[Note to the reader: This text was originally published in the now out-of-print book ”Studio Talks: Thinking Through Painting” published in 2014.]
In this text Jan Rydén [Bonmot] explores how to find a useful way of talking about painting’s medium specificity without being normative or limiting, and how that medium-specificity explains painting’s remarkable perseverence in contemporary art. He puts forward the idea that painting should be regarded as a field, or a nebulous entity with a strong nucleus and very diffuse boundaries. However, to pinpoint an essence might be impossible. The exact centre of gravity, the core of the matter, could well hover in the empty space between the different central parts. There are resemblances to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Family resemblance theory. These are discussed in the text, as well as the theories of embodied cognition (George Lakoff) , prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch ) and affordances (James J. Gibson) in conjunction to painting.
You find the text below as a downloadable PDF and as a blog post.
Overture
If you are a painter, why bother with contemporary painting
theory? It will in itself not make you paint better paintings. This can
only be achieved by the doing: honing your skills again and again. But
contemporary painting theory might have other advantages. It could
make it easier to discuss painting with your fellow painters. Like all
nerds, many painters take pleasure in delving in to the minute subtleties
of their medium. It might also make it easier to talk about your work
with the outside world, the non-painters.
* * *
Above all, I see an advantage with the practice and theory of painting
being discussed, re-defined and re-distributed, among painters themselves.
This will free them of the burden of having to react to theories
coming from the outside, or as it might feel, from above. Choosing not
to discuss painting’s role in contemporary art is also an active choice.
You run the risk of somebody else formulating the question, for lack of a
better word, that good art is supposed to answer.
I think few painters originally have discourse-driven practices. The
love of paint and painting most often comes before the words. But the
reception and evaluation of what we do can be discourse-driven. And
thoughts, ideas and concepts are of course of great importance to
many painters’ practices, and these ideas and concepts live in a discursive
ecology.
However interesting I might ind it to discuss why one paints, there
is a type of normative statement that has always irritated me a lot.
Someone might write: ‘after that article, argument, artwork, it was impossible
to continue painting… ’. These types of statements are all about
mistaking the map for the terrain. Of course, it was, and is, and will
always be possible to paint. The theory of painting might run into different
dead ends, but the practice of painting remains remarkably vital
over time, and if anything the number of painters in the world keep
increasing especially with the continuous addition of new art schools
around the globe.
What they are actually saying is something along the lines of: ‘according
to our theory of what makes painting important, it would seem
impossible, or at least completely unnecessary to make any more paintings
after that article, argument, artwork’. In such a situation, is it the
theories of painting that need to change, or the practice of painting?
In the case of painting, for some reason, normative statements on
painting often refer to Clement Greenberg. At least the reasoning starts
with Clement Greenberg, if only to emphatically refute his ideas on the
essence of painting. As if he were the year zero in painting theory. He
published his infamous essay Modernist painting in 1960. For the sake of
argument, or a good debate, these discussions are often reduced to an
either-or position. As André Rottman notes in his text Remarks on
Contemporary Painting’s Perseverance:
“For the longest time, the theory and practice of painting has been
organized, contained and propelled by a series of closely related antagonisms
– colour and contour, transparency and opacity, gesture and
facture, illusion and latness, semblance and objecthood, chroma and
contrast, chance and composition, mark making and the monochrome,
ostentatious virtuosity and anonymous execution, figuration and abstraction
– to name just a few.”1
* * *
A similar antagonism is whether painting is medium-specific or not,
an idea that seems closely related to Greenberg’s essentialist view on
painting. Without hesitation, I would argue that the notion of painting
being medium specific has been thoroughly discredited amongst art
theorists. Most critics and writers would not fail to mention Rosalind
Krauss’ text Sculpture in the expanded ield and the reasoning about other
art genres, painting included, which follow. Painting is also thought to
function in an expanded ield. Other texts that argue along the same
lines, only to mention a few recent ones, are Painting beside itself by David
Joselit, and our namesake Thinking Through Painting: Agency and Relexivity
beyond the Canvas by Isabelle Graw.
Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic understanding of art and especially
painting has come to represent Modernism with a capital M, even
though in reality there were many contradictory isms within modernism:
dada, surrealism, futurism, to name only a few. It seems that
Greenberg its nicely as a perfect monolithic counterpart to post-modernism.
Greenberg claimed that an artwork could be qualitatively good
only if it was autonomous, which was achieved by remaining true to
its medium, i.e. being medium specific. However, Clement Greenberg’s
definition of medium specificity is rather particular. He maintains
that within the Modernist project artists created artworks that were
more and more ‘about’ their own medium, one by one excluding traits
from the other arts. Painters emphasized latness, excluding perspective
(the domain of sculpture) and narrative (literature). This process also
showed that these elements were not essential to painting.3 By excluding
narration, figuration and perspective, you ended up with abstract
painting.
