not cease to be painting; instead, the questioning of
painting’s fundaments – its material history and conventions, its reliance
upon architecture and institutional framing – expands what painting might be
and how it might relate to the world beyond itself (explored further in
Chapter 6).
169 Pieter Vermeersch, Untitled (2009) at ‘Beyond These Walls’, South London Gallery, London, 2009
170 Clément Rodzielski, Installation view of Untitled, Pace Gallery, New York, 2008

Steven Parrino’s (1958–2005) so-called ‘misshaped paintings’ also

stand for a rethinking of the properties and function of the support. Known for
furious-looking works that might be described as modernist monochromes
ripped from the stretcher, or folded, torqued, punctured or cleaved in
sections to highlight the intervals between canvas and frame, Parrino has
become increasingly important to other artists in the years following his
untimely death. His entropic, sagging works open a space between painting
and sculpture by manipulating weight and mass, and they also suggest an
extension into popular culture, particularly heavy industry, motorbikes and
guitars, a fact not unrelated to the fact that Parrino played the electric guitar
in several bands, the final one being Electrophilia, a two-person group that
he formed with artist Jutta Koether (p. 217) as keyboardist.
The deconstruction of painting has been furthered in the work of Angela
de la Cruz (b. 1965, A Coruña, Spain), who makes paintings to be destroyed.
[171] Since experiencing an epiphany caused by removing a stretcher and
seeing the emotional impact of the collapsed painting – a monumental
medium so easily undone – she has ripped and dangled works from their
frames or propped them in corners. They inhabit a position between
destruction and existence, carrying the same vulnerability as the human body.
Indeed, such works involve shadows of anthropomorphism; it is latent in
Parrino’s output, and is suggested by the moniker ‘person-objects’ that de la
Cruz uses to describe her paintings, as well as by her works’ titles, which
name emotions. Although it is tempting to relate these acts to the artist’s
biography (she suffered a massive stroke in 2005, the details of which were
obsessively recounted when de la Cruz became a finalist for the Turner Prize
in 2010), she in fact worked in a similar vein well before this event. In an
earlier piece, the tragicomic Self (1997), an oversized painting was crammed
into a seat opposite another painting on a wall.

171 Angela de la Cruz, Deflated XVII (Yellow), 2010

 Dan Rees (b. 1982, Swansea, UK) also incorporates furniture into
painting (both he and de la Cruz might be said to recall John Armleder’s
‘Furniture Sculptures’, which conjoin abstract art and functional objects,
treating them equally as trifling decor [p. 91]). For Shaker Peg Painting
(Triptych) (2011), Rees hung canvases on wooden peg rails, like disrobed
clothes, to emphasize their status as objects. In another engagement with the
physicality of painting, Rees’s Rorschach-like Payne’s Grey and Vermillion
(2010) works as a site-specific, acrylic monoprint: a canvas with two
hovering coloured forms provides the stamp for a mirror image hung on the
adjacent wall, making evident the causal chain that produced it.[172]

172 Dan Rees, Payne’s Grey and Vermillion, 2010

 Process is comparably manifested in the work of David Ostrowski (b.
1981, Cologne, Germany), who paints quickly, and leaves in place such
features as runny cobalt trails dripping down supports as pictorial evidence
of this method. These model the canvas as a kind of sketchpad, the receptacle
for an unforced informality of line and gesture that is nonetheless the product
of careful study and execution. A student of Albert Oehlen (p. 84) at the
Akadamie in Dusseldorf, Ostrowski lost the work that he had made during
his studies to an electrical fire in his studio in 2009. What followed were
paintings that were less laboured and less layered than the earlier ones, but
no less aesthetic. By calling one F (Between Two Ferns) (2014), he nods to
comedian Zach Galifianakis’s celebrity-interview series, while also pointing
to where his own work might end up: between houseplants, maybe above a
couch.[173] This is an acknowledgment that painting is liable to end up as
furnishing – a continuation of the modernists’ fears that the ‘apocalyptic
wallpaper’ of meaningless abstraction would lead to the unwelcome fate of
decorative irrelevance (for further discussion of which see Chapter 6, p.
270). The F in the title of the ongoing series stands for Fehlermalerei,
German for ‘failure painting’, prompting questions as to the nature of the
failure: is it within the painting or the ways in which it is ultimately put to
use?
173 David Ostrowski, F (Between Two Ferns), 2014

As much as the preceding artists conceive their work in installations, they

do not seek to assimilate it into existing architecture, even when the work
uses it as a buttress or exuberantly swells to cover a great deal of it. This
strategy finds a point of contrast in Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941, Long Beach,
CA), who has described Recitative (2009–10) as an unending painting
without edges.[174] Running to nearly 49 metres (160 feet), it covers three
walls and comprises 372 enamel-coated steel plates. Recitative groups
together abstract notations – coloured dots, lines of different lengths and
widths, hatch marks and brushstrokes, all of which might be infinitely
recombined – before trailing off in a loopy black line. In dispersing an entity
across so many constituents, Bartlett revisits her groundbreaking Rhapsody
(1975), which she exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, in
1976. Rhapsody follows abstract and figurative panels with images of
houses, mountains, trees and oceans through varying colour patterns and
configurations. It pluralistically encompasses aspects of period styles
including photorealism and Pattern and Decoration.

174 Jennifer Bartlett, Recitative, 2009–10

In conflict with the conceptual orthodoxy of the California Institute of the

Arts, where she studied in the 1990s, Laura Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, OH) is
invested in the possibilities for painting. She fills canvases with lush
landscapes and playfully wonky abstractions, employing a variety of
techniques and media, ranging from impasto to silkscreen; she sets paintings
freestanding in space, where they might be cast in the shadow of an inflexible
architectural feature, and has added clock hands to others so that they may
tell the time. Early works include multiple versions of paintings with wooden
supports, one painted as though the viewer is looking at the back of the
painting, and four others cropped to reveal the corners as though they could
create a composite when placed together. After years of organizing and
contributing works to other shows, in 2013 Owens presented twelve large-
scale paintings covered with bold, computer-generated motifs in a
warehouse near downtown Los Angeles. She had taken the site over as a
studio, and it soon became 356 Mission (2013–2018), a venue for curated
exhibitions (including Ruth Root’s 2017 show, discussed on p. 55),
programmes and the art bookstore Ooga Booga, as well as a studio for other
artists.
In 2016, Owens made ‘Ten Paintings’ at CCA Wattis in San Francisco.
[175] An immersive installation, it featured a single 5-by-46 metre (16-by-
150-foot) painting that covered three walls with silkscreened, flocked,
painted, and hand-printed wallpaper. To make the work, Owens scanned a
crumpled-up piece of white paper and converted the image into a bitmap (an
image that looks like a grid in which each square is a pixel of a single
colour): literally making wall paper. Together with motifs lifted from her
earlier paintings – chequerboard patterns and strokes from a digital
paintbrush – were classifieds from the likes of Berkeley Barb, an
underground newspaper published between 1965 and 1980, tarots and
horoscopes, and other instances of California countercultural effluvia that
have been overwhelmingly lost to the regional high-tech revolution. The
installation was emphatically interactive: viewers could text questions to
local phone numbers that appeared in the work and receive answers that
boomed through nearby speakers. Further breaking down boundaries between
the work and the space, wooden beams extending down from ceiling rafters
correlated in places with the images of lumber bisecting the gridded panels
of the mural itself, visually incorporating the existing shafts into the painted
field.

175 Laura Owens, Installation view of ‘Ten Paintings’ at CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 2016

Other artists might work to purposefully remove painting’s autonomy by

hiding it between walls, or more frequently, using it to cover walls or floors.
Miquel Mont (b. 1963, Barcelona, Spain) makes painted surfaces that he
hides between thick walls, boards or canvases. These could be shown on yet
another wall, on the floor or sandwiched into an architectural crevice from
which the paint oozes. For a 2019 project at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles,
Yunhee Min (b. 1964, Seoul, Korea) explicitly engaged with the architecture
by layering abstract forms on the central staircase, in the first project at the
museum to be oriented on the floor rather than the adjacent walls.[176]
176 Yunhee Min, Installation view of Hammer Project, LA, 2019

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg, Germany) wields an industrial

spray gun to paint directly onto walls, floors, ceilings, windows or facades,
as well as objects.[177] She has applied this spray technique to found sites,
including a whole house in New Orleans that was left behind after Hurricane
Katrina, although Grosse typically creates landscapes composed of dirt,
found objects and clothes, together with abstract, tectonic shapes made in
wood, Styrofoam or plastic, and uses these as the ground for the sprayed
paint. Since the colour – intense fluorescents and acidic synthetics –
continues unabated irrespective of what it is covering, it produces a
superficial continuity of forms. To achieve this effect, Grosse works very
quickly, using a compressor to keep the pigment flowing. She also dons an
impermeable Hazmat suit, in what might be described as a performance
without an audience; though the works are completed on site, this happens
prior to the show’s opening.
177 Katharina Grosse, Installation view of One Floor Up More Highly at Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2010

Grosse’s decision to keep the execution of the work unseen contrasts with
artists who incorporate actions into the work. Alex Hubbard (b. 1975,
Toledo, OH) performs for the camera in his studio, producing short, single-
channel videos of his manipulation of objects on a tabletop. The fixed
vantagepoint of the camera aligns the representational frame with the flat
plane of its subject: a stand-in for the painted surface. This becomes an area
of destruction through the very act of creation, as Hubbard’s manipulation of
the objects in the frame extends to overpainting and knocking items off the
tabletop as work progresses. The resultant paintings concretize this action as
artefacts, which he recuperates and exhibits on walls. One collage-like
example flaunts a balloon from Cinépolis (2007), a video in which Hubbard
haphazardly paints around a projection screen before using the support as a
ground for a set of Mylar balloons, which he torches, tars and feathers with
the insides of a disembowelled pillow. A 2016 presentation at House of
Gaga, Mexico City, implied a different kind of conversion from one state to
another. It featured a series of Bar Paintings, in which paintings fronted
wall-mounted boxes that resembled medical cabinets but were stashed with
alcoholic drinks like a bar.[178] To see the painting, the interior must remain
hidden; when open, that cavity revealed the paintings’ roles as props:
‘theatrical gestures that yield secret space’, as per the press release that
accompanied the show.

178 Alex Hubbard, Installation view of ‘El Cafecito’, House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2016

Theatricality also informs the work of Mika Tajima (b. 1975, Los
Angeles, CA), who, with curator and artist Howie Chen (b. 1976, Cincinnati,
OH), co-founded collaborative group New Humans in 2003. The group
produces sound work (using physical materials, piercing drones, static and
low bass frequencies) within the parameters of Tajima’s own shifting
multimedia practice. The elements she includes in her works are paintings,
props, stage markers and functional structures. A notable case is The Double
(2008), presented at The Kitchen in New York and at the Center for Opinions
in Art and Music in Berlin. Tajima conceived of a room bisected by double-
sided freestanding panels on wheels, which in their planarity suggest painting
and in their dimensionality sculpture, while also referencing Robert Propst’s
1960s Action Office designs (commonly known as the cubicle). Propst’s
designs were commissioned by Herman Miller to foster productivity and
conviviality in the workplace; in fact, they have become markers for
alienated labour, and thus this reference is also a comment on the false
promises of relational practices.
Tajima has repurposed the modular units elsewhere. In The Extras
(2009) her wooden painting panels are surrogates for humans waiting for
their star turn, in a scene reminiscent of a production set, while for a 2011
show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, she juxtaposed workspace
dividers, ergonomic kneeling chairs, spray-painted wall-bound decoration
and a performance by two contortionists; the last strained against the ciphers
of efficiency, while at the same time demonstrating the marks of a punishing
routine.[179] In concert with Charles Atlas (b. 1958, St Louis, MO), Tajima
occupied the main space of the South London Gallery for ‘The Pedestrians’
(2011). Over a ten-day period, the exhibition area became a rehearsal venue,
film set and installation, supporting a programme of performance, music,
video, lecturing, painting and sculptural tableaus – all of which were
negotiated by viewers, who were guided through the space on a designated
walkway.

179 Mika Tajima, Installation view of The Extras, X Initiative, New York, 2009
 Sigrid Sandström (b. 1972, Stockholm, Sweden) works with formal
abstraction, applying paint in varied texture and quantity to give the
appearance that paper, or other foreign items, have been added to the surface
of her paintings; trompe l’oeil tape marks and controlled swathes of smeared
paint further register the visual cues of collage. She has leaned large
paintings against a wall, set them across from mirrors to exaggerate their
already optically disorienting and physically confounding effects, and hung
small panels near to the ground. For ‘Föreställningar’ at Västerås
konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden, in 2018, Sandström responded to the walls
of the cube-like gallery: painted grey, they set the stage for an ambient play of
theatrical coloured light beams of perfect lavender, chrysalis pink, follies
pink, slate blue, dark steel blue and daylight blue. Spots hit the relatively
achromatic Projection I and Projection II, both 2018.[180] These transitory
marks added an extra layer to the paintings’ surfaces, activating dry paint (the
residue of once-active handling) and querying when the activity of making
ceases.

180 Sigrid Sandström, Projection I, 2018

 Painting and Performance
Beginning with her use of ultraviolet pigments in 2005, Jacqueline
Humphries (b. 1960, New Orleans, LA) posited that light might exist
separately from colour.[181] Backlit through translucent fabric supports,
synthetic fluorescents turn on and off. When on, these paintings unite the
ambient setting and its viewers, creating a psychedelic room-scape in which
everything is incorporated: dust, lint and fingernails all glow, along with
teeth and the whites of eyes. Her silver paintings also act as agents of
destabilization, shifting from bright silver to dark grey depending on the
ambient light and the position from which one views them. To achieve this
receptivity, Humphries primes a canvas before using a clay-like black as the
ground for colours applied wet-on-wet, followed by a monochromatic
spread of silver, which she scrapes, re-paints, strips and gouges. The brute
physicality necessary to force the dense black paint out of the tube, and the
various implements required to manipulate it, attest to the resistance of the
materials and to the exertion required of the technique.

181 Jacqueline Humphries, Installation view at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
2015

Humphries’s paintings insist that both making and viewing are bodily.
While the body is most obviously represented in figurative work, it is no less
essential to gestural abstraction. Non-objective paintings may refer to the
maker’s activity, visually registering, often deliberately, its traces in
preserved marks or manipulated surfaces. (One such example is Katharina
Grosse’s work, p. 209.) As discussed in Chapter 2, expressive, physicalized
strokes do not necessarily communicate the interiority of the maker, but they
do, by and large, evidence the manner of wresting material into form. In a
related externalization, paintings might also insist on the centrality of the
body perceiving them.
Mary Weatherford (b. 1963, Ojai, CA) creates atmospheric, colour-
washed paintings featuring giant tubes of neon affixed to their surfaces.[182]
These epic linen canvases are evocations of place but also meditations on
illusionism; they draw attention to where the viewer is positioned relative to
the burning light, reminding them of their physical presence and existence in
time and space. The energizing of the relationship between viewer and
painting need not, however, stop here. As paintings come off the wall, or
create environments that we can walk into, the spectator’s engagement
becomes increasingly physical.

182 Mary Weatherford, from the Mountain to the Sea, 2014

Such physicality is palpable in the work of Julia Dault (b. 1977, Toronto,
Canada).[183] Though her sculptures of commercial detritus – arced, folded
and improbably tethered to the wall – contain no illustration of the individual
who made them, they too reveal the presence of the artist through the brute
strength necessary to coerce unwieldy sheets of Plexiglas and Formica for
each site-specific installation. This is a power that one cannot help but sense,
and perhaps even fear, as the forms threaten to undo themselves imminently,
with a significant force. Less aggressive are her ‘drapes’, mutable paintings
that hang from a nail or pin, bunched and folded in casual wall-bound
arrangements. They oblige further remaking with each hanging, in the
important tradition of Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, MS), whose Drape
paintings of the late 1960s hung without stretchers, as if they were curtains.
Even in her more traditionally formatted paintings, Dault submits herself to
restraints – such industrial implements as metal rulers and door handles, and
jerry-rigged utensils such as branches and manipulated brushes – that control
her gestures while still evidencing the spontaneity of her body’s movements
across the work’s surface.

183 Julia Dault, Sure You Can, 2011

 Perhaps above all, Jutta Koether (b. 1958, Cologne, Germany) has been
influential in emphasizing the dialectical relationship between painting and
performance. In the vein of her friend Martin Kippenberger (p. 86), Koether
has achieved near-cult status for acting out the mentality of bad painting, with
supports that might be festooned with cheap jewelry, encased with resin or
coated with washes of pigment. This is to say nothing of her installations –
replete with curtains of Mylar ribbons, silver walls, shiny, oversized fitness
balls or pulsing strobe lights – and still less her theoretical writing and
criticism or work for the music and pop-culture magazine Spex. The
dedication and frequency with which she works with other artists and
performers is remarkable: as a performer, she has collaborated with Kim
Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Tom Verlaine, Tony Conrad,
John Miller, Mike Kelley and others, in alternative or underground scenes in
Europe and America. With Gordon and Rita Ackermann, as the group
Freetime, Koether experimented with collective paintings, and she has
worked in collaboration with other artists – Josef Strau (p. 137) and Emily
Sundblad (p. 218) among them – and under a variety of names, such as
JXXXA, Mrs Benway, Reena Spaulings and Grand Openings.
Though Koether exhibits her paintings as completed objects (meaning
once made they are not subject to subsequent transformation into another
physical state), she incorporates them into scenarios in which they are
activated from outside: so-called viewing sessions for her work to be seen in
different light conditions, or appointments for giving her live feedback on
paintings. She also allows for a multiplicity of uses, by herself and others.
For example, her Mad Garlands (2011–12), a series of painted planks
inspired by the tradition of the garland motif from ancient Roman wall
paintings, have been shown as wall-bound objects at Campoli Presti in Paris,
as components of a dance contest at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
and as illustrations of a presentation at a conference on art and subjecthood
at the Frankfurt Städelschule. Before these, ‘Lux Interior’, her 2009 show at
Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, presented just a single painting, which
hung not on the gallery’s walls but on a freestanding support in the centre of
the room.[184] (Koether repeated this strategy in 2011, avoiding the walls of
Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin, as if their very use might render the work
ornamental.) Hot Rod (after Poussin) (2009), her homage to Poussin’s
Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) – the sole item in ‘Lux Interior’
and the basis for poetry and performances around it – was theorized by the
critic David Joselit as exemplifying the ‘behavior of objects within networks
by demonstrating…their transitivity’, by which he means their open-
endedness.

184 Jutta Koether, Performance documentation, ‘Lux Interior’, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York,
2009

Reena Spaulings is an endeavour much in the spirit of art expanding

beyond the canvas: Reena Spaulings Fine Art is the name of a gallery, and
Reena Spaulings is a pseudonym under which a number of anonymous
collaborators create work and an eponymous fictional character of a 2004
novel, collectively authored under the name Bernadette Corporation.
Cofounder of the gallery Emily Sundblad (b. 1977, Dalsjöfors, Sweden)
occupies a range of positions, from dealer and artist to actress and singer,
and asks the same flexibility of her art. For ‘Si me dejas te destruyo’ (‘If you
leave me I will destroy you’) at House of Gaga in Mexico City in 2010, she
acted in the capacity of artist and dealer and more: hanging paintings in a
restaurant next to the empty gallery, playing music in the streets and, courtesy
of Michael Werner Gallery, New York, exhibiting Francis Picabia’s painting
Woman in Blue Scarf (1942) in Mexico City via an I-chat live feed visible in
the gallery during the show.
For ‘¡Qué Bárbaro!’ at New York’s Algus Greenspon in 2011, Sundblad
worked with the gallerist Amy Greenspon and prop stylist Matt Mazucca to
design the interior for the opening: gold folding chairs set up on a champagne
carpet bathed in coloured lights, while canvases referencing friends and
influences hung on nearby walls.[185] She began the show with a cabaret
performance of music orchestrated by Pete Drungle, who played a grand
piano alongside a seven-piece band, during which Sundblad sang in a gown
designed by Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough of the American
fashion brand Proenza Schouler. After the first night, the costume came to rest
on the wall, alongside newly designated paintings of flowers and clocks,
abstractions and framed pages from an auction catalogue, which had, after the
opening performance, been released from their purgatorial duty as props and
claimed as artworks. The changing status of an object between painting and
prop continued; in parallel with the gallery presence, Sundblad sent a self-
portrait/announcement for the show directly to Phillips de Pury, to be
auctioned in its sale of contemporary art on 13 May 2011. As she wrote in
the materials for the show: ‘The time of the artist’s emergence and their work
showing up at auction is shockingly brief. With this painting I decided to cut
to the chase.’
185 Emily Sundblad, Installation view of ‘¡Qué Bárbaro!’, Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York, 2011

Ei Arakawa (b. 1977, Fukushima, Japan) also epitomises the position of

making art as reflexive social spectacle. Mid-Yuming as Reconstruction
Mood (2004), a half-hour-long performance in which Arakawa and his
collaborators built and disassembled a temporary platform, was based on the
rapid construction and dismantling of the stage for the National Football
League’s famous Superbowl halftime show: a coordinated effort involving
hundreds of people working together to complete the task within the allotted
time of a commercial television break. In doubling back on itself, the work
also related to the makers, who, like Arakawa, had been immigrants. When
performed under the sign of ‘homelessness’ at the Yokohama Triennale in
2008, Arakawa implied that the lives that we build are contingent on
circumstance and always at risk of dispossession. He likewise challenged
the parameters of spectatorship by failing to indicate the beginning of the
performance. Consequently, the action looked like a work being installed by
handlers, with bodies moving around a construction site and materials
shuffled into and out of place. As soon as forms began to connect, whatever
had been erected was undone in a deferral of finality, which was only
fulfilled after the materials had been tucked away behind a false wall.
 Arakawa’s Towards a Standard Risk Architecture (2006) further
incorporated the public as participants, however unwittingly. The artist and
his associates endlessly shifted construction materials, vacuumed and
otherwise distracted gallery-goers at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York,
who were thereby stymied in their efforts to see the wall-bound works – the
art that was seemingly on view. Arakawa more explicitly invited audience
interaction when, following a dance routine carried out by art students from
the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, people were encouraged to
dance in the streets around the venue. This piece, the opening of ‘BLACKY
Blocked Radiants Sunbathed’ at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2011, featured
Arakawa and his brother Tomoo Arakawa (under the name UNITED
BROTHERS) in collaboration with DAS INSTITUT and the fashion designer
Nhu Duong.
As with collaboration, travel is a mainstay for Ei Arakawa, forming the
basis of ‘I am an employee of UNITED, Vol. 2’ at Overduin and Kite, Los
Angeles, in 2012 (‘Volume 1’ took place at Galerie Neu in Berlin in 2010).
[186] As the press release stated:

186 Ei Arakawa, Performance of I am an Employee of UNITED, Vol. 2, Overduin and Kite, Los
Angeles, 2012
With their expanded organizational skills, they [Arakawa, Nikolas
Gambaroff and Shimon Minamikawa] manage to fly 100,000 miles (160,000
km) in a calendar year, all operated by one airline alliance. Museums and
galleries covered all of the expenses. The collective is now Premier
1KTM…. Since 2005, their performances have been all over: Jan: Tokyo,
14,000; Feb: Berlin, 7,000; Mar: London, 7,000; Apr: Paris, 7,000; May:
Seoul, 14,000; Jun: Basel, 7,000; Aug: Milan, 7,000; Sep: Sao Paulo,
9,000; Oct: London, 7,000; Nov: Warsaw, 8,000; Dec: Hong Kong, 14,000;
total: 101,000. This is typical of a performance artist today…. Inside our
carry-ons, each under 14 inches x 9 inches x 22 inches (23 x 35 x 56 cm),
there are objects not claimed as art. Those objects are almost like tools,
yet too precious and fragile to send them over by FedEx…. The objects are
scanned and explained at the security gate (officers don’t really care what
they are). We take care of those objects as if smugglers.

Given the global climate crisis, this position is untenable, or at the very least,
irresponsible – a glaring example of the industry culpability in this area, and
a reminder of how, until recently, such copious travel indicated status and
success predicated upon jet-set mobility.
Assuming the role of contemporary artist as cultural service provider,
Arakawa explored themes of transit and exhaustion more critically through a
performance involving painted panels inserted into wall niches, and
mannequins, which were for the remainder of the show left to sit in wooden
chairs and contemplate a wall painting. In treating the aftermath of
performance as nascent installation, Arakawa suggested the convertibility of
these materials and the possibility of repurposing infrastructure. The scenario
served as the basis for the show of Nikolas Gambaroff (b. 1979, Frankfurt
am Main, Germany) at the same gallery two months later, who reclaimed
aspects of Arakawa’s display, and transformed them into backgrounds for
mixtures of paintings and collage that he supplied.[187] In this act,
Gambaroff established a kind of game of exquisite corpse (the surrealist
parlour game in which a group of participants create a drawing without
seeing one another’s contributions, resulting in a composite creature). As in
his other projects in which performance acts as a support for painting, he
simultaneously treated process as form, and form as process. Here, process
refers not just to the creative act; Gambaroff also examines the administrative
system that is involved in the staging of art, titling a show at Balice Hertling,
Paris, ‘2008 8864 3362 2250 Z1 CDGRT’ after the FedEx tracking number
attached to the abstract oil paintings he sent to the gallery.

