It may well be that the best painters today are not worrying so much about the “next inevitable step” as they are about extending the limits of the painting medium itself or, perhaps, working within those limits. Like most of the other disciplines, it has its clearly defined limits. Al Held and a few others are good examples. It is simplyone of the numerous available visual arts media in which the artist can, in 1975, work with brilliant or not so brilliant results, depending upon his innate gifts and application. Now that the right to utilize context has been decisively won for all artists, perhaps we can look at painting again with some perspective. For example, Joseph Kosuth (language and philosophy), Vito Acconci and Chris Burden (theater), Robert Irwin (architecture), Robert Smithson (landscape architecture), Hanne Darboven and Mel Bochner (mathematics), Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol (advertising and comic art) and Joseph Beuys (politics). It is an old and, by now, familiar device: simply take another discipline, shift it into the visual art context and you have advanced art. GENE DAVIS: For the past decade or so, it has become increasingly apparent that advanced art must rely, in large measure, on the manipulation of context to achieve its gains. Thus-no hailing of new media and no mourning for Winsor & Newton.Īs for the inevitable next step, I know only one: Socialism. Medium partisanship is always naive and can be harnessed for both-desperate forced innovation and nostalgic retrograde conservatism. However, what really matters, both formal values and the power to convey feeling, I grant other media without hesitation.ģ) The energies and ideas in painting which merit attention may seem technically unique, but they are not autonomous in a significant sense. But this is only a route, and as a painter I happen to be most familiar with it. How is the morale in the field? In the field of understated expressionist power fused with fine nerve-ends of formal sensibility-splendid.Ģ) Obviously, painting does offer some possibilities not found in other media, and very specific ones come to mind: subtle value and chromatic relationships find unique hospitality on stable, flat ground. I do recognize fellow artists: late Reinhardt middle Segal Robert Morris of Hearing Munch of Voices Ingmar Bergman before he deteriorated the slow holistic pulsation of an Agnes Martin the surreal brink of Acconci’s defending space. I, for one, while a painter (tubes, brushes, cans of Rustoleum, rollers et al.) do not think of myself as being a fellow painter of, let’s say, Fairfield Porter. Do you really believe that the debate between the abstract and the representational ended in a standstill because neither side triumphed, or was it not a sham battle, fought on the periphery, while the best on both sides secretly remained one?ġ) You must not parcel out “fields” in such a seigniorial way, Artforum. I will not argue with that, nor with the nonsubstantiated “those understood to be making”-this-step reasoning, because it all seems to me a needless concern. RUDOLF BARANIK: The media used in making “the next inevitable step” may be anything but paint, you say. What energies and ideas in painting strike you as worth attention, and why? What possibilities, not found elsewhere, does this medium offer you as an artist?ģ. PAINTING AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WHOLE SELFĢ.
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