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National Art Education Association

Painting in An Era of Critical Theory


Author(s): Dan Nadaner
Source: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), pp. 168-182
Published by: National Art Education Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1320467
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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

Painting In An Era of Critical Theoryl

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tenets of critical theory holds that the value of art in conveying subjectivity has been superseded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

The Challenge From Critical Theory


One of the central arguments of critical theory holds that art is not a "fig-
uration" (Jameson's term, quoted in Owens, 1982, p. 21) that is transpar-
ent to either the world or our experience of it. Following Lacan (1977),
painting has lost its role both as a window to the world and as a window
on experience. Both sides of the signifier/signified relationship are viewed
as problematic. Communication through paint (the signifier) is problem-
atic because the paint masks the word. Language is the form in which
thought occurs. Signification based on language is arbitrary and socially
contexted rather than authentic and universal. And the notion of an iden-
tifiable "experience" (the signified) is problematic, because that "experi-
ence" is also constructed by language as it used within a specific social
positioning (Harrison & Wood, 1993, p. 232). Therefore, one cannot
claim that art is related to experience.
This view refutes the modernist tradition of seeing increasingly deeper
levels of human experience in art, and especially in the relationships
among visual forms. An arrangement of forms by Kandinsky becomes a
construction of signification within a particular social context and world-
view rather than, as Kandinsky had hoped, a language for conveying the
vibrations of the soul.
When the premise of art-as-arbitrary is substituted for art-as-experi-
ence, the stage is set for a variety of speculations about the contemporary
function and direction of painting. Without confidence in the authentici-
ty of the subjective, and believing that the plastic possibilities of expres-
sion are encrusted with dense layers of historical structuring, the argu-
ment for painting as a unique form of human expression loses its founda-
tion. Speculations about the future status of painting follow. Some of the
critical leaps regarding the nature of painting have included an insistence
on language as the focal point of painting, and the demand that painting
take as its subject the investigation of the nature of representation. If rep-
resentational forms mask social constructions, then the artist deconstructs
representation so as to disclose underlying content. Exemplars of this
school include Rosler's inquiries into multiple forms of representation
and also the works of Kosuth, Haacke, Burgin, and Syrop (Rorimer,
1989, p. 152), that use language to call attention to the arbitrary nature
of art as signifier, and that position art within a socioeconomic context.
Rorimer (1989, p. 153) sees these artists as "[succeeding] in the transfor-
mation of previous concepts of art." Singerman sees these self-referential
critiques as "mourning" the overblown claims of art as representation,
and the critic as serving as a "watchdog...protecting the canon by
patrolling the periphery" (1989, p. 116). Harrison and Wood celebrate
conceptual art (e.g., the early work of the Art and Language group) for its
use of hypothetical situations and events, and complex verbal texts, to

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Dan Nadaner

inquire into underlying conditions of perception, representation, and


social positioning.
These critical leaps put painting in a conflicted state. The ideals that
make painters want to paint-e.g., the notion that painting must belong
to its time-also make it difficult for a painter to avoid the theories that
argue for the exhaustion of painting or the vitality of other forms. In the
presence of Lacanian or Derridaist texts, no contemporary text on paint-
ing carries equal influence. Almost all of the great studio discourses-
Hawthorne (1960, first published 1938), Henri (1923), Hofmann
(1948), Kandinsky (1947), Klee (1953), and Nicolaides (1941)-
emerged in the first half of the century. Kandinsky's Concerning The
Spiritual In Art (1947) gave to the teaching of painting a concept of
expressiveness that transcended particular schools of thought in painting.
At mid-century Hans Hofmann brought to painting a similarly delineated
conception of expression through non-objective means that had special
relevance to contemporary developments in abstract painting. For decades
ideas from teachers like Hawthorne-about finding beauty in the ordi-
nary, making a lot of a little, avoiding the literary, going for studies rather
than finish, painting more than drawing, and emphasizing large shapes-
have remained the model of studio discourse. Today, in the presence of
theories of interpretation that do not value painting, studio discourse is
suffused with an unease that it lacks its own contemporary strengths.
Contemporary painters are likely to find themselves positioned some-
where between the poles of critical discourse, studio discourse, and per-
sonal ideas and intuitions. At times there seems to be little contact
between these poles. Often the disjuncture between discourses is not only
implied but demanded.

