Painting 2011-2021

Juried by Peter Frank

Painting is Undead
By Peter Frank

For the last eight or so centuries, painting has served as the backbone to Western artistic practice. In recent years it has withstood numerous challenges to its legitimacy, in the 20th century by yielding some of its hegemony and in the 21st by positing itself in the face of global electronicization as a unique and irreducible IRL experience. Art, like life, may soon be thoroughly digitized, but painting will remain one of the practices, and experiences, unreplaced by pixels.

As a basically visual medium, of course, painting cannot fully resist the conditions of electronic diffusion. It must compromise its haptic qualities to fit onto a screen. But that compromise is already long-standing, predating as it does the digital era. Walter Benjamin famously cautioned against that compromise in his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”  Indeed, photography has documented painting for nearly 200 years, confounding our comprehension of what Benjamin defended as painting’s “aura,” that is, its ineffable presence. But for centuries other, older means of reproduction, from etchings to lithographs to photogravure, have brought otherwise unviewable paintings to distant eyes. And by the 20th century photographs of paintings and other artwork were having a profound impact on other artists, and thus on the history of art. Art evolved as much through what was seen second- or thirdhand as what was seen first.

But that visual commerce was one of pictures, not paintings per se. The reproductions in countless art magazines, even when in color, lost all sense of scale, texture, and coloristic accuracy. This loss, bemoaned by Benjamin, had to be inferred by anyone – artist, art professional, and amateur alike – viewing slides and magazine ads. The distortions of print and photographic media were no less misleading, and required no less compensatory comprehension, than their digital descendants. Painterly practice itself responded to the challenge(s) of photography by reflecting the camera’s eye back on itself in styles and movements such as Photo Realism, styles and movements in which craft and subject matter pretended to arrogate primary importance to themselves. In reality, they were posing questions of perception – ours, art’s, and the artist’s equally.

So, after all this dancing and theorizing around, paintings are still being painted and remain capable of great vitality and self-sustenance. And that energy comes through the reproductions on our screens, backlit and buzzy as they may be, if we have anywhere near enough experience looking at paintings themselves so as to “read” the reproductions with sufficient accuracy. Most of the painting most of us now see we see in this fashion. And for better or worse, most of the paintings most of us buy we buy from these pictures. Make sure the measurements – of your walls as well as of your new art purchases – are accurate.

I posit all this in support of distance-jurying – and in defense of presenting a show comprising entirely painting – through on-line means. Benjamin would have been vexed by the circumstance, but we have different problems, and experiences, to sort out. “Painting 2011-2021” is a competition allowing paintings from the first entirely digitized decade to stand with and against one another; to assemble it entirely from jpegs does every work entered the same service or disservice, and does the same for every viewer, beginning with me and my Site: Brooklyn hosts. It’s important to remember that we’re all in this together. It’s even more important to realize that we’re all in at the same level.

To maintain that level, I have chosen one work per artist, as I usually do when I serve as lone juror. Almost invariably, I find more worthy submissions in a show I’m judging than there is room for them. To maximize a competition’s variety and inclusivity, I stick to that one-artist-one-work method. Still, a lot of deserving stuff gets eliminated in the last go-round. Of the hundreds of entries submitted to “Painting 2011-2021,” my hosts were able to allow about 5 percent to make the final cut. No resource, it seems, is infinite

One class of work I had to put aside – regretfully in more than a few cases – was art that isn’t, or isn’t really, painting. Any number of applicants sent objects and images that, quite often by their own admission, contain no paint. And several others submitted “paintings” that are in fact images printed digitally with acrylics or some other nominal paint substance. As I (and my hosts) understand it, “painting” is not just a substance, it is a medium, an act, and a resulting object. In this regard, I hold onto Benjamin’s “aura.” Paintings engaging digital means are one thing (among the artistic pioneers of personal-computer work in the 1980s were David Hockney and Philip Pearlstein), but painting without hands is itself a reproductive process, not less-than-painting necessarily, but other-than-painting. 

Some of today’s best art is other-than-painting. Some of it is painting. I have selected “Painting 2011-2021” from the latter class of objects. Happily, the class of artists who produced these objects is high, and the visual experience they provide in the aggregate is gratifying, even if devoid of Benjaminian aura. Virtual shows like this may lack palpability, but they brim with promise. In their own way they, too, reward the gaze.

 Wall 1

Abstraction is an elusive condition in the context of the pictorial arts. Where does the seen world end and self-dependent form begin? “What you see is what you see,” advised one of our most diffident abstractionists; but we “see” more than we see, because the mind insists on making sense, finding logical patterns, identifying the supposedly recognized.

 Wall 2

Abstract art – painting above all – brims with metaphors, or shall we say with metaphoric potential. Some visual devices clearly refer to elements which we recognize in common; but other such devices remain in dispute, even within single minds. Even the difference between the picture and the object can be obscured. It is this constant slippage, this ongoing dispute with(in) the process of identification, that keeps abstraction surprising and vibrant.

 Wall 3

On the other hand, referential painting also flourishes – especially now that we have essentially two very different, even experientially opposite, kinds of representational painting to consider. The ages-old tradition of nuanced pictorialism has been joined by an emblematic, thoroughly stylized approach, one emphasizing the graphically schematic over the observed natural. Pop art’s language of signs supplements an older realism’s language of scenes.

 Wall 4

Visual depth, the implication of perspective and atmosphere, is the province of representational art, but abstraction can feature this elusive but vital quality no less dramatically. Space in abstraction, recessive and lateral, does not so much trick the eye as ease it into unfamiliar realms of abstract visual language; but it also serves to bolster the inner coherency of those realms themselves.

 Wall 5

Even seeing what we know, or think we know, is as much challenge in today’s art as it is reassurance. No still life lies truly still. No figure is without its stage. No landscape is mere space or backdrop. For the last century or two – since the advent of photography – painting has been free to shatter into myriad private inquisitions and public reflections, all in search of an inner truth – which stubbornly remain myriad inner truths. “What you see is what you see.”