187 Nikolas Gambaroff, Installation view of ‘Tools for Living’, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, 2012

Social Studies
Math Bass (b. 1981, New York, NY) moves between performance and
object-making, with the residues of early performances retained in other
formats. Notably, since 2013 Bass has worked on Newz!, a series of brightly
coloured shapes and recurring hard-edged images – including a plume of
smoke, binoculars, a Scottie dog, a cigarette, a matchstick and an open-jawed
crocodile – set into frieze-like motifs on raw canvas. The passage of their
work from one format to another is evident in these paintings, some more
directly than others. The smoke icon recalls both Bass’s 2010 solo
performance Another Country, in which their voice was projected live,
together with a pre-recorded soundtrack, while a scooter ran and filled the
room with carbon monoxide, as well as the 2011 performance piece Dogs
and Fog, 2011, in which Bass filled a gallery with dogs and fog, before
singing with friends, standing atop cinderblocks arrayed in a circle.
 Further, Bass poses that a prop for artmaking may become a sculpture, or
an exhibition a performance event, indicating that anything can lend itself
equally, if not simultaneously, to multiple roles. A sculptural ladder might be
climbed (another recurring feature, and one that Bass now fabricates in
walnut to indicate its evolution from studio tool to aesthetic product), as in
Brutal Set, performed at the Hammer Museum in 2012 as part of ‘Made in
L.A.’. Or its role might be subverted, as in Body No Body Body (2012), in
which Bass fitted sewn, striped canvases over unfolded steps, coaxing oddly
affective bodily decoys from the inanimate things. Bass’s title for a solo
show at the MoMA PS1 in 2015, ‘Off the Clock’, also implied that things
could moonlight as something different.[188]

188 Math Bass, Installation view of ‘Off the Clock’, MoMA PS1, New York, 2015

Bass leaves the props in place after the performance ends, allowing
viewers to carry out their own choreography in moving through the spaces,
effectively asking whether they are enacting a performance of their own.
Others prevent stasis in their work through different means. Vanessa Maltese
(b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) literalized the connection between process and
form in a 2018 installation at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, where she
displayed a series of reimagined surrealist parlour games, cartoons for the
viewer to complete.[189] Through this, she effectively cued the
manipulability of the graphic geometric paintings that surrounded them. Each
of the paintings has a powder-coated steel frame with moveable pieces:
magnetic, acrylic-coated wooden shapes (short lines, half-spheres, jaunty
arcs), the physical presence of which complicated the plays of illusion
within the compositions.

189 Vanessa Maltese, Duped by the grapes, 2018

The Taiwanese artist Michael Lin (b. 1964, Tokyo, Japan) makes
elaborately painted, day-bed-like platforms, furniture and cushions, from
which viewers can absorb work installed nearby, and in so doing, become
part of a moving tableau. In 2016, he wrapped the walls of Manila’s Museum
of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) in bright floral prints
appropriated from textiles from his native Taiwan.[190] For Untitled
Gathering, Manila, in the main gallery, he extended the flowers to cover 240
wooden stools – low seats found commonly on Southeast Asian sidewalks –
in a shifting puzzle, the individual components of which were to be
reassembled by viewers. In another instance of refusal to administer and
determine social space, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, San Francisco, CA)
produces painted-wood and polypropylene-webbed Clubchairs on casters
from which to view her paintings.[191] With them, she encourages people to
idle and roll the chairs about to form conversational groups.

190 Michael Lin, Installation view of ‘Locomotion’, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila,
2016
191 Mary Heilmann, Installation view of ‘To Be Someone’, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport
Beach, California, 2007

Sarah Crowner’s (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) collage-like, sewn

geometric paintings make over schemes from Victor Vasarely, Lygia Clark
and others; their part-by-part seamed constructions wrap tautly around their
stretchers like vernacular quilts. Large-scale and often immersive, they serve
as backdrops for unscripted actions in the gallery, with some even suggesting
theatre curtains opening to an empty stage. Referencing futurist stage sets,
such as those by Fortunato Depero and Giacomo Balla, ‘Ballet Plastique’ at
Galerie Catherine Bastide in Brussels (2011) featured a raised plywood
stage on which visitors had to climb to inspect the paintings at closer range.
For ‘Acrobat’, a show of the same year at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in
New York, Crowner exhibited small wooden sculptures, envisioned as
proposals for subsequent theatrical incarnations. Indeed, this was borne out
in her painted backdrop for a Robert Ashley opera at the Serpentine Gallery,
London, in 2012 – a project that has inspired others, including Crowner’s
2018 contribution of scenery and costumes for the American Ballet Theatre.
Crowner has also been working with hand-glazed ceramic tiles that she
fabricates in Guadalajara, Mexico, which, when complete, she lays out in
patterns on the floor or wall as though composing a painting. These may
extend from wall to wall or layer over a platform (a room within the room),
though in either case, Crowner refuses the illusion of totality (the
Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art) by ensuring there are positions from
which the outside of the scenario remains in view. ‘The Wave’, Crowner’s
2014 show, also at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, featured a shimmering
turquoise parquet, a mosaic of more than a thousand tiles set into a Wiener
Werkstätte herringbone pattern.[192] Five paintings hung on the adjacent
walls and two were supported by freestanding structures at the floor’s
perimeter. When standing behind these, viewers could see the backs of the
two unattached paintings, strings hanging, easel skeletons conspicuous. These
multiple perspectives show perception to be corporeal, contingent and
durational, forcing an active – if irresolvable – mode of beholding the work.

192 Sarah Crowner, Installation view of ‘The Wave’, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, 2014

Marc Camille Chaimowicz (b. 1947, Paris, France) offers an even more
encompassing environment in which viewers engage with the work and space
– and with other viewers doing the same. His major 2018 show, ‘Your Place
or Mine…’, iterates a decades-long project in which he designs decorative
objects and art in relation to his apartment, which originally served as his
performance site.[193] The setting of this installation at the Jewish Museum,
New York, a French Gothic style landmark built in 1908, extended this logic.
Within it, an array of work from throughout his career was grouped as if
displayed in domestic interiors. The pastel period rooms evoke a somewhat
indeterminate past. Chaimowicz used curving pathways to connect the
galleries of patterned wallpaper and framed art, furniture and small
sculptures, creating a meandering route that mimicked the circuitous trails
through the neighbouring Central Park.

193 Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Installation view of ‘Your Place or Mine…’, The Jewish Museum,
New York, 2018

Creating an interior world that is continuous with the exterior, Elise

Adibi (b. 1965, Boston, MA) showed her Respiration Paintings –
abstractions with grids and pours of pigments mixed with essential plant oils
– in the Frick Greenhouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from April to October
2017, in a profound meditation on transience and the reciprocal relations
between people, art and nature.[194] Subject to changing seasons and
fluctuations in temperature, humidity and light levels, and beset by torrential
rains that rushed through the century-old glass structure, the paintings on
canvas changed during the installation as elements activated the organic
matter in her paintings and mould took root.
194 Elise Adibi, Installation view of Persian Rose Monochrome, with plants, from Respiration
Paintings, The Frick Pittsburgh Greenhouse, 2017

Adibi courts direct engagement with the material of painting, exploring

the role of accident. As well as activating the canvas itself (Adibi works
with a precise shade of pistachio green that brings forth the otherwise
imperceptible red in the unprimed beige fabric), in many pieces she uses the
grid as a foundation for emergent patterns. Despite the priority of the grid and
its regularized matrix, the combination of multiple paint layers and human
slips means imperfections and misalignments predominate. Adibi pushes this
bodily connection with her work further by choosing organic materials,
incorporating the plant-oil pigments, as well as rabbit-skin glue, graphite and
even her own urine. The last seeps into the thick ground, streams down its
surface in rivulets or radiates outwards in stains that suggest cosmic nebulae,
and the imagery ‘develops’ as the urine interacts with a copper-based paint
that coats the support like an emulsion. For another show in 2018, ‘The
Outermost Painting’ at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania, Adibi left a single
copper painting that she had oxidized with her urine outside, exposed to the
elements, and brought people together around it, even in the dead of winter.
Attempting to rethink public art as such, in 2019, a group show of
paintings was unveiled on the High Line, New York – a 2.4-kilometre-long
(1.5-mile) elevated park on a former New York Central Railroad spur that
cuts through the Chelsea gallery district on Manhattan’s West Side – to be on
view outdoors for a year.[195] Ei Arakawa, Firelei Báez, Daniel Buren, Sam
Falls, Lubaina Himid, Lara Schnitger, Ryan Sullivan and Vivian Suter all
contributed works that relate to the tradition of open-air painting, in concert
with the show’s title, ‘En Plein Air’ (which refers to the mid-19th-century
practice of painting in the landscape instead of the studio, a custom made
possible by the invention of paints in portable readymade tubes).

195 Firelei Báez, Installation view of 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, ‘En Plein Air’, High Line, New
York, 2019–20

For many, performance implies an even more direct engagement with

audiences, less as witness to an event or its aftermath – or viewers within an
indoor or outdoor installation – than as participants in its realization. Think
back to Marina Abramović performing The Artist is Present (2010) at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, as discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 73). Or to
give another example of a performance involving direct contact, for Museum
Museum: XX (2007), executed as part of the Performa Biennial in New York,
David Adamo (b. 1979, Rochester, NY) stood in front of John Singer
Sargent’s Madame X (Madame Gautreau) (1883–4) at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, for a whole day, communing with the art and
interacting with others. If this work asked how interpretation might come
from discourse, and relationships from both, a subsequent performance at the
Bergen Kunsthalle in Norway in 2011 involved Adamo spending a night in
the museum, improvising on a piano in total solitude.
Paul Branca (b. 1974, New York, NY), too, develops explicitly
relational projects. He has painted images on phone cards for use by
immigrants, and in 2010, set up a ‘painting distribution project’ at Golden
Parachutes in Berlin. There, Branca hung nineteen monochrome paintings in
the colours of the German flag, emblazoned with Google-translated lines
about travel and displacement.[196] The title ‘Couch Crash’ nodded to
staying with friends, and, more broadly, suggested the realities of artists
travelling from place to place on a low budget and the networks that make
this possible. Branca invited his friends in Berlin to take a painting as a gift
on a first-come, first-served basis: once they removed their respective
paintings, the nails were left behind as markers of the accepted offerings. In
an alternative kind of exchange, the only paintings for sale, which remained
on view after the others were taken home, were three works composed of
materials left over from making the presents. In holding the relational and
transactional strands of his work in tandem, Branca refuses the approach of
so many relational projects of the preceding decade, which proposed that
gifting upends capitalism, rather than providing it with another point of entry.
196 Paul Branca, Installation view of ‘Couch Crash’, Golden Parachutes, Berlin, 2010

Still others use paintings as pretexts for even more directly activist
projects predicated on social engagement. This is discussed more fully in
Chapter 7, but a few key cases of this direct commitment are as follows. In
2000, Özge Açıkkol (b. 1976, Istanbul, Turkey), Günes Savas (b. 1975,
Istanbul, Turkey) and Seçil Yersel (b. 1973, Istanbul, Turkey) founded the
collective Oda Projesi, or ‘Room Project’, in Istanbul, using an apartment in
Galata (one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods) as the site for communal
activities and a gathering place for artists, musicians, scholars and nearby
residents.[197] Engaging directly with local children and their families on a
regular basis through, among other things, a Sunday programme, Oda
Projesi’s members shared art supplies, and used clotheslines to display
artwork and streets as sites of production and pedagogy. Galata became
gentrified rapidly, and Oda Projesi lost their lease in 2005. This initiated a
comparatively mobile way of working, in which capacity the collective
continues today.
197 Oda Projesi, Picnic, Galata, Istanbul, 2004

More recently, Theaster Gates (b. 1973, Chicago, IL) commenced

Dorchester Projects, a major urban renewal project on the South Side of
Chicago, where, due to the subprime mortgage crisis, he was able to buy
buildings in disrepair. These are being put to use for concerts and
performances, and they serve as repositories for art and architecture books,
19th- and 20th-century glass-lantern slides and the archive of John H.
Johnson, who founded Johnson Publishing Company, famous for the
magazines Ebony and Jet. As Gates remarked in an interview: ‘I started to
recognize that if there was not direct intervention by normal people, black
space in the United States would not be saved. It would simply spiral down,
without a whole lot of investment from outside.’
These urban renewal projects might be compared to others in the US,
including Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles, CA) and Rick Lowe’s (b.
1961, Eufaula, AL) Watts House Project in Los Angeles, itself modelled on
Project Row Houses, Houston, a previous venture by Lowe in the 1990s,
which gave shelter to single mothers and set up artist residencies and
exhibitions. Watts House Project is a non-profit that gathers artists, designers
and residents of the eponymous post-industrial neighbourhood to renovate
homes. But Gates goes further in ‘recirculat[ing] art world capital’. For the
cultural activities at Dorchester Projects are financed by the sale of artworks
fashioned by materials – marble, wood, roofing paper – salvaged from the
structures he purchases. The decommissioned fire hose in particular has
become important to Gates for its additional reference to the hosing of civil
rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 (that served a very
different end for Kelley Walker, as discussed in Chapter 1, p. 38).
Gates has also made paintings in 2016 and 2017 based on sociological
studies on the advancements of Black Americans in the decades after the
Civil War.[198] There is a tension between the nature of these works as
determined by context and their self-sufficiency as discrete objects. Gates
renders statistical data as hard-edged shapes, stark geometries without
captions that act as a guide for the charts that are absent from these paintings
but exist in the original pages of the studies. These paintings pose a core
issue of representation: what is communicated in the field of the image, and
what reading and learning must be brought to bear on it. The works do not so
much inject ‘content’ into modernist abstraction as insist that the context for
making and circulating such canvases is necessarily a social field. But this
field is subject to misrecognition, as Gates acknowledges elsewhere
(productively achieved in his fire hoses, which harness the historical
baggage of painting by presenting materials that are politically freighted and
from outside the artistic tradition to look as if they are modernist
abstraction). The next chapter considers this from another angle. By acting on
painting, as opposed to using it to transmit clear content, to represent
narrative, and so on, is to endow it with a self-reflexivity: it allows the artist
to produce a painting about painting. The risk in so doing is that this may also
produce a solipsism or return art to the status of a merely decorative picture
on the wall.
198 Theaster Gates, Land Ownership on Conspiracy Blue, 2016
Chapter 6
About Painting

Contemporary artists may question where, when and under what

circumstances a painting becomes legible as a painting, or ceases to be so
considered. As demonstrated in Chapter 5, painting no longer exclusively
implies an image on a flat picture plane, framed on a wall (even if it may
well sometimes be that, too). And as will be posited in this chapter, external
circumstances ‘beyond’ the painting motivate the medium anew, with the
institution (its physical architecture, but also its power in authorizing work
for display, and the meaning ascribed through its selection) playing a crucial
role in the course of painting’s de- and re-definition. Questions as to what
painting is – and what good painting is – are answered provisionally with
each work that comes to be shown. In this way painting exists productively
as an investigative tool to explore not only how we see, but also how the
institution filters this act of reception in the first place.
In what is perhaps an extreme case in point, Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960,
Padua, Italy) installed 128 of his works of art – representing the near-entirety
of his output since 1989, from preserved animals to framed photos and
paintings – at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2011, for
his retrospective ‘All’. The works did not hang on the walls, but rather from
ropes lowered from the museum’s ceiling; viewers circled the ramps around
the central cavity to see the art.[199] This proved an especially strange
unmooring for some pieces, such as Untitled (2009), a painting pinned to a
wall by a broom, the upright stick of which pokes and distorts the canvas
surface.
199 Maurizio Cattelan, Installation view of ‘All’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011

If Cattelan shows just one position for painting as an object – and a

potentially inert one at that, hanging listlessly, as if from a noose – his work
is also indicative of the ways in which artists have extended their forebears’
institutional critique in the service of painting. The Guggenheim’s history
itself provides examples of past attacks of this kind, by the likes of Hans
Haacke (b. 1936, Cologne, Germany) and Daniel Buren (b. 1938, Paris,
France): both called foul on the institution while manoeuvring within it,
pointing to the museum’s operations as well as to the burden of architecture.
In 1971, Haacke’s solo show at the Guggenheim was cancelled and the
curator fired when the artist refused to pull works such as Shapolsky et al.
Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1,
1971, which details the real-estate holdings of a then-trustee’s New York
empire built on slums. Earlier that same year, Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture, a
giant, vertically striped banner unfurled from the skylight crowning the
rotunda, was removed from the museum’s ‘Sixth Guggenheim International
Exhibition’ after fellow exhibitors complained that Buren’s installation
blocked sight of their works. Though other artists wrote protesting this act of
censorship, the painting was not reinstalled.
The Buren episode remains a potent instance of institutional critique
registered through painting. It prefigures more recent work that challenges
institutions’ claims on art, even as the work depends heavily upon the
institutions for economic support and visibility. For example, Heimo
Zobernig (b. 1958, Mauthen, Austria) collaborated with Albert Oehlen (p.
84) in 1994 for a show at the Vienna Kunsthalle, where he installed red
fluorescent lighting: an incandescent haze through which to see Oehlen’s
canvases. Zobernig reprised this strategy at the Museum Bärengasse in 2011,
where, as before, the circumstances of display transformed the objects on
view (in this case, Zobernig’s own work).[200] There it deliberately
amplified the museum’s lighting problems, recuperating these institutional
shortcomings for Zobernig’s purposes.
200 Heimo Zobernig, Installation view of ‘Ohne Titel (In Red)’, Kunsthalle Zürich at Museum
Bärengasse, 2011

Given the broadening of the scope of ‘painting’ that has already been
considered in Chapter 5, Chapter 6 emphasizes painting that more
straightforwardly deconstructs the history and conventions of painting as its
own institution. This idea of ‘institution’ is defined as established practice
and custom. A subset of abstract work that is conceptual in this vein has,
over the last few years, ironically come to appear so absent of meaning as to
return painting to 1980s-like debates around the empty commodity. This
perceived frivolity of formal innovation loosened from consciousness of the
times was unceremoniously tagged ‘Zombie Formalism’, and the reaction
against it serves as the basis for Chapter 7; in response to assertions of the
medium’s decorative frippery, such works see a return to painting as
something much more socially engaged, even useful.
The Institutions of Painting
Considering painting about painting, Stephen Prina (b. 1954, Galesburg, IL)
has described his output as ‘system specific’, a reflection on how exhibition
spaces relate to art discourse. The Painter’s Studio, Real Allegory,
Resolving a Phase of 153 Years in My Artistic Life: A, No. 1 (2001), an off-
white, screen-printed canvas with the initials ‘SJP’, honours his commitment
to painting as subject and practice. Each of Prina’s pieces is related in some
way, and develops in a series of long-term projects that often mutate within
different contexts – informed by personal associations as much as they are by
circumstantial factors like the limitations of existing exhibition architecture –
in a chain of reference that leads back to previous shows and sources. He has
even made paintings in primary colours on commercially produced linen
window blinds, merging art and architecture in a new variation on
collaborating with site.
Prina’s best-known project is his Exquisite Corpse: The Complete
Paintings of Manet (1988–present), a reinterpretation of each of the 556
items of Edouard Manet’s oeuvre listed in a now-outdated catalogue
raisonné.[201] Rather than reproducing the extant paintings, Prina pairs a
lithograph of a particular work (reproduced in the exact size and format of
the original, but without attempting to figure the paintings or reproduce
Manet’s pictorial content) with a charted overview of Manet’s body of work,
executed in ink wash or watercolour on rag paper. When cited in full, each of
the individual titles refers to an original painting and its location, including
the places and collections through which it has passed: e.g. Exquisite
Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 41 of 556, Nymphe Surprise
(The Startled Nymph), 1861, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, 1988. Prina has
asserted that he chose Manet as the subject of this exercise precisely because
of Manet’s status as the artist who many consider to be the first modernist, as
well as that of the first ‘museum artist’ – that is, an artist who assumed the
museum would be the eventual home for his painting, according to the
philosopher Michel Foucault. As discussed at greater length in Chapter 3,
this formulation shows paintings to be implicated in institutions and
dispersed across fields of information, even before they are painted.
201 Stephen Prina, Installation view of Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 135 of
556: L’Execution de Maximilien de Mexique III (The Execution of Maximilian of Mexico III),
1867, Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1990

This anticipation of the gallery as the destination for painting, broached

in Prina’s project, has been investigated in other instances. Scott Lyall (b.
1964, Toronto, Canada) weaves between examinations of material, the
gallery and his areas of research. For a presentation at Sutton Lane, Paris, in
2011, he exhibited composites of digital files containing thousands of
different colours, applied to canvas and vinyl in successive layers. If the
work is neither solicited for subsequent showing, nor purchased, Lyall retires
the code on which it is based. He has described his installations as
scenography, relating to the staging and managing of parts into a theatrical
whole. His 2019 show ‘Superstar’ at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York,
comprised near-holographic paintings made with Nanomedia, a technology
developed by a team of optical physicists at Simon Fraser University in
British Columbia, with whom Lyall collaborated to apply the technology in
an artistic context. In the resultant series, Nanofoils, the colour is neither
chemical nor pigment, but rather the actual appearance of scattered light; the
viewer does not look at a static image, but a performance initiated each time
the eye interacts with the artwork.[202]

202 Scott Lyall, Nanofoil (SLStudio.clone_1/1/3), 2018 (detail)

Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975, Baton Rouge, LA) also explores the subject
of networks of invention and display. ‘Quelques Aspects de l’Art Bourgeois:
La Non-Intervention’ (Certain Aspects of Bourgeois Art: Non-Intervention),
a 2006–7 show at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, consisted of a series of
twenty-five colour offset lithographs depicting the gallery’s art storage bay,
clustered in groups of five; four large, abstract oil paintings in greyscale,
derived from blurred photocopies; and eight lightweight folding tables on
which were displayed sixteen imageless photographic prints progressing
from white to black. A viewer following the diagonal path of the tables
would traverse the gallery to arrive at the storage bay pictured in the
lithographs, completing the narrative circuit. However repetitive the loop,
the folding tables – neutral presentational devices but also explicit symbols
of the portable economy of the street – led back outside, further extending the
reach of the objects and their relations. More recently, ‘Bird Shells and
Chambered Wings’, at Raucci/Santamaria in Naples, Italy in 2016, featured
Thompson’s abstract images as a kind of painting by the yard: items were
displayed at identical height but adjusted in width in proportion to the walls.
The resultant works will always reflect their origins, even when exhibited
elsewhere, precisely by not fitting in as seamlessly anywhere but their
original site of display.
Merlin Carpenter (b. 1967, Pembury, UK) is a former assistant of Martin
Kippenberger (p. 86), as well as a writer, and he is co-founder of Poster
Studio, an artist-run space in London, which he started in 1994 with Dan
Mitchell, Nils Norman and Josephine Pryde. His work repeatedly engages in
institutional critique, from the gallery to conventions of painting, such as
authorship; for example, in 2011, Carpenter gave away a gestural painting
that he had created in 1990 and signed with a stencil, in exchange for twenty
copies of it, painted by the recipient and also signed with a stencil. He has
exhibited paintings produced in galleries just in advance of, or even during,
exhibition openings: these canvases bear slogans such as ‘BANKS ARE
BAD’, ‘Kunst [Art] = Kapital’, and ‘DIE COLLECTOR SCUM’, and have
been presented in galleries in New York, Zürich, London and Brussels, as
well as in a car showroom and a fashion boutique in Berlin. For ‘A Roaring
RAMPAGE of Revenge’ in 2005, he enlisted his gallerists as assistants at
Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, to make brushy paintings of the World
Trade Center on 9/11, in the style of Josh Smith (p. 133). Over these he
superimposed gallery press materials, one Xerox per canvas, resulting in a
portrait of the gallery at the time of exhibition. (The gallery’s promotional
materials that were used for this work – the complete gallery press pack for
2005 – chart the ascension of the Chinatown gallery in the wake of the 9/11
attacks.) At the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2008, Carpenter exhibited
Burberry throws, both genuine and knock-off, displayed on stretchers, in a
comment on commercialism and authenticity.
As these works illustrate, Carpenter’s paintings are suited to the spaces
they critique, especially, perhaps, his holistically conceived ‘TATE CAFÉ’
at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, in 2012.[203] The gallery is run by
John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad, who are also members of the artist
collective that works under the guise of fictional artist Reena Spaulings, a
separate entity to the gallery (Sundblad and Reena Spaulings are discussed
further in Chapter 5, p. 218). ‘TATE CAFÉ’ was created in response to
Reena Spaulings (the artist collective) contributing a work of Carpenter’s to
the Tate gallery in London for its 2009 pop-art blockbuster, ‘Pop Life’,
despite him refusing permission for them to do so. ‘TATE CAFÉ’ was built
to replicate its namesake’s recognizable furniture, counter area and comment
cards, and even featured a photomural of the venue’s view of the Thames. A
bookstore stocked with books associated with the artist and the gallery
provided a setting in which viewers could read an interview between
Carpenter, Kelsey and Sundblad, which discussed the event and raised
questions about the roles of artists and museums, many of which remain
unanswered. Like a snake eating its tail, one could speculate that perhaps the
paintings Carpenter included will one day end up at the Tate.