Questioning the Questions


In order to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between
critical theory and painting, the central concepts of each field, as they
relate to other fields, require examination. This examination is especially
needed because the influx of critical theory has been rapid and often
wholesale in form. Pollitt has commented wryly on the often superficial
handling of critical theory within academia:
...Often the postmodernists don't really understand one another's
writing and make their way through the text by moving from one
familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a
murky pond, by way of lily pads. Lacan...performativity...Judith
Butler...scandal... (en)gendering (w)holeness.. .Lunch! (1996, p. 9)
Those painters and critics who have digested Lacan, Derrida, and
Lyotard tend to assume that implications for major changes in the arts are
indicated. By contrast, the search for points of contact with the arts has

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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

For Arnheim (1994), the mind actively structures perception in visual


images, and the work of art acts as an equivalent for these images within a
publicly observable medium. Therefore, there is a direct connection
between representation in art and human experience.
There are many reasons to question the critical hegemony that is main-
tained with respect to painting. The literature-based analysis of significa-
tion need not dominate the viewing of painting. The field for construct-
ing an alternative viewing of painting is wide open. Nathan Oliveira has
said "everything in life can occur in a painting, spontaneously in the
work" (in Protter, 1963, p. 272). Oliveira speaks to an evaluation of
painting that is open and multiple in its vision, at the same time that his
work is sensitive to the contexts and contradictions that surround the art
of painting (Nadaner, 1984). Could painting be re-viewed in an alterna-
tive way that speaks to this multiplicity of vision? And could this kind of
reviewing be stated in terms that hold up to contemporary critical inquiry
(i.e., avoid repeating the simple assertion of significance, meaning, spirituality
in the work that characterized the many manifesto-like statements preva-
lent in art discourse earlier in the century?)

Alternative Viewings: Conceptual Grounds


What is needed is a re-evaluation of the points of linkage between paint-
ing and theory, as well as the direction of attention to aspects of painting
that escape current theoretical paradigms. For example, Derrida's (1979)
notion of the floating quality of both signifier and signified has applica-
tion to the nature of painting. Not only has critical theory ignored the
ways in which painting informs the concept of the floating signifier, but
one could argue that the concept cannot be fully understood without ref-
erence to painting. Paint, as a plastic medium, is a medium of all possibil-
ities. A single brushstroke by Monet can be decisive or awkward; it can be
a figure or a blob of paint. A brushstroke by De Kooning can float as a
signifier between the brush strokes of signpainting, classic Hals, and graf-
fiti, and it can float as signified between the references of a roller coaster,
an emotional crisis turned inside out, and numerous other things.
Painting is a floating world, and as such remains a way of saying what
cannot be said in ways that cannot be described.
The Lacanian idea that signification occurs metonymically (through
adjacent terms) rather than metaphorically has proved a powerful concept
for the interpretation of pictures (1977, p. 169). Yet, the converse propo-
sition has not been valued; the proposition that painting is unique among
the arts in its capacity to present significance through ambiguous juxtapo-
sitions, ambiguous presences, and elided relationships. When Joan Brown
outlines a sock in the midst of a densely plowed field of paint she con-
nects two things in a way that is irreducible to a "story," and yet that

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Dan Nadaner

speaks for a consciousness of its times. The scratches on a Diebenkorn


cityscape are only scratches, and yet they speak of another world of
inquiry and inner life when compared to a typical rendering of the same
subject.
Lyotard's idea (1971) that painting and poetry present incommensu-
rable events is equally powerful in explaining the way that pictures func-
tion. Philip Guston's late-career presentations of cartoon-like, machine-
like, figure-like forms delineated forcefully on expressionist pink grounds
make no sense. They are incommensurable presentations. And yet, they
speak precisely in a way that only painting can, presenting figures that are
outside of discourse, in Lyotard's terms.
An alternative look at painting in relation to critical theory therefore
discloses several concepts highly generative for the valuing of painting.
These include, as discussed above, the floating signifier, metonymy, and
incommensurabilty. Other concepts in critical theory that seem potent for
the understanding of painting include the concepts of non-semiotic
analysis (Elkins, 1995), stressed passages (Caws, 1989), eluding definition
(Linker, 1984), transgression, and negation.
Each of these concepts contributes considerably to the understanding
of painting as painting. By painting as painting, I mean the sort of thing
that Diebenkorn speaks of when he says that what interests him most in
painting are the "events on the canvas" (Ashton, 1985, p. 6). In the 20th
century many painters do not so much translate pre-formulated thoughts
into paint as they do search for ideas in the process of painting. These
thoughts are integrally connected to lived experience. But they are not
necessarily connected through signification alone. Rather, the painting is
a world of events which relates to experience in complex ways.
The relationship between painting and concepts such as metonymy,
floating signifiers, and the incommensurate may be better understood
through critical readings of specific painters and works. Through these
readings the complex relationships between painting and experience can
be more fully articulated.

