SOME CURRENT PROBLEMS WITH PAINTING

by

Andy Patton

Department of VisuaI Arts

Submitted in partial hrlfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Faculty of Graduate Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario December, 1996

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This essay examines several problems in contemporary painting, beginning with the question of painting's real or imagined centrality within the visual arts. The question then asked is whether or not there is anvthing fundamental which distinguishes painting from the other arts, by looking at the example set in sculpture by Richard Serra.The conclusion reached, in opposition to Serra, is that what distinguishes painting are its conventions, following the work by the critic, Yve-Alain Bois, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Painting's convention of frontality is examined in some detail, and as well, certain problems which currently mark some of the practice of painting: the fact of painting being a commodity, the notion that painting is dead or dying, and the homelessness of contemporary painting.

Kevwords: Sartz, Serra, Greenberg, Bois, Comerton, Wittgenstein, Kosuth, Ayearst, Eckart, Commodity, Conventions, Homelessness, Abstraction, Easel Painting. Acknowledgements

I would Like to thank Professor Mark Cheetham, my friend as well as my thesis advisor, who not only guided me through the process of writing and preparing this thesis, but has been (as usual) UnfailingIy generous in his support, his criticism, and his commitment both to my own art work and to contemporary art in general. I would also like to thank Professor Sheila Butler, with whom I had the opportunity to study both the practice of painting and the writings of several contemporary painters. This thesis emerged, in part, from our many discussions. Thanks too are owed to the artists Yam Lau and Sheila Ayearst, who gave permission for their works to be reproduced here. Contents

Page Certificate of Examination ii

Abstract and keywords iii

Acknowledgements iv

Table of Contents v

List of Plates vi

Introduction

1 The Centrality of Painting

Z Richard Serra and Fundamental Sculpture

3 How Fundamental are the Fundamentals?

4 Frontality and Address

5 The Painting as a Commodity

6 The Homelessness of Contemporary Painting

7 Is Painting Dead?

8 The Lesson of Ferrara

Endnotes

Bibliography

Appendix

Vita List of Plates

Rate Description Page

"The Civil Ordering of Night" (detail: north wall) 89 Andy Patton, 1996, acrylic on wall, painted area 14' tall, each wall 49'6" long. at ArtLab, University of Western Ontario.

"The Civil Ordering of Night" (detail: west wall) 90 Andy Patton, 1996, acrylic on wall, painted area 14' tall, each wall 49'6" long. at ArtLab, University of Western Ontario.

"Barragon" Andy Patton, 1996, acrylic on concrete, two walls, each painted area 5' x 20'. At loading dock of John Labatts Visual Arts Building, University of Western Ontario.

"Blue Folds", Yam Lau, 1996, lacquer on aluminum, 60" x 78".

Uccello frescoes in situ, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. 93 (Photo by Andy Patton.)

"The 401 towards London: View", Sheila Ayearst, 1992 94 oil on canvas, 72" x 96". Some Current Problems with Painting

Introduction

"Ei7ery illiterate, rlncultured dingbat (rich or not) knows that paintings are

mf." -\osep h Kos rl th

Since I began to work as an artist in the late 70s, painting has been pronounced dead at least twice, then been declared born again-or at least has Lurched out of the grave. Yve-Ahin Bois obsemes that even if it's not dead, its dying is being perpetually played out:' for painting's detractors, the last two decades must have been Like watching an endless film loop of "Night of the Living Dead." But the obvious question to ask is, why of all the arts, is it only painting that is imagined to be dying? Why should only painting be in need of some act of cultural euthenasia? What's so important about painting relative to other arts? Why is painting imbued with a special status even by its enemies? This thesis is in part an attempt to come to some understanding of this apparent "special statusw-though I should say at the outset that 1 regard it as foolish. But foolish or not, it has become part of painting's condition, part of what perpetuates a sort of stalemate for painting. As long as painting remains content to be supported by this special status, it remains cemented in place, confined by the repetition of conventions long since grown stale, conventions it must unceasingly reiterate. So I'd Like to look briefly at this special status accorded to painting. My other goal is simply to collect my thoughts about what painting is, to sort out at least provisionally what, if anything, it is Jundamentdly. I do this in the hope that this can provide some sort of vision of what might be possible for painting beyond this mere repetition of conventions. You might think of this as a kind of painter's housework, one more periodic dusting-off of the conventions. In beginning my housework, I'U look briefly at the example set by Richard Serra, who took the feather duster to sculpture's conventions, and in so doing, sorted out what sculpture can be that would not be dependent on other languages, other arts. I then go on to look at the question of how fundamental these things are which appear to be fundamental. Finally, I propose certain things that I believe are fundamental to the enterprise of painting at this moment, though none of these should be taken as anything more than provisional conclusions. When 1 wrote on Wanda Koop's paintings several years ago, 1 related how she thought of her paintings as like words which could be brought together to form different sentences, and also that I couldn't see her work that way. I wrote then that "how an artist thinks of her work doesn't have to be accurate; it is only a tool that helps in making the work. Only part description, it is partly an armat~re."~Much the same thing can be said of this: in the end, I'm writing it to dear a space for myself to work in. Yet there's nothing written here that I did not believe at the time 1 wrote it? Perhaps it's only the illusion of truth that can make space for a new kind of work. I don't want to suggest however that what a critic or an art-historian writes is somehow objective where an artist's writing is subjective, that one is closer to the truth than another. I suspect that we read each writing differently: with an art historian's writing we can more convincingly create the illusion of objectivity about the work through a willing suspension of disbelief: that allows us to arrive at the truth of the work. With an artist, we can have a more convincing illusion of subjectivity, or of a writing emerging directly from the material and labour of the artwork. But all interpretation is just that: interpretation. It's not the material thing; and there's always a gap between words and things. The artwork is something never-to-be-settled-something that is obviously not simply interpretation, but it's not the thing either. It biurs and wobbles somewhere in between and is never fixed and never has a position that can be known. About the artwork, we can never have knowledge: but the illusion that we can draws us forward. I. The Centrality of Painting

If painting were dead, or dying, at this moment it nonetheless would seem to be flourishing. Ignorant of its demise, painters continue to paint and exhibit:' To speak just of Toronto: in the early 805, Joanne Tod, Will Gorlitz, Oliver GirLing, Andy Fabo, and a host of others were seen as constituting a return to painting. After that period, when painting was once again alleged to have died, there was another outburst of vigour. The big extravaganza exhibition of 1994-the latest in a series of huge artist-initiated shows that announce to Toronto what's current in art this year-was "The Mud Show: An Exhibition of Contemporary ~aintin~."'Pnin t ing Disorders-- which to many observers including myself has been the most interesting and most focused of the many collectives which has sprung up here in the last decade-is, as their name suggests, a group of painters6. The recent "Perspectives" exhibition at the AGO, which annually introduces younger artists to a broad public, was made up this year entirely of painters: Eric Glavin, Steven Shearer, Angela Leach, and Cora Cluett. The single new artist whose work made the strongest impression on me in the last three or four years is Yam Lau, a painter. (Of course, you could say that I'm a painter, hence my interest in another painter. But how would you then explain the installation artist, Gordon Lebredt's, interest in Lau's work?) There's been a lot of interest in the paintings of David Urban, the Jared Sable Gallery's new start. The problem is, though, that these impressions remain merely anecdotal. Until recently, there was no hard data: no one had done the work of keeping track of exactly what kinds of work are being exhibited, a sort media census of the art scene. Fortunately, this finally was accomplished when Jerry Saltz wrote an important article for Artforum, "A Year in the Life: Tropic of ~aintin~'"--thou~hunfortunately his survey was only able detail what occurred that season in New York. Sartz begins with the obvious point that "for a medium supposedly on the wane, painting was certainly in evidence last year"%nd he goes on to provide statistical evidence of exactly how often painting was exhibited in the New York gallery scene during the 19934994 season. From early September 1993 through early July 1994, I kept track of all the shows in 85 New York Galleries: some uptown, some midtown, the majority in SoHo, nearly all of them listed in the Gallery Gtr ide, and a LI regularly exhibiting contemporary art. Charting their monthly shows on a large five-page, color-coded graph, I counted and tracked 610 exhibitions. Of these 240 (or 39.34 percent) were solo painting shows by living artists. If two-person or group painting shows, museum shows and exhibitions of deceased painters are added, the number grows to nearly 50 percent, with the remaining exhibitions divided between sculpture, photography, video, gallery group shows, theme shows, and sundry installation^.^

What's striking is that if you realize that the gallery group shows and theme shows must have included some painters some of the time-and very likelv, ittost of the time-then painting must have accounted for over half of the exhibitions at the galleries Sartz watched. This would mean that one art form-painting-accounted for more than half of all the exhibitions in those eighty-five NYC galleries. Painting then, was more prevalent than all other lzrt nredin put fogether: a fact which took me by surprise, though I was not surprised to find that painting was the most e-xhibited form. When Sartz looks in detail at the exhibition records of the more powerful galleries the same pattern emerges:

Look at some of the big galleries: nine out of ten shows at Gagosian's uptown gallery were devoted to painting... Six out of eight shows at Robert Miller, six of seven at Emmerich, three of five at Mary Boone, and five of seven at Pace's downtown gallery were painting shows. Tony Shafrazi showed only paintings, while a number of galleries exhibited almost only painting: Jason McCoy, Frumkin/Adams, Pamela Achincloss, John Good, David Beitzel and M-13. A very cuttingedge gallery like Feature had paintings up in every one of its shows aU year.L0

Of that group, the lowest percentage of painting shows was Mary Boone's, at 60% of her exhibition season! The problem with statistics, of course. is with their interpretation. "What do these numbers tell us?" asks Sartz. His conclusion? "Like it or not, they say that painting is still the main currency of the art world (which is probably why people get so worked up over it). While the current house style of the art world is late-late Conceptual art, if you go even slightly outside the art world, painting is still art's ambassador."" I find little to disagree with here: his study seems to fit with my own sense of both the New York art scene and Toronto's (the only two I know well enough to have any sort of opinion about). Certainly, though, these numbers collected by Sartz suggest that painting is the most-exhibited form of art at this point in time, just as it was, in all probability, in the New York of the 1940s. What seems likely-but again, there are no records that would verify this contention-is that although painting is still the dominant form, it has become less prevalent than it was, largely because of the advent of newer forms such as video, installation, and computer art, and the acceptance of photography as an art and as an avant-garde practice." These have cut into painting's "market share. " But if they have put in a dent in painting's dominance, they have obviously not put an end to it. t seems probable that Sartz's statistics may disclose something more. When one considers that the "big galleries" all exhibited painting more of rrt than the roughly 50% of exhibitions Sartz noted across the galleries surveyed, it may well be that the economic basis for their power is based on exhibiting (and selling) painting. Mary Boone, for example, built her gallery's economic and taste-making clout in the early 80s through her representation of paintersjulian Schnabel, Ross Bleckner, Brice Marden, Eric Fischl, to name only a few. I should point out as well that the gallery began to represent a more conceptually-oriented artist like Sherrie Levine at a time when she'd begun to produce paintings-watercolours, casein on panel, and gold-leaf on plywood. Boone's business alliance with the Michael Werner Gallery was one forged with a German gallery who at that point represented only painters. The obvious point to make is that the marketplace for artworks priced at over forty or fifty thousand dollars was, and still is, primarily a market for painting. From where else could the economic power flow? The few galleries that restricted themselves to sculpture for example, such as Oil and Steel in New York, were, whatever their merit, simply not on the same plane as far as both real and perceived art world power go. The second point to be made is that Sartz's article looked at the exhibition season "from early September 1993 through early July 1994." This period comes after the artworld boom during the Reagan years, and after the bust of the 89-91 recession, in which many New York galleries closed, artists' prices dropped like anvils tossed from windows, and careers went belly-up. One of the artistic costs of this recession, or of the boom-and-bust mentalitv, was that the market for art which had been fairly receptive to forms other than painting-notab ly commodity-sculptures, such as those by Haim Steinbach or Jeff Koons, and photoworks, such as those by Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, or a plethora of German photographers-closed back in on what was always its most stable commodity: painting- So it's possible that Sartz's findings would have been less strongly oriented towards painting if his survey had been done somewhere between 1985 and 1989. Sartz's study can also be taken-with caution-as suggestive of what art forms are being produced in artists' studios, though there are two very different directions in which it could be interpreted. The most obvious is to suggest that what is exhibited roughly mirrors what is being produced. Thus it could be argued that painting is Likely the most-produced art form. (And mv experience, which is of course, not objective at all, tells me that this is the case.) The other way to take it is to note that Sartz was looking at commercial galleries in New York, and was excluding the most experimental of artists' outlets, ignoring, obviously, galleries specializing in video performance or computer art (since those from the outset do not exhibit painting and would therefore lie outside Sartz's intended survey of painting over a one year period.) This, in turn, would suggest two things. First, that if one surveyed all outlets of every type, the apparent dominance of painting would be diminished. Second, that the commercial nature of the galleries surveyed necessarily skews things towards painting-because painting sells. In the early 80s Joseph Kosuth said: "Let's talk about money. The art market, which by nature is conservative-particularly in this country-loves paintings. Every illiterate, uncultured dingbat (rich or not) knows that paintings are art, are great investments, and look swell over the couch. Forget whatever historical necessity was thoughtfully felt by some artists for a return to painting; the market is delighted to have paintings hip again .... Once, the idea of art historical importance stabilized the market value of an artist's work, but prices no longer reflect this-how could they? Now they reflect speculation on short-term market scarcity, and the mode of painting is ideally suited to marketing scarcity."13 I believe that this observation is stiIl accurate. As 1 wrote elsewhere, "painting has maintained its market and symbolic centrality, even if sculpture and especially, photographic works, have become much more prominent than they were when Kosuth wrote his articie."l4 If painting has a speaal status, then it must be given by the marketplace. Or else, it's simply that it's the most popular medium among artists. Or else it's the preferred medium because it's central to the marketplace. Or else it's the preferred medium for artists, and the favourite t'om for the marketplace because every dingbat knows that paintings are art. To briefly summarize: it seems Likely that painting is the most exhibited t'o rm of art today; also it's Likely the most prevalent medium, the one most likely for an artist to work in. Then painting's centrality is "real"15in this sense: it's probably the most common form for art. But this "real" centrality rests on another way in which painting is central: it is the form most favoured by the market. These must condition each other and reinforce each other in a feedback loop of sorts: the market likes paintings, so artists produce paintings; artists are most likely to produce paintings, so galleries are most Likely to exhibit and sell them. But all of these "real" ways in which painting is central also rest on a purely symbolic centrality that painting is imbued with: somewhere along the line, an equation has been made between painting and art. Painting signifies "Art" with a capital "A" in a way in which, say, a video-installation does not. Both are art works, yet one has come to stand for the entire field, where the other only represents itself. Is it any surprise painting has become a lightning rod of sorts? Artists in other media should rightfully resent nt Ienst this symbolic centrality because it displaces towards the margin all the other media. And similarly, any attack on art as an institution will be forced to rritiaze painting first and foremost because of that equation. Perhaps the symbolic centrality given painting is the outcome of the scandal of modernism that served to raise the profile of art since 1850 or so. Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism were all styles of painting that inflamed the public. "Modem Art," said in that derogatory, mocking tone of voice, is probably aimed most accurately at the works of Picasso or Mondrian, and at the figures of Picasso or Pollock. ALI painters. Does Modernism equal painting? It seems to me that it is seen to: otherwise it would make no sense for Sherrie Levine to say about her paintings that they "are about death in a way; the uneasy death of m~dernism.'~"If painting and modernism had not become equated, or at least thoroughly entangled with each other's fates, dealing with the end of modernism would not require painting at all1'. Yve-Aiain Bois writes that "one can take abstract painting as the emblem of rnoderni~m."'~Thus the fate of our period, the period which is either coming to an end or from which we are struggling to escape, and the fate of painting, are one and the same- It's as though painting, like some dragon, must be slain so that the future can be born. (This is the point that Bois makes: that modernism "could not have functioned without an apocalyptic myth," and that painting-specifically, abstract painting-was to be the agent of this myth. "Freed from all extrinsic conventions, abstract painting was meant to bring forth the pure pnrozisin of its own essence, to tell the final tn~th and thereby terminate its co~rse")'~ Painting then has both a "real" and a symbolic centrality--though these are not necessarily permanent, even within western culture. They are simplv part of the history and condition we know as "modernism." It's entirely possible that they will evaporate-or are evaporating-as we move out of those conditions, that period of history. What a "non-central" painting might mean remains to be seen, unless of course we are beginning to see the first faint glimmers of it in the deliberately "failed" paintings of artists such as Jonathon Lasker or, closer to home, someone like Eric Glavin. Either way, I look forward to it, since from my vantage point, it looks as if the privilege accorded to painting was also a prison of forms". 2. Richard Serra and Fundamental Sculpture

"Tlrr ioork I make does not allow for experience outside the cunoentions 4 scdptnre ns sculpture. ,,2 1 -Richard Serrcz

It's precisely because painting's privilege looks Like a prison to me that Richard Serra's work has become increasingly important for me-even though I dislike certain aspects of his work and his thought, even though I'm certain that he would find my wall paintings to be something like "subservient to architecture" and, therefore, thoroughly disagreeable. If it seems a bit odd for an essay on painting to shift so quickly into dealing with .I sculptor, it makes sense to me simply because sculpture, in comparison with painting, is fairly marginal. As Serra says, "I know that there is absolutely no audience for sculpture, as there is none For poetry or experimental film."" Sculpture lacks the privilege and centrality accorded to painting, and as a result, as a field it perhaps allows a somewhat greater freedom for exploring rather than simply repeating its conventions. (Of course this reveals that I'm turning a blind eye to the thoroughly wretched parade of public sculpture dumped in public spaces in Toronto.) What's been important for me is Serra's constant insistence on sculpture as a lang~ageor a discipline of its own-one not identical with architecture (with which he's often at war) or drawing (which he seems to treat sometimes as a tool to use in clarifying his thinking about space, and at other times as a discipline of its own?) Perhaps I can say that Serra's work would be valuable to me even if it demonstrated nothing but being the fact of being disciplined: I think it shows a rigour which is largely lacking in painting at the moment. (Which is not to say that I accept Serra's work or discipline in precisely the terms in which he seems to set it out.) In the end, though, what value is just this-that in trying to sort out what was fundamental to sculpture, Serra freed himself from having to make "sculpture." That is, his work seemed to be heed from having to recapitulate endlessly a long series of norms and conventions for sculpture that no longer had arty relevance for him? Painting is in need of something similar. Not that this process will result in finding out what "really" constitutes painting; but it's a sort of necessary illusion. In trying to sort out what painting is hdamentally, painting will get no doser to the truth of what it is-but perhaps it can wiggle free for a moment of a herd of unnecessary assumptions about itself, assumptions which are simply carried forward unquestioningly and repeated in the day-to-day practice of painting. SU turn then to the example of Serra.to see what he understands as fundamental to sculpture, and remembering that these form the foundations of his work. The first point, which really is somewhat prior to anvthing substantive about sculpture, is simply the notion that it is not identical with any other art. There are examples of this scattered throughout his writings and interviews, but I'll cite one as characteristic of this emphasis. Here's his reply to a question lrom Bernard Lamarche-Vadel in 1980:~

BL-V: How did you extend sculptural problems into video and film?