203 Merlin Carpenter, Installation view of ‘TATE CAFÉ’, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, 2012
 Nick Mauss (b. 1980, New York, NY) addresses the gallery as a social
structure within which painting operates, initiating a dialogue with the space
of display. For the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Mauss built an antechamber to the
cosmetics company Guerlain’s first Institut de Beauté spa in Paris (dating
from 1939), designed by Christian Bérard.[204] Instead of supplying his own
drawings or silver paintings, Mauss installed objects from the Whitney’s
collection on the makeshift walls. A small screen embedded in one of the
walls of the stage-set-like chamber reverse-projected slides of Mauss’s
studio, fragments of text and abstractions, which set off further associative
chains to be reconciled (or not) by viewers. More recent painted mirrors
reflect the people who pass before them; while static, the images that dance
across the surfaces are not. In this way, Mauss’s work directly implicates the
spectator in the construction of value initiated by the institutions themselves.

204 Nick Mauss, Installation view of Concern, Crush, Desire, Whitney Biennial, New York, 2012

A branch of conceptual art that began in the late 1960s, institution

critique prioritizes the scrutiny of institutions, especially those that take the
presentation of art as their primary task and subject matter (museums and
galleries, biennials and fairs, but also publications and publicity materials as
part of an expansive media ecosystem). Such critique is manifold, but it
includes a focus on the institution’s part in conferring value onto artworks
and artists, its involvement in securing funding from compromised sources,
and so on. This relies on a fundamental division in which, in a David and
Goliath-like battle, the artist opposes the mighty institution. This dynamic
continues to play out in many forms: from near-comically meta (as with the
Carpenter projects, p. 241), to research-driven and analytical (as with the
Thompson, p. 241), to viewer-contingent (as with the Mauss), to more
directly activist works.
Nasrin Tabatabai (b. 1961, Tehran, Iran) and Babak Afrassiabi (b. 1969,
Tehran, Iran) take political constraints as the subject of their painting,
installation and video work: those constraints that result in paintings being
moved across borders, and into or out of sight. Since 2004, the two artists
have collaborated under the name Pages, publishing a bilingual (Farsi and
English) magazine; in 2011 they began a series involving intersecting
archives in the UK and Iran, one industrial and the other cultural.[205] The
modernization that took place in Iran is recounted in the archive of British
Petroleum (formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and then the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Company), which contains documents relating to the company’s
operations in Iran from 1908 to 1951 (when the oil industry was
nationalized). Their second case study, the collection of modern Western art
by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art during the late 1970s, continues
the former project on different terms, since it was rising oil prices that made
possible the acquisition of Western works. Following the Islamic revolution
in 1979, the collection was withdrawn for twenty years and put back on
display only intermittently thereafter. Tabatabai and Afrassiabi’s images of
storage racks further this sense of artistic exile, while simultaneously
exposing the situation.
205 Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, Installation view of ‘Two Archives’, Tensta Konsthall,
Stockholm, 2013

Much more direct in their accusations is Decolonize This Place, ‘an

action-oriented movement centering around Indigenous struggle, Black
liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification’, in
their own words. The shifting group of collaborators who work under this
name has rallied around issues of decolonization at the Brooklyn Museum,
New York, in 2018, protesting the hiring of a white woman as consulting
curator for African art, and that same year began weekly picketing of the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, calling for the removal of a
trustee whose wealth comes from manufacturing defence supplies, including
tear gas that was believed to have been used against a migrant caravan along
the US-Mexico border. Around the same time, Prescription Addiction
Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) staged disruptive events at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York, objecting to the continued patronage of the Sackler family, who
contributed to a public health epidemic by peddling the addictive opioid
OxyContin. In part as a result of P.A.I.N.’s campaign, The National Portrait
Gallery in London and the Tate art galleries (which include the Tate Modern
and the Tate Britain in London, and smaller outposts in Liverpool and
Cornwall) announced they would not accept money from the family, and the
Louvre Museum in Paris stripped the Sackler name from one of its wings.
Other actions against museums have encompassed protests over what
should be seen and how unsettling material should be framed (this is also
discussed in Chapter 7). One notable instance came in 2017, when New York
resident Mia Merrill circulated a petition against the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, asking the museum to reconsider the way it displays
Thérèse Dreaming (1938) by Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski). The painting
shows the titular Thérèse – the artist’s young neighbour, who often modelled
for him – leaning back against a pillow, her legs raised and bent, exposing
her underwear, as a cat laps milk from a saucer on the floor below her. For
Merrill and the thousands that signed the online petition, the nascent,
precocious sexuality of the girl poised between childhood and adolescence
provoked fears of habituated libidinal aggression, implied if not actualized.
The uncomfortable image had been subject to censure before, but it was in
the context of 2017 and the rise of #MeToo that the institution was held
newly accountable. The Met did not remove the painting or revise its display
to include additional contextual information.
In response, Michelle Hartney (b. 1978, La Grange, IL) set a
performance in motion in 2018, titled Correcting Art History: How Many
Crotch Shots of a Little Girl Does It Take to Make a Painting?. She wrote a
plaque highlighting Balthus’s obsession with young girls and noting that the
artist later took almost 2,000 polaroids of a different child in highly
sexualized positions; he photographed her once a week for eight years.
Hartney placed this plaque next to the Art Institute of Chicago’s official
signage for Balthus’s Girl with Cat (1937), which, like Thérèse Dreaming,
features a pubescent model exposing her underwear. Hartney carried out
additional performances in the series, which she called Separate the Art
from the Artist?, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she placed
plaques with feminist content of her own authoring next to the official signage
for artists including Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, providing contextual
information as to how these artists treated women in general as well as how
they treated the specific subjects of their paintings.[206a, 206b]
206a–b Michelle Hartney, Separate the Art from the Artist?, 2018

In 2019, a show that had originated at the Wallach Art Gallery in New
York under the title ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and
Matisse to Today’ opened at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, where the included
works (mostly 19th century French paintings) were renamed to honour the
black sitters they picture, rescuing them from historical anonymity. This
admits the enduringness of white ignorance when it comes to the experiences
of people of colour – as has been exacerbated by white painters who have
historically ‘used’ images of black people as tools to serve their painting –
and an attempt to address (if not to redress) it.
Taking on matters of self-representation, Kara Walker wrote a press
release for a 2017 show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, which
garnered more public response than the art on view in the gallery. This was
especially striking given the six-metre-long painting that was its centrepiece:
Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit) (2017), a tableau recalling the
atrocities of slavery in vignettes of a woman carrying a corpse and another
split over a tree, in the midst of which a man stands knee-deep in water,
bearing witness to the unending tragedy.[207] An excerpt of Walker’s written
testimony, which she titled ‘Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present
The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show
viewing season!’, is as follows:

207 Kara Walker, Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit), 2017

Collectors of fine art will flock to see the latest kara walker offerings, and
what is she offering but the finest selection of artworks by an african-
american living woman artist this side of the mississippi. Modest
collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition
will recognize bargains! Scholars will study and debate the historical
value and intellectual merits of miss walker’s diversionary tactics. Art
historians will wonder whether the work represents a departure or a
continuum. Students of color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise
their free right to culturally annihilate her on social media…. Gallery
directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-
curious flooding the pavement outside…
In trumpeting the ‘astounding’ nature of the works on view – many of which
partake in the same visual idioms with which she has long been engaged –
Walker sets up a kind of false expectation for something that will shock her
audiences. Damning the ‘Make it New!’ ethos of the art world – which builds
upon and exacerbates accelerated obsolescence – the press release speaks of
the pressure imposed by the institution in the hopes of eliciting on every
occasion incrementally more awesome and excruciating material from a
black woman, and the exhaustion that this kind of pressure begets. Walker
furthered this writing with an artist’s statement, in which she expresses
frustration at serving as a role model, ‘a featured member of my racial group
and/or my gender niche’, and speaks about the resurgence of ‘supremacist
goons’. As with so much of Walker’s past visual work, this too proved a
lightning rod, with some artists publicly bemoaning what they took as an
abdication of responsibility (regarding the role-model comment). On the
other hand, Ebony magazine dubbed the press release an ‘incidental
masterpiece’ that can be accessed far from its original site even as it grows
out of areas of privilege; Walker used it ‘to make a statement (and relay an
eloquent eye roll) on thoughtless and clichéd consumption of artistry’. It is
additionally useful to consider how Walker’s writing enlists – and
incriminates – so many in the process of framing art’s significance before it
ever gets seen.
Modernism with a Difference
To complicate the earlier model of institution critique (in which artists
scrutinize where and how art is presented, who funds these institutions, and
so on, and take this as the basis for their art), in 2005 the artist, writer and
teacher Andrea Fraser (b. 1965, Billings, MT) proposed another way of
thinking about the problem. She argued against contemporary institutional
critique as a practice of challenge to specific people, places or organizations
from outside of them. Instead, she wrote in ‘From the Critique of Institutions
to an Institution of Critique’, published in Artforum in 2005:

[The institution of art is] internalized in the competencies, conceptual

models, and modes of perception that allow us to produce, write about, and
understand art, or simply to recognize art as art, whether as artists,
critics, curators, art historians, dealers, collectors, or museum visitors.
And above all, it exists in the interests, aspirations, and criteria of value
that orient our actions and define our sense of worth.
For Fraser, the institution is already inside those who are part of the social
field; in turn, the social field is formed and reshaped by each participant. As
Walker’s press release-cum-manifesto shows, this still sparks antagonism. It
may also serve as the basis for considering the fundaments of practice, and
one’s over-determined relation to them.
The institution at issue is not so much the museum, gallery or the writing
around it, but the individual and one’s relation to the history and practice of
painting as an institution of its own, among other things. In this way, painting
is taken apart, or deconstructed, which is to say that it is analyzed by artists
to expose its internal logic and the assumptions that have maintained its
sanctity over the last many decades (and appreciably longer, as exemplified
by the Renaissance invention of linear perspective). In this way, the
deconstructive act challenges painting from the inside. Recall the example of
Robert Ryman given in Chapter 5 (p. 199): by continuing to paint, one might
break down painting’s constituent parts – paint, support, edge, wall and also
authorship (he made the signature a compositional feature, sometimes
enlarging it across the surface or repeating it as a though it were a staccato
mark) – the better to reinterpret the whole. Critique is not just an act of
negation; it is also a way of making works and imagining new possibilities
that precisely relate to the world in which they are emerging.
While Cheyney Thompson did engage the gallery in his institutional
critique, as discussed (p. 241), he also examines painting in and of itself, and
helps to clarify this difference. In 2009, Thompson completed two projects,
Chromachromes and Chronochromes, which addressed painting and its
systems directly by exploring the materiality of canvas and the formats it has
taken historically.[208] For these works, Thompson scanned, enlarged and
reproduced the grid of a section of raw linen on a series of new canvases of
different shapes and sizes; the circular format of one echoes a Renaissance
tondo, while another wry piece is 61 by 2.5 centimetres (24 by 1 inches),
dimensions that register as even more absurd when viewed in relation to the
other shapes. Each canvas is composed of a pattern that replicates the actual
weft of its material support, oriented either horizontally or diagonally.
Though Thompson relies on mechanization – recently even using an algorithm
to dictate the amount of pigment applied in each gestural stroke – the
paintings are still hand-painted in an array of complementary hues based on
the American painter, teacher and inventor Albert H. Munsell’s colorimetric
system, which Thompson has extended through the use of specific colours on
certain days (even the colours’ tones are based on the hour of their painting,
with noon calling for absolute black and white). This acknowledges an
assumption of an audience that has the art-historical knowledge to ‘get’ that
the work is about the history of painting in the first place.

208 Cheyney Thomson, Chromachrome (S6/SPR) (Tondo), 2009

 Anna Betbeze (b. 1980, Mobile, AL) is even more forthright.[209] She
eliminates the canvas altogether, using woollen Flokati carpets as grounds to
be razed: saturating the rugs with acid dyes and burning them; pulling or
shearing their tufts; or washing them before hanging them on the wall,
sometimes with their matte undersides facing out. For these works the
convention of the support is critical; no matter how much force Betbeze
enacts on it, it remains paradoxically unscathed. The support is a mental
habit as much as a physical structure, as demonstrated by Sergej Jensen (b.
1973, Maglegaard, Denmark), who makes abstract paintings without paint,
constructed from found textiles, the imperfections of which nod to their prior
lives – which are recuperated as pictorial effect.[210]

209 Anna Betbeze, Gutter, 2016

210 Sergej Jensen, Golden Shower Chanel Strip, 2019

Instead of treating the canvas as a ground to be covered, Dianna Molzan

(b. 1972, Tacoma, WA) reveals it, as well as the paint and stretcher, in
strikingly physical ways. Her sliced, twisted, unravelled and draped
canvases expose the wooden structure underneath, and behind it the wall,
which the paintings actively frame. She has dressed the support in ruched
fabric, strung cans from its framework, and draped velvet ropes across its
face. A painting from 2019, shown that year at Kristina Kite Gallery, Los
Angeles, sags as individual strands from the stretcher’s upright posts, as
Molzan has removed all the vertical threads.[211] Addressing both the norms
of painting and the often cyclical trends that determine their understanding at
specific moments, Molzan titled one 2013 show ‘La Jennifer’, using the
American name, once ubiquitous and now out of favour, to reflect upon the
historicity of surges of interest.
211 Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2019

Paintings about painting become a site for both material and conceptual
elaboration for others, like Molzan’s peer Lesley Vance (b. 1977,
Milwaukee, WI).[212] Differently engaged with historical conventions,
Vance photographs still-life arrangements of shells, horns, coral or a ceramic
jar, which she turns into abstract compositions over the course of a single
sitting. Her earlier still lifes of flowers and bivalves betray self-
consciousness in heavily worked passages where the brush has lingered and
gone sketchy, thereby obscuring some detail that it might have clarified; more
recent abstractions foreground material process – how the work came into
being, rather than to what it refers. Knowing that a still life is the point from
which a non-objective image originated offers little help in identifying its
references, even if in rare instances a shape or colour hints at a source.
Instead, Vance highlights the role of the paint and her approach to painting, to
call attention to, rather than conceal, the nature of her art.

212 Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2017

This is also true of Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, MA). Her
small oils of newspapers, book spines, tombstones, machines and domestic
and industrial surfaces embrace the lost tradition of the American still life,
creating tightly cropped records of the material world depicted through close
observation. Making an object by hand is, for Halvorson, ‘a radical act with
ethical implications’, by which she means that the investment of time with the
object during the painting process initiates a sense of togetherness with it.
The materials she renders are often overlooked: post-industrial, ephemeral
or otherwise unappealing in a traditional sense. Like Vance, she usually
completes a piece in one stint, with looking and painting coincident.
Halvorson paints on site, although her titles do not connect canvas and place.
It is her lushly applied paint, speckled with globs and textured with bugs
stuck to the wet surface – as in Sign Holders (2010), which displays a
viscous mingling of gnats and paint – that marks the time and place of
creation.[213] Many of Halvorson’s newer paintings crop surfaces into
illusionistic openings, and often include rectangles, which, in a form of
reflexive mirroring, can be understood as allusions to the shape of the
canvas. These are paintings about paintings, but also about how the medium
trains us to see.

213 Josephine Halvorson, Sign Holders, 2010

Nathlie Provosty (b. 1981, Cincinnati, OH) uses oil on linen, slowly
building up alternately matte and luminescent surfaces that shift according to
the physical position of the viewer before them.[214] To be sure, they
incorporate the viewer (within the reflective paint), and also the room,
effectively posing how the painting may serve as an extension of human
actuality. Often monochromatic, Provosty’s paintings nevertheless reveal
forms including a curved shape that she initially called ‘doubleu’ (after the
name for the letter ‘w’), which emerge through sustained looking over time,
as though in relief from the ostensible and imposing blankness. The viewer
comes to see tinges of colour in black or white paint that divide the surface
into a pattern of superimposed geometries. This disambiguation demonstrates
how something that was previously unacknowledged, because unseen, can be
recognized as our attention shifts.

214 Nathlie Provosty, Visions, 2017

A restructuring of the way in which we see things remains the bedrock

for work by John Nixon (b. 1949, Sydney, Australia); he is interested in its
utopian dimension, in the possibility that by reframing the way we see things,
we can rebuild society.[215] An early proponent of minimal painting in
Australia, he examines the possibilities of the monochrome and its social
dimensions in a continuation of the Russian avant-garde’s revolutionary
belief that basic geometry and fidelity to materiality could offer a site of
transcendence, as well as Josef Albers’s pedagogical – and, ultimately,
ethical – idea that colour could abet perceptual retraining. (At Black
Mountain College, North Carolina, in the 1930s and 1940s, Albers
encouraged his students to execute their own colour studies based on a series
of exercises that led them to discern the differences in hues, tones and
intensity, not as definitions and diagrams to be learned by rote, but by
comparison and through trial-and-error experience that would cultivate
sharpened perception.) Working from such specific points of reference,
Nixon uses the cross, square and circle, questioning their meaning in the
course of re-motivating them.

215 John Nixon, Black Monochrom (Ruler), 2019

If painting offers the potential for social change, the other side of that
coin is a separation of painting from what came before. For some, this
differentiation of painting now from its historical precedents becomes what
the art is about (a potentially tautological loop, as explored in ‘Other
Formalisms’, p. 270). An example of formalism can be seen in the work of
Ian Davenport (b. 1966, Sidcup, UK), who denies traditional composition
and premeditated application of strokes, instead regarding the paint spill as
both chance-based method and iconography.[216] He makes many works by
pouring or using a syringe to squeeze household gloss paint onto a tilted
surface, avoiding the sentimentality of the hand and assuming that gravity will
take care of the rest. In this departure from more longstanding artmaking
traditions, however, Davenport still seemingly returns to modernist strategies
– the liquefied paint spill deliberately invokes the mid-century drips of
Jackson Pollock, the stains of Helen Frankenthaler and the pours of Morris
Louis – and priorities of self-definition, each medium defining what is unique
and specific to it, which was central to the formalist theories of the
influential American modernist critic Clement Greenberg.

216 Ian Davenport, Puddle Painting: Dark Grey (after Uccello), 2010

Such artists engage in auto-critique, of their work and the categories of

art. But if this was a direction established by Greenberg in his argument for
medium specificity, their use of it now evidences a profound difference of
orientation. Greenberg famously espoused that medium specificity meant
upholding and even exaggerating the distinction of what is unique to each
medium, such as flatness in painting, and excluding all else. Contra his vision
of progressive refinement, the artists who now work with auto-critique are
not world-averse. Many no longer consider the conditions of self-criticism to
be painting’s distinction from other media; instead, they centre it around
painting’s connection to other media, as well as to its surroundings and to the
lives of others, and – as the work explored in Chapter 5 regarding
installation and performance makes clear – its relation to space and time.
Working in this vein is Gaylen Gerber (b. 1955, McAllen, TX), who
designates artworks to serve as the backdrops for others: his grey
monochrome became the support for an intervention by Stephen Prina, who
deposited the contents of an entire can of spray paint onto its pristine surface.
[217] Prina has repeated this action with Wade Guyton (p. 66) in
performances that display paintings for a single night.
217 Stephen Prina, PUSH COMES TO LOVE, Untitled, 1999–2013, 2013

This means artists often work to show their opposition to the autonomy of
painting; some, like Molzan (p. 253), achieve this by literally taking painting
apart. In so doing they might make evident support structures, piercing
surfaces to achieve sightlines (or glimpses of the backing wall) through holes
or connections to the exterior. To this last point, the world beyond the gallery
is implied in works by Ida Ekblad (b. 1980, Oslo, Norway).[218] Her
sculptures are often accumulations of metal and other materials salvaged
from the street or scrap yard, welded together and painted in monochromatic
coats of lacquer that treat fragments of cars, train tracks or ironing boards as
aesthetic objects. She also makes so-called ‘sculpture missions’ on location
– from New York’s Rockaway Beach to London’s Clapham Common – to
source materials for works that are then presented in these cities. In some
cases, Ekblad has fashioned freestanding gates, which emphasize the portal-
like nature of her gestural paintings, and lead into and out from the canvases.
Within the latter, she works within the limitations that are inherent to the
picture plane, even as she is complicating and recapitulating this pursuit
through her addition of various media.

218 Ida Ekblad, Installation view of ‘ILLUMInations’, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011

Ekblad’s play of space within the picture depends and draws on

modernism: Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró, Henri Matisse and Asger
Jorn. Like so many other artists, she mines this past with an unburdened
openness. In this respect, she is comparable to Matt Connors (b. 1973,
Chicago, IL), who appropriates a host of individual precedents (many of
which overlap with those visually cited by Ekblad). These artists may not
free painting of its historical precedents, but Connors also moves, in his own
words, towards ‘a kind of inward progression so that materials, processes,
the studio, and my own actions have all started to qualify for me as origin
points in and of themselves’. Using mostly raw canvases, he pours paint,
which the fabric absorbs like dye, and has also imprinted one canvas with
another and with the traces of their surroundings. Connors seems to go out of
his way to make clear the reasoning behind his compositional choices and
methods of execution, whether cockeyed forms, overpainted designs or rings
left behind from paint cans, jars or coffee mugs (containers he was using at
the time to hold paint, gesso and brushes).[219]

219 Matt Connors, Table II (16 Cups), 2010

In a clear engagement with traditions in the presentation of painting,

Connors also brings our attention to picture frames. Picture Corners (2010),
a relatively small panel, employs three devices to emphasize the frame: large
black triangles fixed to the corners of the canvas, just shy of its edge; an
unpainted perimeter; and, close to this, a thin blue line. Fergus Feehily (b.
1968, Dublin, Ireland) also relies on the frame as a primary component in
small paintings composed of wood, paper, fabric and paint, sometimes to
bind a stack of such materials together.[220] In so doing, these artists
highlight institutions of display, reshaping patterns of habituation around them
in the process.

220 Fergus Feehily, Grey Foxed, 2009

A further engagement with the virtual space of the picture plane can be
seen in the work of Robert Janitz (b. 1962, Alsfeld, Germany), who paints
large-scale gestural abstractions with wide horizontal and vertical strokes
thickened with cold wax and flour. In the repetitive movement of these
substances over a support, exquisitely visible gestures that survive across
distinct bodies of work, Janitz finds affinity with repetitive actions of
domestic labour – window washing, spackling or grouting – and the less
physically demanding act of buttering toast. (In the Twisted Box paintings,
shown at Anton Kern, New York, in 2018, these gestures conjure optical
puzzles of tower-like shapes torqueing in on themselves, sometimes alone,
sometimes regarding another in a duet, and in Field Paintings, shown the
same year at CANADA, New York, they are layered in wide vertical
strokes.) He leaves corners unpainted to reveal rainbow gradients of
underpainting and allows the giant sweeps to remain diaphanous.[221]
Through this, the paintings seem to solicit optical regression, but they avert
this except at the periphery; they maintain the possibility of illusionism and
pictorial depth, even as they prevent it. In 2019, Janitz showed designed
benches at König London: a place to sit and observe the aftermath of the
process, in a self-referential acknowledgment that the application of paint to
a ground yields something worth regarding.

221 Robert Janitz, Installation view of ‘Uptown Canvas’, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2018

Posing questions of what one is seeing and how it was made, Markus
Amm (b. 1967, Stuttgart, Germany) has been described as a ‘modern
alchemist’ for small-scale monochromatic, process-based oil-and-gesso
paintings that look like photograms.[222] In fact, Amm fixes the image by
pouring extremely thin layers of paint onto a prepared surface, one at a time.
Deeply analytical, he was part of a generation of European painters included
in the defining 2004 exhibition ‘Formalismus: Moderne Kunst, Heute’
(Formalism: Modern Art, Today), curated by Yilmaz Dziewior at the
Kunstverein Hamburg – a show that recast process-based artmaking after
conceptualism and ushered in many ways of making paintings through
increasingly baroque techniques. These are seen in the works of Ruth Laskey
(b. 1975, San Luis Obispo, CA) and Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981, San
Francisco, CA), among others.