Memory and Metonymy


When Edvard Munch exhibited his painting The Sick Girl, which sig-
naled his turn away from naturalism, in Christiania in 1886, the work
was not received well. Munch defended the work by saying "I paint not
what I see, but what I saw" (Steinberg, 1995, p. 9). The Sick Girl was
completed only after years of reworking. It is a masterpiece of searching
and discovery. It is based on memories of his sister's last illness, when he
was 13 years old, but the memory is not a fixed template. The painting is
"permeated with the adult Munch's pain at her loss" (Steinberg, 1995, p.
16). It is also permeated with the events on the canvas as they emerged
through scratching, wiping out, and overpainting. And finally, in creating

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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory

a print of the same subject with a master printmaker in Paris, Munch


invited chance, gesturing with closed eyes in order to choose one group of
colors or another (Steinberg, 1995, p. 16). The work emerges from a
search through life and through artistic means, taking real chances in
both.
Munch's experience with The Sick Girl demonstrates the contribution
of memory painting to the expression of subjectivity. By reading into the
past but necessarily working in the present, painting from memory invites
juxtapositions and the creation of metonymic relationships. Just Munch's
adult consciousness intersects with his childhood memory, his childhood
memory intersects with his adult exploration of marks and colors. The
painter sacrifices fixed contours for change and surprise.
Elizabeth Murray's work stands as further evidence of the contribution
of memory painting to the expression of subjectivity. Murray's work uses
metonymy to structure diverse elements of memory. The work responds
to the initial impetus derived from memory, but takes off from there as an
active search during which ideas are discovered. She describes Searchin'as
being about "a face crossing the moon; only later did I realize how
Brancusi-like the face was" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 28). For Can
You Hear Me? she says that she was thinking about Munch, about "mak-
ing a sound... the green felt painful and screechy" (Graze & Halbreich,
1987, p. 72). In interviews Murray has described the images in her work
as being related to her family, her childhood, and thoughts as diverse as
the color yellow, cubism, a chair, and Vermeer's woman reading a letter.
The specificity of her accounting is revealing precisely because the works
are not mimetic representation. They are painted constructions, built of
heavily painted organic and linear shapes, that are arranged and
rearranged with tremendous energy.
Through memory painting, painters create a kind of productive confu-
sion in the thoughts they brings to their work. This state of staying con-
fused is one that is difficult or even a sign of failure for the logocentric
thinker, but it is not necessarily unconducive to painting. One of the
more constructive implications of Derrida is that productive thought
occurs at that state of analysis where there is no closure, where ideas
remain open and evocative (1979). Speaking of her work More Than You
Know, Murray says that she "wanted to paint a chair realistically. At the
same time it's a big heart" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 68). Here
Murray exemplifies the kind of metonymic presentation the plastic arts
make possible, the kind of presentation that would be so difficult to make
in language. Surrealism explored this world with great deliberateness;
more recently painters such as Bacon, Rothernberg, and Murray have cre-
ated metonymic images with increasing obliqueness and mystery.

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Dan Nadaner

Marks and The Floating Signifier


As a series of marks, painting embodies the concept of floating signifier.
The markings in many of Monet's works are painted to have a life of their
own. In Church at Varengeville: Morning Effect (1881) and Track Signals
Outside Saint-Lazare Station (1877), Monet shows us more than an
"impression" of an ocean or train station. What is revealed is produced in
a moment but does not refer to any particular moment. The marks of the
artist relate to the experience of the artist as it has developed over time
and is manifested in the performance of painting that we see.
Norman Bryson's distinction between gaze and glance informs the
floating function of the mark. Bryson (1983) argues that Western paint-
ing fixes the gaze of the viewer where social conventions intend. In order
to fix this gaze of pleasure Bryson argues that Western painting has tradi-
tionally concealed the mark as mark, so as to conceal the status of the sign
as sign. When painting is conceived alternatively as glance, the mark is
valued for itself rather than subjugated within a seamless illusion.
Bryson's analysis opens up the surface of the painting. Elkins (1995)
follows Bryson by looking at the marks of the painted surface and calling
for a non-semiotic analysis of the mark. Cy Twombly evidences some of
the contrary possibilities of the mark. Barthes sees Twombly as non-
aggressive, negating tradition, and playful. But play, for Barthes, is not
just the stereotype of free and beautiful lyricism; it is also awkward and
clumsy, sparse and insubstantial. For Barthes, Twombly's marks are pro-
duced without wanting to be produced, and without becoming a prized
production for the artist. As such they stand as a negation of the "fine
hand" that is at the very center of traditional notions of painting. For
Barthes, Twombly deconstructs the aesthetics of painting at its very core,
which is not only the concealment of the mark but the nature of the mark
itself.