RS: I did not extend sculptural problems into film or video. I began to make sculptures, film, and video at about the same time, so it can't be a question of developing one form into the other. My involvement with different media is based on the recognition of the different material capacities and it is nonsense to think that film or video can be sculptural?

This labour of "distinction," of refusal, is important, whether you regard its content as true or not. Serra is determined not to allow a particular domain- -sculpture-to be elided, to slide away and blur into the domains of other arts. The influence of Clement Greenberg must be obvious here-both in the idea that the concerns of sculpture are not shared with other media, and in the philosophically richer belief that there is something "proper1'to a specific medium. It's ironic, then, to realize that Greenberg did not consider Serra to be a sculptor at all?' For the moment, though, I don't want to delve into the larger question of whether or not there are things fundamental to sculpture or any other kind of art; I simply want to explore Serra's understanding. If the arts are different because of their "different material capacities," then what material capacities distinguish scuipture? Gravity of course is crudal. (The following sequence of questions and answers is from an interview with Peter Eisenman conducted with serra?)

RS: I use gravity as building principle. I am not particularly interested in disequilibrium.

PE: But for you gravity also has formal overtones of convention.

RS: No. Gravity has also been a problem in sculpture. How that problem is resolved is part of any definition of making sculpture.

As Serra suggests, a concern with gravity is nothing new to sculpture; all scdphtre must necessarily deal with it in some way. What's important to note here is not that Serra's work must deal with gravity, but that his works often result from relying on gravity to create structures. The One Ton Prop (often called The House of Cards-though not by Serra) relies on the famiIiar "house of cards" structure in which four steel plates lean against each other much as cards wodd. The pull of gravity, oddly enough, is what keeps the four steel plates upright. He says of the Skrrflcrncker stacked works he did in the yard of Kaiser Steel: "The problem: to avoid architectonic structure, i.e. to allow the work to be both dense, loose, and balanced. Work that both tended upward and collapsed downward to the ground simultaneously was

And if gravity is crucial to sculpture, then weight (which can only be divided off from gravity in language) is crucial as well. In fact, it is weight is the only aspect of sculpture to which Serra devoted an essay. When he writes of it, he's insistent that, obviously, all sculpture has weight and must inevitably deal with it, emphasizing it or attempting to deny or mitigate it. Predictably, Serra is on the "weighty" side of weight.

Weight is a value for me, not that it is any more compelling than lightness, but I simply know more about weight than lightness and therefore 1 have more to say about it ....I have more to say about the history of sculpture as a history of weight, more to say about the monuments of death, more to say about the weight and density and concreteness of countless sarcophagi, more to say about burial tombs, more to say about Michelangelo and Donatello, more to say about Mycenaean and Incan architecture, more to say about the weight of OLmec heads.."

And he goes on to speak of "the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight, the addition and subtraction of weight, the concentration of weight, the rigging of weight, the propping of weight, the locking of weight, the psychological effects of weight, the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight, the rotation of weight, the movement of weight, the directionality of weight, the shape of weightw3' in what really amounts to a hymn of praise. It's clear too that for Serra, sculpture is spatial-though this is never stated explicitly as a principle. Still, it keeps popping up throughout his various writings and interviews. 'l'm interested in the particular relationships that I conceive of to be sculptural in a given context," he says, "and in pointing to whatever the manifestations of those sculptural attributes are. There's a difference between walking into a telephone booth and a football stadium. If you take those two extremes and make the idea verv subtle, then you can say there's a difference between walking to the left and walking to the right, between the experience of something concave and something convex, between something leaning right and something leaning left."" Of Newman's Zim Zlim, Serra says:

My problem with the Newman is that it functions more like architecture in that it doesn't hold the volume of the space between the vertical elements. I've made pieces that you can walk through and it's always been my concern to try to make the interior of those spaces different in kind and substance and feeling and emotion than you would anticipate. The thing about the Newman piece is that it attempts to do that architecturally. I'm more interested to take a volume and make it resound as content.... It may be that his concerns were more visual, less to do with how you feel in the space than how A,. you perceive space." Whatever the differences between Newman and Serra's sculptures then, space is of fundamental importance.w Gravity, weight, space-all these would suggest a sculpture that exists prettv well on its own terms, quite apart from the physical concerns of the other arts, with the exception of architecture in the passage above. (As though only architecture threatened to encroach upon sculpture's domain.) By and large, those properties, which are clearly important to Serra's work, are stated positively, as though the understanding is that they are inherent in the making of sculpture. But that reference to architecture is also characteristic and suggests quite the opposite-that sculpture can only be detined negatively, in the attempt to withdraw it horn what other media are. [t would then be not a positive something, but a resistance to or a difference tiom other arts. And early on in his career, Serra was busy trying to distinguishing it, not from architecture, but from painting and photography. In 1970, in only his second published writing, "Play It Again, ~arn,""he wrote that "A recent problem with the lateral spread of materials, elements on the floor in the visual field, is the inability of this landscape mode to avoid arrangement qua figure ground: the pictorial convention." Sculpture, then, is not-pictorial. This is carefully worked out in a passage that seems to be criticizing the sculpture of both Anthony Caro and Carl Andre, though without mentioning them by name:

Solving the problem of the base has been cruaal to the development of sculpture. Some recent work attempts to circumvent or camouflage this dilemma by constructing a series of points (surrogate bases) within the work which can support the lateral members splayed out above them. This is redundant, for if the floor actually functions as a base, there is no need to construct such surrogate bases within the work to make the floor appear to hction structurally. The debt of such solutions to pictorial conventions is obvious. When pieces are viewed from above, the floor functions as a field or ground for the deployment of decorative Linear and planar elements. The concern with horizontality is not so much a concern for lateral extension as it is a concern with painting. Lateral extension in this case allows sculpture to be viewed pictorially-that is, as if the floor were the canvas plane. It is no coincidence that most earthworks are photographed from the air. The crucial problems confronting sculpture today are the avoidance of the concerns properly kionging to architecture and painting, which, as Barbara Rose has indicated, have produced in the name of sculpture, so much failed architecture and three-dimensional painting. Limitations of weight, physical properties and materials cannot be imagined?

By comparison, sculpture-as Serra's emphasis on gravity, weight, and space suggests--would be an art thoroughly mired in exactly those "limitations of weight, physical properties and materials" that he says "cannot be imagined" bv a pictorial consciousness. It is the illusionism, or virtuality, of pictorial arts which cause them not to be limited in this way, yet this, according to Serra, is not a freedom &om constraint, but rather a very abstract relationship to the material world. For Serra, this critique of pictorialism has consequences that extend hr beyond a simple emphasis on things such as weight If sculpture is non- pictorial, then it is clearly not something that can be experienced, as a photograph is taken, from one position. And this makes sculpture radically temporal. Serra insists on this in an interview with Douglas crimp3':

RS: What most people know of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example, is an image shot from a helicopter. When you actually see the work, it has none of that purely graphic character, but then almost nosne really has seen it. In fact, it has been submerged since shortly after its completion.

DC: But much of what we do know of the entire world we know through photographs. I think that Smithson's work shows a consciousness of the photographic in general.

RS: If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're only passing on the residue of your concerns. You're denying the temporal experience of the work. You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but vou're denying the real content of the work. At least with most ;culpture, the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience ot the work is a deception. There's a lot here which is valuable for me. First, Serra's insistence on zcnle. For him (and perhaps I can say in this context, "for sculpture,") anything which alters the scale of the work is destructive to the specifiaty of the work-and Serra points out that this process of abstraction is accomplished for the purposes of the consumption of the work. Secondly, he places a great emphasis on the experience of the work in time-which the photograph destroys. And thirdly, this sense of lived temporality is also tied to an emphasis on the place of the work. If Serra can say that "apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception," then the truth of sculpture is an experience of placement. All of these, taken together, are crucial to his work-and crucial too, to any artist or viewer who wanted an un-abstracted relation to an artwork or by extension, to this world. Sculpture photographed is, for Serra, a form of false consciousness-since it leaves one with the impression of having a knowledge or experience of the work which one does not in fact have at all. The destruction of the specificities of scale, time, and place leave almost nothing of the concrete work behind. I have great respect for this, for a commitment to the the specifics of a work which are not replaceable by anything else. Serra's work (and I mean to take as his work both his sculpture and the writings and inte~iewsthat prepare the ground for them and reflect on them) is nothing else but an insistence on singularity. This extends even to questions about the viewer, in which Serra is explicit in asserting in his writing about the StJohn 's Ratnrll Arc (1980) that 'the driver' and 'the pedestrian' as viewers of the Arc, are fictions."" Because each viewer-or in this case, each driver passing around the Arc-is singular, and goes thrcugh a precise experience of the work which cannot be known beforehand, no generalized entity like "the viewer" exists.39 This emphasis on the experiencing of the work by a viewer means that the emphasis (for the artist constructed a work) has somehow shifted a certain amount from being entirely on the work as a delimited object ("from the work as a noun.'*" I could say) to something which occurs in the reception of that object by a viewer?' It seems to lead to a sculpture that is discontinuous-since at any one moment, or from any one position, the sculptural object will appear quite different from the same object seen at a different time, position, or rate of speed. And of course, Serra's work plays on these discontinuities increasing as he becomes increasingly conscious of the possibilities of these effectd2 'Driving around the Rota y, both the Arc 's convexity and concavity foreshorten, then compress, overlap, and elongate ....Walking up to the platform, the pedestrian looks over the overlapping convexity into the expanding curvature of concavity. [n a matter of steps, the appearance of the Arc changes from a half circle to an elongated hook-like shape. Crossing the bridge, the convexity diminishes .... Walking up and across the bridge, the pedestrian experiences a quick succession of changing views of the A~C.'*'~Sculpture, then cannot be thought of apart from a viewer:

DC: So your intention is, in fact, to block the conventional views of the Federal Building, the surrounding courthouses, and the fottn tain?

RS: No. The intention is to bring the viewer into the sculpture?4

Gravity, weight, space, scale, time, place, the vicissitudes of viewing- but all understood as concrete, specific, and singular: these seem to be the foundations of what constitutes sculpture for Richard Serra. Some are what he referred to as "limitations of weight, physical properties and materialsm- that is, as physical properties of the materials used in sculpture. Others, such as the non-pictoriality which makes of sculpture an experience of viewing sculpture in time, only seem possible to be defined by opposition with other arts. But all lay emphasis on concreteness (for lack of a better word), on physical properties of materials, on the specific placement of a work or its scale, or the way the work's appearance is dependent on where it is viewed from. From my point of view-which is of course specific to myself-what Serra accomplished was not really laying bare the foundations of what sculpture truly is. Rather, he found a way of keeping his work from simply recapitulating what sculpture had been. His articulating of specific aspects of sculpture could be seen as a dismantling of sculpture, since Serra pries each out of the ensemble one at a time. This of course can only occur in language, and in a certain sense, amounts to a misrepresenting of what sculpture is because sculpture must be all these things occuring together. But this prising OLLt of one aspect, then another, of various aspects of sculpture in practice amounts to a way of amplifying each one, as well as simplifymg the text that "sculpture" is. The literary critic Wolfgang Iser points out that since the whole work or text is never available to any reader-or in this case, any viewer-the text will be formulated by the reader? (In practical terns, you can think of this as meaning simply that no one can keep the whole of a novel in mind because there's simply too much information. So the work is construed by the reader through what Iser calk "consistency-building.") In Serra's case, quite apart from the question of whether or not what he sees as fundamental to sculpture "really" is fundamental to it, this taking apart of sculpture into a limited number of aspects drastically simplifies it. And because it simplifies it so much, each aspect that survives Serra's analysis plavs a much bigger role than it did before, in the earlier sculptural ensemble. Each aspect is less restricted in its role than it was, because now, having been said (or found) to be fundamental, its role requires that it displav that it is something fundamental, and not merely something subsidiary. Serra's type of analysis of sculpture then, can never be "objective" in any way, since it can never keep from changing the object that it means to st~d~~~-whichis fine, of course, because his goal was to clear a space for his work to take place in. But it already suggests that even raising the question of whether there is something central to sculpture or to any of the arts already changes them, since it can only end in a process of focussing, limiting, simplifying, and ampwing the cultural object placed under the glass of this lens. 3. How Fundamental are Fundamentals?

Nonetheless, if a particular kind of art can be distinguished from all other arts, then obviously there must be something fundamental to it-just as sculpture deals with "limitations of weight, physical properties and materials" that "cannot be imagined" by pictorial arts, at least according to Serra. But in what sense are these WLdamentals"fundamental"? When he insists that gravity, line, mass, balance and the like are the language of sculpture, it sounds as though these are simply given by the materials of sculpture. If that were the case, then what is fundamental is "objective," or "hctual" in some sense. But there is a problem here, in that these properties which are believed to be specific to sculpture are also shared by objects in the world which are not regarded as sculpture. A sparrow balances on a branch of a tree. A brick lies on another brick. A fallen piece of rock is kept from falling further down a slope by another, heavier rock against which it has been wedged. From this vantage point in time, Serra's debt to Greenberg is obvious in his insistence on "the different material capacities" of different media and in the attempt to define a terrain for sculpture that is not shared by another arte4' In "Modernist Painting" Greenberg wrote that

Each art, it turned out, had to effect this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itse lf.... It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nahue of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of every other ad8

And what was left that defined painting, after it was purged of every effect borrowed from the other arts? According to Greenberg, "the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness 49'~ and the delimitation of flatness. Here, flatness is a convention, not a fact of the medium-and it may be that Greenberg was never entirely clear about exactly what the status was of what he saw as essential to pictorial art. But in the whole context of his criticism, it seems to me that the opposite note is the dominant one? "the arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated, and defined. It is by iiirtrw of their medium that each art is unique and strictly itselfw5' [Emphasis mine.] Now the physical medium itself is the issue, not conventions, not norms. "Emphasize the medium and its difficulties, and at once the purely plastic, the proper, values of visual art come to the fore."" According to Greenberg, avant-garde art since Manet was a long historical development in which the art and the medium for that art slowly came to be identical. All of this is, of course, predicated on the notion that the physical medium itself is tinally determining. Greenberg said, "the picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas... 53'1 Essentially, the history of modem painting is one in which, over time, the hlse consciousness of illusionism is gradually eroded by the real surface of the painting. By the mid-seventies, though, it was already clear to many painters that Greenberg's famous "flatness" was a goal which could not be reached: there was always a certain residual amount of illusionistic space left in a painting no matter how rigourousiy one attempted to squeeze the last vestiges of it out. What this suggested was that in practice-and contra Greenberg-the medium itself kept the picture plane from becoming identical with the actual surface of canvas. It was also becoming clear how much Greenberg's formulations depended on specific practices by artists he seemed to have certified as card-carrying Greenbergen. The ideal of the picture-plane becoming one with the actual canvas surface could only be kept alive as a plausible goal if that canvas surface was not treated with gesso, and instead left raw, as in the works of Morris Louis or Kenneth Noland. Otherwise the white gesso surface introduced a certain amount of "illusion, " as pictorial space was referred to derogativeiy, as soon as it was introduced. Similarly, Greenberg's view of the medium also came to be more and more dependent on the properties of acrylic paint-which tends to be flatter than oil paint, and more importantly, can be soaked right into the raw cotton duck, thereby making the colour (which always creates a fictional, or phenomenal space) much closer to being one with the canvas surface. Oil paints by contrast, tend to require a gessoed ground (to prevent the canvas from rotting) and are engineered to create modeling with only the slightest of touches. They create fictional space almost on their own. If the pictorial space never did become identical with the canvas surface, Greenberg's demand of painting seemed increasingly to have become identical with acrylic paint stained into cotton duck. The problem for sorting out what is fundamental for painting was that "painting" was not one unified set of material practices. By the seventies, the "painting" I was aware of consisted of oils, acrylics, tempera, casein, watercolours, encaustic, dry pigments, and likely a few other options, being applied to paper, wood, plexiglas, plaster, fiberglass, metal, canvas both raw and prepared, walls, plastic sheets, human bodies, trees, and rocks among others, and was applied by brushes, compressed air spray guns, rags, finger-painting, pouring, and gluing of dry pigments. The supports used were, more often than not, rectilinear, but they often weren't-as in the famous case of Linda Benglis' latex pours. If the question was finding what was "unique to the nature of its medium," then "painting" could never suppIy an answer about its own essential being simply because it was so manv divergent mediums. But does this mean there's nothing fundamental to painting? In an obvious sense, the answer must be no, since each new kind of painting that appears within our culture is still recognizable to us "as painting" and is assimilated into that tradition. "Painting" still seems able to accommodate artworks as apparently far afield as Christian Eckart's (in which many works do not use paint at all, and therefore cannot be defined as painting simply by referring back to the medium used), Mary Scott's (where she twists, crumbles up, and binds up older paintings with transparent tape), or Eric Cameron's (which are three-dimensional objects Like lobsters, ties, brushmarks, lamps painstakingly covered with alternating layers of white gesso and slightly greyed gesso until the work no longer discloses what object is buried inside). In our time, painting has thrown off any explicit dependence on the kind of physical attributes Greenberg stressed: that materialist sense of history has been tossed aside. In some of Eckart's work there's still a picture plane, but no paint or canvas. In the case of Scott and Cameron the picture plane doesn't grow shallower or flatter, nor disclose "the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvasw-since neither has a plane at all in Greenberg's sense. What once was the picture plane in Mary Scott's painting is now crumbled and bound up in a three- dimensional wad. Eric Cameron's paintings are fully volumetric, and more like traditional sculpture than Richard Serra's. And they entirely dispense with canvas as a support for the paint. If those two different kinds of work have no picture planes at all, and, like Eckart's no picture, not even an abstract one, and also intrude upon the three-dimensionality of traditional sculpture, then why are they painting at all? If it is still sensible to speak of "painting," or to ask (as Mary Scott does, and as Christian Eckart does2) that their works be considered as painting, then what is fundamental to painting can't be a matter of physical attributes given by the medium of the art. Does it even make sense to speak of "painting" at all? I would say that it does. Here's a quick thought experiment: imagine Eckart's works, or Mary Scott's existing "outside" painting. The first thing that strikes me is that these works might not have been made at all if Scott or Eckart or Cameron did not believe in the existence of a category or tradition called "painting." Obviously nothing would have prohibited the making of these things. But I have no sense at all of why they would have been called into existence. What would require them? But even if those objects had been made anyway, it seems obvious they would not be the same without painting. Even if they were physically identical to what they are now, we would relate to them differently, and attribute different meanings to them. Therefore, they would be different. If, as Wittgenstein believed, "the meaning is the usefWs5and Scott and Eckart and Cameron have asked viewers of their works to "use" these things as paintings, then they are different as "paintings" than as any other type of object. Perhaps "painting" only describes the use of an object, and not the object. But if "painting" is not a matter of a matter of purely physical attributes, then what distinguishes paintings from other objects and other artworks? Yve-Alain Bois' use of game theory (which he found in Hubert Da misch, but which seems to derive ultimately from Wittgenstein's "language games") is a useful way of viewing this problem. Bois writes: The theory of games, used recently by Hubert Damisch, can help us overcome this paralyzing trap. This theory of strategy dissoaates the generic game (Like chess) kom the specific performance of the game (Spassky/Fischer, for example), which I will call the match. This strategic interpretation is antihistoricist: with it, the question becomes "one of the status that ought to be assigned to the match painting as one sees it being played at a given moment in particular circumstances, in its relation to the game of the same name." Such questioning has the immediate advantage of raising doubt about certain truisms. Is the "alleged convention of depth-rejected by the pictorial art of this century because. according to Greenberg. it is unnecessary-necessarily of the order of the match more than of the gnme? Or rather, should we speak of a modification of this convention within the game? Without thereby becoming a theoretical machine encouraging indifference, since one is obliged to take a side, this strategic approach deciphers painting once and for all as an agonistic field where nothing is ever terminated, or decided orzce lznd for aN, and leads the analysis back to a type of history that it - - had neglected, that of long d~ration.'~