222 Markus Amm, Untitled, 2017

By focusing on process in this manner, many artists revaluate painting as

both a manual and conceptual activity. This is achieved by some through
exploration of the ethical dimension of craft, albeit in very different ways.
After becoming dissatisfied with more traditional painting materials, Ruth
Laskey began to make paints from scratch and to weave her own canvases.
She now uses a loom to make her pieces, the individual threads of which she
paints and then laces into the structure of the canvas. The resulting effects –
which follow preparatory sketches (each titled Study for Twill Series) on
graph paper to ensure mathematical exactitude for her colour fades and
designs – show figure and ground to be inseparable as part of the woven
matrix.[223] Once complete, Laskey’s intricate woven paintings recall the
maligned ‘women’s work’ of fireside embroidery.

223 Ruth Laskey, Twill Series (Robin’s Egg Blue/Yucca/Light Green), 2007

Tauba Auerbach engages with the materiality of the canvas in a different

manner. Having worked with diagrams of the semaphore alphabet and
patterns derived from the binary language of digital technology in her earlier
work, in 2009 she began her Fold paintings. These appear three-dimensional,
but are, in fact, after-images of their pre-stretched state; the folded, crumpled
canvas was spray-painted with an industrial gun before being re-flattened on
the stretcher.[224] Functioning as charged clues to prior configurations, each
crease is both illusionistic and literal: a 1:1 relationship exists between the
surface and its image. In her Weave paintings, form is developed not from the
surface but from the support beneath: strips of canvas bound into geometrical
patterns imitate the architecture of the wooden stretchers. Taking the corner
as her starting point, Auerbach unfurls a field of intersecting planes to create
an undulating monochromatic pattern in which two overlying grids intersect
at an angle.
224 Tauba Auerbach, Untitled (Fold), 2012

In comparable plays between materiality and immateriality, Paul

Sietsema (b. 1968, Los Angeles, CA) dispassionately incorporates trompe
l’oeil images into thickly painted works, keeping hold of the device’s
illusionism but simultaneously showing it to be an illusion. His paintings
invite suspension of disbelief: take the enamel-on-linen Swipe painting
(Chase) (2016), which features a credit card gliding across the paint its
passage looks to erase.[225] This feat was a pleasurable hallmark of pre-
modern picture making, which aspired to achieve a realism so convincing
that it appeared not a semblance of the thing, but the thing itself (in the
Classical story of the artist Zeuxis, he painted grapes so lifelike that birds
were wont to peck at them). Yet Sietsema also unmasks this mode of
picturing for what it is, giving the means and the end in one fell swoop.
225 Paul Sietsema, Swipe painting (Chase), 2016

In contrast to this mischievous engagement with illusionism, Tomma Abts

(b. 1967, Kiel, Germany) shuns references to nature, her body and identity,
and, indeed, anything that lies beyond the canvas, aiming for work that
‘becomes congruent with itself’.[226] Her compositions – all approximately
48 by 38 centimetres (19.8 by 15 inches), vertically oriented and titled with
proper names from an obsolete German dictionary – emerge from the give-
and-take that comes with numerous layers of paint. In some works,
interlocking linear elements float across densely layered fields, while in
others, the surface is bisected by delicate webs of faintly protruding ridges,
which give them an oddly sculptural effect at close range. This somewhat
protracted process reveals Abts’s commitment to creating the object and
giving it an identity, but she stops short of making her intentions directly
accessible. Rather, in insisting upon the primacy of form, she asks whether
abstraction can negate, or at least obstruct, meaning. Many critics consider
this to be the case for other process-based abstract painting; they came to
find in it only insular, self-referential exercises, resulting not only in painting
that negates meaning, but also in painting that never presumed to have it in the
first place.
226 Tomma Abts, Weie, 2017

Other Formalisms
In the 2010s, abstraction became ubiquitous: flourishing again in its
separation from medium specificity, and without ideological underpinning or
progressive ideal. Critic and artist Walter Robinson penned ‘Flipping the
Rise of Zombie Formalism’ in 2014, which coined an ‘ism’ (a rarity now,
after nearly two centuries of avant-gardism and successive modern
movements). He defined Zombie Formalism as ‘a straightforward, reductive,
essentialist method of making a painting’ that ‘brings back to life the
discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg’. When Jerry Saltz entered the
discussion with ‘Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New
Abstraction Look the Same?’ he added to the monikers, noting colloquial
instances of ‘Modest Abstraction, Neo-Modernism, M.F.A. Abstraction, and
Crapstraction. (The gendered variants are Chickstraction and Dickstraction.)
Rhonda Lieberman gets to the point with “Art of the One Percent” and
“aestheticized loot.”’ Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these are all
pejorative labels, ways of panning painting made on spec: a trophy for, but
also a symptom of, an art world awash with money and absent of financial
regulation.
As explored above, many artists who engage the institution of painting
(and the more local history of modernism) do so in substantive ways. But
Robinson was provoked to write the initial piece after reading an interview
with Los Angeles art flipper Stefan Simchowitz, in which Simchowitz
bragged about purchasing lots of inventory; getting friends and clients to buy
the same artist (often as a result of his ruthlessly promoting them on social
media and distributing images of camera-friendly paintings online); raising
the price for that artist; and getting rid of the work before the artist’s market
crashes. While Robinson took issue with the structure of these interventions,
and the qualitative impoverishment of the work Simchowitz had championed,
it is Saltz who most forcefully extended the critique of work made as high-
end interior decor, by posting pictures of gridded, monochromatic, chicly
muted, smudged, covered, printed or stencilled paintings that he took at
galleries and art fairs over the course of a year. The point of such clickbait is
the paintings’ visual equivalence within sub-groups (paintings with splatters,
say), a striking demonstration of their fungibility (interchangeability of units
of the same commodity) in the market.
Lucien Smith (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA), Jacob Kassay (b. 1984,
Lewiston, NY) and Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia) are
the three artists most closely associated with these considerations,
particularly because of their prioritization of process and the ways in which
their markets developed. Beginning in 2011, Smith began making the series
of works that would make him so collectable: the Rain Paintings, which he
made by putting paint into fire extinguishers and spraying it across an
unprimed canvas in a torrent of tiny beads that accumulate into fields of
varying density.[227] A mechanized version of a Jackson Pollock drip
painting – and according to Smith, an exploration of loneliness (as in comic
books, where characters walk through rain when sad) – these paintings could
be made quickly while still referencing a precedent, thus guaranteeing their
significance.
227 Lucien Smith, Southampton Suite #3, 2013

Kassay made a substantial body of elemental, chemically produced

abstract paintings, using a photographically derived electroplating technique
that produces a silvery, mirror-like surface, capable of reflecting the space
around them.[228] Murillo rubbed his canvases on the studio floor so that
they could sop up dirt, before making the first mark, often using a broomstick
(he also condensed debris from the ground into balls with pulped drawings,
thread, cement dye, copper and dust), engaging the location of creation and
establishing a basic level of formal consistency. The presumption that
paintings that look similar are similar might be considered a kind of
pseudomorphism, a term referring to the way we consider things that look
alike to be connected, allowing formal likeness to obscure the differences in
positions behind their conception and intent. As the moment of their creation
and the initial discourse surrounding Zombie Formalism recedes, their
differences become more apparent.
228 Jacob Kassay, Installation view at ‘EXPO 1: New York’, MoMA PS1, 2013

Nevertheless, so caricatural had these styles and procedural chronicles

become that in 2015, Seth Price (p. 139) published a polemic in the form of a
novel masquerading as a memoir, Fuck Seth Price, which addressed the
topic of creativity under adverse conditions. They served as the target of
easy contempt: ‘tepid compositions, hesitant and minimal in appearance, kind
of pretty and kind of whatever, loaded with back-story. The main thing to
remember, both in executing this work and in appreciating it on the wall, was
to be knowing…’ This returns us to issues of taste and attitude explored in
Chapter 2, while also showing that any style of art is subject to the new
machinations of the Internet-fuelled art world. While this domain was
previously presided over by experts, with the profusion of social media, art
is now more broadly consumed and shared by the public, supplanting more
formal, journalistic or academic criticism. Thus does a review all too often
pale in comparison to a shot of an artwork posted by a social media
influencer.
This development of social media might sound non-hierarchical – and to
be sure, its pluralism of expression (if not access) is often characterized as
such. Still, as Chris Wiley astutely noted in 2018, Zombie Formalism
‘altered the fabric of the art world. The reins of aesthetic power, which had
for decades traded hands among critics, curators, and various moneyed
interests, now belonged solely to the global collector class’. In the aftermath,
the London-based Murillo has proved an interesting case. To Price’s point
about backstory, Murillo has emphasized his Colombian origins, titling his
first show in London, at Carlos/Ishikawa in 2013, ‘Dinner at the members
club? Yes! i’ll have a black americano first pls’, and even offering packs of
ground coffee at the gallery for visitors to take home. His incorporation in the
art world on these terms, which outlived and ultimately outweighed his
association with Zombie Formalism, demonstrates how alterity is
increasingly fetishized by the market, too, and even more recently, by
museums. This makes the moments when Murillo points back to himself, as
when he plays the part of the ‘black americano’, particularly relevant to
conversations about race and a history of colonial and nationalist
exploitation.
These interests are exposed in much work made in the years that
followed Zombie Formalism (see Chapter 7), in a historical juncture at
which painting’s relation to the market intersects with signs of identity
politics and social justice, especially as these factors come to be imagined as
running counter to this strain of abstraction. Nevertheless, it is worth noting
the extent to which other artists during these same years took responsibility
for how their work was made, while insisting that abstraction might harbour
or materialize content.
Gary Hume (b. 1962, Tenterden, UK) created a series called Door
Paintings, some fifty big, rectangular slabs, the dimensions of which mimic
precisely those of their subject: the swing doors in a derelict, state-funded
London hospital. These were shown to great acclaim in the generation-
defining ‘Freeze’ show curated by Damien Hirst in 1988. Hume’s idea for
the series originated from an advertisement for private health care amidst
funding cuts to the UK’s National Health Service carried out by Margaret
Thatcher’s government, and at the same time, the doors offered a template
adaptable in colour and design but consistent in their reference to the
tradition of painting as a rectangle on a wall. They also operated as a
metaphorical window to another realm, which Hume made literal in a
painting of a window composed in 2002, a decade after painting the final
door. The panes of Hume’s window, however, are blacked out, presenting a
flat plane and refusing transparency.
In a 2018 show at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles, Hume took on forced
migration and the global refugee crisis. He worked an image of a life jacket
into a repeating design that floated across the slick, watery surfaces of mural-
scale horizontal paintings, which were executed on paper so thickly covered
with paint on both sides that they became rigid. The forms summon so many
similar items awash on beaches throughout Europe, buoyant but absent of
bodies, or gruesomely, still carrying them lifeless to shore. Water, 2018, a
colour-shifting blue-green monochrome, deftly captured that suspense,
imaging nothing but writhing waves in an improbable elegy.[229]

229 Gary Hume, Water, 2018

In another powerful instance of abstraction that carries meaning, Tomashi

Jackson (b. 1980, Houston, TX) uses the history of colour theory in art
making in work including Avocado Seed Soup (Davis, et. al. v County
School Board of Prince Edward County) (Brown, et. al. v Board of
Education of Topeka) (Sweatt v Painter) (2016). This giant mixed-media
painting deals with the history of American school desegregation and its
lingering effects on public life.[230] While studying at Yale University,
Jackson discovered that the language Josef Albers used in his 1963
educational text, the Interaction of Color, to decry the wrong way to see
colour – as static and fixed instead of relative to what is next to it – mirrored
the racialized language of segregation that appeared in the transcripts of
education policy and civil rights court cases fought by Thurgood Marshall
and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall is best
known for challenging Plessy v. Ferguson, the court-sanctioned legal doctrine
from 1896 that called for ‘separate but equal’ structures for white people and
black people in what was an upholding of the constitutionality of racial
segregation. As Jackson states in an interview: ‘I recognized terms about
how “colors” interact from Albers’s text: colored, boundaries, movement,
transparency, mixture, purity, restriction, deception, memory, transformation,
instrumentation, systems, recognition, psychic effect, placement, quality, and
value.’ Thus does she argue in her paintings that it is through boundaries,
such as school and voting district, that race is created and segregation
maintained in the United States.

230 Tomashi Jackson, Avocado Seed Soup (Davis, et. al. v County School Board of Prince Edward
County) (Brown, et. al. v Board of Education of Topeka) (Sweatt v Painter), 2016

Jackson’s paintings happened alongside the making public of another

startling revelation: in 2015, researchers from Russia’s State Tretyakov
Gallery were studying a version of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915)
under a microscope when they discovered a shocking handwritten
inscription, reading ‘Battle of negroes in a dark cave’. This would place it in
conversation with French writer Alphonse Allais’s Combat de Nègres dans
une cave pendant la nuit (Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night) (1897), a
horizontal black rectangle with the title conspicuously printed below it, in
what one cannot but understand to be a racist joke. (The latter was published
in an album of monochrome prints of colours, each outlined and keyed to a
supposedly humorous, caustic title, e.g. the red one is titled Tomato Harvest
by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea.) This discovery
irrevocably recasts the whole of modernist abstraction, the consequences of
which remain to be seen.
Chapter 7
Living Painting

By way of a conclusion, this briefer final chapter addresses work that

jettisons investigations of medium and instead opens to lived experience. For
Juan Uslé (b. 1954, Santander, Spain), who applies paint in pulsing
brushstrokes keeping time with his own heartbeat, repetition becomes a form
of translation, and a way of exemplifying his own life force. His small-scale
In Kayak works (2012–present) achieve parity between method and theme,
as his technique – bands of dark, narrow strokes laid side by side – reflects
the repetitive movement of oars.[231] This broaches the question of how
artists use painting to process, reflect on and characterize present
circumstances, and also how painting might, in this manner, evidence a way
of coming to know the world – and perhaps of intervening in it. While more
direct social action is addressed in turn, it is first essential to assert that
painting as a practice is ongoing: it goes without saying, but it preceded
Zombie Formalism and survives it.
231 Juan Uslé, In Kayak (Silente), 2012
 The Practice of Painting
In the early 1970s, Peter Dreher (b. 1932, Mannheim, Germany) began
painting a single empty water glass. The series now contains over 5,000
individual paintings of the subject, within the same surroundings and from the
same angle, sometimes during the day and sometimes at night. Within this
serial structure, differences – in light or reflection, or the artist’s touch –
assume subtle if profound meaning in the context of the whole, which Dreher
has named Tag um Tag guter Tag (Day by Day, Good Day, or Every Day is a
Good Day).[232] An ode to the banality of living, it optimistically proposes
that as long as there is another day, there is always another surface, another
support onto which more paint can be applied, and another painting to be
made.

232 Peter Dreher, Tag um Tag guter Tag Nr. 2685 (Night) (Day by Day, Good Day), 2013
 In 1965, the Polish-French painter Roman Opałka (1931–2011) began to
paint consecutive numbers, starting at one, with the impossible goal of
stretching to infinity. As though writing on a sheet of paper, he began in the
upper left-hand corner of a canvas and worked his way in horizontal rows to
the lower right; with each new work, he continued from the number with
which he had finished the previous painting. Opałka referred to each new
painting as a detail, standardizing their size to the dimensions of his studio
door and their title to 1965 / 1—∞, to indicate an unending project. He soon
incorporated a tape recorder into the process, speaking each number into the
microphone as he painted it, and also took passport-style photographs of
himself standing before each completed canvas. Changes materialized over
time within Opałka’s prodigious output, from white numbers painted on a
black background, to a grey background, to a background progressively
lightened with each successive detail. In the last stages of the project, the
numbers were no longer legible, as Opałka was writing them in white on a
white.
Like Opałka, On Kawara (1933–2014) worked in a serial format,
marking the course of time through the production of paintings. From 4
January 1966, he sustained the Today series, monochromes on standard-sized
horizontal panels, on each of which he wrote the date it was made, in the
language and calendrical norms of the country in which he was working.
[233] He fashioned a storage box for each: a time capsule lined with a
cutting from a local newspaper procured that same day. If a work was not
finished by midnight, it was destroyed. Though this was a continuous process
for Kawara, viewers see a single marker of each day, or the erratic lapses
between them: such are the conditions of collection and display, as well as of
history.
233 On Kawara, SEPT. 19, 2013, 2013, from Today series, 1966–2013. Acrylic on canvas, 20.3 × 25.4
cm (8 × 10 in.)

By contrast, the paintings of Vija Celmins (b. 1938, Riga, Latvia) are
cumulative: the vast photorealistic deserts, seascapes and nocturnes that she
has been making since the late 1960s are achieved through a slow
accumulation of marks, over hours that become years. Each mark contributes
to the surface of the work, and also to the mythology of the artist as something
like a modern-day version of the Greek mythological figure Penelope,
making and unmaking in a succession of near-infinite labours (just as
Penelope was said to have woven, unwoven and rewoven a shroud in a
repetitious cycle). People tend to imagine the studio as a productive site, and
indeed, the lengthy process by which an image of the heavens becomes Night
Sky #24 (2016) – a velvety oil on canvas on which each fleck of light
puncturing its opacity is a physical cavity, an obdurate, minutely realized
wormhole – suggests the multi-year spell of its creation.[234] Yet Celmins’s
work also powerfully proposes that labour is but a means to an end: a visible
registration of the capturing of time, soliciting a mediation on one’s place
before it.
234 Vija Celmins, Night Sky #24, 2016

Dashiell Manley (b. 1983, Fontana, CA) has also gained notice for
focused, labour-intensive techniques and processes that reflect on
temporality. His The New York Times and Financial Times series feature
transcribed front pages from days-old editions of the papers, so that words
like ‘Ebola’, ‘Ferguson’ and ‘ISIS’ emerge from the would-be abstractions.
[235] The topical content is decelerated, seemingly stilled in layered and
smeared materials, where it remains.
235 Dashiell Manley, The Financial Times, front page, Jun 15 2019. jun152019, 2019

Finally, Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, VA) is vital to this

conversation about the salience of current events to painting, and the notion
of obligation in a work of art. He wrote the manifesto ‘Black Dada’ for
Manifesta 7 (2008), invoking Hugo Ball’s 1916 Dada manifesto as well as
the 1964 poem ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’, written by LeRoi Jones (who was
later christened Amiri Baraka, the name by which he is best known as a key
figure in the Black nationalist movement). Since then, Pendleton has been
engaged with Black Dada, a multi-part project encompassing paintings –
deep, crystalline black-on-black monochromes with words: black or dada or
both – drawings, and more recently, a literary anthology of sources pertaining
to Black consciousness. By appropriating specific cultural forms, such as the
press photograph, he dismantles dominant discourses, enacting a position
whereby political struggle can accomplish much for art, beyond what art
reciprocally may do for active political struggles. In all of this, Pendleton
uses aspects of modernist style and directs his paintings towards utopian
social configurations, still unrealized. This is his basis for using art to
imagine, for one thing, a United States liberated of mass incarceration,
slavery by another name.
In 2015, Pendleton began incorporating language of new protest, bringing
the message of Black Lives Matter to Pace, London, and later that summer to
the Belgian Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale, with black-and-white
paintings and large-scale vinyl text-based works that read ‘Black Lives
Matter’.[236] Pendleton’s paintings are fierce, accusatory, communicating
much in the space of the image, but they are also careful and slow. Their
superficial present-ness is a red herring; the works are Janus-faced, both
retrospective and anticipatory, even as they exist where and when they were
made. In a 2016 Brooklyn Rail interview, Pendleton answered to a prompt
about the popularity of Black Lives Matter being ‘fashionable’:

236 Adam Pendleton, Installation view of ‘Personne et les autres’, Belgian Pavilion, 56th Venice
Biennale, 2015

It was about bringing a different kind of rhetoric and attention to the

language, to the moment, to the movement…. I showed these paintings in a
show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2015 and the local art
critic came around and said, “Oh, yes, these are nice paintings but this is
so yesterday. Six months ago maybe this would have meant something, but
it just seems so old.” There is the case in point—“this is so old”—when
actually these are things that as a country we have been grappling with for
hundreds of years. It is neither new nor old.

Painting and its Publics

Pendleton’s remarks also raise a very different problem: the way in which
fashion has moved on from production-heavy art or minimal paintings, and
claimed art of political fervour – some of which is opportunistic. As a result
such practices often involve virtue signalling without any sustained
commitment, and in so doing unfortunately trivialize the work that so many
artists are doing in communities, to say nothing of in the institutions of art (as
considered in Chapter 6). Mark Bradford (b. 1961, Los Angeles, CA), for
one, operates in multiple sites simultaneously, using painting as a means to
achieve – and fund – other projects. He began by painting signs at his
mother’s beauty shop, before seizing her supplies, like endpapers used for
perms, for his art. His large-scale, map-like paintings of city grids are
collaged out of posters and detritus repurposed from the street. In the
beginning, these included advertising for a fringe economy (in which houses
are sold for cash and immigration papers are expedited) and were attached to
fences encircling still-desolate sites that had been burned out during the 1992
Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of police officers seen on video
brutally beating Rodney King.
Bradford has continued to make increasingly epic paintings, notably the
architectural Pickett’s Charge, a commission for the Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington, D.C., that encircles the round building like a contemporary
cyclorama (it is based on Paul Philippoteaux’s 19th-century cyclorama
depicting the final charge of the Battle of Gettysburg in favour of the Union: a
critical turning point of the Civil War and of American history thereafter).
[237] Bradford’s own work is a kind of deconstruction of this imagery, full
of cut and torn, drawn and photographically reproduced images from the
original panorama. Alongside his artmaking, in 2015 Bradford co-founded
Art + Practice (A+P) in South Los Angeles as a neighbourhood art centre and
a partner in social services for local foster youth, where he has worked to
build robust programmes.
237 Mark Bradford, Installation view of Pickett’s Charge, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, D.C., 2017

In a different form of social practice, Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977, Mexico

City, Mexico) has been collaborating with undocumented persons from
Mexico and Central America who live in the United States. When working
with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s (b. 1968, Havana, Cuba) Immigrant
Movement International – a long-term art project in conjunction with the
Queens Museum of Art, New York, which provided social services to the
large and multilingual immigrant neighbourhoods in the immediate vicinity –
Nisenbaum discovered the intimacy of portraiture as a means by which to
connect with the person she faced; she paid her subjects for their time and
participation. The conscientious depiction of others led her to portrait-
making workshops for those in the area – an endeavour she then
memorialized in Wise Elders Portraiture Class at Centro Tyrone Guzman,
‘En Familia hay Fuerza’, Mural on the History of Immigrant Farm Labor
to the United States (2017), a painting picturing the students holding
portraits that they drew.[238]
238 Aliza Nisenbaum, Wise Elders Portraiture Class at Centro Tyrone Guzman, ‘En Familia hay
Fuerza’, Mural on the History of Immigrant Farm Labor to the United States, 2017

Nisenbaum’s project additionally tracks with recent claims for the

therapeutic value of art. Doctors in Canada can now prescribe art for their
patients through free access to a museum, and many medical schools in the
United States are piloting curricula in which students are learning diagnostic
skills – aiding in the ability to formulate careful, unbiased visual
observations – and possibly even realising greater empathy through looking
closely at art, or in other cases, by making it. Nisenbaum’s project also
acknowledges the transformative potential of artmaking for the participating
artists, sitters and viewers, in what becomes a proliferation of painting
culture for many more stakeholders.
In a kind of reparative realism, Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO)
paints large-scale oil portraits of family and friends, as well as strangers
who she meets on the streets near her home in Harlem and her students in
New Jersey.[239] She casts a palpably benevolent eye over black men
engaging in quotidian situations: posing on a couch, looking up from a phone
or reading a book. She pays keen attention to the environment in which she
shows them and has been outspoken about her desire to transform how such
subjects as these are elsewhere depicted. This work, like that of Tschabalala
Self (b. 1990, New York, NY) and Janiva Ellis (b. 1987, Oakland, CA)
owes much to Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham, AL), whose
precedent has been overwhelmingly important, especially since his travelling
exhibition ‘Mastry’, a retrospective of the prior thirty-five years of his
career, which opened at MCA Chicago in 2016.[240] He has for these
decades painted only African Americans, and in the darkest ebony black,
systematically occupying each genre of art – portraits and landscapes,
domestic scenes and history paintings – with sensitivity and technical
precision, as though to redress centuries of having been excluded from their
hallowed ranks. His work is about the indignities of representation, in the
face of which he erects an archive that bestows beauty and self-possession
where it had long been denied.