The humility of Twombly's work is its achievement. His mark is not


beautiful; it deconstructs beauty. It is a kind of common experience, set
in opposition to the Western tradition that presents painting as a unique-
ly significant experience.
Twombly's example, although it is singular in its sparse, deconstruc-
tionist aspects, helps to direct attention to similar aspects in the paintings
of Rembrandt, Daumier, Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Diebenkorn.
Oliveira has used the mark to document his inquiry into the uncertainty
and limitations of the act of painting (Nadaner, 1984). In the painting as
mark there is the conveying of experience in motion, floating freely, close
to experience and far from aesthetic dictum.

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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory

Change and The Incommensurate


As Elkins (1995, p. 841) points out, marks made in clusters become sur-
faces, losing their identity as marks, until the surfaces in turn become 5In a sense the penti-
mento was manifesta-
marks themselves. For many artists painting involves numerous layers of
tion of the artist's
surfaces. Rembrandt, with his lengthy reworkings and secret, almost freedom and power
alchemical methods (van de Wetering, 1991, p. 31), can be taken as a over his own cre-

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,

best characterization: 1991, p. 31).

[The viewer experiences] a slower, inchoate, darker contemplation, a


state of mind hypersensitive and a bit stupid... The effect is somber,
even sullen, but with patience there is stirring in its depths, the
beginning of a grateful joy. (quoted in Posner, 1991, p. 10)
Kirkeby is as accomplished a painter of the incommensurate as any
working today. His work evidences the possibilities of painting to deal
with the incompatible, to go beyond an insistence on the singularity of
expression. A simplistic view of the incommensurate would hold other-
wise. A simple critical leap might call for a more digital form, the kind of
word/photograph/paint juxtapositions or interruptions that are ubiqui-
tous in the contemporary art world. Works like these function mainly to
repeat an analytical discourse such as Lyotard makes, rather than to pre-
sent in artistic form the inexplicable figurations that are the subject of
Lyotard's analysis. Kirkeby, on the other hand, perseveres with the figural,
in paint. The reward is an extension of insight and the extension of paint-
ing as medium. References to earlier painters are implicit in this achieve-
ment. Turner's paintings are sustained as valid and still informative forays
into overpainting and change, as are Matisse's, Pollock's, and De
Kooning's. The decisions not made by Kirkeby, the refusals of total
coherence, the resignation of emotion before the mark, are negations and
self-referential commentaries that carry weight because they are made
within the realm of painting, because they follow these other painters but
exhibit difference as well.

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Dan Nadaner

The changing that goes on in painting is often more connected to the


flow of experience than to the residual image on the canvas. Diebenkorn
has said "It is a great experience to violate my overall conception of what
a picture has to be and find that in doing so, that it has changes me"
(quoted in Cathcart, 1978, p. 25). Paint can always be painted over. Lines
can be changed. Forms can be moved. Unsuspected possibilities can be
brought together. Painting as change leaves us with further insight into
the subjectivity of contemporary life.