If what is fundamental for art is not anything material or objective, but instead something akin to the rules of the game. then in retrospect, even Greenberg's views can be seen in this way. To repeat the key sentences horn the passage in Greenberg I ated earlier: "What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each particular art Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself." These kind of statements can now be taken not as statements of fact, nor something understood "objectively" about history-as a former Trotskyite such as Greenberg might have believed-but as an incisive articulation of what one of the rules of the game called Modemism was. But the rules have changed, and of course, are never entirely agreed upon, and often not declared or articulated either. Greenberg, to give him his due, was perhaps someone who saw clearly exactly what some of the rules which were determining Modernist art werebut by making them explicit. probably forced them to change. There are many artists now making work from this "rules of the game" mentality: Eckart, Scott, Sheme ~evine~.or Lydia Dona, to name just a few. But Jeff Wall is one of the few who has been able to articulate this understanding in words as well as in practice. Wd writes that "I kel that art develops experimentally through the positing of possible laws or law-like forms of behaviour, and then attempting to fohw them. I admit this is a completely reversed view, but it interests me more than any other.5swI think of Sol Lewitt's famous "Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1968"", in which he says that "if the artist changes his mind midway throughout the execution of the piece he compromises the result," and later, that "the process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." Wall continues with a view largely at odds with what has become the ideology of the art world-that tired rehearsal of art as revolution, art as transgression, art as breaking with convention.

The "culture of transgression" involves a sort of romantic binarism. Law exists and the soul is crushed by it. To obey the law is to live in bad faith. Transgression is the beginning of authentic existence, the origin of art's truth and freedom. But modem soaeties are constitutional; they have written, deliberately, their own foundations, and are continually rewriting them. Maybe it is a sense that it is the writing of laws, and not the breaking of them, that is the most significant and characteristic artistic act in modernity. Avant-garde art certainly operated this way, writing new laws as quickly as it broke old ones, thereby imitating the constitutional sta tem60

If what Wall is asserting is plausible, then art proceeds, we could say, "constitutionally," by the instituting of agreed-upon conventions, which are then treated and experienced as laws, as though genuinely fundamental. The only caveat I would insist upon here is that Wall's statement makes it appear that these conventions are established knowingly, as the product of debate and compromise, like laws in a legislature6'. I would suggest that in fact the truly powerful conventions-the ones which seem to act upon us, rather than we upon them--are ones which are unconscious, still largely invisible to working artists. I'd also like to suggest that this "rules of the game" approach to painting is, as Greenberg's was, also a product of history. Ln Wall's case, is it surprising that "the constitutional state" would be available to him as an examp te of how the avant-garde proceeds when within his own lifetime, his nation's constitution was repatriated from the old imperial power, or that, within the last fifteen years, two attempts were made to amend that constitution, once by national referendum? It seems to be no acadent that this model would suggest itself to an artist who is a atizen of a state in which the constitution has been for more than a decade a divisive issue continually forced on the consciousness of most of its citizenry by political problems left unresolved in its history? Canada's constitution has become a thing which it would seem its citizens can shape, sirnultaneously plastic and intractable. Is it any wonder then that art might also seem "possible" rather than obligatoryb3?(I don't mean to suggest, though, that Wars thought was anv the less original for being partially determined by historical events. If conditions made it possible for a Canadian artist or intellectual to see the avant-garde in constitutional terms, it still remains a fact that it was Wall who articdated it while many others continued to think of the avant-garde in terms imported from Europe and European history without noticing the differences in our conditions.) This "rules of the game" understanding of painting is, then, not ahistorical. But it does seems to involve a very different experience of history than Greenberg's. There seems to be in it some expression of a dissolving away of history, as though history had existed for Greenberg, or for later Marxist critics such as Benjamin Buchloh, but had now evaporated.M Ln a short article, Arthur Danto makes a very important observation:

A sympathetic reviewer of a recent exhibition of the paintings of Melissa Meyer finds herself wondering why "More young painters aren't investigating the possibilities that Abstract Expressionism still offers." No other style of painting, the reviewer goes on to say, "is so conducive to the celebrating the properties of paint-it can be brushed on, dripped, splattered, scraped, or impastoes..." It would have been unthinkable, in the period of Abstract Expressionism's floodtide, for someone to recommend it in such terms: "Have you thought of giving Abstract Expressionism a try? It might just suit you-no other style of painting is so conducive to celebrating the properties of paint ..." Melissa Meyer's work in no sense stands to that of the Abstract Expressionists in the relationship of farce to tragedy, as Marx's mean-spirited characterization of historical repetitions requires us to think, but there is a deep difference between these two historical moments even so. The first time something happens in the history of art, it does so as an inevitability, while the second time it happens only as an option?

Danto continues, saying that "The immense shilt from 'must' to 'may', from Abstract Expressionism as a categorical imperative to merely a hypothetical imperative... dramatizes the internal difference between two historical epochs ...We live in an atmosphere where only History, that tyrant in whose name categorical imperatives of art were issued, is dead. Dead as well is the language of artistic obligation."66 It was only a decade or so ago that Benjamin Buchloh could write of Neo-expressionism that "the spectre of historical derivativeness hovers over every contemporary attempt to resurrect representation, and traditional modes of production. This is not so much because they actually derive forxn particular precedents, but because their attempt to reestablish forlorn aesthetic positions immediately situates them in historical sec~ndariness."~~Back then, history still operated as necessity, at least according to BuchIoh. What is cruaal to this new understanding is that the rules of the game are fundamentally not fundamental. Rightly or wrongly (but even that is bring up the spectre of historical obligation, as though time and history were moral domains) they are not felt as historical imperatives imposed on artists from without. And we cannot force ourselves to experience them as such, we can only play the game. History, Like a tide, has moved out and left us beached? Perhaps this is an opportunity to realize our own complicity, or compliance, with convention. Certainly, it seems to require that the pretense to radicality be dropped, since there can be no radicality if individual artists are no longer the agent of history. And can anyone play a vanguard position if no one is at the forefront of history? Artists then are implicated in "weak thought" as Gianni Vattimo termed it, are no longer agents of a great truth. This also allows a different structure for art, and for the writing about art-since the making of radical daims for each and every artwork (which is still routinely carried out in most catalogue essays and most articles) has long since shown itself to be the same language as that of the causes of this shift-from historical necessity to historically displayed options-may always be beyond our full comprehension. But I'd like to suggest one. The lack of felt necessity expressed in the Melissa Meyer reiriew seems to be one with the kind of extreme wealth (by historical standards) and relative lack of any felt desperation that marks the post-war period in North America. The sociologist Neil Nevitte, author of 'The Decline of Deference," has been studying what he calls "postscarcity values"'u-which appear to be the same as the values expressed in much of the art and criticism of this "posthistorical" generation of art works and criticism. In an interview he observed that "the notion that we're into postscarcity or postmodern orientations has to do with the fact that we have an increasingly large proportion of the Canadian population that has no first-hand experience of the traumas of the 20th century-the Second World War and The ~e~ression.""That large proportion of the population, then, would not only have been brought up into a relative lack of material need, but perhaps more importantly, it would thereby have been removed emotionally from the great familial narratives of necessity, of struggle, poverty, immigration, war, internment and displacement, which may be fundamental to the experience of history. Perhaps history is nothing more than necessitv, and choice would be the agent of its evaporation. Ihor Holubinsky makes a similar point in his essay for the "Mud" show, "Mud: a [ntroduction." He suggests that "Modernism is the cutting of the umbelical cord of tradition and genre, resulting in a constant state of mutation. Without the safety line, painters are left with an attachment to materials .... 1172 In this way the kind of focussing on the sheer materiality of an artform which Greenberg's thought came to represent would not be anvthing like finally seeing "what was truly there." It would be an artifact itself, a way of thinking about and experiencing painting that was the result of our thinking about and experiencing history differently. 1 don't wish to fish this discussion, though, by leaving behind any sense that this rules of the game metaphor means that the "moves" within the "game" of painting are in anyway less crucial now than they were within an earlier comprehension of painting-or even that any sense of some move being crucial to us would derive only from history, as it might seem from my very sketchy suggestions about history as necessity. Wittgenstein wrote that "A language-game does not have its origin in consideration. Consideration is part of a language-game. And that is why a concept is within its element in a ~an~ua~e-~ame.""If he is right, then these games are not idle games at all. These games, then, are not products of our ionsciousnes~,but rather consciousness-which can only emerge in some very precise context-is a product of such "games." Consciousness is that game in which it emerges: "consideration is part of a language-game." In this way, it seems as though I've had to return part way to Greenberg's notion of each medium undertaking to go through a certain kind of self- criticism in order to define itself. Here, though, after Wittgenstein, instead of the operations of consciousness being mobilized to further define and develop a medium such as painting, painting and constiousness (or "consideration" as Wittgenstein puts it) can no longer be considered apart from one another. Consciousness, or consideration can only take place materially. In the end, though, does it make a difference for painting if there are rules or if there are things fundamental to the medium itself? Yes, I think it does. Serra, in my view, was able to free sculpture from "sculpture" by stressing what seemed to be "the medium itself." In practice, this may have kept him from assuming that he knew what sculpture was, would have simply meant then that he would recapitulate it once more. So it may be worthwhile to believe "in the medium itself." But 1 can't, I. believe that the rules of the game aren't inherent in the medium, so all that is open for me is to pplay the game, with the rulebook and the chessboard that have been

3uiven me. But what this ~lesof the game mentality does allow that is different from the medium-centred view is the realization that some of the rules for painting which are there for us, are rules which don't follow from the medium, which even appear, in some sense, to be "unreal." 4. Frontality and Address

If there is a condition painting cannot dispense with-at least in our period-it must be frontality. Greenberg with his "flatness" would probably have agreed with this, though he seems to have believed that this was inherent in the medium itself. There's nothing in a "rules of the game" understanding of painting that would dispense with this; only now it would be thought of as a convention or rule rather than anything factual or determining. In Danto's language, it would be "optional" rather than "obligatory." "Flatness", or as I'd prefer to call it "frontality," is still central to painting, all that's changed is our relation to it. More than a decade ago, I came across a little-known pamphlet on an exhibition of several paintings by Rothko, David Novros's architectural panels, and Brice Marden's monochromes. It was useful for me simply because the author, Sheldon Nodelman, went through the works in painstaking detail, trying to sort out how they occurred. how they imposed their conditions on a viewer. So for me as painter, it became for a few years a text book of sorts. His account of frontality was partidarly important to me, in part because it helped account for how forceful the apparent blankness of certain late Rothkos could be, and in part it articulated something which I understood as fundamental to painting:

The traditional format of the picture/object-that of the flattened planar slab, geometrically bounded and usually rectangular- significantly combines with its egregious placement to impose a confrontational relationship between the observer and the picture ...With the repertory of his customary behaviour and motives drastically contracted, the viewer is made to face and regard the work, which reciprocally faces and appears to regard him ... Attention and action are directed forward from this "face" or "front", while the realms to the back and sides are largely ignored. In this sense the planar display of the graphic notational system, centred on and distributed transversely to the axis of vision and motion, closely parallels the human focusing of attention to the front?

The viewer must commit himself to a set of specific behavioural and attitudinal modifications necessary to experiencing it in the mode, that of its proper functioning, which it seeks to prescribe. He must, first, of all, so position himself in space relative to that of the artifact as to center it in his field of vision- in effect the picture organizes the space in front of it and dictates out of the entire range of possible positions which the spectator might assume-and the possible angles of view which he might thus have upon it-a single dominant axis, and ultimately a single point on that axis, as the "right" viewing position ...This system...p osits for itself an ideal two-dimensional (hence "neutral") plane of display guaranteeing the constancy and sameness of the relationship of each notational element to that plane and hence the applicability of a single, unvarying code of interpretation to the pattern of similarities and differences which these elements evincex-

Though "the viewer" is a fiction, of course, and the "he" would not likely pass unquestioned today, Nodelman's description is still acute. What is striking, for anyone who hequents galleries or rn~seums~~is just how completely paintings seem able to enforce this kind of behaviour before them. Even when a painting is disparaged by viewers-for example, when recently a woman beside me in the Guggenheim was scathing about Agnes Martin's "North Seatt-the correct position before the work is usually taken up. Even when viewers want to show their lack of respect for a particular painting, they rarely fail to behave properly in front of the work, that is, in standing before it so that the work displays itself properly. And every painter in the avant-garde knows that the only people who ever go up and examine the sides of a painting are other artists, who are examining the construction- -rather than the display-of the work." "The viewer is made to face and regard the work, which reciprocally faces and appears to regard him." It's interesting how close Nodelman's description is to Bahtin's concept of the "dialogical": "The exact sciences constitute a monological form of knowledge: the intellect contemplates a tiling and expounds upon it. There is only one subject here-cognizing (contemplating) and speaking (expounding). In opposition to the subject there is only a zviceless thing. But the subject as such cannot be perceived and studied as if it were a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and consequently, cognition of it can only be d ia logic."7s Oddly enough, then " hontality -which, as I said, could easily be mistaken for being simply a material fact of painting-is, if Nodelman is correct, the material means by which the painting becomes something much more intimate than a merely material object. It is the means through the subject-to-subject relation which Bakhtin believed characterized all the human sciences can occur. What I would quibble about here is the contention that "the viewer is mnde to face and regard the work (emphasis mine). Just as "the viewer" is a fiction, to say that the viewer is "made to face and regard the work is a fiction too; obviously nothing compels a viewer to bce the work in this way. But I don't want to suggest that this behaviour is simply the result of social training. The ktis that there are no real data to establish whether this is the result of training or of the physical nature of the work or both-and the question may be unanswerable. What seems apparent to me, however, is that there is some recognition of the structure of the work which is not merely the result of training-just as chess can be recognized "as a game" by someone who has never before seen it played.79 Viewers, by behaving as they do, are entering into the game, regardless of what they feel about the painting in question. By their behaviour, they are recognizing that it is meaningful. So, rather than say that the viewer is somehow forced into addressing the work, I would rather sav that there is an unconscious recognition at work here, in which both the viewer and the work conspire. At any rate, frontality and "address," then, are one and the same, as Node [man's analysis makes clear.

