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Ndaner, Dan - Pintura en La Era de La Teoría Crítica PDF
Ndaner, Dan - Pintura en La Era de La Teoría Crítica PDF
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Copyright 1998 by the Studies in Art Education
National Art Education Association A Journal of Issues and Research
1998, 39(2), 168-182
Dan Nadaner
California State University, Fresno2
What are the values of painting for the contemporary visual arts curriculum? One of the central
tenets of critical theory holds that the value of art in conveying subjectivity has been superseded
by the newer task of interrogating the nature of representation. In an art world dominated by
critical theory and by new forms that speak to that theory, the contribution of painting to society
and to education is not as firmly established as it was in the first half of the century. In this paper
I review the challenge from critical theory to painting and construct an alternative relationship
between the two fields. I attempt to reaffirm the relationship between painting and experience,
and to articulate ways in which concepts in critical theory are informed and extended by the prac-
tice of painting. A constructive analysis of the relationship between critical theory and painting
permits a positive reconception of the role of painting in a contemporary visual arts program.
Critical theory has rapidly become a center of attention and energy in the
1This paper was writ-
visual arts. By critical theory I mean the grouping of semiotic, structural-
ten while the author
was a Visiting Scholar ist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theory that has taken a leading role
in the School of in the direction of art criticism and contemporary art history.3 The writ-
Education, Stanford ings of many critical theorists-e.g., Irigaray (1985), Jameson (1984),
University, with the
Lacan (1977), and Lyotard (1979)-have contributed to an awareness of
support of a sabbatical
leave from California the social context of artistic production, a focus on relations of power in
State University, works of art, and a mistrust of claims of authenticity and subjectivity in
Fresno.
the modernist tradition. Since 1970 there has been a close relationship
2Inquiries about this between developments in critical theory and the emergence of "new
paper should be
forms" in visual art, such as language-based and conceptual installations,
addressed to the
author at Department
that speak directly to that theory (Gottlieb, 1976; Harrison & Wood,
of Art & Design, 1993; Rorimer, 1989). Painting is discussed most often as an artifact of
California State modernism, and therefore an object of dismissal rather than a medium of
University-Fresno,
promise for speaking to contemporary issues (Baker, 1996; Crimp, 1981;
Fresno, CA 93740-
0065. Kuspit, 1996; Lawson, 1984; Rubinstein, 1997). If painting is not
3It is understandable "dead," it is not very healthy within the critical climate of recent years.
that the use of the Yet little rigorous analysis has actually been applied to the relationship
term "critical theory" between critical theory and painting. As new forms demand attention and
to refer to this group-
funding, it is easy for painting to get lost in the excitement. At a time
ing-typified by the
works of Lacan, when changes are being considered in many visual art programs, it seems
Lyotard, Derrida, imperative that implications for change be reasoned and not assumed.
Baudrillard, Irigaray, I will argue in this paper that there is a positive relationship between
and Jameson-may
critical theory and the practice of painting. I will make this argument in
seem unfair to schol-
ars who would rather three stages. First, I will review and critique the challenge from critical
apply the term to theory to painting. Second, I will set forth several concepts that are con-
other literature in crit- structive points of contact between painting and critical theory. Third, I
ical thinking and edu-
will use these concepts to create an alternative view of painting in an era
cational theory.
Nevertheless, the term of critical theory. I will suggest that painting continues to relate to experi-
is used widely. ence and to education in specific and significant ways.
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
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Dan Nadaner
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
been slower to emerge. Very little effort has been addressed to the fleshing
out of critical theory with reference to the concrete experience of paint-
ing, or to viewing painting in terms of the generative concepts of critical
theory.