Extension and Possibility


The fourth relationship between painting and the painter's experience
involves the painter's search for that which is outside of his or her experi-
ence, extending into the realm of belief or the unknown. This approach
to painting is connected to an overt interest in the imagination. Through
the imagination the painter can extend the realm of search beyond what-
ever bounds are accepted as the contemporary norm. Thus Redon could
extend subject matter from the natural to the supernatural (in his "blacks"
prints) in reaction to the norm of 1850s naturalism.
A more recent artist, Sylvia Lark, makes extensions of different kinds:
she alludes to the icons of diverse cultures, and she challenges the domi-
nant formal structures of painting. Lark's work sets up an alternative for-
mal structure by flooding pictorial space into a region in front of the can-
vas. For Lark paint is to be touched and yet it conveys, through its atmos-
pheric veil, a sense of what cannot be touched. These formal means are
appropriate to their subject, which is ostensibly (in a painting such as
Chanting) a Tibetan prayer ceremony. Richard Wollheim has said of her
work:
...what impresses me most about these paintings is the return jour-
ney they record. Amulets, archaic rocks, scraps of veil and silk, pas-
sages of half-erased script, lie side by side with her father's bric-a-
brac, with vestiges of the body, and now...with lumps of paint
exploding onto the palette... Lark's art is, among other things, an art
of equivalences. It equates, by means visible to us, affections and
feelings we would have thought irreconcilable. (1990, n.p.)
Lark's work emerges from abstract expressionism, as Kirkeby's does.
Like Kirkeby's, it extends the expressionist tradition in ways that leave
behind a simple assumption in the power of paint to express emotion. It
works to extend painting to places where the irreconcilable can be held in
view.

It was Redon who most explicitly conceptualized an art of extensions.


Calling his work "suggestive art," Redon spoke of creating images so as to
evoke thought and inquiry by the viewer: "My drawings inspire and do

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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.

Painting As Acceptance and Resistance


By looking under the light, critical theory of the last two decades has
changed the landscape in which painting is created and discussed. It is
now a landscape that is self-aware of the text and subtext of power rela-
tions pervading all of the visual arts. It is also, by comparison with the
first half of the century, a flatter and less colorful landscape. Text is privi-
leged over vision; discourse is privileged over presentation. Claims of self-
expression, authenticity, truth to the emotions, and spiritual discovery
either are not permitted or not believed. It is a no-nonsense place, and
along with the absence of nonsense there is very little mystery or inven-
tion as well.
What I have attempted to suggest here is that by considering painting
more fully as painting, not just as sign system or as an archaic system of
illusion, a more complete view of the landscape can be restored. Painting
can never again make blanket claims of self-expression; but to argue that
painting depended on this claim was to miss the point in the first place.

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Dan Nadaner

Painting carries on a complex relationship to experience, as memory, as


mark, as change, and as extension.
Painting accepts. It accepts the problems involved in the definition of
experience in the contemporary world. It accepts a medium (paint) that
does not speak, that is physically difficult to work with, as a means of pre-
sentation. Painting accepts the kinds of incommensurates, negations, and
transgressions to which critical theory calls attention. Painting offers a
view, perhaps the only view, of what these things look like.
Painting also resists. It resists what cool rationality insists it cannot do.
Faced with the impossibility of conveying experience, Murray or
Twombly or Kirkeby or Lark search, summon from memory, mark,
change, and extend their searches until improbable things are held up to
view. At the very least the unexpected is presented; at most, in the belief
of some viewers, the invisibles of human experience are conveyed. Because
these things happen in the paintings themselves, painting remains an irre-
placeable occasion of culture. At its best it has little in common with dis-
course and cannot be replaced by didactic statements, verbal or visual.

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.

To realize these possibilities of painting in the studio requires a trained


and deliberate attitude of openness. The teacher's capacity to model and

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Painting in an Era of Critical Theory

encourage exploration and openness is essential to the student's success in


pursuing discoveries and accepting them when they present themselves on
the canvas. Teachers must encourage students to take risks with their cri-
teria as well as their brushes if students are to allow the unexpected to
emerge. The practice of art criticism is a concrete means for secondary
teachers and students to develop a sensibility that is broad and open to
the possibilities of painting.
In 1985, I argued that art education should concern itself with the cri-
tique of media images, the expansion of multicultural imagery, and the
creation of inventive, non-stereotyped images. I still agree with this posi-
tion today. However, I believe that the creative dimension is suffering a
benign neglect and needs attention. There is a need to look critically at
arguments that would abruptly negate the creative possibilities of studio
work, or that argue that visual form does not have the capacity to repre-
sent experience. There is a need to relate creative practices like painting to
inquiries in critical theory. There is a need to engage actively in the cre-
ation of works that speak to contemporary experience. I believe that the
strengthening of the creative dimension is central to the development of
an art that is truly responsive to multicultural society.
To sustain the vitality of painting requires the maintenance of breadth
and quality in secondary and post-secondary studio programs, and the
active engagement of teachers in both practice and theory. What is at
stake is a central component of the humanities and its continuing contri-
bution to the quality of life of future generations.

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