Orientation to a wall, rather than immediately or ultimately to a ground plane like most other artifacts, contributes a further egregiousness to the picture/object. Quite unlike, most artifacts, the picture-despite its vertical orientation-has no direct contact with the floor. It does not stand or even lie; rather it hangs, dependent for its position upon having been set up; ... this having-been-set-in-place more than anything else robs the picture of the claim to an apparent relative autonomy which most other self-supporting artifacts possess. Its presence clearly depends upon a prior act, of which it is the sign. This act of display, thrusting the picture forward for the attention of anv potential viewer, suffuses its whole character; more than any other artifact it proclaims itself thereby the vehicle of a human address. ... w Then, in a certain sense, painting is more dependent than most other artifacts on being received, since its being displayed on the wall dissipates its autonomy as an object. The act of display marking it off from the other things in the world asks of a viewer that the painting be taken up: it is this that keeps the painting from being "a voiceless thing." It calls for reception, and in this sense, is like an utterance. "An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addres~ivit~"~~ says Bakhtin. "Addressivity, the quality of turning to someone, is a constitutive feature of the utterance; without it the utterance does not and cannot exist.*"2 I saw this worked out practically in a series of Wanda Koop's paintings. When I had the opportunity to study a set of works from 1989 and 1990, (in order to write a catalogue essay on them) what struck me was that everything depicted there was centred in the painting and turned outward to regard the viewer. "Everything faces us. A target, the radar dish of a tracking station, a huge torso, the trunk of a plane tree. Christ's face on a veil, a grasshopper's head, an orchid, the high arched window of a cathedral, a monkey and her child. All things, beings or objects, turn toward us. Even the huge baby's face, one of the few images set at an angle to us, watches us. I want to say 'a universe of beings and things suspicious of us.' "83 What impressed me was how emphatic and explicit a use Koop made of something that seemed to lie unexpressed within every painting. "If this act of display us part of painting's potential, what is important here is just to realize how much Koop makes use of it, by bringing every subject of every painting toward us. If most painters consciously or unconsciously are dependent on this, few return to it so repeatedly. Fewer still bother to turn every depicted thing until is aligned with the axis of our vision, so that this anthropocentric experience of a painting which 'faces' us and 'regards' us surfaces in each depiction." Koop's way of handling the subject matters and composition together seemed to me to disclose something about painting itself. In retrospect, 1 think it was only then, after having had to confront my friend's work, that 1 began to understand a bit better what I had already been doing intuitively in my own work. The white on dark ground found- image paintings I did during the early 80s (which some referred to as "black and white all had some residue of kontality as a concern in how thev were executed-since the dark ground was prepared first, and then the slide image was projected onto the flat, dark surface. The process of chalkingin the outlines of the image cast onto the surface of the painting itself forced on me some inkling of just how frontal painting is. But it was only after I began to make paintings from the image of the greatly magnified weave of canvas that frontality began to emerge as an issue for me. Those paintings were quite obviously a kind of membrane parallel to the wall of the gallery; all that appeared in them was an image of the canvas surface which the wooden stretchers carried and allowed to be mounted on the gallery walls. I see this concern with frontality continuing, and even growing stronger in the wall paintings I've done throughout the 1990s. I don't want to leave the impression that this was always in my mind, or even was part of what my consaous intentions were. Usually I was simply preoccupied with the problems peculiar to each particular site, but when working with the wall itself, frontality inevitably becomes part of the painter's toolkit. It has to be sorted out each time, particularly when a wail painting takes place on more than one wall. Then the hct of one wall being around a comer, or across from the first, or at an angle to the first "forces" Frontalitv to be reconsidered simply because the walls are no longer neutral surfaces on which painting are hung. The actual architecture, the real space traversed by people in the gallery is at issue. Nodelman says of paintings in general that "Attention and action are directed fonunrd from this 'face' or 'front', while the realms to the back and sides are largely ignored" and he is for the most part correct, because he is referring to easel paintings and paintings which have emerged from that tradition. But I think that he's still, in a sense, right even when he is wrong. Let me give an example from my own work, The Civil Ordering of Night (see plates 1 and 2 ) wall painting that existed at Western's ArtLab in September of 1996. In that work, the wall painting was done on all the four walls of the gallery, and each wall was divided in half by zips (lines which had been taped-off as the walls were darkened, so that they remained lighter) both horizontally and vertically, so that the exact center of each wall drew the viewer's attention. This is perfectly in agreement still with Nodelman's analysis. In fact, wall paintings in general fulfill the observation that "the realms to the back and sides are largely ignored" much more thoroughly than the traditional paintings-on-stretchers because there are no realms to the back or sides at all, only the surhce of the wall. Yet, when I stood and addressed any one wall, the side wall was always visible. Its taped-off lines angled off in parallax, and I found myself extremely conscious of the painting on the walls that lay beside, and behind me. As a result, 1 spent most of my time tuning and turning in the space of the gallery, and eventually realized that 1 was spending my time trying to see the whole work, which was, of course, impossible. In retrospect my understanding of the show in its simplest terms is this: the gridding off of each wall delivers a central point in the wall to you-as though the work were perfectly comprehensible, or perfectly able to be appropriated by vision done. Yet no matter where you stood, or how you addressed any wall, or combination of walls, at least one wall would be behind you. So the work was always not-being-seen. So Nodelman's description would both apply and not apply. I found mvself addressing each wall just as should if 'attention and action are directed fonvd from this "face" or "front."' Yet after that first frontal address, 1 spent my time turning and turning. Though Nodelman has said (correctly, in my view) that "with the repertory of his customary behaviour and motives drastically contracted, the viewer is made to face and regard the work,"" it seems to me that in the case of this particular wall painting, the repertory of behaviour is forced back into play: that is, instead of standing still in front of the painting, you walk and turn about in the space. Nodelman writes that the viewer "must position himself in space relative to the artifact as to center it in his field of vision. In effect the picture organizes the space out in front of it and dictates out of the entire range of possible positions which the spectator might assume...a single dominant axis, and ultimately a single point on that axis, as the 'right' viewing position, the only one from which it will disclose itself as itself? My experience of the wall painting at Western is that there was no "right" viewing position, and that the anxiety I felt in viewing the piece was the result of this. I was never able to find the correct place to stand so that the work would disclose itself. I think I've been interested in this lack-of-a-right-viewingposition for some time. Looking back, this is obvious in the mere fact of having made two circular paintings87(in abandoned concrete farm silos.) Because those walls are cylindrical, the wall paintings there sweep around behind you, disappearing at the edges of your peripheral vision, and the architecture alone suggests that you turn and move in the space. How could there be one correct viewing position? By contrast, ~nrrtzpn?~(see plate 3) the wall painting I did in the loading dock at Western's Visual Art Building does seem to have a correct viewing position. I noticed that people tended to stand at the end of the paved area leading down to the dock area. The odd thing about this is that they then see each wall from the side, which must be "wrong." But this is, in a certain sense, logical: to move down into the loading dock area so that a wall could be seen clearly and front-on would mean that the other wall was behind the viewer, entirely hidden from view. The more distant position seems to be an attempt to see "the whole work," to have it entirely disclose itself to vision, even though this can't be accomplished, even if the walls are seen from the side. The silos also suggest that one of the unconscious underpinnings of Nodelman's analysis is the assumption of flat planar walls-entirely legitimate in our society, where curving walls are rare, but not necessarily true of all walls in all cultures or all periods. But I don't think that any of this means that Nodelman is wrong about frontality: as I said earlier, I think he's right even when he's wrong. To return to nte Civil Ordering of Night wall painting, it seems to me that the whole work is predicated on the expectation that normal viewing will work, that the work is frontal in the normal way, that there will be a correct position from which the work will disclose itself- The taped- off crosses in the centre of each wall seem to assert that. If you think of this from a rules of the game perspective, where frontality is not just imposed on painting, but is one of the rules we agree to piay by-like agreeing to move a bishop only along diagonal paths-then perhaps it might appear that I'm breaking the rules to no purpose, moving bishop like a knight. But I wouldn't agree. I think that the work is strongly rule-bound. Wittgenstein wrote:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined bv a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to be in conflict with it. And so there can be neither accord or conflict here. It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give .one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shows is that there is a way of grasping the rule which is not an in terpretnfion, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.89

t think that those wall paintings were intuitively based on something like this, some wav of grasping a rule that was exhibited in going against it. In the avant-garde, this is a prevalent way of knowing, and of course, there are others who have been playing with the frontality rule. Here, I'll mention just three. The first is Robert Ryman, whose work has been an example to so many painters of my own generation and later ones because he's been so tho rough in exploring painting's formal elements-or its rules, depending on your point of view. Pace, from 1984, is interesting because it displays a painting horizontally rather than vertically. In an interview Ryman described the thinking that led to it. "P~cecame about because I was thinking about how it would be if a painting was horizontal to the wall rather than being hung vertically. Of course, most paintings being pictures, it's logical that they are hung vertically. The whole thing seemed a little crazy, but I thought it might be interesting to see. 1 could do that, not working with pictures. And I could see it would give me the opportunity to work with two paint planes because you could see both sides?" Quite obviously, Ryman wanted to play with the way paintings are addressed. I've never seen Pnce myself, but what's interesting about it is that it would require something different from the alignment of the viewer and work that Nodelman describes: to view it, you'd have to walk over to the painting, bend over it to see he upper surface, and perhaps, bend down to look at the underside as well. Obviously, there is no one position from which the painting reveals itself fully, and it seems that the painting would require "walking and peeringv-not the norm certainly. The second example I'd like to point out are the recent paintings of Yam Lau, who has recently moved from Edmonton to Toronto where he now lives and exhibits, most recently with the Painting Disorders in their exhibition, ~nst." Three of the paintings Lau showed were monochromes of .I sort, constructed from metal rectangles painted to a very glossy reflective tinish. One was white, the others were diptychs, one made of two red rectangles, the other two blue rectangles. I'U deal here only with the blue diptych, as the other two works use the same basic structure. Blue Folds (see plate 4) is made up of two very glossy red metal rectangles, separated by a narrow strip of the white wall-so the image presented is something like a Barnett Newman painting with a white "zip" dividing it. The interesting "move" in the work is that the two rectangles, rvhich are wry thin, are mounted on the wall by a hingelike mechanism rvhich allows each rectangle to be angled off the wall. In the blue diptych, each is hinged so that the outside edges of the work-the edge on the left side of the whole piece, and the edge on the right side-touch the wall. This means that the interior edges of the metal sheets along the "zip," are raised several inches out from the wall, so that the painted "picture planes" are not parallel to the wall. And because they are extremely glossy, each plane reflects the room in which it is placed, but each plane reflects along a different axis, so that the work's reflections (which function as though they were ib depictions) are divided against each other. This is extremely disruptive in terms of viewing position. Nodelman insists that "the picture organizes the space in front of it and dictates out of the entire range of possible positions which one the spectator might assumew- and I believe that is correct. It's just that the way in which Lau's painting organizes space is at odds with the norm. Where Nodelman (again, correctly, for the most part) savs that the painting determines "the possible angles of view which he might thus have upon it-a single dominant axis, and ultimately a single point on that axis, as the 'right' viewing position", it's dear that in practice Lau's painting, if it has a correct viewing position at all, requires that you stand in two places at once: one for the left panel and one for the right. What I find fascinating about this-quite apart from the strange sensation that this determining of space by the painting gives me+ that if this divided-position painting of Lads has a precedent, it is i Jcr~llo'swonderful painting of Sir John Hawkwood in the Duomo in Florence. In that painting, rvhich is interesting in art because it is a painting of a sculpture that never existed, the plinth for the statue of the mercenary is seen in perspective from below, as one would, standing in a square such as the Signoria where such a piece of public sculpture might be found. The figure of Hawkwood mounted on his horse, however, is seen as though directly from the side, at exactly the same level as Hawkwood and his horse. The painting is obviously impossible, and suggests that you are standing below the sculpture, looking up at it, and at the same time, are at the same level, just looking across space at it. (An amazing work, which I admit influenced me long before 1 ever saw it.) John White argues that Uccello "was not merely elaborating ever more complex applications of the theory of artificial perspective, like some old and hddled schoolmaster muttering theorems to himself long after the class has run away. He was inquiring into the nature and validity of the new method, and weighing it against his experience of the natural world. Brunelleschi himself apparently felt the contradiction of the evidence of his own eyes which seemed to be entailed in his new svsteem. Uccello was trying to eradicate this flaw, this apparent element of convention and, as many must at first have seen it, of untruth."92But it seems to me that this can be seen the other way around: that far from trying to eliminate "untruth from the system of perspective, UcceUo was instead playing with the rule, drawing attention to its arbitrariness, to "this apparent element of convention." (From this vantage point in time, the experiments or play with perspective that are visible in artists Like della Francesca or Lrccello seem to die out as perspective becomes successfully adopted in the west as tile code for depicting space, and only come into view again once perspective is beginning to be dispensed with-in Manet's work and that of more recent artists and artistic movements. Only when it comes into existence or wanes, is it possible for artists to see that it is simply a convention.) The last example I'd Like to point out is the work of Imi Knoebel, a German artist who emerged during the 1980s. Certain of his works (such as Mnmntri from 1986) are assembled from groups of monochrome paintings displayed sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, most with their backs turned to us to display their stretchers. Obviously, since they're installed "backwards," these works display the frontality rule by going against it, specificaily they move against the convention that "the realms to the back and sides are largely ignored." But they also play against another convention on which Nodelman believes the ability of painting to address us rests. He has carefully pointed out that the painting "does not stand or even lie; rather it hangs, dependent for its position upon having been set up; ... this having-been-set-in-place more than anything else robs the picture of the claim to an apparent relative autonomy which most other self-supporting artifacts possess." By contrast Knoebel's Mnmnfu sits on the floor of the

0uallery, Like a pile of works nbotrr to be tnstnlled, as though they were only potentially able to address a viewer. They lack the "having-been-set-in- place" to which Nodelman refers-except of course that this sitting on the floor and turning their backs on us is their having-been-set-in-place. tn such a work, the whole way of addressing viewers is "wrong." What would be the point of this? I can only gesture towards a value for these experiments, or bendings of the rule of Irontality. I believe that Nodelman is largely correct when he says of painting that "it claims for itself a special dispensation from the laws which ineluctably govern our experience, proclaiming a transcendent space in which phenomena are made completely and simultaneously accessible to the mind, with values which are guaranteed not to shift in the course of being apprehended?3" But as I wrote about Wanda Koop's paintings (which take froxttality to an extreme) "in the world of our daily lives, things occur wherever they occur; they are not placed for us. We are not at the centre of the world.94"What irontality entails is that guarantee of a momentary centrality. I'm not opposed to this, and don't wish to make a moral issue of it. My own paintings on canvas rely on exactly that same special dispensation that Nodelman has described. It's just that this dispensation, which follows from the constant repetition of frontality, has become so prevalent that it passes by unquestioned: I just want it to be seen as a dispensation, as something we've produced, both artists and viewers together, a condition quite different from the uncentrality of our lives. To put it another way, the etfects of this constant repetition of frontality seem to me to be like a constant reassertion of our importance in the world-as though everything reallv is, or could be, "completely and simultaneously accessible to the mind." Don't "values which are guaranteed not to shift in the course of being apprehended" sound suspiciously Like a dream of objectivity, in which the world can be seen clearly, as what it somehow is, quite independent of our agency? I cannot believe there are changeless values, things which do not change in time. Perhaps it would be better to regard these values that don't shift as being a fiction, part of the virtuality that marks painting. But there's another way of answering the question of what point there might be to bending or going against the frontality rule. In his fascinating book, HOZVSocieties Remember, Paul Comerton discusses two different types of social memory:

The first type of action I shall call an incorporatitzg practice. Thus a smile or a handshake or words spoken in the prescence of someone we address, are all messages that a sender or senders impart bv means of their own current bodily activity, the transmission o;curring only during the time that their bodies are present to sustain that particular activity. Whether the information imparted by these actions is conveyed intentionally or unintentionally, and whether it is carried by an individual or a group, I shalI speak of such actions as incorporated. The second type of action I shall call an inscribing practice. Thus our modem devices for sorting and retrieving information, print, encyclopedias, indexes, photographs, sound tapes, computers, all require something that traps and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing.95

[n Connerton's terms, both painters and critics engage in inscribing racticesG6The frontality ~le,however, involves an incorporating practice. One has to do certain things in a gallery of painting: walk over to a particular work, stand directly in fiont of it as Nodelman has described, and then look at the object. As many have pointed out, it is a strangely ritualized performance, which "everyone" understands. "The memorization of culturally specific postures may be taken as an example of incorporating practices" says comerton?' In a passage quoted earlier, Nodelman wrote that "the viewer is made to face and regard the work, which reciprocally faces and appears to regard him": if Comerton is correct, then the implication that it is the painting's formal structure which structures the viewer's behaviour would be incorrect. Both the painting and the viewer would be structured by our "knowledge" of incorporating behavioun. In a certain sense then the viewer could be said to be "made" to hce the painting, rhough only in the same sense that diners are made to use a knife and fork or drink tea horn a cup: the "making" is social. The more important point to make is Connerton's, that "the importance of postures for communal memory is e~ident."'~Our behaviour in front of a painting is quite obviously how we are implicated in the society of which we are part: in a tiny, almost insignificant way, our behaviour is the work we do in perpetuating the society (which of course can only be perpetuated in a myriad of performances of behaviours which in themselves seem insignificant.) Connerton writes:

Ceremonies, proprieties and techniques of the body exist along a spectrum of possibilities extending from the more or less formal to the more or less informal. All in varying ways entail cognitive memory. Thus certain ceremonies of the body, such as are exemplified in court etiquette at VersailIes, remind performers of a svstem of honour and hereditary transmission as the organizing principle of social classification... The ceremonial display of presence at court here establishes a relationship between the organization of courtly space and the stratification of social relations, behaviour in courtly space being both a form of cultural representation and a mnemonic system... In each of these cases, performers are reminded of something with cognitive content. But in each case, too, it is through the act of performance that they are reminded of it.99

There's obviously a formality about our behaviour in front of a painting which, when performed properly, reminds us of the value of these objects to the society of which we are part. The behaviour is not only formal, but respectful of the object and its social worth, which our behaviour reminds us of. There are obviously many issues involved beyond simply this display of respect; I'll focus on one and leave the rest for the anthropologists. Comerton argues-and I think that this is avery important point--that:

The dominant mode of self-understanding represented by contemporary conventionalism has, at least until recently, entailed a tendency among social theorists to lose sight of the human body as 'an object domain. Thus in the case of certain recent conceptions of social theory the object domain for social theory has been defined in terms of what is taken to be the distinctive feature of the human species, language: language itself being conceptualised by the Wittgensteinian, structuralist and poststructuralist schools as a set of social rules, or a system of signs, or a powerful discourse. The human bodv can be included in an object domain thus defined only as the caker of linguistic meanings or of meanings structured Like a language. It can be included, in other words, only in an etherealized form.'00

I might have said "an abstracted form." But I believe that Comerton is correct. The painting/object itself, which is our proxy in the viewing relationship, is valued by criticism-itself an inscribing not an incorporating practice-as a carrier of Linguistic or, linguistically structured meanings.'01 (Is it surprising that an inscribing practice should also value meanings that can be inscribed?Iu2)But where Comerton, in this instance, is speaking only of the body as understood in the social sciences, I see this same attitude displayed in the way frontality restricts movement Whatever value the going against the this rule had for Uccello or Holbein, today it may be nothing more than an insistence on the corporeality of the body. Obviously the human body is not used any the less in walking up to a painting and addressing it frontally than in having to move about in front of it. But: this departure from the routinized use of the body in the usual addressing of the work cnrr make it more clearly a performance, an incorporating practice, a bodily activity. A slight de-etherealizing of the body. And if this occurs at all, then it makes the painting less purely a carrier only of "linguistic meanings or of meanings structured like a language." I don't want to lay too heavy a weight on this change, which is not revolutionary or shattering in itself, but rather, small-scale, perhaps almost insignificant. But our behavioua do matter, do perpetuate or change the society of which we are part I believe that this small change at least registers some small complaint against the social structure which is visible in the socia 1 theory against which Connerton pro tests. 5. The Painting as a Commodity

I have suggested that frontality is one of the most important rules by which the game of painting is played. Though again, it's a peculiar game which might well be played better by those who see things as necessities, not rules, and frontality has the advantage of appearing to be a fact of the medium. At least for our moment in time, it seems to be that a second rule could be proposed, that the painting must somehow deal with the fact of its being a deluxe commodity. If this seems somehow fundamental to painting (for me), then unlike something like frontality, this aspect of painting looks to be a question not of the medium but of its status. But why should this be so important that it should be addressed? My simplest answer would simply be to say that it is the result of painting's special status, a status of which (it seems to me) almost every working painter is aware. And if a painter weren't aware of this "intuitively" (let's say), then since 1970 or so, the critique of painting as a commodity has been brought up again and again in print and in debate. Regardless of its veraaty, that critique exists and is more-or-less ubiquitous: it would seem difficult to avoid. Of course, anvthing can be avoided, but I would argue that when this is done, the painting appears like an image of a deliberate unconsciousness, a kind of aesthetic burying your head in the sand. (But Gerrnaine Greer has said that "an examined life isn't worth living.") All I'm arguing is that works are products of their time, and our time is soaked in that critique. Hence paintings will often be interpreted through that lens, both in their reception by many critics and viewers, and during their production, by artists for whom that critique has been apposite. My favourite example of this critique is Joseph Kosuth summing up the situation in his wonderfully blunt, yet acute, style :

Let's tak about money. The art market, which by nature is comema tive-particularly in this country-loves paintings. Every illiterate, uncultured dingbat (rich or not) knows that paintings are art, are great investments, and look swell over the couch. Forget whatever historical necessity was thoughtfully felt by some artists for a return to painting; the market is delighted to have paintings hip again .... Once, the idea of art historical importance s ta bilked the market value of an artist's work, but prices no longer reflect this-how could they? Now they reflect speculation on short-term market scarcity, and the mode of painting is ideally suited to marketing ~cardty!*~