239 Jordan Casteel, Three Lions, 2015

240 Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014

Tschabalala Self uses paint and discarded fabric to fashion bright, lively
portraits of black females, over-sexualized figures with round bottoms and
breasts, whom she describes as avatars.[241] Self’s exaggerated images
dramatize the perverse fantasies historically attached to the black female
body, providing an alternative to the extant archive of racial stereotypes,
such as imagery of black nursemaids and nannies to white children and prints
of Saartjie Baartman (a South African Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited
at European ‘freak shows’ in the nineteenth century, and is best known by her
colonial stage name, the ‘Hottentot Venus’), among so much else. Rather than
negating or sublimating this archive, Self uses these artefacts of racism to
construct new possibilities for representation.
241 Tschabalala Self, Bodega Run Diptych, 2017

Janiva Ellis paints tortured-looking figures, riots of colour that

nevertheless communicate with startling gravity the isolation and pain of the
subjects’ experiences: a dark face zips off to reveal a darker face underneath,
or organs erupt from the chest of a woman at a farmers’ market.[242] At
times rendered with hints of cartoonish levity, according to Ellis these
metamorphosing figures form ‘a language that functions like a gloved hand,
muting its individuality yet exaggerating its gesture’. As with Kara Walker’s
press release (p. 248), such works critically respond to being categorized as
a ‘type’ of artist (black, for example), attendant to limitations on the wider
experience of race and subjectivity.
242 Janiva Ellis, Open Pour Reality, 2017

Their work discloses the ways signs of ‘otherness’ and their intersection
– here, Blackness and womanhood – are managed: how they have become
big business and cultural flashpoints. In what might be described as a sort of
convergence of interest, it has now become desirable to art-world
stakeholders for underserved and ignored populations (including people of
colour) to be represented in municipal institutions, galleries and the market,
and for related imagery to be highlighted in painting. Likewise, social media
support has bolstered painting that had previously been ignored because of
systemic prejudice. Viewership’s influence on contemporary painting has
made for a larger audience, and one ever more diverse than before,
generating out of ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ – or the galvanizing force of not liking
– individual but also co-produced reactions to art without necessarily
simplifying their point of view.
The 2017 Whitney Biennial offers a case in point, showing representation
to be vital in terms of undoing the damage that has been wrought by a history
of art in which many demographics have been drastically under-represented
– but, at the same time, revealing that representation can perpetuate this same
damage. Fundamental questions must be asked as to who has a claim to
people’s narratives, and what an artist’s motives are in engaging them. One
exhibited work was by Henry Taylor (b. 1958, Oxnard, CA), who works in
the tradition of artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, crossing
folk art with elements from modern Black life to portray an American
landscape of mass migration and lingering oppression.[243] Taylor counts
friends, relatives, acquaintances from the art world, strangers, sports stars
and politicians among the subjects of his sizeable and unremittingly personal
accounts of vernacular activity – barbequing or talking on a stoop, getting a
haircut – painted in a single sitting on canvas or on cigarette packs, cereal
boxes or suitcases.

243 Henry Taylor, Split, 2013

At the Whitney, he showed a monumental painting commemorating the

fatal shooting of Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old African American
man, by a Minnesota police officer in 2016. In THE TIMES THAY AINT A
CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! (2017), the victim is shown slumped back in
the car he was driving, seatbelt still buckled in this makeshift tomb. Another
painting, exhibited rooms away, was by Dana Schutz (b. 1976, Livonia, MI),
an artist already well known for narrative-based figurative work, which
involves pairing subject matter with the style chosen for a certain region of
the composition, often symbolically: scrapers, squeegees and oil crayons
might be employed to highlight characters, gestures and moods. Her paintings
also frequently involve the desecration and display of the body, as in her so-
called self-eaters (paintings of people eating their own faces and therein
figuring creation through destruction) or Presentation (2005), a long,
emphatically horizontal painting – based on sources including El Greco’s
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586) – that is centred on a partially
dismembered figure lying on a board balanced above a chasm in the ground:
impending burial or reaching exhumation.
In the Whitney exhibition, one of Schutz’s contributions was Open Casket
(2016), a gruesome, near-sculptural painting of Emmett Till, a black teenager
from Chicago, Illinois, who was murdered in Jim Crow-era Mississippi in
1955 when visiting relatives.[244] His mother insisted on an open casket
(topped with glass) at his funeral, so that the world could see the brutality
with which her son met his death at the hands of white men punishing the
fourteen-year-old for an alleged slight on a white woman. The pictures were
published in mainstream media and were instrumental in catalyzing the Civil
Rights Movement in the United States, a cause for which Emmett Till remains
an icon, his sacred coffin newly enshrined in the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington,
D.C.

244 Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016

 Schutz’s painting was initially praised in the press, but shortly thereafter,
opposition mounted. Artist and activist Parker Bright saw the image on
social media (as so many did before – if ever – seeing it in person) and
staged a protest, standing before Open Casket while wearing a t-shirt
emblazoned with the words ‘Black Death Spectacle’ across the back. Photos
of him and his message before the painting went viral, and he later made a
mixed-media-on-paper rendition of the image, titling it Confronting My Own
Possible Death (2018).[245] In the meantime, Bright had set off a debate
regarding cultural appropriation, white privilege and Black suffering, the
role of the artist, the culpability of the institution (lying with the curators and
the educators, among others) and the stakes of censorship. Writer and artist
Hannah Black (b. 1981, Manchester, UK) followed up with an open letter, in
which she not only furthered the call for the exploitative painting’s removal,
but also advocated for the painting’s destruction, for ‘treating Black pain as
raw material’ and effectively centring whiteness.

245 Parker Bright, Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018

Schutz defended her painting with the words ‘I don’t know what it is like
to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett
was Mamie Till’s only son.’ In this discourse, however, Schutz is paired not
with Till’s grieving mother – despite her avowal of maternal solidarity – but
rather with the white woman who was complicit in his murder. Even so,
these calls for censorship were surprising in the United States. There, cries
for suppression of art, however incendiary, are still associated with the
political Right, in a hangover from the culture wars of the 1980s (p. 10).
These were fuelled by civic outcry at Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946–1989)
photographs of sex acts between men, which were exhibited in a travelling
retrospective in the wake of his untimely death from AIDS-related
complications, and the legal battles that these photos instigated. (Politicians
challenged Mapplethorpe’s work’s status as art, denouncing it as
pornographic, and the exhibition of the photographs in Cincinnati, Ohio,
resulted in an obscenity trial in 1990, marking the first time an American
museum was taken to court on criminal charges for the art that it showed.)
Yet in the present day, calls for censorship are no longer the sole remit of the
Right, with the Left just as likely to highlight the effects of representation,
albeit for very different reasons. Arguments for the removal or destruction of
Open Casket draw further attention to the fact that free speech historically
has been sanctioned for only some citizens and not others.
Schutz’s painting stayed in place and generated a level of art-world
introspection that is truly unprecedented. In direct contrast to debates around
Mapplethorpe’s photographs, which ultimately, if unwittingly, withdrew the
responsibility of art (defenders of his work counter-intuitively argued that
they were merely photos), those around Open Casket have, conceivably
more than any other instance, asserted the significance of representation in
the public sphere. The work in question and its surrounding controversy, to
say nothing of the structural problems it exposed, evidenced a failure to
achieve allyship – and yet it is precisely in this failure that it also
unequivocally highlighted the conceivable task of painting in the institutions
of art and the broader culture. This points to the medium’s continuing
consequence: painting is not separate from the ongoing situations from which
it emerges and on which it reflects, but wholly implicated within it. Much
work remains to be done.
Postscript

This book was finished in 2019 and edited in the months that followed. It
was set to go to press when, in early 2020, a novel coronavirus circulated
internationally and brought life to a standstill. I am writing this Postscript
while sheltering in place in Los Angeles, where local institutions have
shuttered. The immediate impact on the art world has been immense.
Museums and galleries quickly furloughed and laid off staff; the former are
making news in their attempts to stave off financial collapse by entertaining
the possibility, previously unthinkable, of deaccessioning parts of their
collections. Concluding lines from the introduction of this volume, a missive
from another time, resonate anew in their acknowledgment of the accidental
temporality of writing. A text about the contemporary does not typically
provide narrative closure, but this is something COVID-19 might
accomplish. It is early days, however, and as with other moments of rupture
that portended transformation and instead returned society to the old order,
perhaps conditions will not really change on the other side. Museums may
soon reopen and galleries survive, lined with art made while artists were in
lockdown, and travel could resume to see them first-hand. For now though,
art institutions are imagining audiences and their relevance to them in altered
ways. They are sending links to recent programmes and virtual ‘viewing
rooms’ for archived shows, and openings of new exhibitions and art fairs
have migrated online. All educational content – lectures, artmaking exercises
and public conversations – is delivered remotely, and curators are
conducting high-profile studio visits through video conferencing portals. So,
as with the introduction, this note intends to foreground the interval between
drafting ongoing history and reading it: it is an interval of open contingency,
conceptually if not actually punctuated by an ellipsis, rather than a full stop,
which awaits the next chapter. April 2020
Glossary

abstract expressionism A movement in American painting of the 1940s and 1950s, centred in New
York, works of which display an engagement with the unconscious mind and its automatic
registrations: gestural, process-based abstraction is employed to communicate intense emotion,
expression or experience. Artists associated with the movement are further categorized as action
painters (e.g. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning) or colour-field painters (e.g. Mark Rothko
and Barnett Newman, as well as a so-called ‘second generation’ in the later 1950s and 1960s).
afrofuturism An aesthetic movement that uses science fiction and technology to re-imagine histories of
and possibilities for people of the African diaspora.
appropriation The self-conscious use or adaptation of images from a pre-existing source as the basis
for a new work; through this process of re-framing or transformation, the imagery acquires new
meaning.
avant-garde In French, avant-garde means the ‘vanguard’ or the ‘advance guard’ (the soldiers who
entered battle first). Since the 19th century, the term has been applied to people or artworks that are
deemed ahead of their time, or outside the norms of the society from which they arise. A synonym
for modernism (or name for its ambitions), it often implies a reinvention of the existing aesthetic,
social and institutional order, and also radical politics.
bad painting Artwork that, through its content or its style, intentionally or ironically offends the viewer
to query the bounds of acceptable taste. The term was coined by critic and curator Marcia Tucker
in 1978 (in a show of the same name exhibited at New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York),
in this context referring to figurative painting.
Bauhaus This movement began in 1919, when Walter Gropius established a school (called the Bauhaus,
founded in the German city of Weimar) that combined crafts and fine arts, which aimed to integrate
the arts into everyday life. The Bauhaus regarded painting as equal to and logically interdependent
with other media and practices, such as architecture, weaving, wood or glasswork, which were
ordinarily associated with the applied or decorative arts, craft or design.
conceptual art As defined by artists in the United States, Europe and Latin America in the 1960s, art
that prioritizes the message, or ‘concept’, over traditional aesthetic, technical and material concerns;
the process of making the piece is also prioritized over the finished product.
contemporary A period of art generally agreed to come after modernism and postmodernism; it is not
identified by a coherent style but is instead understood relative to shifting historic, social and
technological conditions; a pluralism of artistic approaches; and the rise of international exhibition
formats, such as the biennial. It is variably defined as beginning as early as the aftermath of World
War II or as late as the 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall or developing alongside the
proliferation of the Internet.
criticality The quality of being critical of an artistic context or tradition. This can be addressed within a
work. Critical cultural practices (art, but also writing, music, drama and dance, among others) work
to reveal and change conventions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and other aspects of
identity and subjectivity.
Cultural Revolution A socio-political movement (1966–76) launched by Chinese leader Mao Zedong,
who sought to purge traces of traditional thought or bourgeois values from Chinese society to defend
Communism against capitalism. The effort was accompanied by a comprehensive propaganda
campaign typified by utopic images of idealized, spirited citizen-workers supporting and fulfilling
Mao’s vision.
cynical realism Art movement originating in China following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
Artists use figuration (in a parody of socialist realism) and irony to critique socio-political issues
and events.
death of painting The notion that painting had arrived at a point of exhaustion – a depletion of energy
and cultural relevance – or even the moment of its demise. An idea that has been variously
articulated since ancient times, it gained traction anew in the 1980s in response to neo-
expressionist painting, critics of which preferred work in other media, including photographic-
based appropriation, film, video and performance.
endgame A term borrowed from chess, referring to the last stages of a game; in art, it is used to
describe the theory that, having reached postmodernism, art could not be developed further and
would instead become a potentially endless re-examination of ideas that had come before.
expressionism A modernist movement that expresses an individual’s psychological, emotional or
spiritual experience (extending the tradition of romanticism) through non-naturalistic, sometimes
proto-abstract styles. It started in Europe (especially Germany, with the Brücke and Blaue Reiter
groups) in the early years of the 20th century, though the term may also apply adjectivally to painting
after that moment.
feminism A political orientation and social movement for women’s rights that commenced in the 19th
century and extends to the present day, advocating for political, economic and social equality, and
confronting cultural norms of gender and sex roles.
Fluxus An international movement of interdisciplinary artists from the early 1960s to the late 1970s.
Their works and events (including publications, performance, sculpture, music and dance) frequently
encouraged the participation of the viewer in their creation and welcomed chance occurrences, or
everyday activity, into the space of art.
formalism An interpretive approach to visual art that foregrounds formal qualities such as line, value,
colour and texture; these are seen as being of primary importance and autonomously meaningful. It
rose in prominence alongside modernist painting in the 20th century, expounded first by British
painter and critic Roger Fry and writer Clive Bell, and later by the American critic Clement
Greenberg.
gestural A quality in mark-making or surface texture exemplified by a palpable sense of the gesture
involved in its making; often found in layered, thick or impasto surfaces that maintain individual
strokes as part of the composition. It is consistently connected to expressionism.
globalization The process of interaction between people, companies, nations and cultures worldwide,
resulting in an integrated global economy. In the late 20th century this was typified by free trade, the
flow of capital and the expansion of labour markets.
historicism A relativist, as opposed to universalist, approach to art history, which considers the
significance of historical or geographical circumstance in the development of art.
iconoclasm Formerly applied specifically to the act of destroying religious icons, images or public
monuments for doctrinal or political reasons, this concept now extends more broadly to describe
behaviour that rejects established values, institutions or beliefs.
identity politics A strand of politics in which people united by any element of identity – be that gender,
ethnicity, religion, race, sexual orientation or culture – self-identify as a group and actively promote
concerns specific to that group, often in reaction to injustice.
illusionism A term first used for decoration in Baroque buildings (e.g. ceiling paintings that appear to
open up to the heavens), it refers to a style of painting that looks like it extends into or blends
seamlessly with the real three-dimensional space of the spectator. In the 20th century, many artists
worked against illusionism in favour of truth to materials.
institutional critique A branch of conceptual art that began in the late 1960s that takes the scrutiny of
institutions, especially those that present art (museums and galleries, biennials and fairs, but also
publications and publicity materials) as its primary task and subject matter. Critique is levied at the
institution’s part in conferring value onto artworks and artists; its involvement in securing funding
from compromised sources; and so on.
interiority The condition of having an inner life; used to describe a connection between an artwork’s
surface and the psyche, character or subjectivity of the artist.
kitsch Originating in the 19th century, the term initially implied poor taste, and was used to refer to
creativity that was considered less refined than art; in the 20th century, it was similarly linked with
mass-produced, cheap commodities, and with popular entertainment and sentimentality. In 1939, the
critic Clement Greenberg argued that kitsch was the antithesis of avant-garde art, but later
generations revalued it in a positive light.
low culture Derogatory in connotation, this term is applied to forms of culture that are popular and have
mass appeal. It is a counterpoint to the elitism and supposed refinement of taste associated with its
opposite, high culture.
mannerism From the Italian maniera, ‘manner’, or ‘style’; the style of European art after the High
Renaissance and before the Baroque (roughly between 1510–1600). Such art used the classical
vocabulary established by the Italian Renaissance but departed from its previously harmonious ideal
by playing with exaggerated scale, bodily proportions and unnatural colours. Expressionists in the
20th century have been associated with its strategies of formal experimentation.
medium specificity An aesthetic ideal first proposed in the 18th century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
and popularized in the 20th century by Clement Greenberg (see formalism), arguing that each
medium should concentrate on effects unique to it. This means in painting, flatness and abstraction
are seen as more appropriate than illusion, perspectival extension or figuration.
medium Physical material of any kind that is employed for the realization of artistic ideas or expression.
Also used to denote types of artmaking: painting, sculpture, collage, etc. ‘Mixed media’ means that
multiple materials were used to create an artwork. Medium also, more narrowly, refers to the liquid
in which pigment is suspended to make paint.
minimalism A style of visual art, music and dance that emerged in the 1960s. In visual art, it generally
denotes a concentration on fundamental geometric forms such as cubes or grids and a visual
simplicity or classicizing tendency. Forms are often presented serially, in an ascetic manner, and/or
realized in impersonal or industrial material. It is commonly associated with artists who engage
assistance in fabricating their work.
modernism A variety of artistic responses to the emergence of modernity, which developed following
the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century (a period marked by transformations in labour,
manufacturing and technology, accompanied by demographic shifts to more populous areas). In this
period, artists shifted from working on commission (for private patrons, religious organizations or
political powers) to making art based on subjective experience. The term is used most frequently to
 describe an interconnected sequence of experimental avant-garde art practices, stretching from the
19th century to postmodernism.
monochrome Used to describe painting (or other artwork), the surface of which consists of only one
colour. Ordinarily there will be little or no line or other surface incident beyond potential modulation
of shade, marks of a brush or texture of the support showing through its applied layers. Often
incorrectly thought to mean black and white, monochrome in fact means any single colour.
multiculturalism A theory of culture that values the coexistence of distinct ethnic or cultural traditions,
without their individual distinctions being lost within the larger group. It is often used to describe a
body of academic theory or cultural criticism that embraces a more diverse, less North American
and Eurocentric canon of artists or artworks.
neo-expressionism A style identified by expressive and gestural large-scale painting; it first
developed in Germany in the late 1970s and was popularized in the early 1980s, when works were
characterized by vibrantly coloured, figuration-based reactions against the formalism of minimal
and conceptual art. Centred in New York, neo-expressionism was associated with other
contemporary international movements including the Italian Transavanguardia and the German Junge
Wilde or Neue Wilden.
old masters An umbrella term used to refer to a loose group of esteemed European artists who were
active before the 19th century.
outsider art Art produced by artists who have not received training and who work outside the art
establishment.
participatory/relational art Art that encourages participation in order to emphasize or query the
relationship between an art object and viewing subjects, or that between viewing subjects in social
space. Such works or events as these might seek to highlight or exaggerate community or disunity
for ethical or political ends.
pastiche In visual art, a work that is eclectic and imitative of the work of other artists, styles or periods;
such quotations may or may not acknowledge their primary context or means of circulation. The
term is related to parody, but the implication of pastiche is less mocking.
Pattern and Decoration A movement in the 1970s that opposed the uptight classicism of minimalism,
finding force – and feminist agenda – in decoration, with designs sourced from quilts, mosaics and
textiles.
persona A role or character suggested by an artist’s behaviour or artwork.
photorealism A precise and finely detailed style of painting that emulates the representation of the
world as it is captured by a photograph. The style emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s but
continues to the present. Unsurprisingly, such works are often based on a source photograph.
pluralism Culture, and cultural theory and criticism, of the late 1980s and 1990s that embraced the
coexistence of more than one school of theoretical orientation or artistic course, including those
understood by some as mutually exclusive. Critics pursued conflicting evaluative criteria and artists
embraced distinct media in order to honour divergent aesthetic precedents and represent different
perspectives.
pop art Short for ‘popular art’; a style of art that arose in the mid-1950s in the United States and Britain
(though the term also encompasses international manifestations including nouveau réalisme in
France, capitalist realism in Germany and anti-art in Japan). Pop art took up everyday subject matter
including household and consumer products, and made use of found imagery from advertising,
cartoons and comics. Artists created pop works using handmade and mechanical or commercial
techniques, such as silk-screening, to challenge traditional methods and the boundaries between
media.
postcolonialism Referring to Western colonialism, the cultural condition that arises after a colonial
occupation concludes, and the study of the effects of this process on the colonized populations. It
indicates a particular strain of critical theory associated with scholars such as Edward Said, Gayatri
Spivak and Homi Bhabha.
post-studio The idea, especially popular after 1970, of a new period in which artwork is realized
outside of (and/or without recourse to) traditional material- or medium-based training and studio
practice. Idea-driven, the search for the appropriate form to realize a work may involve developing
new relations to existing structures of production and display, and might also engage novel
technology.
postmodernism The cultural period that followed modernism; developed after the 1960s, the term
was originally popular as a description of architectural eclecticism, and was later applied to the
rejection of modernism, critique of its canons and cultural norms, and a general pluralism (or
subjectivism and relativism). Such concerns were staged by art in a variety of media by the 1980s.
Postmodernism is further characterized by suspicion of reason and explanatory narratives, and a
critique of the role of ideology in forging and maintaining political and economic power.
pseudomorphism In art, a term referring to the presumption that artworks that share physical
characteristics are alike. Viewers might consider things that look similar to be connected, in a
prioritization of formal likeness over possible differences in positions behind conception or intent.
readymade A term generally associated with and popularized by the found-object sculptures of Marcel
Duchamp: any found object, typically manufactured, that is appointed as an artwork by an artist’s
decision to present it as such, with little or no need for alteration.
realism Sometimes called naturalism, a style of painting associated with the un-idealized figuration of
Gustave Courbet (and other artists in mid-19th century France, where the term was coined by the
French critic and novelist Champfleury). It is generally concerned with real, ordinary people of the
present, as opposed to historic or mythic subject matter. It may also refer to any work since that
point that embraces unembellished depiction.
Pictures Generation A generation of 1980s artists engaged in critique of representation, canonical
modernism and mainstream cultural values; this was often achieved by re-presenting found imagery,
such as from advertising or other mass-media outlets, in various photographic and moving-image
formats.
post-structuralism A movement in criticism and theory that contested structuralism, the idea that
cultural representations hew to a singular coherent logic. Post-structuralism suggests that this is
more an expectation imagined by the historian’s desire for narrative or authorial coherence rather
than an objective reality verified by the world.
Romanticism An artistic and intellectual movement originating in the late 18th century, concerned with
individualism and intended to inspire emotion.
socialist realism A style of idealized figurative art, first declared in Soviet Russia and imposed across
the Soviet Union and in China during the revolutionary era. The style was used for propagandistic
images.
social realism Realist art that involves social or political commentary.
structuralism A movement in criticism and theory developed in post-World War II France, associated
with the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and
predicated on the idea that there is an underlying structure on which the logic of all aspects of
culture is based.
surrealism An international movement across several artistic and intellectual fields in the 20th century,
inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud. It involves an interest in the subject matter and logic of
 dreams, as well as methods of creating that encourage chance or repress the conscious mind, such
as automatic drawing – mark-making without pursuing any conscious intent or form – or creating a
drawing in collaboration with other artists without viewing their contributions (a game the surrealists
called ‘the exquisite corpse’).
universalism The concept that some ideas can be applied universally, regardless of context.
Further Reading