Critique of Greenberg has had two main ingredients. Firstly, the
aesthetic definition of art was considered having come to an end and
no longer being useful to understand the art of the time: e.g. minimalism,
happenings or conceptual pieces. Secondly, the aesthetic notion
of art was a part of a bourgeois ideology that many artists and theorists
wanted to question or attack. Conceptual art was among other things
a way to counteract the commodiication of art. By taking away the
material basis of an art piece, there was no object to sell. In some sense
post-modernism and conceptual art was also a direct extension of the
modernist idea of the avant-garde. To take art even further you had to
critique the institution of art itself. In the post-modernist context being
avant-garde equals performing institutional critique, whereas Greenberg’s
conception of avant-garde is linked to the idea of developing art,
in this case painting, within the limits of its medium. In his view, any
political power is rather a side effect of aesthetic innovation.
Today nobody would be caught dead saying the art of our time is
post-modern, however multiple the art scene might be. Instead, the
discourse has morphed into an even more vague notion: contemporary
art. The foundation of this notion is still very much based in the
post-Greenbergian shift to conceptualism in the late sixties. The value
of painting is still not considered to be linked to the actual medium.
“However, painting has long since left its ancestral home – that is, the
picture on the canvas – and is now omnipresent, as it were, and at work
in other art forms as well”.
If painting is omnipresent, everywhere, thus everything, is it
anything in particular? Clearly, this type of reasoning; that you cannot
define painting because its boundaries are diffuse, is untenable. At the
time, the post-modernist theorists argued that Greenberg’s notion of
medium specificity wasn’t useful as a way to understand contemporary
painting. Today one could argue that the post-modernist/conceptual/
contemporary art stance isn’t that useful to explain contemporary painting’s
continuous allure and perseverance within the world of contemporary
art.
To me as a painter the crux is the idea that painting shouldn’t be
thought of as medium specific has never rung quite true. I can follow
the reasoning in the essays mentioned above, but my experience
from my own physical reality tells another story. Especially, it tells me
another story of why painting as a practice continues to exist, and why
paintings continue to enthral us as viewers. In this case the medium is
certainly a large part of the message.
* * *
Defining without defining
It is pretty obvious that in the way we use the word painting
every day, it is medium specific. Of course, it is a tautology, since it is
the name of a medium. What we seem to need is a useful way of talking
about medium specificity that is neither normative nor limiting
and to avoid the cul-de-sac of Clement Greenberg, as well as some of
the more Orwellian versions of post-modernism. What annoys me with
the existing discussion is irst and foremost the disciplinarian ring that
statements based in Aristotelian definitions tend to have: if and only if
you accept that all Brillo Boxes are also paintings can we accept your
argument… Secondly, I am also annoyed by some of the nonsensical
and counter-intuitive conclusions this rigid reasoning leads to.
In the publication with the same name as our project Isabelle Graw
raises two interesting questions: “How do we explain painting’s remarkable
perseverance in the expanding ield of contemporary art? […]
How to determine a practice that renders impossible the rigorous distinction
between what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to it?”5 Both
questions are interesting, but we come up with quite different answers.
I will offer her answers, and elaborate a bit on my reasons for coming
to a different conclusion. The last question of how to define painting
is dependent on the view that one cannot rigorously distinguish what is
intrinsic to painting, and what is extrinsic to it. Painting, she says, is
omnipresent and at work in other art forms as well. But, is it anything
in particular? I think it is. So does Graw, intuitively I guess, but she
has to go out of her way to ind a definition that is acceptable. Graw’s
solution to the problem is to propose “that we conceive of painting not
as a medium, but as a production of signs that is perceived as highly
personalized.
Painting is indeed a nebulous ield, a practice that in every direction
vanishes into the hazy distance and blends into all surrounding ields of
visual communication. My point is that expanding a notion or making
its boundaries diffuse doesn’t necessarily make its core any less dense.
Lets play with the analogy that the idea of painting is some kind of
luffy, permeable entity with a strong nucleus. It is whatever is in the
nucleus that exerts the strongest gravitational pull on us. Not the luffy
stuff on the rim.
Defining literally means to ‘show the limits of something’, the
extent, the outline, where something ends, to follow it al ine. The avantgarde
has often looked for the limits of a scientiic or artistic ield.
Tongue in cheek one would be tempted to say that this way of defining
the ield of art or the ield of painting has ‘reached its limits’. What I
suggest is to look the other way, instead of looking for the outer limits
search for the inner nucleus.
I came up with an idea of a sort of connected or webbed thinking as
an image. I drew something like a mind map, but where the exact centre
of gravity, the core of the matter could hover in the empty space between
the different central parts. It is a visual way of defining something. In
this case, I wanted to define painting, but in a new way: inside out,
rather than the other way around. I was also looking for a way to say
something meaningful about a concept, or a genre, without being normative.