1 find little to disagree with here. As 1 wrote in an essay on Christian Eckart, "painting still seems to be the deluxe act object pnr excellence, the Mercedes- Benz of art."Io4Sartzrs research which 1 examined previously would tend to bear this out. The problem with the critique of the commodity that underlies many of the attacks on painting, though, is that it's posed as though it comes from an ideal position-as though everything else in our society were not at least a potential commodity too. As though writers did not sell their writing, as though wage labourers did not sell their labour abstractly. (I'd argue that the selling of labour abstractly is fundamental to the structure of capitalism, where the selling of material object by their makers is not.) Similarly, this kind of attack was initially launched (in the artscene) from artists such as Kosuth and other Conceptual Artists-at a peculiar moment when some artists held out the hope that conceptual art was not simply another commodity that could be taken up by the art market. Those hopes turned out to be illusions of course, and works of conceptual art were absorbed as commodities just as all other types of art other than performance had been. [n itself, this does not mean that the criticism of the commodity structure was without value; only that it is dearer now that there seems to be no position outside that structure for any works other than, perhaps, performance. Yet painting still functions as the lightning rod for that critique, attracting that critique more than any other medium. If nothing else, this alone suggests that painting plays a highly-charged symbolic role, even for critics. But if there is no way outside this commodity-structure for those artists who want to make material objects, does this mean that all paintings are simply more-or-less interchangeable commodities and nothing more?lo5 No. Wittgerstein's reminder is important here: "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language game of giving information." Each painting then, even if assembled horn commodities offered for sale in the marketplace, and even if the painting is then offered for sale itself, is not simply confined to its status as a commodity. Its meaning, in the language game of taking paintings as meaningful, is not given solely by its status as a commodity. The critique of painting as a commodity often seems aimed rhetorically at reducing all paintings to merely equivalent and entirely abstract commodities. But if this were so, then it would be impossible to explain why so much ink has been wasted in the wars of interpretation around various paintings. It would be difficult for instance, to explain why Cubism was so controversial, when all of Picasso's and Braque's paintings from that period were no more and no less purchasable commodities than the work of the by- then weil-established Monet. But t do not want to leave the impression that, following upon Wittgenstein's comments, all the meanings of a painting lie, by virtue of being moves in a different game, outside the commodity structure. Kosuth has argued that "In our sociopolitical system, cultural engagement is expressed in socioeconomic terms we can't get away from that."'" I take this as fundamental to our culture. (To put it in extreme terms, I could say that anything that is not sold in the marketplace does not come to exist culturally: it evaporates in seconds. This may help to explain why performance art, whether that of the Futurist or more recent works, have had relatively little cultural influence: not fitting into the commodity structure, they therefore forfeited the chance to have any sort of lasting effect.'") In the case of painting, I've argued of Christian Eckart's work'" that it must be seen against the backdrop of the powerful New York art market, and Further, that in having adapted itself to that market "this forced accommodation to conditions which are, in the end, largely inimicable to it, has resulted in artwork which is more. not less, interesting than it might have been."'" In the case of Edtart's work, which I interpreted (as many have) as a work with a religious dimension, "the market, and above all, the commodity, in what seems like its perfection, has become the only arena where our religious desires can be played Though it may seem to odd to say so, even a work with a religious impulse must express itself as a commodity in order to have any religious effect. "The artwork has thoroughly internalized the promotional culture that surrounds it-and in kct, it must internalize and display it simply in order to find its way. It's not just that artworks have to be willing commodities in order to be salable: they have to proclaim themselves through this commodity structure simply in order to come to people's attenti~n.""~This kind of observation about the artwork is not new, of course. Hal Foster points out that 'For Theodore Adomo, it is with the phantasmagorical operas of Wagner that esthetic appearance first dearly %becomes a function of the character of the commodity." This is to suggest not only that the work of art begins to assume the form of "wares on display," but also that it begins to be appreciated as such-as a magical object which, like the commodity, is worshipped because the labor, the soaety, the history that produced it are concealed behind spectacular effects."" And to continue with Eckart's work for moment, Mark Cheetham, who curated the exhibition of Eckart's work currently traveling Canada,

3tyave the show the title, Dishrbing Abstraction: Christian Ecknrt which for my purposes, is quite lovely. At the simplest level, it focuses on the author of the work, who is, of course, the person bringing the work to market and holder of the copyright on the reproduction rights to the image of his works. But beyond naming the author of the work, the title represents the curator's simplest, most condensed statement of how he interprets the work. Clearly, it's a pun: it can mean that these abstract paintings are disturbing, but it can also be taken as suggesting that Eckart's work has been disturbing abstract pa inting-an interpretation which I agree with, for the following reasons. It has become commonplace for criticism since the Frankfurt School to insist that capitalism functions through an abstracting away from the use- value of things,'" And this view found its way into the artworld and its d iscussions, where it became an insistent note, particularly with respect to discussions of painting. The painter Peter Halley has taken up this view, and articulated it further through many writings that read abstraction (particularly Stella and after) as a figuration of sorts: an image of an abstract world. He points out that "In thinking about this most rarefied of visual languages, it seems we inteUectually retreat into the cloister of high culture; we deny that abstraction is a reflection of larger historical and cultural forces, we deny that the phenomenon of abstraction only gains meaning to the extent to which it does reflect larger forces and is embedded with their history."'14 While Halley's view is a quasi-Baudrillardian one--and in its own way, abstract about these "larger forces"-Robert Smithson was, as usual, remarkably un-abstracted. (I've always found his work and writing useful simply because he insisted on contaminating art with the dirt of the rvorld.) In an interview given shortly before his death, Smithson declared that "abstraction essentially is what rules Capitalism...Thatls why I have to go back to the Marxist thing about the division of labor, in other words the production from work. What is the thing that separates? It's the abstract value. So this abstraction...^^ art becomes... especially p aintings... become super currency for privileged groups."'" It was reading this one, groping, s till-no t-thoroughly articulated statement two decades ago that made me see that the fundamental underpinning for abstraction in art lay outside the artwork, in the vast and powerful abstracting processes of the marketplace. In the case of Eckart's work, if the question is asked "in what way does his work disturb abstraction?", then I would say the simplest answer I could gire would be to say that his early works, the A.A.2.s and the Eidolons (which all utilize gold-leaf surfaces extensively) disturb abstract painting through the creation, display, and sale of works that are visibly heightened in their auratic power as commodities. They display themselves as valuable. 1 won't rehearse the entire argument about Eckart, except to say that his use of gold-leaf accomplishes several things all at once. It allows the construction of areally attractive commodity; it's the means by which Eckart's work is connected to an art historical past of explicitly religious artworks; and it makes possible an artwork of greatly heightened aura. That heightened aura (which Benjamin had connected to the cult value of art) struck me as being not simply an accommodation of the work to the market place, but also as a recognition in the work that the marketplace, and our enthralled worship and pursuit of its commodities constituted an arena-or perhaps even the arena-where our religious desires can be played out?l16 If this interpretation of Eckart's work is at all plausible, then his works can be said to disturb abstract painting by showing that the abstraction on which our history of abstract painting rests is one founded in the structure of capitalism, and not in the structure of art (as Reinhardt might want to argue). matwould all this imply for my practice-particularly for the wall paintings I've been doing? The obvious point to make is that, with few exceptions,117 the wall paintings have been either temporary-to be painted out, when they were done in museums or galleries, after the exhibition is over-or illegal, when they took place in abandoned sites. Because of this- and because they are not portable works-they cannot be brought to the rnarket,L1sThisdoes not mean that the wall paintings are not commodities: they could be, if someone were willing to commission one to be made for a specific site. But the fact remains that the wall paintings are more difficult for the market to swallow than easel paintings, just as they are more difficult to fit into exhibition schedules than more routine forms of work. However, I did not intend this to signal any protest against the commodity structure of art, even though some have interpreted them in this way. I am interested in all the ways in which this kind of work is a difficulty for the art exhibiting system, but I have no ability at all to believe that artwork (mine or anyone else's) has the ability to change the structure of capitalism in any degree. I regard this kind of claim, or demand on art, as being a kind of hang-over from Modernism, when art was seen as a vehicle which could change the world. This was, and is, simply a faith-one I don't share. But I do value the work as a minor difficulty for the exhibition and marketing svstem. As Kosuth wrote: "Part of the process which has limited our conception of art are the institutionalized paths meaning itself is permitted *.I 19 to take. I would be happy to see my wall paintings as constituting, in some small way, a resistance to these "institutionalized pathsw-which are, quite literally, the paths by which artworks are threaded into and through concrete real world ins tit~tions'~~. But there are huge problems with this approach--and I'm quite willing to admit that in many ways the wall paintings are failures. In the essay on Christian Eckart, I tried to make clear that I wasn't accusing him of making work that simply played to the market, and to this end, 1 quoted Kosu th's observation that "In our sociopolitical systern, cultural engagement is expressed in socioeconomic terms; we can't get away horn that."12' I went on to say that if Kosuth were correct, if "cultural engagement is expressed in socioeconomic terms," then it follows that whatever values an artwork may be seen to manifest, that these values have to be somehow made visible socioeconomically, that is, as valuable in the marketplace. To do otherwise would be to render the projection of those values totally ineffectual.lu At that point in time I was already aware that, in comparison to Eckart's works that had made their odd accommodation to the market, my own work was rendered ineffectual by not doing so. "In the case of Eckart's work, even a religious dimension, a metaphysical dimension, would have be expressed within the market for art "-and my contention in the essay on his work, is that this religious or metaphysical dimension was expressed within the commodity structure paintings are saddled with? By having virtually no relationship to the marketplace, not even one of negation, it seems to me that the wall paintings have no ability whatsoever to project their values. It may be that they are failures; it may be that they have no cultural engagement since they are not "expressed in socioeconomic term^."^" On the other hand, there's a point that Richard Serra has raised that has been exceedingly important personally. I've noted that in his interview with Peter Eisenrnan, Serra pointed out that "I know that there is absolutely no audience for sculpture, as there is none for poetry or experimental film.'"" And he continues, "Since there is no audience for sculpture or poetry, no one demands that they resist manipulation from the outside."126 And this strangely Liberating. Serra goes on to make the point that "On the contrary, the more one betrays one's language to comrnercid interests, the

0oreater the possibility that those in authority will reward one's effortsm- meaning that since there is no audience, one can sell so easily, since no-one constrains the artist, there is also a flip side to the coin. Since there is no audience, then in practice there is no-one chasing poets or sculptors with the promise of Lucrative rewards if they'll only corrupt or sentimentalize their own work. Painters, at least, have the illusion that tailoring one's work for the market will be rewarded. By contrast, working in an area without audience can be a form of "a structurally-imposed ethicalness," if I can call it that. By which I mean that the disciphe and rigour of a ethic is really imposed from without, rather than maintained from within-as in traditional narratives from the temptation of Saint Anthony on. There's no nobility or inner strength here. [t's simply easier to maintain some strict .~llegianceto the internal development of one's work, if the work is placed in a domain largely devoid of any possibility of playing to the market. It may not be the same as someone nobly resisting the temptation to corrupt their own work even though surrounded by herds of eager buyers, dealers, critics and curators-but it might suffice... But one crucial point has to be made about the market for art. Back in 1984 Philip Monk, in grumbling about our colonial mentality, remarked pointedly that "Toronto is neither New York nor Germany, let alone Italy. Yet there is a desire to institute a discourse in Toronto on the order of elsewhere-on the authority of that production, legitimation, and his tory. "-' What this should serve to remind us of is that while the marketplace is a vast abstracting power whose structure is more-or-less identicd everywhere in the Western world, the differences in size and power of the New York market (which is a world market for art) and that of Toronto (which is at best a national market in a nation not tembly powerful economically) are enormous, and these differences have specific effects on the artworks produced in those locales. This does not only mean that in Toronto there is less of a market to play to, or less of an opportunity to sell works. It also means that the type of work produced will be different-since the market is as much one of the material inputs of an artwork as is paint or canvas. As 1 said in the Eckart essay, I first realized that the market effected the artwork itself, when, quite by chance, 1 had the opportunity to see Ailan ~McCollum'sSurrogates first in New York, and then a short time later in Toronto. (The Szrrrogntes are plastercast reproductions of framed monochrome paintings, amassed by the hundreds.) When I first saw them in New York, 1 was really impressed. But when I saw them a short time later in Toronto, they seemed curiously flat, as though they'd been unplugged. I puzzled about this for a Long time. How couId my evaluation of them have changed so much in such a short time ? It took a while before I realized that in some sense, the work hnd been unplugged. In New York, in the 80s, McCollum's pieces had that enormously powerful commercial market to push against; in Toronto, where the market is comparatively tiny, the work lacked necessity. It was abstracted in Canada. (On this front, A.A.Bronson writing of our "unique geographical and political situation" and calling for "A Really Good History" specifically mentions "the lack of any real art market at all'2s" as one of the determining factors in Canadian art of the 60s and 70s.) In retrospect, it's easy to see that these stand-ins for painting, which were almost allegorical figures for it, with their apparent emptiness, (but marshaled like an army), only made sense in a situation where art could appear to be emptied out by the sheer power of the marketplace. And much the same kind of reading could be made of Chris tian Eckart's Eidolons-which appear to be nothing more than empty frames. Thomas Crow writes that "If indeed advanced painting and sculpture have been as emptied and debilitated as we have been led to believe, then it would follow that they must possess immense reserves of strength, of residua1 capacity to command interest, in order to sustain the enormous

0vrowth of the last decade."12gIt's certainly plausible then to see the Eidolons as an image of painting having been hollowed out by the incredible power of the 80s marketplace. Perhaps the Eidolons can be interpreted, then, as "saying" that the market for such a valuable commodity as art is so strong that all that is required now is the display, nat of an artwork, but of the work involved in making the signs of art: a kind of semaphore. Crow's point is manifested in works which disdose only that they are art: one being only a frame, the other just a stand-in for an artwork. And yet they "count" as artworks. What I find interesting is that this kind of hollowing-out seems to have been necessary in New York, but not in Toronto (or at least, not yet.) But the commodity structure is the same in New York as Toronto. The difference (a difference that could account for the Stmogntes or the Ei~iolorrs)is that the sheer size and power of the New York market is so much more evident and so much more concretely visible to artists.'30 The d i fi'erence between success and failure there is extreme relative to Toronto- which is also an effect of Canada's grant shucture and relatively stronger emphasis on income-redistribution through taxation and free medical care.131 What would this entail for painting? Just that painting would admit where it stands: that it is a deluxe commodity, perhaps even that it is being drained out by that status. But also that painting, is not just "painting," an abstract category that refers back only to the materials and conventions used in assembling a certain artifact. In a certain sense there may be no "painting" at all, but instead a "painting in Toronto," and a "painting in New York," or a "painting in Montreal"-local inflections or dialects which colour the work and distinguish it. And one last, odd, point. It may seem that notions such as frontality and the commodity structure are aspects of painting which are far from each other. But in discussing the aura of an artwork, Benjamin once wrote that

"Perceptibility," as Novalis puts it, "is a kind of attentiveness." The perceptibility he has in mind is one other than that of the aura. Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man ...To perceive the nurn of an object menns to invest it irpith the ability to look at rcs in rehrrn.'32 [Emphasis mine.]

This is not far from Bakhtin's notion of the dialogical, in which what seem to be objects are to be taken as subjects. And it is very dose to what Nodelman wrote about the viewing of painting, that "with the repertory of his customary behaviour and motives drastically contracted, the viewer is made to face and regard the work, which reciprocally faces and appears to regard him."'33if Benjamin's exploration of the aura is plausible at all, and if Nodelman's description can be taken at face value, then in painting the experience of the aura may well be directly connected to how frontality is utilized and directed in a specific work. Perhaps they are not separate at all. Then the way frontality is used and experienced would be a precise point at which the hct of painting always being a commodity can be asserted, disturbed, qualified, or surrendered to, or simply reinforced once again. 6. The Homelessness of Contemporary Painting

