AN ART THAT EATS ITS OWN HEAD

Painting in the Age of the Image

BARRY SCHWABSKY
We hve in the age of the rmage But don't ask me to define the word: its very elusiveness
is of the essence. we talk about image when we want to indrcate an appearance that
seems somehow detachable trom its material support. Thrs rs most obvrous when we
speak of a photographic image. it's the same image whether it's presented as a small
snapshot or blown up as a big cibachrome. gtowing on the monitor of my computer or
mechanrcally reproduced in the pages of a magazine.
It has often been sard that the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century
changed the nature of palnttnq-by withdrawing from tr the
task eftprcsentationThat
-Igq!q-]9ry_qe9ll
3t rts core, thereby enabhng lre emergence, in the early twentieth
century, of a fully abstiac-t ait.-Tne inltial plauslbllify of this story, however, should not
disguise its falseness. Any mediocre painter of the nrneteenth century could deprct a
person, object or landscape wlth greater accuracy and vivrdness than a photograph
{lf
nothlng else, the painter could show the colour of tlrings. hardly a negligrble dimension
of visual expenence.) The real attraction of the photograph -
beyond simple economrcs:
a photographic porffait cost a lot less than one in oils -
lay not ln its capacity for iconic
representation but rather in what has been called its indexical qualrty. that is, the
apparent causal connection bewveen an object and its image. The image comes from
what it shows. a sort of relic.
Far {rom rnatronal. there may be an lmportant truth lurking in this notion of the rmage
as a detachable constituent of the realify 1t pictures. In any case, rt frnds an echo not
only in the transformation of art since the advent of photography but even in philosophy.
in the late eighteenth century. Immanuel Kart taught that we can know. not tJrings in
themselves, but rather phenomena, appearances. The
'thrng
in rtself is something
whose existence can only be intellectually deduced. The percelvrng mrnd, rn this vrew,
is something like an idea o{ a portrait painter. The subject of the portralt, the sitter. ls
over there; the painter with his brushes. palette and easel is over here. There is no direct
contact bewveen the tvvo of them. Instead. the painter constructs a set of appearances on
the canvas that somehow conesponds to the features of tie sitter. At the end of the
nneteenth century. after the invention ol the camera, a drfferent idea of perception
became plausible. Henri Bergson declared that we are acquainted with the world not
through mere appearances that are somehow different in krnd from things in themseives.
but through what he called, precisely,
'images'.
which are part and parcel of the real
The mind, for Bergson, is less lrke a painter than it is lke a camera. its sampled rmages
not fundamentally otler but slmply quantitatively more limited than the
'aggregate
of
'images"
that is reality. Our perceptual appajatus is, one might say, touched by the
thing rt perceives as the photographic plate or film is touched by the light that comes
from the object.
Absuact painting developed under the spell of a phrlosophy not unlike Kant's: that the
ultimate reality was not the one indicated by the senses, but somethrng intellectualy
deductble. This was tie era of Malevich and Mondrian. And for a long trme it seemed
misguided to think of modem or contemporary painting primarily ln terms of the [nages
it might bear. The most famous and most concise formulation of this view was, of course,
8
Eryyh
The
Tvivaph oF
P" *ti,,,o
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b;h,o u. c_aJa,! otrg
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lrs^d on,
Jox
atltort t^pe *.d
tlt,footzL
i
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5 .
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+
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\TS ITS OWN HEAD
he Image
Clement Greenberq's.
'\.A/hereas
one tends to see what ts in an Old Master before one
sees the pi cture rtsel f. one sees a Moderntst ptcture as a pi ctute fi rst'
{Subsequentl y.
one began to signal adherence to thls dlctum simply by adjudng the word
'plcrure'.
prefernng
'painting'.
a usage stiil in force today.l To loqk at a painting for its image
.could
only be
lo]g!_e_qshldr}re4aatrngsn"t@he
absurdities eloquently denounced by Yve-A1aln Bors in his well-known essay
'Painting
-sMudell
where he lashes lnto critrcs who
'would
make Malevich's Elock Squore a solat
eclipse, Rothko's late work stylized versions of the Pieta and Deposition, or Mondrian's
Broadway Boogie-Woogte an interpretation of the New York subway map'. In thts view,
to think of panting in relation to image was to see it as a form of representation,
however veiled, whereas the great abstractlonists had shown that patnting could have
qurte other functions.
Of course. images never ieft paintrng, not even lrl the work ol sometime abstractlonlsts
like Jackson Pollock or Wtllem de Kooning In the early eighties, image-based paintlng
took the art world by storm. Yet the renown of the Neo-Expressionists
{as
that generation
of painters was cailed whether the term suited them or not) was much resented and
short-lled. Their work has never had the disinterested critical assessment that. perhaps,
may now be possible. It was really a decade Iater that a new generation of patnters
began to emerge. more slowly and steadlly than tire Neo-Expressionists, and gathering
real force only late in the ninetres - p_ajnters t*9_19!91_D_g1AC_qSliLUown. Thoma,s- -
Scherbitz, or many others whose fasciilEiiofrlruFh rmages was clearly central to their
-
woik.m-ey were clearly up to something other than a simple reversion to the dogmas of
the pre-modernist academies. In fact, many of them may have been as much influenced
by the work of non-parnters lke Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley or Jeff Koons as by
anythrng n the history of painting, both Old Master and modem. which they explore
freely. Theu sometimes eamest. sometlrnes slackerlsh technique - at times academic,
at others approaching the slmplicity of the Sunday painter or the extreme stylisatlon of
the decorator - often seems to recklessly evoke everything that had been off-limits to
serious palntrng. In some of this work one can see parallels in the once despised late
work of artists like de Chirlco and Ptcabia.