Addison, Ruth, and Kate Fowle, eds, Rashid Johnson (Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary
Art, 2016).
Armstrong, Philip, Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville, eds, As Painting: Division and Displacement
(Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2001).
Badura-Triska, Eva, and Susanne Neuburger, eds, Bad Painting: Good Art (Museum of Modern Art,
Ludwig Collection, Vienna) (Cologne: Dumont, 2008).
Bayrle, Thomas, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (London: Phaidon, 2002).
Beckwith, Naomi, and Valerie Cassel Oliver, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen,
(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2018).
Beers, Kurt, 100 Painters of Tomorrow (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014).
Bell, Julian, What is Painting? Representation and Modern Art (London and New York: Thames &
Hudson, 1999).
Benjamin, Andrew, Contemporary Painting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
Binstock, Jonathan P., Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Bois, Yve-Alain, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
——, et al., Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Boston: ICA,
1986).
——, et al., ‘The Mourning After’, Artforum 41:7 (March 2003), 206–11, 267–72.
Bonami, Francesco, Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism (Udine: Adienda
Speciale Villa Manin Passariano, 2006).
Brutvan, Cheryl, and Taiye Selasi, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: I Refuse to be Invisible (West Palm
Beach: Norton Museum of Art, 2016).
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’,
Artforum 21:1 (September 1982), 43–56.
Bürgi, Bernhard, Painting On the Move: Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel: Schwabe, 2002).
Cotter, Holland, ‘Obama Portraits Blend Paint and Politics, and Fact and Fiction’, The New York Times
(12 February 2018).
Crimp, Douglas, ‘The End of Painting’, October 16 (Spring 1981), 69–76.
Curiger, Bice, ed., Birth of the Cool: American Painting from Georgia O’Keeffe to Christopher
Wool (Deichterhallen Hamburg, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1997).
Darling, Michael, ed., Painting in Tongues (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006).
de Duve, Thierry, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Debate with Clement
Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Deitch, Jeffrey, ed., The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2012).
Droitcour, Brian, ‘Siebren Versteeg’, Art in America (21 April 2017).
D’Souza, Aruna, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018).
Dumbadze, Alexander, and Suzanne Hudson, eds, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present,
(Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2013.)
Eberling, Knut, Painting Pictures: Painting and Media in the Digital Age (Wolfsburg, Germany:
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2003).
Eisenman, Nicole, Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013 (Saint Louis: Contemporary Art
Museum, Saint Louis, 2014).
Eklund, Douglas, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Elkins, James, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Essl, Karlheinz, Made in Leipzig: Pictures from a City (Vienna: Sammlung Essl, 2006).
Evans, David, ed., Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art: Appropriation (London:
Whitechapel, 2009).
Falconer, Morgan, Painting Beyond Pollock (London: Phaidon, 2014).
Fibicher, Bernhard, and Suman Gopinath, eds, Horn Please: Narratives In Contemporary Indian Art
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007).
Filipovic, Elena, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher (New York: New Museum,
2017).
Fogle, Douglas, ed., Painting At the Edge of the World (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001).
Foster, Hal, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, Art in America 74:6 (June 1986), 80–91, 139.
Fricek, Anita, ‘Contemporary Painting as Institutional Critique’, in Deleuze and Contemporary Art, eds
Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Gaines, Charles, et al., Henry Taylor (New York: Rizzoli, 2018).
Gao, Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2011).
Geers, David, ‘Neo-Modern’, October, 139 (winter 2012), 9–14.
—— ‘The Gold Standard’, The Brooklyn Rail (6 May 2014).
Gingeras, Alison M., ed., Dear Painter, Paint Me...: Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia (Paris:
Centre Pompidou, 2002).
Godfrey, Tony, The New Image: Painting in the 1980s (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986).
—— Painting Today (London: Phaidon, 2014).
Gohr, Siegfried, and Jack Cowart, eds, Expressions: New Art From Germany: Georg Baselitz, Jörg
Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck (Munich: Prestel-Verlag Munich in
association with the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1983).
Graw, Isabelle, ‘Conceptual Expression: On Conceptual Gestures in Allegedly Expressive Painting,
Traces of Expression in Proto-Conceptual Works and the Significance of Artistic Procedures’, in Art
After Conceptual Art, eds Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006).
—— ‘Social Realism: The Art of Jana Euler’, Artforum 51:3 (November 2012), 234–40.
—— The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018).
——, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch, eds, Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and
Agency beyond the Canvas (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).
——, et al., Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition (Berlin: Sternberg
Press, 2016).
Green, David, and Peter Seddon, eds, History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History
in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Greenberg, Clement, ‘Modernist Painting [1960]’, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
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Sources of Illustrations