1 agree with Serra when he says that "the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides." He was careful to restrict this to sculpture, but in my experience this holds true for everything, perhaps because there is no non-place in which things could occur? I never really understood the light and the way that shadows fdand were defined in Morandi's still lifes until I visited Emilia-Romana and Bologna, where Morandi lived and worked. I remember looking out the window of the train, and suddenly seeing that the shadows and the box-like lornof the farmhouses ruere Mornndis- I used to puzzle about the light and the colour of the sky in Jack Chambers' later paintings: to me they seemed unreal, the light a bit too dear, the sky too blue. I assumed that these were deliberately heightened by him, and it was only after living in London for a few weeks in 1988 that I saw that these weren't heightened or unreal at ail, just different from the light and atmospheric conditions of Toronto, which is my home. There was more transcription, and less tuning up of the painting that I had imagined. Later, when I visited Winnipeg (where I was born and raised) I could see how different things were there: the light of that prairie sky was blazing. Everything was declnred. From my hotel window, I could see that the people waiting for the bus were isolated from each other by that light, as though instead of being "a group of people" they were each "a solitary person," each "standing on their own." The buildings too were established by the light as clearly defined (almost super-defined) individual masses, and never formed anything like an urban texture. The point I want to make is that light and place are not abstractions, they are always concrete and specific. Another example: the light in Corot's painting is Italianate. I puzzled about his light-and loved it-long before I knew that he'd worked in Italy. But I knew his light wasn't Paris' greyed Light. The point, I suppose, is that because artworks have been so scattered around the world, there are many things about them which are difficult to comprehend now that the works appear in a very-different locale from where they were made. Everything has been wrenched from its context, as though each work were now only a kind of quotation excised from a larger text If there is a non-place anywhere, it would be the modem museum, white-walled, with artificial and unvarying light so that it moves closer and closer to being identical with the space and light of reproduction. Kenneth Frampton, the critic and theorist of architecture, remarks that "until recently, the received precepts of modem curatorial practice favored the exclusive use of artificial Light in all art galleries. It has perhaps been insufficiently recognized how this encapsulation tends to reduce the artwork to a commodity, since such an environment must conspire to render the work placeless. This is because the local light spectrum is never permitted to play across its surface."'35 The most obvious point about painting today is that it is homeless. By now painting has become equated with "the easel painting1'-though this term is a bit inaccurate, since Pollock's large paintings, or Newman's enormous colour fields weren't painted on easels and yet they're referred to as easel paintings. What we really mean is that they are portable, on the model of the painting on canvas pulled over a wooden stretcher. The great advantage of the easel painting, which has come to eclipse all other forms in the last five hundred years or so, is the fact that it can be easily moved. But that is also its great disadvantage, because this portability dissipates any sense of place. Frampton has pointed out that most contemporary architecture is also predicated on this same lack of place. "It is self evident", he writes, "that the tabula rasn tendency of modernization favours the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction.. . The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is dearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness... ~136 You could argue that the homelessness of our painting is perfectly in synch with the placelessness to which our architecture aspires, but this would be to admit then that the role of the easel painting is to recapitulate the status quo in terms of the same kind of rationalizing and abstracting from a sense of place that architecture administers. I had no sense at all of what had been lost in this until I first visited Florence and saw for myself the Uccellos in the cloister at Santa Maria Novella (see plate 5), the Pontormos at Galluzzo, the del Sartos at Santissima Annuzziata, the Trinity by Massaccio in the Duomo-and in Padua the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto. What surprised me most-especially in the cases of the Uccellos and Giotto's Chapel-was the way in which these fictional spaces were carefully built into the specifics of the one particular place where they occurred. I could talk about the way the depicted light fell at Padua and its relation to the fall of the real light there, but what touched me most was Uccello's painting of the flood. I'd never had much interest in that work until I stood there in the cloister in front of it. Above my head I could see Noah, or perhaps two Noahs at different moments in the narrative, struggling to survive the waters of that Biblical deluge, and visible too throughout the fresco were the damage and the watermarks left by the 1966 flood that devastated ~lorence'". I saw that this wonderful, wonderful work was subject to the same vicissitudes that it depicted, and though it is tembly damaged, it seemed perhaps to be richer than it might have been before. And certainly, it gave me an experience of what an art of place could be. When I returned home, what struck me was that all our works, and the works stacked up in museums, are homeless objects. I thin_! that almost all our artwork since Van Eyck has a terrible pathos about it because it is homeless, with little or no relation to adual place and actual light, making them tembly abstract. Even those works which are not abstract in this sense are presented in this way. The printed reproductions or slides of works such as the Scrovegni Chapel, or the Uccellos in the Chiostro Verde-which are if nothing else, works that are placed-are shot as though they too were easel paintings. The Scrovegni Chapel is routinely presented through photographs which were shot face-on from a scaffolding used to bring the camera up to the same Level as the paintings: a view impossible for any visitor to that place138. Similarly, most shots take each narratival panel and present it alone-as though it were an easel painting! And yet what is striking in the chapel itself is the Long rows of these little rectangles, Like a comic book. And further, the top row of panels are painted where the straight vertical side walls of the chapel meet the vault, so that all the figures there and all the lovely decorative borders bend. Yet photographs taken straight-on from a scaffolding try to "correct" this distorting effect which is so odd and so striking. Please understand: I'm not saying that these photographs aren't useful. What I loathe is their coming to replace entirely the view a visitor standing on the floor would have. These photos and slides are ideal views, presented as the truth of that place, when the Chapel itself is anything but abstracted from its place. To put it another way, our images of the Chapel are interpretations of it, reading from the perspective and values of our time, and getting rid of those elements which would provide the greatest resistance to us. t think it's obvious that the homelessness of the easel painting is what makes them so amenable to the art market, and I believe that this can be seen creeping into view even in works as early as Van Eyck, though in his work it seems almost innocent, a moment of freshness. In the famous Allurntion of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece in Ghent, the artwork is obviously intended to be devotional, yet from my perspective it seems like a work in which what had been sacred is giving way to a very modem sense of the commodity. The lamb radiates rays of light, but I remember being amused by the image of God or Christ (the identity of the red-robed central figure is still debated) proudly displaying from under his robe a pair of beautifully-tooled [talian leather boots. And many sections of the work seem to disclose something that was only just coming into being, a fate for painting that the invention of oil painting, with its wonderful ability to model and detail objects in a space, made possible: the capturing of vision, the making of painting into an object. An object which is modelled on the kind of objects depicted in the new oil painting; a object which from now on will be portable-like the objects depicted, and a commodity-like the objects depicted. Every artwork is potentially a commodity, whether it's a building, a site-specific work of sculpture, a photograph, a videotape, or an installation. Anything can be bought and sold. However, the ease of portability does enter into the equation. A sitespecific work entails certain difficulties that make it less attractive as a commodity: if Richard Serra refuses to allow the Tilted Arc to be moved, then what value will it have to anyone as an artwork? The curved steel plates were purchased after the piece was dismantled, as scrap steel. Even if they were kept together, and set up again in some other place, this would not have been recognized as an artwork by Serra because of his insistence that the exact placement of his work was part of its meaning. Obviously not all works of sculpture involve these sorts of commercial difficulties, but it's obvious why small, light-weight works that could sit on a mantel or table-top sell better than large heavy works. And this does effect the market for paintings: they are very easy to ship and do not require any spec@ place, only a flat waU. But in spite of what I said about Van Eyck and oil painting, my point is not to attack easel paintings for being commodities; rather I believe that they are so thoroughly commodities because of their homelessness-and it's really that homelessness which bothers rneI3'. ''Integral to the accumulation of capital is the repeated intentional destruction of the built envir~nment""~says Paul Comerton. Obviously this destruction makes the easel painting imperative: in a city like Toronto, where so much of the older urban fabric was tom out by the end of the 1960s, if all our visual art were wall paintings, most of it would have been destroyed."' But the very necessity for easel paintings is, by the same token, part of a vast forgetting. From this perspective, 1 could say that Christian Eckart's Andnchtsbild and Eiifolon works are among the most forlom works I've seen-simply because of what their apparently erratic, broken, but still rectilinear outlines implyH'. On the one hand, they suggest those odd works encountered in museums whose shapes are an index of the architecture of a room which they were originally designed to fit, and from which they've been wrenched. On the other, they recall the Gothic and early Renaissance altarpieces whose shape and framing were explicitly like an architecture, and often explicitly reflected the architecture of the building for which they were madeM3.Ln both cases, the works can be interpreted as images of the displacement of painting over the centuries: through the gaps in the Andachtsbild or through the empty kames of the Eidolon ,you see the white wall, like all the other white walls on which works are displayed in galleries throughout the western world. Whether or not this kind of interpretation is relevant to Eckart or his conscious intent, I see this forlorn quality as hopeful, as though the works were mourning for something valuable that's been lost to us. At least there are works now that recognize this loss, that want a place. And there are others. Yam Lads very reflective metal diptydrs for instance, especially when they are installed on their own, without the distraction of others' works around, fill with reflections of the room in which they are installed, but with slight changes. (Since his paintings are installed at angles to the gallery walls, the gallery walls angle off and meet not at ninety degrees to each other in the reflected comers but at wider angles, so that the reflected room is clearly only virtual, impossible in real space.) hiffioebel's Mnnmtn, in its demonstration that the work is merely placed here temporarily, is important in this context of inpretation as well. The modernist museums, then, can never be anything more than hostels for these forlorn objects-though this in itself may be an accurate representing of our lives and history here in North America, which is populated by people who left their ancestral homes, or whose pare~tsor grandparents left their native lands, and who often retain some memory of that family's uprooting. But this is our place. Though I don't see many signs that it is seen as our place, or even a place'a. "Where is here?" asked Northrop Frye. 1 don't think we have an answer yet. But this is one reason why Serra's work has been so useful to me, simply because it seems to have been an insistence on the concreteness of the experience of place, an insistence that places are not exchangeable for each other. Nonetheless, the great examples for me have the wall frescoes of artists like Giotto or Uccello, or the unknown ceramicists who decorated San Vitde or GaUa Placidia in Ravenna. Perhaps it's not yet possible for us to have an art of place: this may be why some museums place an emphasis on sorting out works by nation, as though this relatively modem development could substitute for an experience of place. Thus the Metropolitan in New York separates out American work from the rest of the world with its American wing, and the Whitney is a museum devoted only to American art Until recently, the Art Gallery of Ontario separated out contemporary art from contemporary Canadian art, and assigned each to a different curator, but historical Canadian art and the history of art in all other nations are still kept separate from each o her. Clearly this is an effect of nationalist sentiments. I don't want to say that this dividing up of art by national origin couldn't disclose anything relevant about the works displayed, only that this hasn't been demonstrated. "The Mystic North" exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario was important precisely because it placed the Group of Seven in a larger and non-national context of Nordic painting in the early years of this century: it was an understanding based on the depicting of light in a particular part of a particular hemisphere of our globe, not a dividing up of artworks according to nationality. Such an exhibition can be interpreted as suggesting that, whatever role artworks may place in a national mythology, they do not necessarily have "citizenship" in the same way as their makers did, but instead shared similar problems of depicting conditions of light and geography that were not confined by national boundaries. But if an art of place seems still largely beyond our reach, the price we pay for it is to lay an inordinate stress on time. In the museums, works are jailed in their separate periods, and this way of separating works is guarded much more jealously than the division of works into different nation. At the AGO, Canadian and International contemporary works now mingle- which is a wonderful change from the old regime. But the present and the past still remain largely exiled horn each other.'" Time not place, is what matters. And now each of our homeless objects demands its right to enter eternity: that time beyond time which the museum mimics. This is the demand each working artist implicitly makes, that "my work should be looked after." In his novel Love nnd Garbage from which I've learned so much, Ivan Klirna wrote of art from a garbageman's perspective. His garbage collector-someone remarkably like Klima himself during the period in which this was the only job the state would allow him to hold-observes one day that "the world is groaning, choking with a multitude of creations, it is buried by objects and strangled by ideas which all pretend to be necessary, useful or beautiful, and therefore lay claim to perpetual end~rance."~"~I think that this is part of the reason why so much of our criticism is trash: it no longer aspires to comprehend the work. Rather, it's job is to make the largest possible daim for the work, so that the work can lay claim to perpetual endurance. But why should all these works endure? Uccello's painting of the Flood had been damaged by the very thing it depicted: yet this moved me enormously. What that damage showed me was a work really bound to a specplace, a place where flooding was always a concern; and a work that had somehow not wound up being part of eternity, but simply part of time with all its vicissitudes. So time becomes an issue too, oddly enough: somehow placelessness is bound up with it, with a demand made on time. Comerton argues that:

Integral too is the transformation of all signs of cohesion into rapidly changing fashions of costume, language and practice. The temporality of the market and of the commodities that flow through it generates an experience of time as quantitative, an experience in which each moment is different from the other by virtue of coming next, situated in a chronological succession of old and new, earlier and later. The temporality of the market thus denies the possibility that there might co-exist qualitatively distinguishable times, a profane time and a sacred time, neither of which is reduable to the other. The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity to imagine Life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.'"'

I think it's dear then why light would be such an issue for me, for light is not only tied to an experience of place: it's part of our sense of living in time. Light-natural Light, that is4nothing but a structure of exemplary recurrence, for what we call a "day" is nothing but the return of Light to the sky, and what we caU "night" only the diminishing of the light as our earth rotates once more on its axis.'* If works are separated from place, in part by being bathed in a perpetually unchanging artificial Light, then they are given up to a perpetually unchanging sense of time as well, time which is only quantitative, dissolver of qualities. Connerton argues that "an individual's consciousness of time is to a large degree an awareness of society's continuity, or more exactly of the image of that continuity that societies create and I doubt that many would take issue with the fairly general idea that the way we present and view artworks is also a presentation of something iike "society's continuity." If so, then it seems clear to me that the particular image of continuity we are trying to present (particularly in North American modernist "white-cube" galleries and museums such as Western's ArtLab) is one in which time is made to appear Linear and purely quantitive, separated from the natural world, separated from the specificities of a place, "profane"1"(for lack of a more precise term), and progressive. To quote Connerton yet again, "the fact that we no longer believe in the great 'subjects' of history-the proletariat, the party, the West- means, not the disappearance of these great master-narratives, but rather their continuing unconsaous effectiveness as ways of thinking about and acting in our contemporary situation: their persistence, in other words, as unconscious collective memories.'*'5' This structuring of time--which is identical with the attempt to de-place the viewer and the artwork-s till implicates us in that narration, vast, grand and abstracting. The specificities of time and place, with their attendant vicissitudes and damage, with all their inescapable contingencies, offer instead (or "in their place"?) a relation to art which could be by comparison something far more limited, hr more visibly bound. Perhaps this sounds like it would merely be lessening of what art can be. I see it only as involving a diminishing of art's autonomy and abstraction. A few years ago I visited Ferrara. It was raining the day I arrived. The chesnuts were falling from the trees, hammering the cars parked below, and the streets were filled with people with arms full of flowers. It was Saturday, the day of visiting the grave-sides of relatives. I was spellbound by the colours of the houses, and spent most of the day photographing the colours of plaster walls, wooden shutters, and window frames. The colours were the colours of Italy above Rome: those yellows, pinks, roses, odd greens-but all of them were shifted slightly towards grey. It was as though the whole city were slightly silvered. I puzzled over this, wondering why in this one place the colours would all be shifted that way. It was only the next day that I realized Ferrara was famous for its fogs that roll in from the Po and from the Adriatic. Over the course of so many years, the whole aty had been slowly tuned to that atmospheric condition, in a thousand apparently individual colour choices. Today, Ferrara is one of the really great works of painting because it's an experience of the inseparability of place from colour, and colour from place. 7. Is Painting Dead?

"You must remember that ...we felt the moral crisis of n world in shambles, n icorld deumtnted by n great depression, and a mce ruorld war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of pninfings that we were doing- flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure ruorld of unorganized shapes nnti forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And 1 would say that for sonre of LLS, this zum our moral crisis in rehiion to what to paint. So that we ~ctlrnllybegan, so to speak, from scmtch, as if painting zoete not only denn ~152 hit had neaer existed.

That tabula rasa is not possible br us, if only because the example of Newman and his generation (from which admittedly I draw so much) is still staring us in the face. We can't begin from scratch again. Then there's the matter, if Nevitte is right, of our not feeling anything like a world in shambles. But Newman's example points out how valuable it can be for painters to believe that painting may be dead. It worked for them. I suppose that with my-I don't know whether to call it an active disinterest or simply antagonism-towards any kind of eternity or afterlife for art, it's no surprise that I believe the idea that painting is dead or dying to be valuabie. Painting's great advantage over all the other visual arts at this particular moment is this belief that it's dying. (Is it accidental for instance that so many of the great works of mourning during the AIDS epidemic are paintings?'53) I no longer understand why this attack on painting should automatically be fought off by painters and painting's allies. This is not to say that I entirely agree with how this charge, which is often no more than wish-fulfillment (as I said of Benjamin Buchloh at one point's), is levelled, though, or even that the idea of painting's death is anything less than specious. The most typical Line of argument is that the invention of photography put an end to painting, or began to put an end to it. This is to assume that the arts are a purely technical realm, where a new technology completely supplants the old--yet there's no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. What art media have been completely superseded? The encaustics used by the Egyptians are still in use: Jasper Johns' targets and flags and Brice Marden's monochromes rely on that same technique. Charcoal that was used in certain of the so-called "cave paintings" ten thousand years ago is still used in drawing dams today. Many of the same ochres drawn from the earth are still used in today's modem pigments. Similarly, the invention of acrylic paint in the late 50s didn't end the use of oils. It seems that, instead of existing as a purely technical realm where the new technology supplants the old, new ways of doing things in the cultural arena are simply added to the existing ones, not at all as in our old image of progress- The more obvious problem is that to say painting is dying isn't to make an argument, just a profession of faith. As Arthur Danto points out "the death of painting is less a matter of internal exhaustion than of external declaration. Painting was dedared irrelevant by a majority vote in Moscow in 1921, by artists charged with finding what art was suitable to do in the new society. Easel painting was dedared finished by Siqueros and the admirers of Mexican mural painting, a decade later. The critics of the magazine October wrote and rewrote painting's obituary throughout the Seventies." ''' IS it possible to imagine a better illustration of a "transcendental consciousness"'56 than this-the idea that culture can be determined by vote? Very amusing! Yve-Alain Bois, by way of Damisch, makes the point that in a "rules of the game" understanding of painting, "nothing is ever terminated, or decided once nnd for nlZ..Jt dismisses all certitudes about the absolute truth upon which the apocalyptic discourse is based.""' Then even the death of painting has to be dispensed with, since this kind of closure is only the greatest certitude. As I suggested earlier, if painting is not dead, if it has not come to an end, then perhaps we have finally arrived at the end of the end-which is nothing if not the end of any absolute claim to truth, to having history behind us or incarnated in our paintings. Painting will have to proceed, then, freed from truth. The argument has been made, by Kosuth among many others, that painting is only kept alive by the market for it: as though painting were on life-support in culture's intensive-care ward. It's impossible to know whether this is true or not, because there is no truth here to find. Painting onlv has a cultural vitality if it is still believed to have a cultural vitality-if it is experienced as vital. Once again we are in a realm of faith, not argument: we can only have testimonies, not proof- I believe that painting is still vital: my only proof for this is that I spend time visiting exhibitions of painting, talking with painters, and puzzling about painters as diverse as Jonathon Lasker, Sheila Ayearst, Yam Lau, Nestor Kruger, and Christian ~ckart.'" I don't believe, inspite of how thoroughly entangled with the market painting has become, that painting's only value is as a commodity. 1 accept entirely Wittgenstein's admonition, "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language game of giving information."'" Personally, I think that Yve-Ahin Bois is right when he says "let us simply say that the desire for painting remains, and that this desire is not entirely programmed or subsumed by the market: this desire is the sole factor of a hture possibility of painting...."'60 Yet this does not mean that the "death of painting" can simply be dispensed with. As I pointed out earlier, when dealing with the special status accorded painting, painting has become entwined with modernism: "the death of painting" then is not the actual end of an actual artform, but a way of trying to bring to an end a certain mentality in which we've lived for so long. And similarly, "the death of painting" is a way of trying to bring to an end painting's special status: to chuck it, so that painting can appear just as it is, a medium with certain possibilities and certain hits and certain conventions, travelling without all the attendant baggage of being "Art with a capital A." It's worth mentioning here that the return to painting made by many artists including myself in the late 1970s was made (in part) simply because it was believed that painting had died, and that only an empty form was left. I believed at the time that this made it possible to zoork in painting. That since painting was dead, what was accomplished in a painting would be visible just as itself, since the medium now didn't warrant any special acclaim. In the long run I was wrong, since painting returned, and with it the kind of unthinking praise for simply making paintings: but in the short- run, [ believe I was correct, and that at least other artists recognized the "evacuated painting" that people such Oliver Girling and myself in Toronto, Jack Goldstein and Thomas Lawson in New York, and Pierre Dorion in Montreal were busy sc@reling away at. I wasn't aware of it at the time, as I had no interest in Ad Reinhardt, but in retrospect I think that all of us were acting on what Reinhardt had said years earlier: "The one object of fifw- vears of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating it and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive- non-ob jective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagis t, non- expressionist, non-subjective. The one and only way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not-" AU of us were working with imagery, found imagery in most cases, yet I don't think that this necessarily puts us at odds with his statement. Reinhardt made his pronouncement at a time when only abstract art seemed possible as a way of getting rid of everything that was not the issue at hand. It was different for us: painting had died. It was already empty. Reinhardt had said: "I got rid of all that other stuff. Someone else doesn't have to do it." We didn't have to do it. We only had to utilize its emptiness. The images that were dumped into painting's emptied-out space were found images, dessicated ones. They were only images, not things in the world, copies of copies.'61 "Pictures," not paintings. This kind of attitude continued to be worked out throughout the 1980s, especially in the apparently abstract works of Ross Bleckner and Peter Halley and certain works of Philip Taa ffe. If the earlier, dead-painting paintings appeared to be figurative, these looked like abstract paintings- except of course that they were representntions of abstract paintings. Bleckner's and Taaffe's looked Like Bridget Riley's optical paintings, and Halley's like early Frank Stellas: these kinds of paintings moved even further into, or past, the end of painting, by making works which were based not on the creation of abstraction but on a weary reception of it What's crucially important to these works is their sense of planned hilure. Bleckner said of his own stripe paintings that "Op is a kind of failed imagery. The pictures appear to have iconographic interest, but then don't."'62 Peter Halley, with his propensity for reading abstract works as figurative, wrote of those same paintings that "Op art is chosen as telling symbol for the terrible failure of positivism that has occurred in the postwar era, for the transformation of the technological, formalist imperatives advanced by the Bauhaus into the ruthless modernism preached and practised by the postwar American corporation, of the transformation of the esthetic of Mies and Gropius into the Hula Hoop, the Cadillac tailfin, into Tang and Op Art."1h3The point was, in some strange sense, to make failed paintings, though here thev are more like images of hilure: 1 think that Jonathon Lasker has been much more troubling in making paintings that fail so articulately that thev never stop resonating. At this point I'd like to look in some detail at Sheila Ayearst's paintings, (see plate 6) which appear to be a different way of weakening painting'a. Like Halley or Bleckner, Ayearst's paintings are made from the "receiver" rather the "creator" side of the ledger: they're not based on some apparent creation of a new image in painting but instead on having seen painting from an earlier period. Where Halley or Bleckner's paintings have a foundation in the abstract painting that preceded their own, Ayearst's instead relies on figurative work, usually the work of some figure from Canada's art history, and always a man, so that the work on which hers is based-since she is a Canadian citizen-+ quite Literally her patrimony. Each series of her works is based on some male painter in whose work Ayearst has seen some transcendent kind of imagery or light: Ozias Leduc, or Jack Chambers, for example. But in her works, that light has gone murky, is soing out. This darkening of sight is simply the result of how Ayearst paints-or else how she paints is the result of requiring this darkening. Her paintings are made in a deliberately academic style more than a century out of date. First, she does the underpainting in a sienna or brown, laying out the entire scene that's to be depicted. Then a series of glazes are passed over the surface of the painting, adding the required local colours to the underpainting one by one: yellow, red, blue, green. Finally a series of black