There would be no definite right or wrong, there would be a
centre, there would be more central and less central, but no rigorous distinction;
intrinsic or extrinsic.
There seem to be certain recurrent qualities that keep painting interesting
in an age when it had been discredited over and over again.
In and by themselves none of these would do as definitions of painting
as a genre, or as a full-blooded explanation of painting’s essence, in the
Greenbergian sense, but they nevertheless seemed closely related to our
common fascination for painting.
I had been toying around with this idea for quite a while and decided
to put it into words. At that time, I stumbled upon an article about an
exhibition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s photos and realized that he had
put forth a very similar idea with the notion of family resemblances, apparently
crucial to his later philosophy.7 Wittgenstein suggested that we
understand words
“…like members of the same family, they might have a series of similarities
and dissimilarities that overlap and criss-cross in various complicated
ways. Some Wittgensteins (such as Ludwig and his sisters) might
have the same nose, the same mouth, the same eyes but, say, different
foreheads. There need not be one thing that all members of the family
have in common.
* * *
The exhibition contained a composite photograph made up of four
portraits of Wittgenstein and his three sisters, enabling the viewer to see
their strong family resemblance. However, Wittgenstein’s most famous
example is games. He tries different features that could be common
to all practices we call games: winning and losing, amusing, competition, skill
and luck. But he dismisses them one by one since they are true to some
games but not to other games. Similarities crop up and disappear.
Instead he sees a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of
detail”. Interestingly Wittgenstein encourages us to “look, not think”.9
What he says is that even though it is impossible to define games in the
conventional way, we don’t need such a strict definition. We already use
the word successfully. The same would of course be true for a concept
such as painting. For every individual painting a list of features or qualities
would of course differ slightly. A tentative list of painting’s family
resemblances could look something like this: colour, pigment, binding
medium, surface, form, image, texture, body of paint, perspective, concept,
content etc. Wittgenstein’s family resemblances were introduced
to the discussion of art by Morris Weitz’s claim that art should be considered
an open concept.
The argument goes that art cannot be defined
in a conventional manner, because there is always the possibility that a
new entity will appear on the art scene. There is no one common property
to all art, only strands of similarities. An act of judgement will be
needed to decide if this new entity has enough similarities with what we
call art to be included in the family of art.
An idea that is similar to Wittgenstein’s family resemblance and
my metaphor of the gravitational ield is Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory,
equally applicable to our discussion. Instead of using a model based
on definition, (necessary and suficient conditions), Rosch claimed that
each category consisted of elements of differing status. This led her to a
graded notion of categories; in the category bird, a robin would be more
central than for example a penguin. A traditional definition might
have gone along the lines of a bird fulilling the conditions of having
wings, a beak, feathers and the ability to fly.
In our discussion, painting could be seen as a prototype. Colours
could also be seen as prototypes. Coming from a professional background
as an editor and writer before going to art school, the relation
between words and colour has always held a special tension to me. If
we substitute the questions, ‘What is art?’ or ‘What is painting?’ with
the question ‘What is red?’ we would be able to make a number of observations.
First of all, red is just as abstract an idea as art or painting.
We would be hard pressed to suggest the exact point where red ends
and orange begins. We would define, or name, certain colours as red
or orange depending on what we compare them with. Pure spectral
colours form a continuous spectrum. Another take on the relation
between colour and language would be Isaac Newton’s. By using a
prism, he showed it was possible to disperse seemingly colourless light
into separate colours. He originally divided the rainbow into ive colours:
red, yellow, green, blue and violet. He later added orange and
indigo to make the number of colours seven, out of a belief that there
was a connection between the number of colours and the number of
musical notes. Today, scientists do not see more than six main colours.
Orange is still there, but indigo has vanished from the rainbow. Or is
it cyan? Apparently, in Newton’s day blue was closer to what we today
might call cyan. It has been suggested that what we define as blue today
was then seen as two colours: blue and indigo. It certainly has a poetic
ring to it that the blues we see in the sky have drifted and shifted through
the centuries. The rainbow isn’t the same these days. Or is it?
If we transfer this reasoning to painting, we would be hard pressed to
draw a line where painting ends. Individual works of art would be possible
to define as belonging to painting or not, depending on; on the one
hand what we compare them to, on the other hand our everyday use of
language, in Newton’s case the word blue, in this case the word painting.
* * *
An endnote: Painting as embodied cognition
So, if i were to return to the question of why painting has such
remarkable allure and perseverance within the world of contemporary
art I would not end up outside the canvas or painted surface, I would
end up in the actual body of paint itself. I believe paintings get a lot
of their magic from the fact that we go back and forth between seeing
them as images, windows into another world, and as objects and surfaces
with a bodily, leshy presence in the room. Like Wittgenstein’s famous
and ambiguous image of the duck-rabbit. We licker between the
different aspects not only of the image, but also between the painting
as body or as pure content.
