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Indepth Arts News:
"Painting at the Edge
of the World"
2001-02-07 until 2001-05-06
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN,
USA
With the apparent resurgence of painting at the dawn of
the new millennium, it is clear that reports of this
medium's death have been greatly exaggerated. But what
exactly is painting today in a world dominated by the
prevalence of electronic media? Is painting a mode of
thought? Is there a philosophy of painting that extends
beyond the confines of the medium? Where does the
edge of the canvas end and the edge of the world begin?
The Walker Art Center exhibition Painting at the Edge
of the World, on view February 10-May 6, 2001, asks
precisely these questions in a presentation curated by
Walker associate curator Douglas Fogle. It features work
by nearly 30 artists from across the globe who have taken
up the issues involved in the practice of painting.
Rather than presenting a conservative and nostalgic
celebration of the tradition of painterly practice, Painting
at the Edge of the World will provide an examination of
the recent genetic mutation of that tradition. In light of
Yves Alain Bois' suggestion that any renewal of painting
will be found in unexpected places, the exhibition looks
at these unlikely painters in unlikely places as it examines
the multiple permutations of contemporary painting
practice manifested across the globe.
The artists featured in Painting at the Edge of the World
are: Franz Ackermann (Germany), Haluk Akakçe
(Turkey), Francis Alÿs (Belgium/Mexico), Kevin Appel
(U.S.), Marcel Broodthaers (Belgium), John Currin
(U.S.), Marlene Dumas (The Netherlands/South Africa),
Andreas Gursky (Germany), Eberhard Havekost
(Germany), Arturo Herrera (Venezuela/U.S.), Mike
Kelley (U.S.), Martin Kippenberger (Germany),
Udomsak Krisanamis (Thailand/U.S.), Jim Lambie
(Scotland), Margherita Manzelli (Italy), Paul McCarthy
(U.S.), Lucy McKenzie (Scotland), Julie Mehretu
(Ethiopia/U.S.), Takashi Murakami (Japan), Nader
(Iran/Germany), Chris Ofili (England), Hélio Oiticica
(Brazil), Michael Raedecker (The Netherlands/England),
Thomas Scheibitz (Germany), Rudolf Stingel
(Italy/U.S.), Hiroshi Sugito (Japan), Paul Thek (U.S.),
and Richard Wright (Scotland).
Painting at the Edge of the World begins with a few
historical markers emphasizing artists who began to
question the traditional modernist definitions of painting
popular in the 1960s. The paintings of the
under-recognized American artist Paul Thek, for example,
operated against the grain of mainstream modernism,
eschewing its grand manner in favor of a consciously
minor position put forward by the naive figurative style
of his paintings. His picture-light paintings of the late
1970s, which were installed low on the wall and
illuminated by small overhanging lamps, intensified the
viewer's awareness of the act of looking at painting while
offering a critique of the high seriousness of both
modernist painting and museum practices. The Brazilian
artist Hélio Oiticica also explored the notion of
temporality as he radically altered the viewer's
relationship to the object of painting and the plane of
representation. In his work Nucleus NC1 (1960), for
example, the artist's experiments led him to an evolution
of the notion of the painting's support surface by
merging it with color in a radical hybridization of
painting and sculpture. In his formulation, color,
structure, space, and time merge in a redefinition of
painting at the edge of an expanding notion of the world.
Mike Kelley provides a transitional moment between
these early conceptual takes on the philosophy of
painting and a younger generation emerging today.
Having been taught by a former student of Hans
Hoffman, Kelley is an artist whose roots in modernist
painting come into violent collision with his interest both
in the aesthetics of failure and the delights of the
American vernacular. His seminal series of paintings
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) (1994)
explores and examines the system of values underlying
the material culture of the post-1950s American
childhood by bringing out the darker side of pop culture
moments excavated from his own past in a strange
exorcism of modernist purity.
These investigations into the possible permutations of a
philosophy of painting by an older generation are carried
forward today by younger artists who work in a wide
range of media, including works easily recognizable as
painting as well as more conceptual practices based on
sculpture, performance, photography, and film. In the
paintings of Japan's Takashi Murakami, traditional
Japanese nihonga painting techniques are merged with
iconography derived from the popular cultural
manifestations of Japanese manga or comic books,
forcing a provocative blurring of tradition and modernity.
Puncturing a can of paint and carrying it through
neighborhoods and then into the museum, Mexico
City-based artist Francis Alÿs takes a more conceptual
approach toward painting, engaging in a performance
which confronts the formal modernism of Jackson
Pollock's drips with an itinerant conceptual practice that
provokes questions of both temporality and the social
space of the urban environment. Ethiopian-born artist
Julie Mehretu, on the other hand, makes more
traditionally recognizable paintings. Her works, however,
combine layers of graphic geometries derived from the
architectural plans of airports which are then covered in
layers of resin on which she draws a series of highly
idiosyncratic narrative elements in ink. Creating her own
worlds out of the highly controlled and planned spaces
offered by global airport terminals, Mehretu collapses the
age-old distinctions between the media of architecture
and painting, offering a new vision of the world within
the confines of her canvases.
What has become clear today is that the practice of
painting is no longer bound by the traditional categories
of abstraction, figuration, portraiture, or landscape, or
even by the conventional definition of the medium as
paint on canvas. The artists in Painting at the Edge of
the World demonstrate that a philosophy of painting is
found today not only in paint on canvas, but also in a
photograph (Andreas Gursky), in a walk (Francis Alÿs),
in a club culture-inspired application of vinyl tape on the
floor (Jim Lambie), or in paint applied directly to a wall
(Arturo Herrera, Richard Wright, Franz Ackermann,
Haluk Akakçe). Figuration takes on many forms, from
obsessive self-portraiture (Margherita Manzelli) to the
televisual (Eberhard Havekost) or the merging of art deco
and the cybernetic (Haluk Akakçe). Abstraction is no
longer the purely reductive act popularized by modernism
but now begins to look like techno-organic topography
(Udomsak Krisanamis), an explosion of cartoon
iconography (Arturo Herrera), or a blurring of the
geometry of architecture with color-field painting (Kevin
Appel).
In each case, painting's traditional function as a window
on the world has been inverted. Someone has left the
window open and a number of things have crept in.
Whether working in performance (Paul McCarthy,
Francis Alÿs), sculptural (Hélio Oiticica) and conceptual
approaches (Marcel Broodthaers, Rudolf Stingel), or in
the traditional category of paint on canvas, the artists in
Painting at the Edge of the World redefine both the
nature and contemporary relevance of a philosophy of
painting in a world that has been radically altered by the
virulence of electronic image.
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