A criticism too enamoured of the tradition of abstraction, by now threatening to become
academic in turn. is rll-equipped to deal wlth these new manifestations of the image in
painting But so would be a criticlsm based on the criteria of the Old Masters. The image
as we encounter it in contemporary paintlng rs somethrng quite distinct from depiction
or representatlon in European panting before Modemism. Thtnk of ali the tralnlng ln
perspectlve, the lnvestigatlons of anatomy - the painter was working, in a systematlc,
indeed almost scientific way to reconstruct pictorialiy tlte real world before his eyes,
and therefore had to understand not simply lts surface but its strucfure. Contemporary
painters, needless to say. do nothlng of the sort. Bergsonians wlthout knowing it, they
work from a reaiity that ts always already image. The Impressionists were already
pointlng in thrs direction when they changed the focus lrom the seif-subsistent obiect
to the shimmering piay ol its appearances. A more urgent precedent for contemporary
paintrng, however, is the Pop Art of the sl{ties. Roy Lichtenstefr taklng comlc strips as
7- E
coat Q
his models, James Rosenquist mrmicking; billboards. or Andy Warhol wtth hts grainy
news photos. Panters who cultivated the look of the snapshot. Ike Gerhard Richtel
or Malcolm Moriey. were pursurng simrlar ends But notice the difference betvveen the
image-consciousness of the palnters who have emerged ln recent years and that of
these elders takng photographs, comics or brllboards as one's matellal - simply because
they are cl eari y l i mi ted categones of rmage
.materral
-
sttl l seems to tmpl y that ti el e
could be a realm beyond the image that the artist might otherwise have elected to
access: it implres a quasl-polemrcal chorce of the rmage-realm over some other leality.
That' s a pol emi c today' s parnters no l onger seem to feel cal l ed upon to make. Instead,
they frnd every'thing to be of the matter of rmages
Painters lke Doig, Marlene Dumas or Luc Tuy'rnans - to name three of the most influential
artists-arwork today
-
make work ftat is ennrely permeated by a photographic reality,
that ls, a realrty composed ol detachaLrle appearances; yet in contrast to Rrchter or
Morley, they feel no need to represent the
'look'
of the photograph The painting remains
painterly. To say that contemporary palnters treat reality as an aggregate of rmages, in
Bergson's phrase, ls not to say that they pant rt wrtlr neutralify, or with pure aesthetic
distance, or wlthout commltment. 0n the contrary, the[ engagement with the image
is precrsely that, a form of engagement. and inevrtably conveys an emotional stance,
whetlrer it be the prss-takrng disdain fyplcal of Tuymans' saturnine gloom, the aIIy
bemusement that emanates from Sophie von Hellerman's paintings, Ian Monroe's sense
of claustrophobia. or Cecily Brown's frenetic urgency The effects are often uncornJortable.
Dana Schutz's images are lmages of the body, but always awkward and resrstant, while
Dexter Dalwood's are spaces, plausrble enough to draw one in but too drsjornted to
actually inhabit. Much of thls work has a syncretlc quality that could not have existed
without the example of modernrst collage, but by folding its disjunctive effect back into
paint -
an actual heterogeneity of paterials is exceptional here. and when it occurs,
as in the work of Michael Raedecker or Davrd Thorpe, lt represents not the shock
ol an irruptron of the real into art, as it did in different way for Cubism, Dada and
Constructrvism, but somethrng more like an incursion of the homely distraction of crafts
and hobbies nto the artistic Iield
Thrs fascrnation with craft has the same source as the more widespread attraction to
painterliness. among today's younger painteis, as opposed to the seamless surface of
photorealism: not an overturning of hrerarchies between htgh and low cultures. but a
more iundamentai concem with a physrcal involvement in tlre rmage. For although it
was photography that taught us the modern idea of the image, lt is painting that allows
us to internalise it lt's a question of touching and being touched. The photogtaph
may have been touched by the lrght of its object. but the sense of contact rs entuely
subsumed in the seamlessness of the photograph's surface. Painters like Dumas and
Tuymans. and so many others who freely interpret photographic tmagery, are attemptlng
neither to disgulse its photographic basrs rn order to retain an aesthetic effect, nor to
reproduce the appearance of the photograph in order to neutra-lise rt. And their srrategy
ls not essentiaily drfferent fiom that of colleagues who may not directly use photoEaphs
rn the work process but who nevertheless treat the world they paint as wholly image.
r
The surface of painting. then. is for current painting something that partakes neither of
the homogenelfy of the photographrc emulsion nor the heterogenerty of collage. It rs a
place where both differences and srmilanties are consumed. ln a way. Schutz's painting
Face Eater (2004), can be taken as a paradigmatlc paintrng of the moment. With lts
evident allusions to Prcasso and Bacon, lt clearly signals its art-historical allegiances, but
the painting wears rts citations lightly
-
the painnngs of the wvo modem masters, and
notably those of Bacon which are themselves based on photographrc vrsion, are simply
part of Schutz's image-world. It is hilanous and ternfylng at once. A head tries to
swallow itself and in the process it does not disappear, but the senses become confused:
the mouth sees by consuming the organs of vision, the eyes feast on their own imminent
consumption. Is this an emblem of the artrst's so[psism? Not necessarily. The painting
declares itself to be - borrowing a resonant phrase from the literary theorist Stanley
Fish
- a self-consuming artefact. but does consumption really take place? Not really.
Instead, we are shown a commotion o{ the senses that seems as pleasurably seductive
as it may be neurotic. To look at it is practically to feel one's own teeth start reaching up
to bite the upper llp . It's an image about interiorrsing as image even oneself. And in
that mage, touching realrry.
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