Like any theoretical argument, the challenge from critical theory to
studio practice needs to be subjected to critique itself. Chief among the
points calling for critique is the Lacanian assertion that language is at the
heart of cognition and art. While the claim that language is at the center
of representation has become a popular assumption in the contemporary
art world, this claim is not fully supported by research in other fields. The
study of cognition and imagery calls into question the claim that the word
underlies human thought. The study of mental imagery demonstrates the
central role of the visual image in cognition (Arnheim, 1969; Kosslyn,
1977; Paivio, 1971). There is evidence in psycholinguistics that concepts
are created in the mind nonverbally before they are "mapped out" onto a
linguistic form (Clark, 1977). Even psychologists skeptical of "pictorial
thinking" believe that images and words are epiphenomena of mental
processes that are neither verbal nor visual in form; very few believe that
language is at the core of cognition (Finke, 1989).
Many semioticians, including Roland Barthes (1977), Umberto Eco
(1976), Norman Bryson (1981), and James Elkins (1995) have been trou-
bled by the dependence of semiotic theory on language. Elkins, in his
study of the signification of marks and traces in paintings, questions the
assumption that visual form is reducible to language for its meaning.
Elkins speaks of a figure as being primarily a "mass of sticky oil." For
Elkins, it is wrong to continue the semiotic practice of jumping to "sto-
ries" (1995, p. 860) to extract meaning from the work. The artist Aimee
Rankin speaks for those who would prefer to value the pictorial image in
its own terms:
...I have problems with the way some artists have appropriated
impressive-sounding arguments to legitimate their own reductive
practice. The idea that a work of art would come equipped with
footnotes underlines the role this work assumes, often illustrating
what functions as a master discourse like a book report in rebus
form. (In Foster, 1987, p. 97)
In Elkins's view, critical theory must admit the "incoherence and
strangeness" of pictures. Critical theory must look at all elements of the
picture, not only its identifiable subject, but its less easily identifiable
marks, traces, and orli (shimmering auras) as well. Elkins's work summa-
rizes an emerging direction that restores to the picture the primacy of
visual signification, and calls for a new emphasis on understanding pic-
tures in visual terms.
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Dan Nadaner
I would argue, then, that there is ample reason to question the lan-
guage-based critique of painting that comes from critical theory. By mak-
ing an analogy between painting and language and then by conflating
painting with language, critical theory has created a body of discourse that
is both useful and overly convenient. It is useful because it has raised con-
sciousness about the texts and subtexts of power relations that pervade the
creation, dissemination, and viewing of art. But it is overly convenient
because it is addressed only to places that are well lit (i.e., that connect
easily to existing discourse in the literary realm). There is a wider field
that needs illuminating.
There are many "less lit" aspects of painting requiring discussion.
There is, for example, the task of analyzing visual form as visual form, as
Elkins suggests, rather than through analogy to text. It is much harder to
find words to interpret the entire painted surface than it is to describe
subjects that can be construed as signifiers, but it is also much more rele-
vant to painting to consider the entire painted surface. Many painters
eliminate recognizable subjects from their paintings specifically so as to
preclude facile interpretation.4
4Diebenkorn and
Another less lit place is the relationship of visual form to human expe-
other people talked
about "annihilating
rience. The argument that the correspondence between signs and refer-
the image-if you get ents in human experience is arbitrary makes good sense, but it is facile. It
an image try to looks under the light. It relies too much on Saussure's (1966) concept of
destroy it" (Tuchman,
arbitrary signification to serve as a blanket negation of all claims of repre-
1976, p. 13).
sentation. Saussure (1966, p. 120) argued that signs (e.g., words and visu-
al forms) function independently of the object world in creating meaning.
But how does one account for the numerous and diverse indications that
painting is motivated by experience in the world, and that painting
expresses lived experience? Elizabeth Murray speaks to the authenticity of
experience when she says that she finds "that anything I want to excise
comes back" in her works (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 127). It is as if
her images had a life of their own. When Munch says that he painted
from the "lines and colors... of the inner eye," and that he painted "what
I recalled, without adding anything" (Steinberg, 1995, p. 15), he is not
mouthing stereotypical phrases of self-expression, mere theoretical wish
fulfillments. Or when Per Kirkeby speaks of his colors springing from a
memory such as "a sinking ship or your wife leaving you" (Posner, 1991,
p. 6) or when Murray speaks of a painting "reflecting a lunar oriental
mood" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 28), there is a specificity to the lan-
guage that transcends blanket theoretical negations of experience.
