Why Painting Now?

The attention which the medium of painting presently demands constitutes the driving motive behind the decision to explore its potent effects as well as its conceptual and historical premises in regard to its perception. The fifth edition of curated by_vienna, initiated by departure ‑ The Creative Agency of the City of Vienna, aims at launching a discussion that centers on a reflection of today’s discourse of painting.

Under the title “Why Painting Now?” selected Viennese galleries will present a number of exhibitions conceived by international curators. “Why Painting Now?” examines the motives for regarding painting as a medium suited to capture, critically highlight, or escape the structures of information and communication media decisively oriented toward the visual parameters of art. The dependence of painting on the desire for seeing it essentialistically charged and its involvement in the production of this desire are as much at issue as the search for a long-term guarantee of its value. By taking up the challenge of examining these requests and analyzing its historical commitments and foundations, painting may mark out a discursive field that transcends the individual picture and artist personality and thus makes itself comprehensible as a social process. As artistic production and aesthetic perception expose themselves to their mutual effects, painting turns into a pervious medium that cannot be confined to the canvas alone. It will be necessary to discuss anti-academic and pop-cultural strategies in conjunction with those institutional, social and economic conditions which actually produce the “dispositif”¹ of painting. It is exactly the focus on social and institutional formations in which painting is embedded along whose lines “Why Painting Now?” pursues the issue of the complex relationship between picture, discourse, text, and perception and the parameters painting adheres to.

Though a shift from the fine arts and the genres of painting, sculpture, and graphic art to a general concept of “art” can be observed since the eighteenth century and expansive strategies of dissolving the boundaries of art have become commonplace in the meantime, it is not so much the end of genres we find proclaimed but rather their redefinition through a critical examination of their respective qualities. Painting takes a special position in this discussion. This role provokes a particularly vehement debate for and against the specificity of the medium that unfolds between seemingly conservative and traditionalist motives and ways of overcoming them, which are often associated with conceptual strategies.

In parallel to the so-called digital revolution, the medium, whose often invoked end has always been proclaimed when pronounced technological innovations were about to prevail, goes through a phase in which its potential to apply a variety of different painterly speech acts at the same time is activated in a special way. Painterly gesture, surface effect, and the relationship between figure and ground may be short-circuited with concept, abstraction, as well as mimetic and narrative strategies. The aura of painting—its impact, the flow of color and motif—offers special possibilities to the performance of relationships and proportionalities such as those of space and time or social and discursive constellations. This potential of painting to call up narrations, motifs, but also colors and textures opens up a space of reflection which always sees new connections being established.

As painting is increasingly understood as a system of signs rather than as a medium with the primary purpose of recording what is perceived, as Ernst H. Gombrich still saw it, conditions of painting outside the genre become important, too. Painting may transmit information which can adapt to contents in the process of painting. This is to say that painters paint right through the medium or rather the beholder’s eye in order to connect transmitters (the conveying forms, contents, and discourses) and receptors (the beholders’ emotions). This process, which David Joselit describes as transitive, entails a change in the relationship between picture and person. As the relationship between the two is a mutual one, the two sides continually respond to each other. This perhaps becomes most evident when we visualize that painting does not become manifest in a singular, hermetic product, but is part of a discourse. Helmut Draxler introduces the term “dispositif” for this, which, relating to Michel Foucault, emphasizes the dimensions of time and space into which painting is integrated. The connections coming about within this discursive framework of references are permanently revised—not in order to deconstruct them, but to establish further connections and organize painterly effects and affects and the physical relationship to the picture, respectively.

The principle of perspectival space, which particularly Leon Battista Alberti described as the central concept of painting in his De Pictura, still exercises its influence within our culture. The perspectival view as a basic means for directing the eye, for the regime of the gaze, is called into question as an organizing power, the mode of representation determining the relationship between picture and space subjected to critical investigation. In his book Vision and Painting, the British art historian Norman Bryson distinguishes between “Gaze” and “Glance,” the contemplative and the cursory look. He confronts principles of Asian painting centering on the process of painting itself with examples of Western Renaissance painting to define the different notions of brushwork, of revealing and concealing, of motion and standstill. For Bryson, the abandonment of the perspectivally composed picture that extends into the material world of the beholder marks a decisive change in the prerequisites of painting and vision—a change that mainly finds its expression in a picture’s different temporality. The calculability of the body in space is, as Bryson says, replaced with a computative, i.e. a calculable space of imaginary reference points beyond duration and extension. Since the days of the avant-garde, the “flickering, ungovernable mobility of the Glance”² has become a crucial premise for a choreography of painting, which finds its expression not least in a mobilization of vision that goes hand in hand with a mobilization of the body. Under these circumstances, performance, installation, and exhibition may be seen as arrangements producing contexts, but also as social formations in which painting is involved—as an entity in a system of references characterized by connotation, not by denotation, as Bryson puts it. This web of references makes painting social painting: a process based on a division of labor in which artists, viewers, institutions, and media participate in equal measure.

(Eva Maria Stadler)

¹ Helmut Draxler, “Malerei als Dispositiv. Zwölf Thesen,” in Texte zur Kunst, issue 77, 2010, 38–45.

² Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven and London, 1983), 121.