0ulazes are passed over the painting, which subdue colour and eliminate detail from the underpainting-excep t where those glazes are carefully wiped awav again to Let the undercoats peek through. It's these final glazes which darken the whole scene, adding gloom, making everything more difficult to see-and oddly, often making certain of the colours underneath that blackness seem to glow all the more by virtue of having had to struggle up through the darkness. The black coats add to the feeling of datedness, as though the painting had darkened with time, the way varnish in fact does darken with time. All in all it's a curious, even slightly stilted way of working, deliberately out of step with the moment. It's a mode which could never replicate Chambers' brightness, that sensation of direct sunlight. And this seems to be how the painting works-by not zuorking-if Chambers' painting is the standard of judgement. When I wrote on her work for her exhibition of her paintings after Chambers, I said that her paintings were "a darkening of vision, as though a cataract were slowly forming in painting's eye. I think that Ayearst's paintings have always been looking back, as though the great artworks of the past were seen diminishing in the rear- view mirror of a car- The paintings Ayearst takes up as starting points for her own works function in part as standards, as images of what once was possible for painting. By now, the works to which her works refer are part of the historical record, and so they seem to be in some way unassailable. Right or wrong, they are there to be seen-Her own paintings after Chambers might be a kind of tarnishing, a rusting away of possibilities during the years which now separate his time from ours. But this doesn't mean that her paintings are simply a form of mourning, or a nostalgia for the pastr at this point in time painting can only enter the present by admitting its diminishment. It is no longer the vehicle for a transcendent light-" It seems to me that Ayearst's work is an example of how painting could proceed after the death of its death, by admitting its diminishment, by admitting that it has no certitude, no truth to reveal. Her work can be interpreted as being like some corrosive agent eating away at the idea of painting having some special status. This may be a necessary part of the job for painting at this moment, a way for painting to begin to get past painting. Reagan Morris' latex "paintings" of the last five years, which are really "peelings,"L6'look like cracked-clay or cracked-skin, and have the colour of mud or clay. If Ayeant's paintings suggest that painting has gone dark, Morris' say that painting has been beached, that the historical tide has gone out. I don't think a painting could be clearer about not being an agent of history or progress, or for that matter, any teleology. To point out another example: Eric Giavin's recent works, such as those shown in the AGO'S "Perspectives" show this year, like Halley's, rely on the example of Stella's flat design and thick stretchers-though where Halley's use ludicrously bright day-glo paints for maximum optical effect, Glavin's increasingly rely on the careful study of bad 1950s commercial printing and "supergraphics" stretched textile art (the sort of thing one could have seen in neighbourhood bank buildings.) Careful, articulate, studious, their colours "fail," ladcing all perceptual "pop." What do they "say"?They say that painting has been reduced to be merely a design element, part of some ensemble in a corporate lobby, innocuous. Unlike Bois, though, whose interpretation of painting has been so influential, I don't see this kind of "failed"painting as mournful. Bois writes that "mouming has been the activity of painting throughout this cent~r~"~~~-whic.hsimply Looks mistaken to me when I consider how painting has been allied to utopian projects (for example Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Newman.) Nor do I agree with Bois that "our historical task [is] the difficult task of mourning."167In retrospect I think that Bois' view at that time may have been shaped by the way in which the mourning which the AIDS epidemic had engendered had somehow became bound up with our view of painting-which is particularly dear in the cases of Bleckner and Morris, whose paintings became the official moumers for New York and Toronto artworlds. But "the task of painting" if that can ever be formulated at all, is not the same as the actual mouming for the deaths of actual persons. An artform, a cultural form, doesn't have the same Life span, or even, except metaphorically, a Life. Where Bois saw an interminable task of mourning, I see the same works (and other allied ones which have been done since) not as moumers for painting, for abstraction, or for modernism ~vithits utopian fantasies, but rather as attempts from within painting to change painting entirely, to withdraw it from its own power, centrality, and those fantasies about changing the world. Gerhard Richter often returns to a similar kind of discussion, though with a very different view. In his famous interview with Benjamin Buchloh, Buchloh said that the two goals of depiction and seif-reflection "run very close together" in Richter's painting. He then asked:

BB: But aren't they juxtaposed to show the inadequacy, the bankruptcy of both? GR: Not bankruptcy, but always inadequacy. BB: Inadequacy in relation to what? The expressive function? GR: In relation to what is expected of painting. BB: Can that expectation be formulated? GR: That painting ought to have more effect.'68 There's no way of knowing of course, but 1 think that the inadequacy of painting which Richter refers to is the result of painters and painting no Longer feeling and expressing that utopian and millenid drive that was at the heart of modernism. As modernism failed, or began to lose momentum and along with it, its illusions of universality, painting no longer was sustained by the same fantasies, but it's still haunted by those ghosts. Similarly, painters now must confront the apparent fact that radio, television, computers, and all the died mass media have dearly displaced painting from the kind of role it could play in Courbet or Manet's time.'69 It's rather minor in the scheme of things, growing to be more and more like poetry (which Serra reminds us has no audience) though better paying. One can always say that painting ought to have more effect, though the obvious question is "why?" It's not clear to me that to have power and wield it is jomehow better than not to have it. And our fantasies of the past, when painting seems to have had more power, shouldn't blind us to the role painting played as propaganda for the church, in Giotto's case, or for the divine right of kings in that of ~elas~uez."~Perhaps painting only had power when it borrowed the church, the state, or the king's power; perhaps it always had Little power of its own. Perhaps its power was based on near- universal illiteracy. Perhaps on its own, its strength was never adequate."' But if painting seems inadequate "in relation to what is expected of painting" as Richter says, then it may be that the problem lies less with painting than with expectations which painting should rid itself. At the moment, painting's inadequacy seems to be more productive than its imagined past adequacy. 8. The Lesson of Ferrara

"I zcmnt to report how I fomd the roorld.172 N -Ludwig Wi Vif tgenstein

Of course, I can reach no conclusions. To do so would be either to wind up speaking for history-as painting were still the agent of that mtth as it was believed to be in Modernism-or to take part in the kind of millenarianist sense of closure that Bois writes of-which, like Modemist painting was supposed to do, would offer the last word? The game has not ended. "'AU I can offer here are not conclusions, but simply examples 17' which light the way for me-which is of course, to say that they light my way, and not necessarily anyone else's. The citizens of Ferrara, painting their houses and apartments, windows, walls, and shutters.... It's not simply that there I saw a real art of place which had been slowly and carefully tuned to that city's atmospheric conditions over time, or even that I: saw there a work which didn't even announce itself as "Painting1'or "Art" at all. The lesson of Ferrara is that painting is just something done with paint. Obviously this is not the whole case: there's a set of works, of which Christian Eckart's paintings which don't use paint at all are members, that show that painting is also a history, tradition, or discourse: a game we agree to play. But while that option has to be kept in mind, it's also a way which surfs along on the game as it has been played. But while "Painting" was going on, painting was going on all the while: someone painted the walls of their rooms; another, the porch of their house. This too is painting. This, more than anything else, is also the lesson I take from Richard Serra. Unlike Serra, I don't believe that there is anything essential that emerges purely from the medium of an art: but let's say there was. (If we're playing a game, then why not play around with the rules?) Then what if painting were anything done with paint? Why not? What does Painting have to lose? Richter declares "that painting ought to have more effect." This strikes me as tired and nostalgic. Why must painting always been seen against the ground of that long artistic tradition? Perhaps to take the path I'm suggesting would allow painting to have less effect, and not to see this as a loss. I'm sure thzt to Richter it could only be a loss, but this is because Richter is the inheritor of the great European tradition, has appointed himself to that role in the play. But I'm not; I'm not even European. Ln spite of trying not to conclude, there always has to be a last word, which becaw of being at the end, will ring with all the effects of closure as though it dosed the debate itself. Well, if that must be, then I'd like to close with the example of Luis Barragan, the Mexican architect I tried to pay homage to with that painting in a Loading dock. He was a great colourist, to my mind far better than most painters-far better than Milton Avery, just to mention one painter often touted as a coloucist-in part because the colours he works with are carefully chosen to At the geography and light of Mexico city. 1 often think of his Red Wdl near the entrance to the Los Arboledas residential estate. It's simply a earthy-red-coloured wall, about 6 feet tall which runs in a straight Line "along the main road, through an ash grove, before disappearing over the horizon beneath high tree^.""^ Almost any of his walls would do: the beautiful pink wail at the fountain at Los clubes1", or the startling red bar of a wall in the middle of a pool of water next to the dining room, seen against a deep blue wall in the Gilardi ho~se"~-asfine a work as the very best of Barnett Newman. Barragan's beautiful walls "function as both theme and element... P~wesurface, unpunctuated except for window^."'^ They serve as examples for me precisely because, while they're not Painting, Like Ferrara they're painting of the highest order. They don't lack effect. They just don't ask to be adjudicated as though they were part of that tradition on which Richter still depends. A painted wall, hardly extraordinary in a society where most walls are painted: with nothing to set it apart from any other wall except the lucidity with which it is done. Endnotes

; See Yve-Main Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mou-g" in Endgame: Rrferwce nnd Sirnuinlion in Recent Painting ~nciSculpture, MIT Press, cambridge, 1986. '"No Communication With the Dead", in Wanda Koop, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, 1991, p.18. ' In an interview with Paul Taylor, Sherrie Levine said that "obviously, as an artist, I make the pictures that I want to make and I look for the theory that t think is going to help me ..." Sherrie Levine, "Sheme Levine Plays with Pad Taylor", FlashArt, Milan no. 135, Summer 1987. 'This has led to some pretty strange distortions of thought, most notably Benjamin Buchloh's "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression." In that essav Buddoh loudly proclaims the lack of any "real import" in both the return to Figuration in European art between the two world wars, and in the then-current European Neo-Expressionism. Yet if they were without importance, why were they important enough that Buchloh had to write articles, give papers, lecture and rail against them? (For more detail, see Andv Patton, "Buchloh's History", C magazine nos, spring 1985.) 'All that remains of the exhibition, held on three floors of an empty office tower on Adelaide St. East in Toronto, is the catalogue, MUD,with an essay bv Ihor Holubinsky. The exhibiting artists were: Jodi Altman, John Armstrong, Nicole Collins, Michael Davidson, Suzanne Funnell, Oliver Girting, Sheila Gregory, Alexander Iriving, Howard Lorn, Anda Kubis, Patrick Macauley, Euan MacDonald, Jennifer McMackon, Cedy Moon, Natalie Olanick, Brent Roe, Ayad Sinawi, Richard Storms, Denyse Thomasos, and Julie Voyce. These painters were drawn from a great range of commercial galleries, artist-run centres, artists collectives, and young, unaffiliated artists. Painting Disorders is made up of Mark Bell, Angela Leach, Eric Glavin, Nestor Kruger, Elizabeth Madntosh, and Sally Spath. 'Jerry Saltz, "A Year in the Life: Tropic of Painting", Art In America, October 1994, pp 90,91. bid Ibid "' lb id " hid Kosuthls essay, "1979," is useful as reminder of just how recent photography's acceptance was. Speaking of his own early work, he writes that he was able to use photography in the middle to late 1960s precisely because it hadn't yet been accepted as part of avant-garde art. 'It's ironically that verv isolation which permitted me (and others) to find photography a useful, and noit-artistic tool ... The rate however at which photography gained acceptance within the "avant-garde" after its use by artists in the early seventies ... altered the reading of any photograph used within an art con text (as photography accumulated new uses as art, it became associated with "avant-garde" practice.' Joseph Kosuth, "1979,"Arf After Philosophy and ilfter: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, MIT Press, 1991, p. 187. Ibid, p.206. " Mark Cheetham, Disturbing Abstraction: Christian Ecknrt, ArtLab, .University- of Western Ontario, 1996, p.33, footnote 7. " I've put scare quotes around the word "real" simply because I'm not at all certain that for human beings in a society and a culture than symbols and svmbolic activity are less "real" to us than "real" things. To @ve an obvious example: people have been killed in huge numbers for godswhich I believe do not even exist. Then unreal gods have real effects. :^ quoted by Yve-Alain Bois in "Painting: The Task of Mourning", see Bois, op-cit p.29. " In the catalogue essay for the exhibition, Toronto Painting '84, David Burnett wrote that "In recent years figurative painting has-been the centre of polemical, ideological, or merely enthusiastic attention. But the arguments, both for and against, have tended to polarize around painting as an enterprise, leaving abstraction or figuration as second-order issues. Clearly, this is symptomatic of a more fundamental crisis than a simple attachment to or rejection of a means for making artifacts. It is a crisis at ihe deeper roots of strategies concerned with the understanding of modernism..." David B urne tt,Torontu Painting '84, Art GaUery of Ontario, Toronto, 1984, p.8. :' Bois, op-cit, p.30. ."hid,p.30. '"One of Peter Halleyrsearly paintings, which is made to look Like an early Frank Stella is titled "Day-Glo Prison." I think it's plasuible to interpret this painting as meaning that the forms used in stella's minimalist work were a prison for painting and for vision. '' "Interview by Bernard LarnarcheeVadel", Richard Serra, Writings lit temiem, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p.117. '"Interview by Peter Eisenman", Serra, op. tit., p.143. Of course, it cannot literally be true that there is no audience for sculpture; if this were true, then Serra's work would not be being dealt with here, nor would I be citing a book made up entirely of writings and interviews with a sculptor. Adjusting for rhetorical effect, I believe that the point is that the audience for poetry and sculpture is small, espeaally for avant-garde poetry and sculpt&e, and certainly smaller than the audience for painting. " The most useful introductions to his attitudes toward drawing are contained in his "Notes on Drawingf' from 1987 and the "Interview by Lynn Cook" from 1992. see Serra, op-cit. '' Ibid, p.185. In "Weight," he writes that "I continually attempt to confront the con&adictions of memory and to wipe the slate dean, to rely on my own experience and my own materials...'' While I dislike the heroic tone (one which I think is visible in some of his sculpture as well) I think that nonetheless he has been able to accomplish this to a noteable degree. This emphasis on the material differences between different media was quite widespread from 19651975 or so: Michael Snow, for instance, insisted on the differences between media and his work played on those differences. - - Serra seems to me to be valuable in that, unlike many, he did not discard or mitigate this emphasis, and his work has continued to be constructed using this awareness. For my own work, I've found Serra's example to be more useful than Snow's because Serra has been more-or-less continuously a sculptor, where Snow was more wideranging in playing different media off against each other, and thus has been less important in doing the work of defining the Limits of one medium. --" "Interview by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel", Serra, op. at., p.116. - In a rather heated with argument with Greenberg at Plug-In (an artist-run gdlery in Winnipeg) in either 1974 or 1975 (I'm not certain of the date), Greenberg told me-that Serra was not a sculptor. That whatever his work was, it was not sculpture. For Greenberg, then, Serra had not engaged with what was proper to sculpture. For Serra, Caro's work (which Greenberg defended and promoted) was not specific enough to sculpture. (Serra's name had come up in the course of an argument about the different arts. I brought up Serra because I thought his work, whatever our different evaluations of it, would be accepted by both of us as an example of "sculpture" which we would not dispute, and could then use to clarify our positions. I was shocked