1 Yue Minjun, Inside and Outside the Stage, 2009. Oil on canvas, 267 × 336 (105⅛ × 1325/16).
Courtesy Yue Minjun Studio
2 Patrick Lundberg, No title, 2019. Acrylic on fabric, enamel on pin, 113 × 1 (44½ × ½). Photo Samuel
Hartnett. Courtesy the artist and Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
3 Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost, 2001–13. Oil, acrylic, glitter, enamel, resin and rhinestones on birch
wood, 304.8 × 1828.8 (120 × 720). Photo Kerry Ryan McFate. Courtesy Pace Gallery and White Cube
4 Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, Jerusalem, 2004. Video documentation of an action. In collaboration
with Julien Devaux. Photo Rachel Leah Jones. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. © Francis Alÿs
5 Sheila Hicks, Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, installation view, Arsenale, 57th Venice Biennale,
2017. Photo Pierluigi Palazzi/Alamy Stock Photo. Hicks © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020
6 Kristaps Ģelzis, Artificial Peace, installation view, Latvian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011.
Courtesy the artist
7 Sofie Bird Møller, Interferenz, 2011. Acrylic paint on page torn from Playboy magazine, 29 × 21 (10⅞
× 8⅛). Courtesy Martin Asbæk Gallery, Copenhagen
8 Bénédicte Peyrat, Dog, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 230 × 195 (909/16 × 76¾). Courtesy the artist and
Paolo Curti/Annamaria & Co., Milan
9 Adam de Boer, Narsisis Mantrijeron no. 1, 2017. Wax-resist acrylic ink and rabbit skin glue on linen,
polychrome carved wood, 183 × 103 × 5 (72⅛ × 40⅝ × 2). Courtesy the artist and Hunter Shaw Fine
Art, Los Angeles
10 Jumaldi Alfi, Een Prachtig Landscape #4 (Postcard from My Past), 2005. Acrylic on canvas, 135
× 135 (53¼ × 53¼). Mr Herman Collection, Jakarta. Courtesy Jumaldi Alfi Studio
11 Chatchai Puipia, Vase with twelve sunflowers 120 years after Van Gogh, 2009. Pigments, gold
leaf, carbon and wax on canvas, 180 × 154.5 (70⅞ × 6013/16). Courtesy 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok
12 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Whistle in a Wish, 2018. Oil on canvas, 101 × 70 (29¾ × 279/16).
Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London. © Lynette Yiadom-
Boakye
13 Michaël Borremans, Six Crosses, 2006. Pencil, watercolour and acrylic on paper, 23.4 × 21 (93/16 ×
8¼). Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
14 Drea Cofield, Double Spank, 2018. Oil on linen, 127 × 152.4 (50 × 60). Courtesy the artist
15 Lucy McKenzie, ‘Slender Means’, 2010, installation view, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne.
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
16 Karen Kilimnik, Fountain of Youth (Cleanliness is Next to Godliness), 2012, installation view,
Brant Foundation, Connecticut. Courtesy Brant Foundation and 303 Gallery, New York
17 Florian Meisenberg, Continental Breakfast, Overmorrow at Noon, 2011. Oil on canvas, 245 × 215
(96 7/16 × 845/16). Photo Jörg Lohse. Courtesy the artist, Kate MacGarry, London and Simone Subal
Gallery, New York
18 Analia Saban, Claim (from Chair), 2013. Linen on chair and canvas, 226 × 264 × 173 (89 × 104 ×
68). Photo Brian Forrest. Courtesy the artist
19 Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), 2011. Courtesy the artist and
Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco
20 Konstantin Bessmertny, E. Meets W. Lost in Translation, 2011. Oil on canvas, 50 × 50 (19¾ ×
19¾). Courtesy the artist
21 Gabriel Orozco, Stream in the Grid, 2011. Pigment ink and acrylic on canvas, 86.4 × 76.8 (34 ×
30¼). Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
22 Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002. Handmade hacked Super Mario Bros. cartridge,
Nintendo NES video game system, artist software, dimensions variable. © Cory Arcangel
23 Vik Muniz, Wheat Field with Cypresses, after Van Gogh (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011. Digital
c-print produced in two editions, each an edition of 6 plus 4 artist’s proofs, editions in two different sizes,
180.3 × 227.3 (71 × 89½) and 101.6 × 128.3 (40 × 50½). Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Vik Muniz/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020
24 threeASFOUR featuring Stanley Casselman, runway show during New York Fashion Week,
February 2019. Photo Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
25 Kelley Walker, Black Star Press (rotated 90 degrees), 2006. Triptych, digital print with silkscreened
white, milk and dark chocolate on canvas, three sections, each composed of two panels. Total of six
panels, each 213.4 × 132.1 (84 × 52), overall 213.4 × 802.6 (84 × 316). Photo EPW Studio. Courtesy
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Kelley Walker
26 Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism – Cartier, 2002. Oil on canvas, 300 × 200 (118⅛ × 78¾). Courtesy
the artist
27 José Toirac and Meira Marrero, 1869–2006, 2006. 39 oil paintings on canvas, wooden frames,
metal identification labels and nails, dimensions variable. Photo Will Lytch. Courtesy PanAmerican Art
Projects, Miami
28 Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky, Our Best World, installation view, 2003. Courtesy
the artists
29 Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video installation, duration 24 hours. Courtesy
White Cube and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Christian Marclay
30 Sam McKinniss, American Idol (Lana), 2018. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 248.9 × 182.9 (96 × 72).
Photo Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist and JTT, New York
31 Tomoo Gokita, Mother and Child, 2013. Acrylic gouache, charcoal and gesso on linen, 229 × 183
(90 × 72). © Tomoo Gokita
32 Makiko Kudo, Missing, 2010. Oil on canvas, 227.3 × 363.8 (89½ × 143¼). Photo Robert
Wedemeyer. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
33 Jesse Mockrin, Syrinx, 2018. Oil on linen, 172.7 × 238.8 (68 × 94). Photo Marten Elder. Courtesy
the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles
34 Tammy Nguyen, Đứ c Mẹ Chuối (Holy Mother of Bananas), 2018. Mixed media on panel, 152.4 ×
101.6 (60 × 40). Courtesy the artist
35 William Daniels, The Shipwreck, 2005. Oil on board, 30 × 40 (11¾ × 15¾). Courtesy Vilma Gold,
London
36 Caragh Thuring, 4, 2009. Oil, gesso and acrylic on linen, 145 × 192 (57⅛ × 75⅝). Courtesy Thomas
Dane Gallery, London. © Caragh Thuring. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020
37 Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Choke), 2017. Oil on canvas, 160 × 200 (63 × 78). Courtesy Anton Kern
Gallery, New York and Sadie Coles HQ, London. © Wilhelm Sasnal
38 Yevgeniy Fiks, Songs of Russia no. 10, 2005–7. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 121.9 (36 × 48). Courtesy
the artist and Galerie Sator, Paris
39 Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts), 2012. Ink and acrylic on canvas, each 457.2
× 365.8 (180 × 144). Installation, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany. Photo Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy
the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and White Cube
40 Maryam Najd, Self-Portrait VIII, 2006–7. Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 (31½ × 23⅝). Courtesy Maryam
Najd
41 Ruth Root, Untitled, 2017. Fabric, Plexiglass, enamel paint and spray paint, 251.5 × 133.4 (99 ×
52½). Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
42 Mamma Andersson, Memory Banks, 2018, installation view, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati,
OH. Photo Tony Walsh. Andersson © DACS 2020
43 Andrew Grassie, Installation: Martin Creed, Rennie Collection, Vancouver, 2012. Tempera on
paper on board, 15 × 26.4 (6 × 10½). Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Andrew Grassie
44 Matts Leiderstam, Grand Tour, (1997–2007), installation view, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, 2010.
Photo Johanna Glösl. Courtesy the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
45 Uwe Henneken, Vanguard #66, 2006. Oil on canvas, 45 × 66 (17¾ × 26). Courtesy Galerie Gisela
Capitain, Cologne
46 Dirk Bell, Zitat, 2007. Mixed media on canvas, diptych, each panel 60.9 × 80 (24 × 31½). Courtesy
Sadie Coles HQ, London. © Dirk Bell
47 Pavel Büchler, Modern Paintings No. A45 (cartoon figures in a barn, “Sumie 98,” Manchester,
August 2007), 1997–2007. Reclaimed paint on canvas, 114.5 × 113.5 (451/16 × 4411/16). Courtesy the
artist and Max Wigram Gallery, London
48 Lucas Ajemian, Laundered Painting (26x26) I, 2014. Painting on dropcloth, 66 × 66 (26 × 26).
Photo Bill Orcutt. Courtesy the artist
49 Radu Comsa, ‘Being Radu Comsa’, 2010, installation view, Sabot Gallery, The Paintbrush Factory,
Cluj. Courtesy the artist and Sabot Gallery, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
50 Alex Da Corte, ‘Fun Sponge’, 2013, installation view, ICA at MECA, Portland, Maine. Courtesy the
artist
51 Urs Fischer, ‘Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?’, installation view, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York,
2008. Wallpaper: Urs Fischer, Abstract Slavery, 2008. Works featured on wallpaper, from left to right:
Gilbert & George, MENTAL NO. 4, 1976; Cindy Sherman, Untitled #175, 1987. Photo Stefan
Altenburger. Courtesy the artists and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York. © The artists
52 Peter Halley, New York, New York, 2018, installation view, Lever House Art Collection, New York.
© Peter Halley Studio
53 Sherrie Levine, Gray and Blue Monochromes After Stieglitz: 1–36 (detail), 2010. Flashe on
mahogany, each 71.1 × 53.3 (28 × 21). Installation view, ‘Sherrie Levine’, Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W
21st Street, New York, November 6–December 15, 2010. Photo EPW Studio. Courtesy the artist, Paula
Cooper Gallery, New York and David Zwirner. © Sherrie Levine
54 Blake Rayne, Untitled Painting No. 3, 2008. Acrylic, gesso, linen and lacquer on wood, 232.4 × 167
(91½ × 63¾). Photo John Berens. Courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
55 Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2010. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 213.4 × 175.3 (84 × 69). Photo
Ron Amstutz. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York
56 R. H. Quaytman, + ×, Chapter 34, installation view, October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo David Heald. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
57 Rob Pruitt, ‘Pattern and Degradation’, installation view, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s
enterprise, New York/Rome
58 Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Rubens Tiger Hunt), 2015. Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium, 163.8 ×
211.1 × 37.5 (64½ × 83⅛ × 14¾). © Jeff Koons
59 Chloé Wise, Lactose Tolerance, 2017. Oil on canvas, 210 × 300 (82⅝ × 118⅛). Photo Rebecca
Fanuele. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech
60 Banksy, Love Is In The Bin, 2018. Spray paint and acrylic on canvas, mounted on board, in artist’s
frame, 101 × 78 × 18 (39¾ × 30¾ × 7). Courtesy Pest Control Office
61 Yoshitomo Nara, Miss Spring, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 227 × 182 (89⅜ × 71⅝). Photo Keizo
Kioku. Courtesy the artist. © Yoshitomo Nara
62 Wangechi Mutu, Forbidden Fruit Picker, 2015. Collage painting, 100.3 × 148.9 (39½ × 58⅝).
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Victoria
Miro, London/Venice. © Wangechi Mutu
63 Nedko Solakov, The Yellow Blob Story (from The Absent-Minded Man project), 1997–present,
installation view, ‘Emotions’ solo exhibition, Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2008. Yellow paint, handwritten text on
wall, dimensions variable. Collections of MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien,
Vienna; MARTa Herford; Private Collection, Italy; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Collection Deutsche
Telekom, Bonn. Photo Nedko Solakov. Courtesy the artist
64 Peter Saul, Quack-Quack Trump, 2017. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 198 × 305 (78 × 120). Private
Collection. © Peter Saul/ARS, New York and DACS, London 2020
65 Toyin Ojih Odutola, Wall of Ambassadors, 2017. Charcoal, pastel and pencil on paper, 101.6 × 76.2
(40 × 30) (paper), 116.2 × 90.2 × 3.8 (45¾ × 35½ × 1½) (framed). Courtesy the artist and Jack
Shainman Gallery, New York. © Toyin Ojih Odutola
66 Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait with and without the Mask, 2005. Oil on linen, 116.8 × 234.3
(46 × 92¼). Courtesy Francesco Clemente
67 Albert Oehlen, FM 38, 2011. Oil and paper on canvas, 220 × 190 (86⅝ × 7413/16). Courtesy
Gagosian. © Albert Oehlen. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020
68 Charline von Heyl, Corrido, 2018. Oil, acrylic and charcoal on linen, 274.3 × 228.6 (108 × 90).
Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York. © Charline von Heyl
69 Günther Förg, Untitled, 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 260.5 × 280 (1029/16 × 110¼). © Estate Günther
Förg, Suisse/DACS 2020
70 Cosima von Bonin, ‘The Juxtaposition of Nothings’, installation view, Petzel, New York, 2011.
Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York
71 Michael Krebber, Das politische Bild (1968/2010), installation view, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin,
2010. Oil on canvas mounted on cotton, 98.3 × 126 (38¾ × 49⅝). Courtesy Galerie Buchholz,
Berlin/Cologne
72 John M. Armleder, John M. Armleder, installation view, Almine Rech Paris, June 06–July 28, 2018.
Photo Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech
73 Anselm Reyle, Little Yorkshire, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, steel frame and effect lacquer, 69 ×
89 × 4 (273/16 × 351/16 × 19/16). Photo Matthias Kolb. © 2011 Anselm Reyle
74 André Butzer, Blauer Schlumpf (Blue Smurf), 2009. Oil on canvas, 180.3 × 240 (71 × 94½).
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
75 Jim Shaw, Oist Children Portrait (Girl & Dog), 2011. Oil on canvas, 119.4 × 185.4 (47 × 73).
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
76 Mike Kelley, Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, 2009. Acrylic on
wood panels, steel, video monitors, Roku media players, SD video cards, wiring and video mounts, 243.8
× 487.7 × 61.1 (96 × 192 × 241/16), video high-definition NTSC, 8:51 minutes. Photo Fredrik Nilsen
Studio. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS,
London 2020
77 Carroll Dunham, (Hers) Night and Day #1, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 129.5 × 167.6 (51 × 66);
framed 136.5 × 174.6 (53¾ × 68¾). Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. © Carroll
Dunham
78 Tala Madani, Projections, 2015. Oil on linen, 203.2 × 249.6 (80 × 98¼). Photo Josh White. Courtesy
the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
79 Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin, Fruit and Other Things, 2018. Commissioned by Carnegie Museum
of Art for the exhibition ‘Carnegie International, 57th Edition’, 2018. Photo Bryan Conley. Courtesy the
artists
80 Odili Donald Odita, Equalizer, installation view, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, November
14, 2007–March 9, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Odili Donald
Odita
81 Imran Qureshi, They Shimmer Still, 2012, installation view, 18th Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the
artist and Corvi-Mora, London
82 Shahzia Sikander, Disruption as Rapture, 2016. HD video animation with 7.1 surround sound; music
by Du Yun featuring Ali Sethi; animation by Patrick O’Rourke; commissioned by the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Duration 10 minutes 7 seconds, edition of 3 with 2 artist’s proofs. Courtesy the artist
and Sean Kelly, New York. © Shahzia Sikander
83 Bharti Kher, Blind matter, dark night, 2017. Bindis on painted board, 249.5 × 188.3 × 8.9 (98¼ ×
74⅛ × 3½). Photo Jeetin Sharma. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Bharti Kher
84 Meena Hasan, Wedding Marigold 2, 2018. Oil and acrylic on panel, 35.6 × 27.9 (14 × 11).
Courtesy the artist
85 Benjamín Domínguez, El Sueño II, 2013. Oil on linen, 99.1 × 109.2 (39 × 43). Courtesy Ruiz-Healy
Art, San Antonio, TX
86 Mohammad Ehsai, Loving Whisper, 1973–2008, 2008. Oil on canvas, 300 × 184.5 (118⅛ × 72⅝).
Private Collection/Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library. Courtesy the artist and Mah Art
Gallery, Tehran
87 Tsherin Sherpa, Peace Out, 2013. Gold leaf, acrylic, and ink on paper, 56 × 56 (22 × 22). Private
Collection. Courtesy the artist and Rossi & Rossi Ltd., London
88 Dedron, Down below the Snow Mountain, 2009. Mineral pigments on Tibetan paper, 54 × 38 (21 ×
15). Courtesy the artist and Rossi & Rossi Ltd., London
89 Lisa Yuskavage, PieFace, 2008. Oil on linen, 121.9 × 102.2 (48 × 40¼). Courtesy the artist and
David Zwirner. © Lisa Yuskavage
90 John Currin, Hot Pants, 2010. Oil on canvas, 198.1 × 152.4 (78 × 60). Photo Robert McKeever.
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. © John Currin
91 Will Cotton, Cotton Candy Cloud, 2004. Oil on linen, 190.5 × 254 (75 × 100). Courtesy Mary Boone
Gallery, New York. © Will Cotton
92 Merlin James, Two Poplar Trees, 2009–11. Acrylic on canvas, 57.5 × 90.5 (22⅝ × 35⅝). Courtesy
of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Merlin James
93 Bjarne Melgaard, ‘IDEAL POLE. Repetition Compulsion by Bjarne Melgaard’, installation view,
Ramiken Crucible, New York, 2012. Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s
enterprise, New York/Rome
94 Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 2010, installation view, Leo Koenig Gallery, New York, 2011. Polyurethane
on canvas, forty parts, each 121.9 × 121.9 (48 × 48). Photo Thomas Mueller. Courtesy Koenig &
Clinton, New York
95 I Nyoman Masriadi, Masriadi Presents – Attack From Website, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 200 ×
300 (78¾ × 118¼). Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
96 Damien Hirst, Winner/Loser, 2018. Glass, painted steel, silicone, monofilament, bull sharks and
formaldehyde solution, 196.5 × 249.6 × 123.2 (77⅜ × 98⅜ × 48⅝). Photo courtesy Clint Jenkins. ©
Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020
97 Damien Hirst, Oleandrin, 2010. Household gloss on canvas, 37 × 33 (14⅝ × 13). © Damien Hirst
and Science Ltd. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020
98 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ntange Dreaming, 1989. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 135 × 122
(53¼ × 48⅛). National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1989/Bridgeman Images. © Emily
Kame Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2020
99 Bernard Frize, Ledz, 2018. Acrylic and resin on canvas, 281 × 523 (110⅝ × 205⅞). Courtesy the
artist and Perrotin. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020
100 Takashi Murakami, 727–727, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, mounted on board, three panels: overall
dimensions 300 × 450 × 7 (118⅛ × 1773/16 × 2¾). Courtesy Perrotin. © 2006 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai
Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved
101 Aya Takano, All Was Light, 2012. Oil on canvas, 194 × 130 (76⅜ × 51). Courtesy Perrotin. © 2012
Aya Takano/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved
102 Louis Vuitton and Richard Prince, runway show ‘Nurses’, during Paris Fashion Week, October
2007. Photo Lorenzo Santin/WireImage/Getty Images
103 Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, 2018. Oil on canvas, 213.4 × 147.3 (84 × 58). Courtesy the
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the
following lead donors for their support of the Obama Portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg;
Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. © 2020 Kehinde Wiley
104 Subodh Gupta, Saat Samunder Paar VII, 2003. Oil on canvas, 167.4 × 228.6 (65⅞ × 90). Courtesy
the artist and Hauser & Wirth
105 Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition – Products, Part 2, 2005–6. Traditional living-room
furniture and forty paintings in gilded frames, each 69 × 99.5 (273/16 × 393/16). Courtesy the artist and
Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne
106 Christian Jankowski, China Painters (Still Life), 2008. Oil on canvas, 224.4 × 315 (88⅜ × 124).
Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London
107 Ragnar Kjartansson, The End – Venice, 2009. Six-month performance during the 53rd Venice
Biennale. Commissioned by the Center for Icelandic Art, Reykjavik. Photo Rafael Pinho. Courtesy the
artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik
108 Josh Smith, ‘Emo Jungle’, installation view, David Zwirner, New York, 2019. Courtesy the artist
and David Zwirner. © Josh Smith
109 Eliza Douglas, Josh Smith, 2019. Oil on canvas, 175 × 175 (69 × 69). Courtesy Overduin & Co.,
Los Angeles
110 Parker Ito, A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night, 2015, installation view, Château Shatto. Photo Elon
Schoenholz. Courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles
111 Josef Strau, What Should One Do, 2011. Floor lamp and painting with metal chains and rings,
canvas, 76.2 × 101.6 (30 × 40), lamp height 152.4 (60). Photo Martha Fleming-Ives. Courtesy the artist
and Greene Naftali, New York
112 Aaron Young, Greeting Card (Armory, quadriptych), performance at the Park Avenue Armory,
New York, 2007, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York
113 Seth Price, Untitled, 2008–9, from the Vintage Bomber series. Autobody enamel on vacuum-
formed high-impact polystyrene, 243.8 × 121.9 (96 × 48). Courtesy Seth Price
114 Michel Majerus, if we are dead, so it is, 2000. Acrylic paint, digital print and lacquer on multiplex
and wood, 310 × 992 × 4732 (122⅛ × 3909/16 × 1863). Photo David Franck, Stuttgart. Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. © Michel Majerus Estate 2000
115 Tom Moody, sketch_i7a, 2012. Digital painting, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
116 Corinne Wasmuht, Brueckenstr., 2008. Oil on wood, 227 × 519 (89⅜ × 204⅜). Courtesy the artist
and Petzel, New York
117 Harm van den Dorpel, On Usability, 2011. Mixed media, 24.1 × 18.6 × 2 (9½ × 75/16 × 13/16).
Courtesy the artist
118 David Hockney, No. 522, 2009. iPhone drawing, dimensions variable. © David Hockney
119 Joshua Nathanson, David Gets a Cupcake, 2015. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 205.7 × 154.9 ×
3.8 (81 × 61 × 1½). Courtesy the artist
120 Michael Williams, Truth About Painting 2, 2017. Inkjet on canvas, 309.2 × 215.9 × 2.5 (121¾ × 85
× 1). Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. © Michael Williams
121 Simon Ingram, Radio Painting Station: Looking for the Waterhole, 2017–18. Aluminium, steel,
cable, electronics, software, computer, brush, tape, oil paint on linen, dimensions variable. Installation,
‘Open Codes – Living in Digital Worlds’, ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2017–18. Photo
Jonas Zillius. ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. © Simon Ingram
122 Siebren Versteeg, A Rose, 2017. Algorithmically generated image printed on canvas, flash drive,
274.3 × 162.2 (108 × 65). Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York
123 Obvious, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, 2018. GAN algorithms, inkjet print on Japanese canvas,
70 × 70 (27½ × 27½). Obvious – @obvious_art
124 Manuel Solano, Fairuza I, 2014 from the series Blind Transgender with AIDS. Acrylic on paper,
86.5 × 56.5 (34⅛ × 22¼). Photo PJ Rountree. Collection of the artist
125 Pamela Rosenkranz, ‘The Most Important Body of Water is Yours’, installation view, Karma
International, Zürich, 2010. Photo Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist and Karma International, Zürich
and Los Angeles
126 Amoako Boafo, Reflection 1, 2018. Oil on paper, 130 × 110 (51¼ × 43⅜). Photo Robert
Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
127 Neo Rauch, Die Lage, 2006. Oil on canvas, 300 × 420 (118⅛ × 165⅜). Private Collection, USA.
Photo Uwe Walter, Berlin. Courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin, David Zwirner, New
York/London. © Neo Rauch courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin/DACS, 2015
128 Christoph Ruckhäberle, Nacht 32, 2004. Oil on canvas, 190 × 280 (7413/16 × 110¼). Courtesy
ZieherSmith Gallery, New York
129 Zhang Xiaogang, Lovers, 2007, from the series Bloodline. Oil on canvas, 200 × 260 (78¾ ×
102⅜). Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery, Beijing
130 Yue Minjun, Inside and Outside the Stage, 2009. Oil on canvas, 267 × 336 (105⅛ × 1325/16).
Courtesy Yue Minjun Studio
131 Liu Xiaodong, Time, 2014. Oil on canvas, 20 canvases each 60 × 60 (23¾ × 23¾), overall 240 ×
300 (94½ × 118⅛). Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London. © Liu Xiaodong Studio
132 Chéri Samba, Problème d’eau, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 135 × 200 × 4 (53¼ × 78¾ × 1⅝).
Courtesy CAAC – Pigozzi Collection. © Chéri Samba
133 Swarna Chitrakar, HIV, 2004–5. Patua painting on paper, made of six panels, overall 284 × 56
(111⅞ × 22⅛). Photo DGPC/ADF. Museu Nacional de Etnologia/National Museum of Ethnology,
Lisbon
134 Pablo Baen Santos, Baboons in Session, 2008. Oil on canvas, 182.9 × 213.4 (72 × 84). Collection
of Patrick Reyno. Courtesy the artist
135 Carla Busuttil, No Country for Poor People, 2013. Oil on canvas, 100 × 80 (39⅜ × 31½).
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery
136 Vasan Sitthiket, Bomb for Liberty, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 61 × 40.6 (24 × 16). Courtesy the
artist and Ethan Cohen Gallery
137 Teresa Margolles, Flag I, 2009. Fabric, blood, earth and other substances, 298 × 188 (117⅜ ×
74⅛). Photo Tate. Courtesy Teresa Margolles
138 Kara Walker, ‘After the Deluge’, installation view, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lila
Acheson Wallace Wing, The Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery, March 21–August 6, 2006. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New
York. © Kara Walker
139 Ronald Ophuis, The Death of Edin, Srebrenica July 1995, 2007. Oil on linen, 345 × 480 (13513/16
× 189). Courtesy Aeroplastics Bruxelles, Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière
Paris, Luxembourg, New York, Saint-Étienne
140 Pablo Alonso, You’ve Never Had it So Good 1, 2003. Acrylic and marker on unprimed cotton
canvas, 280 × 400 (110¼ × 157½). Private Collection, Beijing. Courtesy Pablo Alonso
141 Miguel Aguirre, Ana Martín Fernández, 2008, from the series In Memoriam. Oil on paper, 50 ×
35 (1911/16 × 13¾). Courtesy the artist
142 Luc Tuymans, Turtle, 2007, installation view, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2019. Oil on canvas, 368 ×
509 (145 × 200½). Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. © Luc Tuymans
143 Luc Tuymans, Schwarzheide, installation view, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2019. Marble mosaic
realised by Fantini Mosaici, Milan. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. © Luc Tuymans
144 Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice n. 53 – Pieta, 2012–16. Oil on canvas, 50 × 41 (19¾ × 16¼).
Courtesy the artist
145 Serban Savu, Blue Shadow, 2010. Oil on canvas, 137 × 106.5 (54 × 42). Courtesy the artist and
David Nolan Gallery, New York. © Serban Savu
146 Alexander Tinei, Uncle J, 2006. Oil on canvas, 100 × 80 (39⅜ × 31½). Courtesy the artist and
Deák Erika Gallery, Budapest
147 Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Ike Ya, 2016. Acrylic, transfers, colour pencil and charcoal on paper
213.4 × 233.7 (84 × 92). Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner. © Njideka Akunyili
Crosby
148 Ghada Amer, The Woman Who Failed To Be Shehrazade, 2008. Acrylic, embroidery and gel
medium on canvas, 157.5 × 172.7 (62 × 68). Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New
York and Aspen. © Ghada Amer
149 Weaam Ahmed El-Masry, The Embrace, 2011. Pen and glass colours on hard paper, 100 × 70
(39⅜ × 27⅝). Collection of Ms. Stefania Phacos Nazzal. Courtesy the artist
150 Anna Bjerger, Toxic/Rock, 2018. Oil on aluminium, 105 × 130 (41⅜ × 51¼). Courtesy Galleri
Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm
151 Chantal Joffe, Blonde in a Black Sweater, 2015. Oil on board, 61 × 45.8 (24⅛ × 18⅛). Courtesy
the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. © Chantal Joffe
152 Richard Phillips, Frieze, 2009. Oil on canvas, 213.4 × 284.5 (84 × 112). Courtesy Gagosian. ©
Richard Phillips
153 Kathe Burkhart, Fuck Off, 2015, from the Liz Taylor Series (Raintree County), 2015. Acrylic and
mixed media on canvas, 228.6 × 152.4 (90 × 60). Courtesy the artist
154 Jenny Saville, Fate I, 2018. Oil on canvas, 260 × 240 (102⅜ × 94½). Photo Mike Bruce. Courtesy
Gagosian. © Jenny Saville. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020
155 Cecily Brown, Paradise to Go 1, 2015. Oil on linen, 246.4 × 226.1 (97 × 89). Courtesy Gagosian.
© Cecily Brown
156 Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe 1, 2012. Rhinestones, acrylic and oil on wood panel,
121.9 × 152.4 (48 × 60). © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020
157 Ellen Altfest, The Penis, 2006. Oil on canvas, 27.8 × 30.4 (11 × 12). Photo Cary Whittier. Courtesy
White Cube. © Ellen Altfest
158 Ivy Haldeman, Full Figure, Open Book, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 213.4 (60 × 84).
Collection of Ari Mir. Courtesy the artist and Downs & Ross, New York
159 Ulrike Müller, ‘Container’, exhibition view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen,
Düsseldorf, 2018–19. Photo Katja Illner. Courtesy Callicoon Fine Arts, New York
160 Mark Beard, [Bruce Sargeant (1898–1938)], Seven Gymnasts on the Ropes, n.d. Oil on
canvas, 213.4 × 182.9 (84 × 72). Courtesy ClampArt, New York
161 Nicole Eisenman, Sloppy Bar Room Kiss, 2011. Oil on canvas, 99.1 × 121.9 (39 × 48). Photo
Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
162 Christina Quarles, Moon (Lez Go Out N’ Feel Tha Nite), 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 127 × 101.6
(50 × 40). Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
163 Louis Fratino, Andrea in Gambara, 2018. Oil on canvas, 27.9 × 35.6 (11 × 14). Courtesy Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino
164 Jonathan Lyndon Chase, dimonds all over my body, 2018. Acrylic, rhinestones, glitter, pastel and
marker on canvas, 152.4 × 101.6 (60 × 40). Courtesy the artist, and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
165 Didier William, M vle santi w andelan m, 2018. Wood carving, collage, ink and acrylic on panel,
152.4 × 121.9 (60 × 48). Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy James Fuentes LLC
166 Carsten Höller, Revolving Hotel Room, installation view, ‘theanyspacewhatever’, October 24,
2008–January 7, 2009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo David Heald. Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, New York. © DACS 2020
167 Richard Aldrich, ‘Once I Was…’, installation view, Bortolami Gallery, New York, 2011. Courtesy
the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York
168 Robert Ryman, No Title Required 3, 2010, installation view, Pace Gallery, New York. Enamel and
acrylic on birch plywood (panels 1–4 and 6–9) and enamel and acrylic on board panel (panels 5 and 10),
overall installation dimensions 213.4 × 1331 (84 × 524). © Robert Ryman/DACS, London 2020
169 Pieter Vermeersch, Untitled, 2009. Acrylic paint on wall, each 500 × 3100 (196⅞ × 1220½).
Exhibition view of ‘Beyond These Walls’, South London Gallery, London, 2009. Photo Pieter
Huybrechts. Courtesy Carl Freedman Gallery, London
170 Clément Rodzielski, Untitled, 2008, installation view. Five notebook sheets, each 41 × 30 (16⅛ ×
1113/16); three wooden boards, 136 × 136 (539/16 × 539/16), 203 × 136 (7915/16 × 539/16), and 207 × 136
(81½ × 539/16), dimensions of installation variable. Photo Remy Lidereau. Courtesy the artist, Galerie
Chantal Crousel, Paris and Campoli Presti, London
171 Angela de la Cruz, Deflated XVII (Yellow), 2010. Oil on canvas, 153 × 180 (60¼ × 70⅞). Courtesy
Lisson Gallery, London. © Angela de la Cruz
172 Dan Rees, Payne’s Grey and Vermillion, 2010. Acrylic on canvas and wall, 142.2 × 101.6 (56 ×
40). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
173 David Ostrowski, F (Between Two Ferns), 2014. Acrylic and lacquer on canvas, wood, 241 × 191
(95 × 75¼). Photo Matthias Kolb. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin
174 Jennifer Bartlett, Recitative, 2009–10. Enamel over silkscreen grid on baked enamel, steel plates,
340.4 × 4823.5 (134⅛ × 1899⅛), 372 plates: 159 at 30.5 × 30.5 (12 × 12), 117 at 45.7 × 45.7 (18 × 18),
96 at 61 × 61 (24 × 24). Photo courtesy Pace Gallery. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York
175 Laura Owens, ‘Ten Paintings’, installation view, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 28 April – 23
July 2016. Photo Johnna Arnold. Courtesy CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. and Sadie Coles HQ,
London. © Laura Owens
176 Yunhee Min, Hammer Project, installation view, 2019. Photo Jeff McLane. Courtesy the artist and
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
177 Katharina Grosse, One Floor Up More Highly, 2010, installation view, Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art. Acrylic on wall, floor, clothing, Styrofoam and glass fibre reinforced plastic, 780 ×
1680 × 8260 (307 × 661½ × 3252). Photo Art Evans. © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn,
2015
178 Alex Hubbard, ‘El Cafecito’, installation view, House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2016. Photo Omar
Olguín. Courtesy the artist and Gaga, Mexico City and Los Angeles
179 Mika Tajima, The Extras, installation view, X Initiative, New York, 2009. Photo Tom Powell.
Courtesy Mika Tajima
180 Sigrid Sandström, Projection I, 2018. Acrylic on polyester canvas, light projection, 193 × 152 (76 ×
59⅞). Courtesy the artist
181 Jacqueline Humphries, installation view, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2015.
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
182 Mary Weatherford, from the Mountain to the Sea, 2014. Flashe and neon on linen, 297.2 × 594.4
(117 × 234). Photo Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy the artist
183 Julia Dault, Sure You Can, 2011. Oil on vinyl, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Bob van
Orsouw, Zürich, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
184 Jutta Koether, Lux Interior, performance documentation at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York,
2009. Photo John Kelsey. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York
185 Emily Sundblad, ‘¡Qué Bárbaro!’, installation view, Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York, 2011.
Courtesy the artist and Algus Greenspon, New York
186 Ei Arakawa, I am an Employee of UNITED, Vol. 2, performance at Overduin and Kite, Los
Angeles, 2012. Courtesy Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
187 Nikolas Gambaroff, ‘Tools for Living’, installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, 2012.
Courtesy Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
188 Math Bass, ‘Off the Clock’, 2015, installation view, MoMA PS1, New York. Courtesy the artist,
MoMA PS1, and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
189 Vanessa Maltese, Duped by the grapes, 2018. Oil on panel, powder-coated steel and wooden
magnets, 132.1 × 104.1 (52 × 41). Courtesy Vanessa Maltese and COOPER COLE, Toronto
190 Michael Lin, ‘Locomotion’, 2016, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design
(MCAD) Manila. Photo At Maculangan, Pioneer Studio, Manila. Courtesy the artist
191 Mary Heilmann, ‘To Be Someone’, installation view, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport
Beach, California, 2007. Courtesy the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth
192 Sarah Crowner, ‘The Wave’, installation view, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, 2014.
Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York
193 Marc Camille Chaimowicz, ‘Your Place or Mine…’, installation view, The Jewish Museum, New
York, 2018. Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
194 Elise Adibi, Persian Rose Monochrome, with plants, from Respiration Paintings, installation
view, The Frick Pittsburgh Greenhouse, 2017. Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint, rose, bergamot, sweet
orange and lemon essential plant oils on canvas, 76.2 × 76.2 (30 × 30). Courtesy the artist
195 Firelei Báez, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, 2019. Concrete panels, paint, wood, 365.8 × 213.4 ×
299.7 (144 × 84 × 118). A High Line Commission. On view April 2019–March 2020. Photo Timothy
Schenck. Courtesy James Cohan, New York
196 Paul Branca, Couch Crash, 2010. Oil on multiple canvases, dimensions variable. Courtesy
Scaramouche, New York and Golden Parachutes, Berlin
197 Oda Projesi, Picnic, Galata, Istanbul, 2004. Community project. Courtesy Oda Projesi archive
198 Theaster Gates, Land Ownership on Conspiracy Blue, 2016. Acrylic on board, 183.2 × 124.5 ×
5.7 (72⅛ × 49 × 2¼). Photo Nathan Keay. Courtesy White Cube. © Theaster Gates
199 Maurizio Cattelan, ‘All’, installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011.
Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris/Hong Kong
and Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London
200 Heimo Zobernig, ‘Ohne Titel (In Red)’, installation view, Kunsthalle Zürich at Museum
Bärengasse, 2011. Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich. © DACS 2015
201 Stephen Prina, Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 135 of 556: L’Execution
de Maximilien de Mexique III (The Execution of Maximilian of Mexico III), 1867, installation view,
Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1990. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Stephen Prina
202 Scott Lyall, Nanofoil (SLStudio.clone_1/13/3), 2018 (detail). UV-engraved photonic structures in
aluminium foil, polymer coating, casein-painted frame, 9.2 × 6.8 (3⅝ × 211/16), framed: 33 × 30.5 (13 ×
12). Photo Stephen Faught. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
203 Merlin Carpenter, ‘TATE CAFÉ’, 2012, installation view, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York.
Dimensions variable. © Merlin Carpenter
204 Nick Mauss, Concern, Crush, Desire, installation view, Whitney Biennial, New York, 2012.
Courtesy Nick Mauss and 303 Gallery, New York
205 Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, ‘Two Archives’, installation view with paintings from the
series Depot of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, 2013. Photo
Emily Fahlén. Courtesy the artists
206 ABOVE Michelle Hartney, Separate the Art From the Artist?, 2018. Guerrilla performance at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo Michelle Hartney
206 BELOW Michelle Hartney, Separate the Art From the Artist?, 2018. Guerrilla performance at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo Nate Brav-McCabe
207 Kara Walker, Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit), 2017. Oil stick and Sumi ink on paper
collaged on linen, triptych, overall 228.6 × 548.6 (90 × 216). Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New
York. © Kara Walker
208 Cheyney Thomson, Chromachrome (S6/SPR) (Tondo), 2009. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 61 (30 × 24).
Courtesy Campoli Presti, London/Paris
209 Anna Betbeze, Gutter, 2016. Wool, acid dyes and ash from burning, 188 × 106.7 (74 × 42).
Courtesy the artist
210 Sergej Jensen, Golden Shower Chanel Strip, 2019. Fabric, UV-Print and acrylic on sewn linen,
188 × 160 (74 × 63). Photo Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo/Rio de
Janeiro; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York; and White Cube
211 Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2019. Oil on canvas with poplar, 68.6 × 45.7 × 3.8 (27 × 18 × 1.5). Photo
Brica Wilcox. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles
212 Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2017. Oil on linen, 78.7 × 61 × 1.9 (31 × 24 × ¾). Photo Fredrik Nilsen
Studio. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
213 Josephine Halvorson, Sign Holders, 2010. Oil on linen, 101.6 × 76.2 (40 × 30). Courtesy Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York. © Josephine Halvorson
214 Nathlie Provosty, Visions, 2017. Oil on linen, 254 × 222.3 (100 × 87½). Courtesy the artist and
Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York
215 John Nixon, Black Monochrom (Ruler), 2019. Enamel, plaster and wood on canvas, 45 × 35 (17¾
× 13⅞). Photo Conradin Frei. Courtesy Mark Müller Gallery, Zürich
216 Ian Davenport, Puddle Painting: Dark Grey (after Uccello), 2010. Acrylic on aluminium
mounted on aluminium frame, 148 × 128 (58¼ × 50⅜). © Ian Davenport. All Rights Reserved, DACS
2020
217 Stephen Prina, PUSH COMES TO LOVE, Untitled, 1999–2013, 2013. The contents of a can of
enamel spray paint applied to Wade Guyton’s Untitled, 2013, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen,
dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists and Petzel, New York
218 Ida Ekblad, ‘ILLUMInations’, installation view, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. Photo Luca
Campigotto. Courtesy the artist; Herald St, London; Karma International, Zürich/Los Angeles; Galerie
Max Hetzler, Berlin/Paris/London
219 Matt Connors, Table II (16 Cups), 2010. Oil and acrylic on canvas 91.4 × 66 (36 × 26). Courtesy
CANADA, New York; Herald St, London; The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Xavier Hufkens,
Brussels
220 Fergus Feehily, Grey Foxed, 2009. Oil and acrylic on card, board and wood, screws, 25 × 20 × 1.2
(9⅞ × 7⅞ × ½). Photo Michaela Konz. Courtesy the artist, Misako & Rosen, Tokyo and Galerie
Christian Lethert, Cologne
221 Robert Janitz, ‘Uptown Canvas’, installation view, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2018. Courtesy
the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. © Robert Janitz
222 Markus Amm, Untitled, 2017. Oil on gesso board, 35 × 30 (13¾ × 11⅞). Photo Annik Wetter.
Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
223 Ruth Laskey, Twill Series (Robin’s Egg Blue/Yucca/Light Green), 2007. Hand-dyed and
handwoven linen, 50.2 × 46.4 (19¾ × 18¼). Courtesy the artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco
224 Tauba Auerbach, Untitled (Fold), 2012. Acrylic on canvas on wooden stretcher, 182.9 × 137.2 (72
× 54). Marciano Art Collection. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Tauba Auerbach
225 Paul Sietsema, Swipe painting (Chase), 2016. Enamel on linen, 111 × 107 (43⅞ × 42⅛). Courtesy
Matthew Marks Gallery. © Paul Sietsema
226 Tomma Abts, Weie, 2017. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 × 38 (19 × 15). Courtesy Galerie Buchholz,
Berlin/Cologne/New York
227 Lucien Smith, Southampton Suite #3, 2013. Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 274.3 × 213.4 (108 ×
84). Courtesy the artist
228 Jacob Kassay, ‘EXPO 1: New York’, installation view, MoMA PS1, 2013. Photo John Berens.
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
229 Gary Hume, Water, 2018. Gloss paint on paper, 120 × 361 × 0.3 (47¼ × 142⅛ ×⅛), framed 121.5 ×
363 × 4.5 (47⅞ × 143 × 1¾). Courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers and Matthew Marks Gallery. © Gary
Hume. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020
230 Tomashi Jackson, Avocado Seed Soup (Davis, et. al. v County School Board of Prince Edward
County) (Brown, et. al. v Board of Education of Topeka) (Sweatt v Painter), 2016. Mixed media on
gauze, canvas, rawhide and wood, 281.9 × 426.7 × 83.2 (111 × 168 × 32¾). Courtesy the artist and
Tilton Gallery, New York
231 Juan Uslé, In Kayak (Silente), 2012. Vinyl, acrylic, dry pigment and dispersion on canvas, 46 × 31
(18⅛ × 123/16). Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
232 Peter Dreher, Tag um Tag guter Tag Nr. 2685 (Night) (Day by Day, Good Day), 2013. Oil on
linen, 25.1 × 20 (9⅞ × 7⅞). Courtesy the artist and Koenig & Clinton, New York. © 2015 Peter
Dreher/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
233 On Kawara, 19 SEPT. 2013, 2013, from Today series, 1966–2013. Acrylic on canvas, 20.3 × 25.4
(8 × 10). Courtesy One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner. © One Million Years Foundation
234 Vija Celmins, Night Sky #24, 2016. Oil on canvas, 86 × 81 (33¾ × 32). Courtesy Matthew Marks
Gallery. © Vija Celmins
235 Dashiell Manley, The Financial Times, front page, Jun 15 2019. jun152019, 2019. Watercolour
pencil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 182.9 × 152.4 (72 × 60). Photo Jeff Mclane. Courtesy the artist,
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. ©
Dashiell Manley
236 Adam Pendleton, ‘Personne et les autres’, installation view, Belgian Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale,
2015. Courtesy the artist. © Adam Pendleton
237 Mark Bradford, Pickett’s Charge, installation view, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, D.C., 2017. Mixed media on canvas, 353.1 × 1523.9 (139 × 600). Photo Cathy Carver.
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Mark Bradford
238 Aliza Nisenbaum, Wise Elders Portraiture Class at Centro Tyrone Guzman, ‘En Familia hay
Fuerza’, Mural on the History of Immigrant Farm Labor to the United States, 2017. Oil on linen,
190.5 × 241.3 (75 × 95). Courtesy the artist and Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Anton Kern
Gallery, New York. © Aliza Nisenbaum
239 Jordan Casteel, Three Lions, 2015. Oil on canvas, 137.2 × 182.9 (54 × 72). Courtesy the artist and
Casey Kaplan, New York. © Jordan Casteel
240 Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel, 211.9 × 301.8 (83½ ×
118⅞). Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London. © Kerry James Marshall
241 Tschabalala Self, Bodega Run Diptych, 2017. Acrylic, watercolour, flashe, gouache, coloured
pencil, pencil, hand-coloured photocopy and hand-coloured canvas on canvas, each panel 243.8 × 213.4
(96 × 84). Photo Damian Griffiths. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
242 Janiva Ellis, Open Pour Reality, 2017. Oil on canvas, 90.2 × 90.2 × 3.8 (35½ × 35½ × 1½). Photo
Jörg Lohse. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York
243 Henry Taylor, Split, 2013. Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, two parts, each 182.9 × 152.4 × 6.4 (72
× 60 × 2½), overall 182.9 × 308.6 × 6.4 (72 × 121½ × 2½). Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los
Angeles/New York/Tokyo. © Henry Taylor
244 Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016. Oil on canvas, 97.8 × 135.3 (38½ × 53¼). Courtesy the artist
and Petzel, New York. © Dana Schutz
245 Parker Bright, Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018. Oil pastel on paper, 48.3 × 61 (19 ×
24). Courtesy the artist
INDEX