The reason that this attracts us might be that painting is closely
related to how we think: in metaphors and images that arise from our
bodily experiences. Cartesian dualism has given western thought two
basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied
and reason is transcendent and universal. As if by chance, if we look for
an alternative to this idea we again ind ourselves among Eleanor Rosch
and her colleagues. Her graded notion of categories is central to many
models of cognitive science and cognitive semantics, most famously in
the work of George Lakoff. As a proponent of the idea of embodied cognition
he has shown that not only is the mind connected to the body, but
that the mind arises from the nature of our brains, bodies and bodily
experiences.
To understand reason we must understand our visual system
and our sensorimotor system. Sensory inputs and motor outputs,
movement, gesture, are integral to cognitive processes. This also entails
that reason itself isn’t passionless and conscious but emotional, embodied
and mostly unconscious.
Semantics arise from the nature of the
body. If reason isn’t based on abstract laws, because cognition is grounded
in bodily experience, this puts a new twist to the relation between
language and painting, and why paintings seem so meaningful to us.
If we do not have a faculty of reason that is separate from our faculties
of perception and bodily movement, the split between perception and
conception is less clear.
A painting, or any other external representation, provides affordances
that internal representations, and concepts lack. Affordance is a term
coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. He defined it as ‘action possibilities’
latent in a specific object, in our case a painting, and our in the
environment. Affordances are measurable and independent of an individual’s
ability to recognize them, but always in relation to an agent’s
capabilities. A typical example would be a child’s reaction to a light of
stairs versus an adult’s. An extended notion of perceived affordances also
includes an agent’s goals, plans, values, beliefs, and past experiences.
This idea of affordances provided by external representations seems related
to Wittgenstein’s emphasis on seeing. A core feature of Wittgenstein’s
philosophy is what he calls the understanding, which consists in seeing
connections. And seeing is not meant metaphorically, but literally.17
External representations help us think thoughts we couldn’t come
up with by pure thinking. I believe that is what Wittgenstein meant
by telling us not to think but to look. Any kind of external representation
of an idea, such as a teapot, would of course provide affordances.
However, since our internal representations are images and metaphors,
images form a very special category of external representation.
The typical approach in cognition literature is that an agent is confronted
with a pre-existing environment or an object, which provides
the affordances. For me as a painter in the act of painting, the notion of
affordances would be different. At the same time as the painter places
another brushstroke on the painting’s surface he or she does two things:
creates an external representation of an internal one, and also creates
new affordances to be recognized, laying down new latent ‘action possibilities’.
It’s like a dance with two partners taking turns leading. By
observing the changes in the painting, new possibilities arise. We can
see anew.
Jan Rydén is an artist who lives and works in Stockholm . [He took the name Jan Rydén Bonmot in 2022]
Footnotes:
1. André Rottmann. “Introduction. Remarks on Contemporary Painting’s
Perseverence”, in Thinking Through Painting, Eds. Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum,
Nikolaus Hirsch. Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2012, p.9
2. Håkan Nilsson, Clement Greenberg och hans kritiker, Stockholm: Stockholms
universitet, 2000, pp.193-197.
3. Ibid. p.95
4. Isabelle Graw, “Agency and Relexivity beyond the Canvas” Thinking Through
Painting: Agency and Relexivity beyond the Canvas eds. Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum,
Nikolaus Hirsch. Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2012.
5. Ibid
6. Loc. cit
7. Ray Monk, “Ludwig Wittgenstein’s passion for looking, not thinking: Ray Monk
decodes the philosophy in the philosopher’s photographs”, New Statesman 15 August,
2012.
8. Loc. cit
9. “For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities,
relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953, § 66
10. The Role of Theory in Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 15 1956,
pp. 27-35; reprinted in P. Lamarque and S. H. Olsen (eds), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of
Art: The Analytic Tradition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004
11. Daniel A. Kaufman “Family resemblances, relationalism and the meaning of ‘art’”,
British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol 47, No 3, July 2007
12. Prototype theory Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype(linguistics).
Date of access 2014-04-03
13. Georg Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its
,Challenge to Western Thought. New York, Basic Books, 1999, p. 5
14. Loc. cit
15. Ibid. p. 37
16. “Affordance” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#cite_note-1,
2014-04-03
17. Ray Monk, “Ludwig Wittgenstein’s passion for looking, not thinking: Ray Monk
decodes the philosophy in the philosopher’s photographs”, New Statesman 15 August
2012 or Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishing, 1953,
2001, p. 122
Jan Rydén Bonmot 