Rudolf Arnheim has been a rare voice debating the role that critical
theory has come to play within the art world. In Arnheim's (1992) view,
the current critique of signification in art derives from the subjectivism of
Hume and the nihilism of Nietzsche, neither of which he accepts as valid.
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
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Dan Nadaner
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
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Dan Nadaner
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
progenitor of painting as change.5 For the painter Gillian Ayres, the ations. This is illus-
trated by Houbraken's
buildup of the paint "is merely the residue of my attempt to resolve a
statement that
painting over a period of time" (Jamie, 1983, p. 43). Matisse (quoted in Rembrandt was self-
Flam, 1973, p. 73) said that "a large part of the beauty of a picture arises willed and that he
from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium." took his right of sole
decision to such
Per Kirkeby is a contemporary painter with an energetic engagement
lengths that "he is said
with change. Kirkeby paints in a way that invites impulsive gesture and to have tanned over
then refutes it, works up compositions and destroys them, transforms (overpainted with
brown pigment) a
composition with emotion and then exchanges emotion for the evidence
beautiful Cleopatra in
of the paint itself. What remains is not a simple effort of either nature or order to give full
emotion, but of his complex and conflicted experience as contemporary effect to a single pearl"
person. The effect of these works, as Schjeldahl describes them, is their (van de Wetering,
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Dan Nadaner
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
not offer explanations. They resolve nothing. They place us, just as music
does, in the ambiguous world of the indeterminate" (1961, p. 26).
Redon's search took on a distinctive character because of his will to
place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible" (1961, p. 29).
The work of Giorgio Morandi fulfills the same mission, but in reverse:
giving the logic of the invisible to the visible. A group of bottles, bowls,
cups, flowers and a tree or side of building sufficed for several decades of
work. What he did with these subjects was not, however, conservative. In
the still lives of the 1940s and 1950s the paintings are worked over for
months until they are both solid and ephemeral. Vibrations suffuse the
works in a way that recalls heat waves, but the waves are emanating from
the objects rather than surrounding the objects. Franco Solmi says that
Painting had become a land of the infinite, a time with no pre-
sent... Morandi's emblematic images seem to dwell both at the very
core and at the extreme borders of inner transgression, tokens of an
inchoate but measured rejection of the system of codes which have
come to threaten the innermost substance of the highly individual
style of the artist, the raw structure of his art, the apprehensive
magma in which the innate partiality of language dissolves, and find
resolve, in the work of art, with its reserve of poetry. (1988, p. 5)
Morandi's work, like Lark's and Redon's, is a sustained challenge to
what cannot be done-to render visible (in Klee's terms) what cannot be
seen, to body forth (in the painter Elmer Bischoff's terms) a substance
incorporeal enough to convey the life of feeling. Morandi's achievement
throws light on one of the dark places that theory fails to observe.
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Dan Nadaner
Educational Implications
If insight and understanding are accepted as values central to education,
then the educational contribution of painting is clear. Painting plays a sig-
nificant role in education by contributing to the understanding of human
experience, and by engaging students in the active exploration of experi-
ence through means that are open, flexible, challenging, surprising, and
powerful.
In order to realize the values of painting in education, art educators
must engage actively in the practical and theoretical dimensions of paint-
ing. To do this requires an engagement with studio work, history, theory,
and criticism. It is the role of the university, and especially programs that
train teachers of art, to provide the courses that permit these several kinds
of engagement. If preservice teachers do not study painting in a sustained
way in the university, they will not be able to pass an understanding of
the medium along to their students in secondary education.
In addition to gaining first-hand experience with painting, teachers
need to address philosophical and critical issues. How do paintings carry
meaning if not through language? In light of the challenge to the signifi-
cance of painting presented by many textbased works, how does painting
continue to function with vitality in the current era? I have argued in this
essay that painting maintains a complex relationship with experience by
allowing the presentation of elusive aspects of experience such as memory,
change, irreconcilable experiences, and extensions to new realms of expe-
rience.
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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory
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