All page numbers refer to the 2021 print edition

References in italics indicate illustration figure numbers

A
Abramović, Marina 73–4, 231
abstract expressionism 84, 92, 187
Abts, Tomma 268–9; 226
Acıkkol, Özge 232
Ackermann, Gordon 217
Ackermann, Rita 217
Adamo, David 231
Adibi, Elise 229–31; 194
af Klint, Hilma 68
Afrassiabi, Babak 245–6; 205
Aguirre, Miguel 171–2; 141
Ajemian, Lucas 59–60; 48
Akunyili Crosby, Njideka 176; 147
Albers, Josef 53, 257, 274–5
Aldrich, Richard 199; 167
Alfi, Jumaldi 18–19; 10
Algus Greenspon, New York 219–20; 185
Allais, Alphonse 275–6
Allegheny College, Pennsylvania 229–31
Alonso, Pablo 170–1; 140
Altfest, Ellen 187–8; 157
Alÿs, Francis 13; 4
Amer, Ghada 176–7; 148
Amm, Markus 265; 222
Anderson, Wes 33–4
Andersson, Mamma 55–6; 42
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York 53, 241
Angulo, Tanya 41
anime 122
Anna Zorina Gallery, New York 195
Anton Kern, New York 264
Arakawa, Ei 141, 220–2, 231; 186
Arakawa, Tomoo 141, 221
Arcangel, Cory 32; 22
Arceneaux, Edgar 232
Armleder, John 91–2, 94, 204; 72
Art Institue of Chicago 246
Art + Practice (A+P), South Los Angeles 285
Art Production Fund 126
Atlas, Charles 213
Auerbach, Tauba 265, 266–7; 224

B
Bacon, Francis 63
‘bad painting’ 28, 72, 93–4, 99, 112, 217
Baechler, Donald 63
Baen Santos, Pablo 164; 134
Báez, Firelei 231; 195
Balice Hertling, Paris 223
Ballester, Juan Pablo 41
Balthus 246
Banksy 77–8; 60
Bartlett, Jennifer 206–7; 174
Baselitz, Georg 36, 88
Basquiat, Jean-Michel 36, 63
Bass, Math 223–4; 188
Bauhaus 125
Beard, Mark 189–91; 160
Bearden, Romare 290
Bell, Dirk 59; 46
Bercea, Marius 60
Bergen Kunsthalle, Norway 231
Bessmertny, Konstantin 28; 20
Betbeze, Anna 252; 209
Bird Møller, Sofie 16; 7
Bismuth, Julien 59
Bjerger, Anna 179–80; 150
Björnsson, Páll Haukur 133
Black, Hannah 291–3
B.M.P.T. 117–18
Boafo, Amoako 156–7; 126
Bodo, Pierre 163
Borremans, Michaël 22; 13
Bortolami Gallery, New York 199
Botticelli, Sandro 47–8
Bourriaud, Nicolas 196
Bowers, Andrea 191
Bradford, Mark 284–5; 237
Branca, Paul 231–2; 196
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 142
Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut 135
Brätsch, Kerstin 141
Bright, Parker 291; 245
Brooklyn Museum, New York 124, 245
Brown, Cecily 156, 185–7; 155
Brown, Gavin 62, 70, 115
Bruguera, Tania 285
Büchler, Pavel 59; 47
Buren, Daniel 117, 231, 237
Burkhart, Kathe 180–2; 153
Busuttil, Carla 164–6; 135
Butzer, André 93; 74

C
Calderón, Miguel 33, 98
Campoli Presti, Paris 217
CANADA, New York 264
capitalism 31, 41, 131, 197, 232
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 183
Cariou, Patrick 70
Carlos/Ishikawa, London 272
Carnegie International, Pittsburgh 98
Carpenter, Merlin 241–3, 245; 203
Caselles-Dupré, Hugo 152
Casselman, Stanley 34; 24
Casteel, Jordan 286; 239
Cattelan, Maurizio 235–7; 199
CCA Wattis, San Francisco 207–8
Celmins, Vija 281; 234
Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw 40
Center for Opinions in Art and Music, Berlin 212
Chaimowicz, Marc Camille 228; 193
Chamberlain, John 63
Chantal Crousel, Paris 90
Chapman brothers 126
Chase, John Lyndon 193–4; 164
Château de Versailles 112
Chen, Howie 212
Chitrakar, Swarna 163–4; 133
Christie’s (London and New York) 113, 151
Clark, Lygia 224
Clayton, Lenka 98; 79
Clemente, Francesco 83; 66
climate change 11
Close, Chuck 183
Cofield, Drea 22–3, 192; 14
Cole, Thomas 111
Colen, Dan 93
Cologne artists 86, 137
communism 10, 40, 50–51
Comsa, Radu 60; 49
Connors, Matt 261–3; 219
Conrad, Tony 217
consumerism 37, 40, 75, 117, 128
Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri 39
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati 55
Cotton, Will 109, 111–12; 91
Courbet, Gustave 109, 187
Coypel, Noël-Nicholas 46
Craycroft, Anna 59
Crimp, Douglas 37
Crowner, Sarah 224–8; 192
Currin, John 109–10; 90
cynical realism 161

D
Da Corte, Alex 61; 50
Dafencun Oil Painting Village, Guangdong 128–32; 105
Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York 138
Daniels, William 48; 35
DAS INSTITUT 141–2, 221 see also Brätsch, Kerstin; Röder, Adele
Dault, Julia 216–17; 183
Davenport, Ian 258–9; 216
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 97, 148
de Boer, Adam 18–19; 9
de Kooning, Elaine 128
de Kooning, Willem 156, 185, 187
de la Cruz, Angela 202–3; 171
‘death of painting’ 9
Dedron 107; 88
DeFeo, Jay 151
Delacroix, Eugène 132, 163
Diaz, Alberto 42
digital technology 38–9, 43, 66–7, 70–1, 118, 135–7, 141, 143–6, 149–53, 240–1
Disney, Walt 93
Documenta, Kassel 52, 80
Doig, Peter 112
Domínguez, Benjamín 104; 85
Dorchester Projects 233, 234
Dorje, Master Urgen 107
Douglas, Eliza 135; 109
Drawing Center, New York 191
Dreher, Peter 277; 232
Dubossarsky, Vladimir 42; 28
Duchamp, Marcel 8, 53–4
Dunham, Carroll 96–7, 109; 77
Dziewior, Yilmaz 265

E
Eder, Martin 159
Ehsai, Mohammad 104; 86
Eisenman, Nicole 191–2; 161
Eitel, Tim 159
Ekblad, Ida 260–1; 218
El-Masry, Weaam 178; 149
Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York 213
Ellis, Janiva 289; 242
Emin, Tracey 73
endgame 9, 10
Ettinger, Bracha L. 172; 144
Evans, Walker 37, 41
expressionism 93, 94

F
Falls, Sam 231
Fang Lijun 161
Fantin-Latour, Henri 44
Fautrel, Pierre 152
Feehily, Fergus 263–4; 220
Fernández, Ana Teresa 27; 19
Fiks, Yevgeniy 50; 38
film 33–4, 40, 50–1, 88, 213
Fischer, Urs 62; 51
Fluxus 91–2
folk art 55, 94, 290
Forest Houses, New York 197
Förg, Günther 86–7; 69
Foucault, Michel 239
found materials 8, 32, 37, 48, 57–8, 94–6, 135, 137, 170–2, 174, 179–80, 234, 253 see also readymades
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 46
Frankenthaler, Helen 258
Frankfurt Städelschule 217
Fraser, Andrea 249–50
Fratino, Louis 192–3; 163
Frick Greenhouse, Pittsburgh 229
Fried, Michael 14–15
Friedrich, Caspar David 133
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York 88
Frieze Art Fair, London 242
Frize, Bernard 122; 99
Fuentes Gallery, New York 195
furniture 24, 114, 203–4, 224, 228, 243, 264–5

G
Gagosian Gallery (New York and worldwide) 96, 110, 121, 185
Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels 227
Galerie Daniel Buchholz (Berlin and Cologne) 88–90, 218
Galerie Meerrettich, Berlin 137
Gambaroff, Nikolas 221, 222–3; 187
Gates, Theaster 233, 234; 198
Gauguin, Paul 246–7
GEISAI Art Fair, Tokyo 124
Ģelzis, Kristaps 14; 6
Gerber, Gaylen 259–60
Ghenie, Adrian 51, 60
Gilbert & George 51
Gilliam, Sam 217
Gokita, Tomoo 44; 31
Golden Parachutes, Berlin 231
Goldstein, Jack 37
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town 164
Goya, Francisco 161, 187
Grassie, Andrew 56; 43
Greenberg, Clement 14–15, 259, 270
Greenspon, Amy 219
Grien, Hans Baldung 46
Grosse, Katharina 209–11, 215; 177
Groupe Ecart 92
Grupo ABTV 41
Guangzhou Triennial 129
Guggenheim Museum, New York 68, 70, 113, 196
Gupta, Subodh 128; 104
Guyton, Wade 65, 66–8, 83, 145, 260; 55

H
Haacke, Hans 237
Haldeman, Ivy 188; 158
Halley, Peter 63–4; 52
Halvorson, Josephine 255–7; 213
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 209
Hammons, David 116
Haring, Keith 63
Harrington, Tim 59
Hartney, Michelle 246–7; 206
Hasan, Meena 103–4; 84
Healy, George Peter Alexander 126–7
Heilmann, Mary 224; 191
Henneken, Uwe 57–8; 45
Herrera, Carmen 180
Hetzler, Max 86
Hicks, Sheila 13; 5
High Line, New York 231
Himid, Lubaina 231
Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. 284–5
Hirschhorn, Thomas 196–7
Hirst, Damien 73, 118–22, 273; 96, 97
history painting 91, 132, 163, 172
Hockney, David 145–6; 118
Höller, Carsten 196; 166
Holt, Nancy 31
Holtz, Katja 59
Hopper, Edward 69
House of Gaga, Mexico City 211–12, 218–19
Hubbard, Alex 211–12; 177
Hume, Gary 273–4; 229
Humphries, Jacqueline 214–15; 181
Husain, M. F. 177

I
Independent Group 40
Indian and Persian miniature painting 100–2
Ingram, Simon 149–50; 121
Instagram 70
Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art 61
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania 137
institutional critique 116, 137, 237, 241, 244–5, 249–50
Internet 11, 16, 42–4, 70, 121, 135, 142, 143, 145, 189 see also Web
iPads 146
iPhones 145–6
Ito, Parker 135–7; 110
Jackson, Tomashi 274–5; 230
Jacobs, Marc 125
James, Merlin 112–13; 92
Jameson, Fredric 37
Janitz, Robert 264–5; 221
Jankowski, Christian 131–2; 106
Jensen, Sergej 252–3; 210
Jewish Museum, New York 228
Joffe, Chantal 180; 151
Jones, Allen 114
Jorn, Asger 94, 261
Joselit, David 218

K
Kahn, Nathaniel 74
Kaikai Kiki 122–5 see also Murakami, Takashi
KAISAHAN 164
Kandinsky, Wassily 187, 261
Kassay, Jacob 270, 271; 228
Kawara, On 281; 233
Keïta, Seydou 187
Kelley, Mike 94–6, 109, 217; 76
Kelly, Ellsworth 53
Kelsey, John 242–3
Kher, Bharti 102–3; 83
Kilimnik, Karen 24; 16
Kippenberger, Martin 86, 88, 217, 241
Kitchen, New York 212
Kjartansson, Ragnar 132–3; 107
Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 121; 98
Koether, Jutta 202, 217–18; 184
Kölnischer Kunstverein 142
Komar, Vitaly 72–3
König London 264–5
Koons, Jeff 63, 73, 74–5, 76, 86, 112; 58
Krebber, Michael 88–91, 94; 71
Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles 253
Kudo, Makiko 46; 32
Kunsthalle Zürich 141, 221
Kunsthaus Bregenz 88
Kunstverein Hamburg 265
Kusama, Yayoi 126

L
L. A. Galerie, Frankfurt 130
Lacy, Suzanne 191
Laskey, Ruth 265–6; 223
Lawrence, Jacob 290
Leiderstam, Matts 56–7; 44
Leo Koenig Gallery, New York 118; 94
Leonardo da Vinci 33
Lever House, New York 64
Levine, David 199
Levine, Sherrie 36–7, 64–5; 53
Lieberman, Rhonda 270
Liga, Berlin 159
Ligon, Zoë 70
Lin, Michael 224; 190
Liu Ding 129–31, 132; 105
Liu Xiaodong 161–3; 131
Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art 139
Longo, Robert 37
Loren, Cary 94
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 124–5
Louis, Morris 258
Louis Vuitton 124–6; 102
Louvre Museum, Paris 246
Lowe, Rick 233–4
Lowman, Nate 59
Luhring Augustine, New York 134
Lundberg, Patrick 24; 2
Lyall, Scott 240–1; 202

M
Maccarone Gallery, New York 70
McCollum, Allan 198–9
McEwen, Adam 81
McKenzie, Lucy 24; 15
McKinniss, Sam 43–4; 30
Madani, Tala 97, 109; 78
Magasin, Stockholm 57
Magritte, René 94
Majerus, Michel 142; 114
Malevich, Kazimir 275–6
Maltese, Vanessa 224; 189
Man, Victor 60
Manet, Édouard 49, 161, 238–9, 246
manga 122, 124
Manley, Dashiell 281; 235
mannerist painting 109
Mapplethorpe, Robert 293
Marclay, Christian 42–3; 29
Margolles, Teresa 167; 137
Marrero, Meira 42; 27
Marshall, Kerry James 286–8; 240
Mary Boone Gallery 81
Masriadi, I Nyoman 118; 95
Matisse, Henri 46, 246, 261
Matthew Marks, Los Angeles 274
Maureen Paley, London 56, 88
Mauss, Nick 243–4, 245; 204
Mazucca, Matt 219
MCA Chicago 288
Mehretu, Julie 51–2; 39
Meisenberg, Florian 24; 17
Melamid, Alexander 72–3
Melgaard, Bjarne 114–15; 93
Merrill, Mia 246
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 99–100, 168, 246
Michael Werner Gallery, New York 219
Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York 240–1
Miller, Herman 212
Miller, John 217
Minamikawa, Shimon 221
minimalism 73, 94, 157
Miró, Joan 261
Mitchell, Dan 241
Mockrin, Jesse 46–7; 33
modernism 7, 8, 64, 92, 107, 239
Molzan, Dianna 253–4, 260; 211
Mondrian, Piet 64
Monet, Claude 46
Monogenis, Dean 59
Mont, Miquel 208–9
Moody, Tom 143; 114
Moore, Charles 40
Moore, Henry 56
Mosset, Olivier 117–18; 94
Müller, Ulrike 188; 159
Munch, Edvard 93
Muniz, Vik 33; 23
Munsell, Albert H. 251
Murakami, Takashi 122–4; 100
Mureşan, Ciprian 60
Murillo, Oscar 270, 271–3
Musée d’Orsay, Paris 247–8
Museum Bärengasse, Zürich 238
Museum Ludwig, Cologne 67
Museum of Bad Art, Boston 93
Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila 224
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver 283
Museum of Modern Art, New York 73, 217, 224, 231
Museum of Modern Art, Vienna 94
Musson, Jayson (Hennessy Youngman) 78–9
Mutu, Wangechi 79–80; 62

N
Najd, Maryam 52–3; 40
Nara, Yoshitomo 79; 61
Nathanson, Joshua 146–7; 119
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 183
National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana 42
National Portrait Gallery, London 246
Neel, Alice 180
neo-expressionism 9, 36, 83
New Leipzig School 159
New Museum, New York 93, 144
Newman, Barnett 64
Nguyen, Tammy 47–8; 34
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York 227
Night Gallery, Los Angeles 224
Nihonga painting 122
Nisenbaum, Aliza 285–6; 238
Nixon, John 257; 215
Nochlin, Linda 183
Norman, Nils 241
Nouveaux Réalistes 40

O
O’Brien, Glenn 12
Obvious 151–2; 123
Oda Projesi 232–3; 197
Odita, Odili Donald 99; 80
Odutola, Toyin Ojih 82; 65
Oehlen, Albert 12, 84, 94, 205, 237–8; 67
old master painting 75, 109, 152; 58
Olowska, Paulina 40
Opałka, Roman 279–81
Ophuis, Ronald 169–70; 139
Orozco, Gabriel 31; 21
Ostrowski, David 204–6; 173
Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles 221
Owens, Laura 207–8; 175
P
Pace Gallery, New York 201; 168
Pace, London 283
Palermo, Blinky 53
Palms Casino Resort, Las Vegas 118
Palazzo Grassi, Venice 172
Park Avenue Armory, New York 138
Parmentier, Michel 117
Parrino, Steven 202, 203
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 206
Pendleton, Adam 281–3; 236
Performa Biennial, New York 231
performances 73, 102, 130, 133, 138, 191, 209, 211, 212–13, 217, 218–24, 231, 246, 260
Petzel Gallery, New York 67
Peyrat, Bénédicte 17; 8
Peyton, Elizabeth 178–9
Philippoteaux, Paul 284–5
Phillips de Pury 220
Phillips, Richard 180; 152
photography 7–8, 36–7, 55–6, 64, 70, 162, 171, 174, 179–80
photorealism 56, 109, 128, 183, 207, 281
Picabia, Francis 94, 219
Picasso, Pablo 183, 246
Pinchuk Art Foundation, Kiev 121
Pliny 10
Polke, Sigmar 88
Pollock, Jackson 138, 258, 271
Poons, Larry 74
pop art 8, 40, 70, 156, 243
Poster Studio, London 241
postmodernism 7, 8, 15, 37, 63
Poussin, Nicolas 56, 218
Prague Biennial 60
Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) 245–6
Price, Seth 139–41, 272; 113
Prina, Stephen 238–40, 260; 201, 217
Prince, Richard 35, 36–7, 70, 125–6; 102
props 133, 198, 199, 212, 219–20, 223–4
Propst, Robert 212
Provosty, Nathlie 257; 214
Pruitt, Rob 63, 69–70; 57
Pryde, Josephine 241
PS1, Long Island City, New York 224
Puipia, Chatchai 19; 11
Pulitzer, Lilly 70

Q
Quarles, Christina 192; 162
Quaytman, R.H. 68–9; 56
Queens Museum of Art 285
Qureshi, Imran 99–100; 81

R
Raimondi, Marcantonio 49
Ramiken Crucible, New York 114
Raphael 49
Raucci/Santamaria, Naples 241
Rauch, Neo 159; 127
Rayne, Blake 65–6, 68; 54
readymades 8, 54, 58–60, 83
realism 154, 161–2
Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York 217–18, 221, 242–3
Rees, Dan 203–4; 172
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 187
Reyle, Anselm 92; 73
Richter, Gerhard 34, 171
Robinson, Walter 270
Rockwell, Norman 109
Röder, Adele 141
Rodzielski, Clément 201; 170
Romanticism 88, 133
Root, Ruth 54–5; 41
Rosenkranz, Pamela 155; 125
Rovner, Lynn 94
Royal Academy of Arts, London 184
Rubens, Peter Paul 46
Rubin, Jon 98; 79
Ruckhäberle, Christoph 159; 128
Rule, Alix 199
Ryman, Robert 199–201, 250; 168

S
Saatchi, Charles 73, 184
Saban, Analia 24; 18
Sabot Gallery, Paintbrush Factory, Cluj 60
Salle, David 36
Saltz, Jerry 34–5, 37–8, 270
Samba, Chéri 163; 132
Sandberg, Anders 148–9
Sandström, Sigrid 213–14; 180
São Paulo Art Biennial 198
Sargent, John Singer 189, 231
Sasnal, Wilhelm 49–50; 37
Saul, Peter 81–2; 64
Savas, Günes 232
Saville, Jenny 156, 184–5; 154
Savu, Serban 60, 174; 145
Scharf, Kenny 63
Schiess, Adrian 201
Schimmel, Paul 112
Schnabel, Julian 36
Schnell, David 159
Schnitger, Lara 231
School of Popular Painting, Kinshasa 163
Schutz, Dana 59, 291–3; 244
Secession, Vienna 90
Self, Tschabalala 288–9; 241
selfies 71, 76
Serpentine Gallery, London 227
Serra, Richard 31
Seurat, George 147
Shafrazi, Tony 62–3; 51
Sharjah Biennial 99, 102
Shaw, Jim 94–6, 98, 109; 75
Shaw, Raqib 14; 3
Sherald, Amy 126
Sherman, Cindy 126; 51
Sherpa, Tsherin 107; 87
Sidibé, Malick 187
Sietsema, Paul 267–8; 225
Sikander, Shahzia 100–2; 82
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York 248
Simchowitz, Stefan 270
Sitthiket, Vasan 166–7; 136
Smith, Josh 133–5, 242; 108, 109
Smith, Lucien 270–1; 227
social media 11, 70, 76, 121, 144, 188–9, 272, 290, 291
social realism 42, 161, 164
Solakov, Nedko 80–1; 63
Solano, Manuel 153, 154; 124
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 235–7, 246
Sotheby’s (London and New York) 77–8, 112, 118–21
South London Gallery 213; 169
South West Art Group 160
Spiegelman, Art 49
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam 169
Steiner, A.L. 191
Stieglitz, Alfred 65
Stingel, Rudolf 63, 138–9
Strau, Josef 137, 217; 111
Stubbs, George 56
Stuckists 118
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York 99
Sturtevant, Elaine 35
Sullivan, Ryan 231
Sundblad, Emily 217, 218–20, 242–3; 185
Supports-Surfaces 65
surrealism 81, 156, 222, 224
Suter, Vivian 231
Sutton Lane, Paris 240
Sydney Biennial 99

T
Tabatabai, Nasrin 245–6; 205
Tajima, Mika 212–13; 179
Takano, Aya 124; 101
Tate 11, 56, 243, 246
Taylor, Henry 290–1; 243
Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art 245
Thomas, Mickalene 187; 156
Thompson, Cheyney 59, 241, 245, 250–2; 208
356 Mission, Los Angeles 55, 207
threeASFOUR 34; 24
Thuring, Caragh 48–9; 36
Tinei, Alexander 174–6; 146
Tiravanija, Rirkrit 11, 179, 196
Toirac, José 41–2; 27
Toroni, Niele 117
Tucker, Marcia 93–4
Turner, J. M. W. 48
Tuymans, Luc 172; 142, 143
Twombly, Cy 87

U
UNITED BROTHERS see Arakawa, Ei; Arakawa, Tomoo
Uslé, Juan 277; 231

V
van den Dorpel, Harm 144–5; 117
van Gogh, Vincent 19, 33
Vance, Lesley 254–5; 212
Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal, New York 138
Vasarely, Victor 224
Västerås konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden 214
Venice Biennale 57, 133, 198, 283; 6
Vermeersch, Pieter 201; 169
Vernier, Gauthier 152
Versteeg, Siebren 150–1; 122
video 31–2, 41, 42–3, 113, 133, 146, 162, 171, 211, 213
Vienna Kunsthalle 237–8
Villazón, Ileana 41
Vinogradov, Alexander 42; 28
von Bonin, Cosima 88; 70
von Heyl, Charline 85–6; 68

W
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 138
Walker, Kara 167–8, 248–9, 289; 138, 207
Walker, Kelley 38–40, 234; 25
Wallace Collection, London 121
Wallach Art Gallery, New York 247
Wang Guangyi 40–1; 26
Warhol, Andy 38, 40, 70, 179
Wasmuht, Corinne 143; 116
Watts House Project, Los Angeles 233–4
Weatherford, Mary 215–16; 182
weaving 266
Web, websites 88, 121, 135, 143–5 see also Internet
Weischer, Matthias 159
Wenda Gu 159
Whitney Biennial 69, 191, 243–4, 290–1
Whitney Museum of American Art 180, 245
Wiley, Chris 272
Wiley, Kehinde 126–8; 103
William, Didier 194–5; 165
Williams, Michael 147–9; 120
Wise, Chloe 75–6; 59
Wojnarowicz, David 62
Wool, Christopher 12, 63, 113

X
Xu Bing 159

Y
Yersel, Seçil 232
Yiadom-Boakye, Lynette 21; 12
Yokohama Triennale 220
Young, Aaron 138; 112
Young British Artists (YBAs) 73, 114, 184
Yue Minjun 160–1; 1, 130
Yunhee Min 209; 176
Yuskavage, Lisa 109; 89

Z
Zhang Huan 159
Zhang Xiaogang 160; 129
Zhukova, Dasha 114
ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe 150
Zobernig, Heimo 237–8; 200
 on the cover: Pablo Baen Santos, Baboons in Session, 2008. Collection of Patrick Reyno. Courtesy
the artist

First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 as

Painting Now

by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX
and in the United States of America by
Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110

This edition published in 2021 as Contemporary Painting

ISBN 978-0-500-29463-5

Contemporary Painting © 2015 and 2021 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
Text by Suzanne Hudson

This electronic version published in 2021 by

Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX

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