at Greenberg's response. I thought then, and think now, that in not seeing- Serra as "scdpture,"Greenberg was insufficiently Greenbergian.) ' Serra, op.cit.. p.145. " Ibid, p.8. '' [bid., p.184 . '' p.lM .- [bid, -.'- Ibid, p.188. " kid, p.265. 'For Serra, the experience of what used to be called "real space" is something that distinguishes sculpture from painting or photography. But Mark Cheetham points of Christian Eckart's works that "his Curved ~onochrornes ... displace the conventional boundaries between sculpture [and].- painting ..." Cheetham,op. ~it..p.8. " Serra, op. ~it..p.7, -" bid, p.8. " Ibid, p.129. " bid, p.121. "The whole notion of exactly who or what "the viewer" is lies outside the area of this thesis, but for now I'd point out that what's valuable in Serra's stahnent is that it makes clear that we do not know who or what the viewer is. It leaves the question quite obviously open. " It may be worth noting here that Serra's first published writing was "Verb List, 1967-68". Serra, op. tit., p.3. ""Meaning must clearly be the product of an interaction between the textual signals and the reader's acts of comprehension" writes Wolfgang Iser. See Wolfgang Iser, The Act Of RendittgJohns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1978, p. Q 1 - "One of the most interesting passages in the various interviews with Serra is one in which he talks about Living in Kyoto in 1970, near the temples at Mvoshin-ji. He points out that "the geometry of the sites prompted walking inks. The articulation of discrete elements within the field and the sense of the field as a whole emerged only by constant looking. The necessity of peripatetic perception is characteristic of Myoshin-ji." The influence of this on his view of sculpture and particularly on his later construction of arcs is obvious. "Interview by Friedrich Teja Ba&' in Serra, op. dt., p.29. "bid, pp.222-123. 'Ibid, p.129. *-'SeeIser, op-cit. pp 16,17. This might be a kind of Uncertainty Principle in the Arts: anyone-artist or critic-analyzing an art necessarily changes it, since social texts have no existence apart from their reception. .- *, It's ironic, as I pointed out in an earlier note, that although Serra has alwavs been insistent on what was specific to sculpture, Greenberg thought was not a sculptor at all, as he told me during a heated argument in Winnipeg in 1975. 'Clement Greenberg, "Modemist Painting", in The NmArt: A Critical Ar~fhofogy,ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1962, p.102. 'Tlement Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism", in New York Pninting mzd Sarlptnre: 1940-1970, ed. Henry Geldzahler, New York, 1969, p. 369. '" Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock seem to agree, arguing of Greenberg that "Each art has been defined in its particularity in terms of the discipline which its medium imposes on it..." seePo1lock nrrd After: The Criticnl Debate, edited by Francis FrascinaJcon Editions, Harper and Row, New York, 2985, p.179. '' Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Lacoon,"in Frascina, op. cit. p.42. ': hid, p.43. -., " Ibid, p.43. " Eckart oftens calls his works "meta-paintings." In his essay 'Christian Eckart: Placing Abstraction" Mark Cheetham argues that Eckart's "constructions pretend to be paintings." (p.11.) But I believe Eckart's works ask to be taken as paintings. His titles disclose this:Veil Paintings, Endless Pnirrtings, Cumed Monochrome Paintings, Detail Paintings, Regtrlar Pnintings White Paintings. (p.7) Similarly, in a taped inte~ewin New York on Feb 2 and 4, 1996, Eckart himself told me that "I consider myself an icon painter." (p.13) And of the Sacra Conversnzione works, he said that the question was "Can I make a painting where the only variables are this organization of four colours and get the same impact from it as we find in these late Renaissance, early Baroque masterpieces?" (p.12) And I noted that even Cheetham himself describes Eckart's works as paintings when he writes that "Eckart's abstract constructions... allow him to allude to, say. the white paintings of Malevich or Ryman in his own white paintings..." (p.12) --All page citations from Cheetham, op.at. '' Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Philosophical investigations", Translated by G.E.H. Anscornbe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963, #43. Yve-Main Bois, Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993. pp. 241,242--- 'I See Sherrie Levine's interview in which she speaks about her chess or checker board paintings:"Sheme Levine Plays with Paul Taylor", HashArt, Milan no.135, Summer 1987. '' "Arielle Pelenc in correspondence with Jeff Wall," in Jeff Wdl , Phaidon Press, London, 1996, p-16. '" "Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1968," in Meyer, Ursula, Conceptrrnl Art, E.P.Dutton, New York, 1972, p. 174175- " Wall, op. cit, p.16. " I've used a word such as "legislature' here because I want to suggest that Wall's view of conventions, laws, and "the constitutional state" may have been heightened by the rather obvious fact that he is a citizen of Canada, ana tion which in his lieftime, repatriated irts own consitution, and twice tried to amend it in the last decade-once by national referendum. '-'The other point to be made here about Canada, as a condition which might have influenced Wall's view of the avant-garde, is Northrop Frye's statement in "Divisions on a Ground" that "it is still perhaps the absence of a revolutionary tradition the tendency to move continuously rather than discontinuously through time that has given Canadian culture one very important and distinctive characteristic." -' There's something else about the Canadian artxene and its history which might also predispose a Canadian artist towards this kind of mentality. Ln writing on YYZ, Barbara Fischer pointed out a major problem for the avant- garde in Canada. 'Since "avant-garde" activity in its historical sense is defined as an attack on the existing institution of art in bourgeois society, the absence of such an institution in Canada implied a lack of reference for the "alternative."' As a result, much activity here was often concentrated on the svention of institutions, whether artist-run spaces or museums such as The Power Plant in Toronto or the Musee d'Art Contemporain in Montreal. Barbara Fischer, "YYZ-An Anniversary" in Decalog: YYZ 1979-1989, YYZ Books, Toronto, 1992. " I addressed a similar point in an essay on how Philip Monk presented Pateaon Ewen's paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It seemed to me that history had simply evaporated into thin air, even though Monk in other statements about curating had laid great emphasis on the writing and presenting of histories. Andy Patton, "History Evaporates: Philip Monk and Paterson Ewen", Parachute 55, Montreal, July-Sept. 1989. ''Arthur C. Danto,"Post-Historical Abstract Painting", Tema Celeste, New York, 110.32-33, Autumn 1991, p.54. - kid. "'Benjamin Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression", in Mo~iernismand Modernity, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, 1986. Tve never been able not to see Regan Morris' cracked and mud-like surhces as showing that painting has been left beached on the mudflats after some historical tide has gone out, leaving painting high and dry. '" 'Every work is declared to be radical. Each exhibition "deconstructs" and "subverts," though nothing changes as a result of this radicality. This language comes more and more to mirror the language and structure of advertising where each product is saleable because it is "new" or "bold" or "improved in an always unspecified way." Andy Patton, "Notebook Pages," C magazine, Toronto, no. 23, Fall 1989, p.36. "The values referred to are ones such as: not thinking politically in terms of being left or right, being ecologically conscious, valuing tolerance, believing homosexuality is okay, valuing free choice, being woman-positive, valuing independence rather than authority, acceptance of out-groups, oposition to the church and to traditional moral standards, etc. See Michael Valpy, "The new, value-added Canadians," The Globe and Mail, Toronto, October 26, 1996. -. dt. --. VzlIpy, op. - "Mud: An Introduction", in MUD: An Exhibition of Contemporary Plr irz king, project coordinators: Nicole Cohand Anda Kubis, no publisher -listed, Toronto, 1994, p.4. ' Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, edited by G.E.M.Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscornbe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, #391. -. * Sheldon Nodelman,Marden, Novros, Rothko: Pninting in the Age of ActrmIity,- hstitute for the Arts, Rice University, 1978, op. cit., p. 21. bid, pp. 22-23. 7'm restricting my comments about painting to the art of the western world for the simple reason that I know nothing about other visual cultures or behaviours- towards visual artworks in those dtures. Would this kind of behaviour-of always standing properly in front of the painting, even when the painting is reviled by a viewer-provide some evidence for Michael Ann Holly's contention that the reception of the work to some degree is determined by the work rather than by the viewer and their presuppositions? 'M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vem W. McGee, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986, p. 161. - To be a little more precise, it is because we humans are a species which engages in the symbolic activity called "play" or "games" that each of us has the capacity to recognize as "a game" some game never before encounter by us-just as we can recognize as language, languages we've never encountered before. " Nodelman op. cit., pp. 22. " Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 95. " %id, p- 99

appear here, and can't appear here. I can only hope that, since language and the non-linguistic aspects of the world and our behaviour are not absolutely divorced from each other, that this essay will afford cz glimpse of what is most important to me in painting. '"' Kosuth, op. at. p. 206.

!I" Andy Patton, "Lustrous Surfaces of Gold", in Cheetham, op. cit., p. 25. ""Bruce Grenville writes that 'Strategies of mass production and the universal commodification of labour resulted in the production of objects which were divorced from any meaning other than the market systems which established their exchange value." The question would be, then, is it possible for artworks to have other meanings than their exchange value. Acording to GrenviUe, the answer might well be "no": "His [Duchamp's] 'readymades' revealed the art object as a fetish object now divorced from anv use value or utility." Bruce Grenville, Active Snrpltis: The Economy of tlz; Object,The Power PLant, Toronto, 1987. p.8 . . &:* Kosuth, op cit., p. 208. ""I am trying to argue here that it is not simply the physical impermanence of performance art that has caused it to have so Little cultural influence; I believe that is also the result of having an uneasy relationship to the commodity structure of art. If physical impermanence alone were the cause, then the influence of music and dance would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain. :'* Cheetham, op. cit. p.24 Ibid, p.25. "" lbid, p.26. : " lbid, p.25. . v. :-- Hal Foster, The Future of m Illusion, or The Contemporary Artist as Cwgo Giltist --in the Endgnrne catalogue, ICA, Boston, MIT Press, 1986. ''' The roots of this are of course in Marx's comments on abstraction which appearthroughout his work. An example horn the Grundrisse: "The example of labor, shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity-precisely because of their abstractness-for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of their abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations." Karl Mam, The Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus, Random House, New York, 1973. '" "Abstraction and Culture," Tema Celeste,New York, no 32-33,Autumn 1991, p.57. "'"Conversation with Robert Smithson on April 22 1971," edited by Bruce Kurtz, The Fox, number 2, New York, 1975, p.74. ""ThomasCrow points out, in his Henk Herron article, that the French Old Regime "was a period in which the argument had to be made over and over again that the visual arts as a category represented a serious intellectual pursuit." Of the 80s in New York, he continues that "leaving aside the ultimate worth of these works, I would suggest that the automatic deference accorded them requires an enormous faith% visual art as a category of experience, one that earlier eras would scarcely recognize." If our viewing of art already involves an act of kith, then there may be a religious dimemion that tinges all art in our period-though we remain largely unaware of it. ."The only exceptions to this have been the wall painting executed for Micah Lexier in his bedroom, and one made for &sumption University at the University of Windsor. Both are meant to last for several years-u&I the colour begins to fade. '" Actually, they can be "brought to market" through being written about, as they have been. So they would still exist within what Joseph Kosuth called the "art critical-historical/ market complex" since criticism is now thoroughly integrated within the market structure, essentially, as its advertising. For now, though, I11 restrict myself to dealing with the art object as a commodity. 'I" Kosuth, op. cit., p.250. '"The wall paintings have instructed me in what some of those "institutional paths" are: artworks which are portable and easy to install, artworks which do not require any difference made in terms of scheduling the installation of the exhibition, artworks which appear only in the expected places (galleries and museums), artworks which aiready present themselves as commodities (but don't draw too much attention to that), artworks which exist before and after their exhibition. :"-. Kosuth, op. cit., p.208. .-- see footnote #5 to "Lustrous Surfaces of Gold", in Cheetham, op. cit., p. 30. !' By which I mean that painting did not create the commodity structure; rather it is, if anything, practice which has been inflected, or-modelled by, the commodity structure imposed by capitalism on all things and on many (but not all) relations. "'(On the other hand, it may be that all types of art which attempt to project something other than a purely mercantile value-whether this was political, ethi~al~philosophical,or religious-are failures, since, in practice, only their exchange values are expressed in tthe marketplace.) Robert Smithson: "That's why I say the artist is alienated from the value of his work. He cannot ...somebody else is determining his value for him. This artists take for granted. Their compensation is that they're spiritual, they're mad, you know, any number of mythologies." ("conversation with ~obertsmithson on April 22 1971," edited by Bruce Kurtz, The Fox, number 2, New York, 1975.p.74.) I would suggest that "political art" is also, largely, one of these compensating mythologies as well: the mythology that individuals can change, or choose, or even understand the socioeconomic system under which they live. '"Serra, op. cit., p.143. I' bid, p.143. '"Philip Monk, Strzrggles with the image, Toronto, WZ Books, 1988, p.185 A.A. BronsonJhe Humiliation of the Bureaucrat" in From Sen to Shinirly Sen, The Power Plant, Toronto, 1987, p.167 . "' Thomas Crow, "The Return of Henk Herron", Endgame, ICA, Boston, MfT Press, 1986. :" As a purely anecdotal example, WZ showed Peter Schuyff in the spring of 1980. In 1981 he left Toronto for New York. Three years later he was a star in New York, exhibiting at Pat Heam-and reported to David Clarkson in a visit to the Cameron (an artists' bar in Toronto) that he had recently purchased a farm in Vermont from one year's sales. This kind of rapid financial ascent was not possible in the Toronto market. Though Joanne Tod's rise to stardom in the Toronto market took place during the same time period, the change in her financial status was not remotely similar. ''I "Well, Like it or not, the art world is a separate world. But there are many golden threads, you know. The art world is dependent on either federal, state ants, and on certain common bureaucracies which channel in the ' ? funds. Kurtz, op-cit., p.74. . -- ."Walter Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire,"in Charles Bmdelnire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Cnpifalism, translated by Harry Zohn, Verso Books, London, 1983, p.148. . -- ." Nodelman, op. cit., p. 21. '"My thesis supervisor and friend, Mark Cheetham wrote that "place has a concrete specificity that often eludes the concepts of time and space. It is difficult to envision or speak of place abstractly-.." Perhaps this is in part because time and space are a priori categories, where place is not. Place instead is always contingent. Cheetham also quotes Edward S. Casey to the effect that "place, bv virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, is at once th; limit and the condition of all that exists." Place, then, is in practice, much like mortality, the Limit and condition of our existence. See. -- Cheetham, op. cit., p.8. ;"Kenneth Frarnpton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism", in "The Anti- Aesthetic: Essays in Pos Modem Culture", edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press, Port Townsend, 1983. p. 27.

'& bid, .- p. 26. It was interesting for me to find out that Christian Eckart had also found something of value in the damage to artworks caused by the flood. Elizabeth Harvey writes that "The Cimabue Restoration Project makes explicit the analogy between the injury to Christ's body and the ravaging of the Santa Croce crucifix in the Florence flood of 1966... he brings together notions of the icon-both religious and artistic-interrogating our twentieth-century propensity not only to revere the objects of high art, but also to resurrect them from the past and rescue them from damage."pp.lQ 17, "Disfigurations and Incorporations: Eckart's Abstract Bodies" in Disturbing Abstmction: Clzristinn Ecknrt, ArtLab, University of Western Ontario, 1996. C see Eckart's work slightly differently. In his immaculate surfaces of gold leaf in his large works, and in the gold and silver leaf overlaid on the catalogue pages detailing the restoration of the Cimabue, his work seems to me to be making reparations (in the sense that Melanie Klein meant it.) It seems crucial to his works that surfaces and objects be undamaged, unblemished, in a certain sense, an image of eternity. I value the damage in the UcceUo, seeing it as proof of having Lived in time. !" As an example, the standard set of slides produced by Scala I purchased at the Scrovegni Chapel site in Padua (which is widely used throughout the world in teaching the Chapel) contains 96 slides, only 5 of which (a slide looking up at the ceiling; one each shot of the chapel as a whole from each end; one each of the end walls a whole) represent views possible for the normal visitor. And the slides of the "individual narrative panels" (which aren't of course, individual panels at all) are cropped so that each "individual panel" is surrounded by black, where in reality you we see a slice of the neighbouring panels. '"To be more precise though, it's not the fact that some paintings are moveable that troubles me. It's the almost absolute preponderance of homeless works. If this were simply one way in which painting were made, an option, a possibili ty... Instead what we have is a regime, a constant making-natural of this condition, an insistence on this one form. "' Connerton,op. cit., p. 64. ." In London, Ontario, the oldest block of Talbot street was tom out in the late 1980s, causing great controversy. That block housed many artists studios, and in that block was a plaster wall made on site by Spring Hurlbut. Since it was not moveable, it was destroyed when the block came down. ''' As you'll see, I interpret Eckart's works as images of art's homelessness, Mark Cheetham on the other hand, sees them in an exactly opposite fashion, saying for instance that "his Curved Monochromes... assert the importance of place by projecting into the area in which we must stand to view them." see Cheetham, op. cit., p.8. '"A good example is the Annuciation by Shone Martini and Lippo Memmi now in the Uffizi. The frame mouldings have a six "spires" and mimic the roof lines of a cathedral. "'Carl Beam, an avant-garde artist of Ojibway heritage, (and the first first nations artist to have a work purchased by the National Gallery) argues that "We have this arbitrary space called Canada, inhabited by people willing to call themselves Canadian, who are withering from inertia because they refuse to define themselves... we need a fresh definition of who we are, made by people who know about us as human beings living in this geographical space, knowing something of our geography..." see Carl Beam, The Colrimbus Project, Artspace and The Art Gallery of Peterborough, Peterborough, 1989. "'The recent Thomas Struth exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario was notable in part because a few of Struth's large-scale photographs of people in museums viewing paintings of past centuries were placed in the AGO'S historical galleries that corresponded to the time period of the work in Struth's photograph. "" Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage, translated by Ewald Osers, Penguin, London, 1991, p.105. :" Connerton, op. cit., pp 64-65. '" In 1993 1 did a large wall painting at the Winnipeg Art Gallery which slorvlv moddated from Lighter to darker to lighter to darker three times acrosi the wall. A wall which for more than decade had blocked off a large north-facing window was taken down to admit Light into the gallery. The piece was titled "Day after Day" and became, inadvertently, a piece of mourning for Greg Cumoe, who had died only a few weeks before. '"Connerton, op- cite,p 12. "'This notion that "The temporality of the market-..denies that there might co-exist qualitatively distinguishable times, a profane time and a sacred time, neither of which is reducible to the other" sheds an interesting Light on Christian Eckart's work, which can perhaps be understood as an attempt to overcome this denial. :'I Connerton, op. cit., p 1. . :. - Barnett Newman, Bnrnett Newmnn: Selected Writings and intervierus, edited bv John P. O'NeiU, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992, p. 287. :" I'm thinking now of Ross Bledmer's paintings like "Memoriam" or "Keyhole," and General Idea's different series of AIDS paintings and their "Infected Mondrians." '"See mv "Buchloh's History" for more detail. C magazine no.5, spring 1985. :''~rthu; Danto "Post-Historical Abstract Painting," Tema Celeste, New York, no. 32-33, Autumn 1991. '.'Michel Foucault writes in the introduction tome Order of Things: "If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a consistent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity-which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness." '"Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, MIT Press, 1990, p. 241. '" quoted by Kosuth in Kosuth op. at. I have been unable to find the original source. '"Ad Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: The Selectedwriting of Ad Reinhnrdt, edited by Barbara Rose, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975, p.53. '"' Bois, op. cit.,p.243. :"' Sheila Ayearst, Janice Gurney, and I applied to Mercer Union in 1980 to do an exhibition of our copies after Giotto, Uccello, and Manet respectively. remember vividly the three of us trying to put in words why we thought that we were not simply making copies of existing artworks, but somehow making artworks. The word "appropriation" was not yet in use, but only a vear later, Rosalind Krauss' article on Sherrie Levine put that term into iirculation, and it suddenly seemed justifiable to make copies as art. !"' Quoted by Robert Pincus-Witten in Arts magazine, November 1982, p.95. '" Peter Halley, "Ross Bleckner: Painting at the End of History", Arts magazine, May 1982, p.132. .*" Much of what follows here is taken horn the essay "Cathy Orfaldls Cat" which 1 wrote for Ayearst's exhibition at the London Regional and Historical Museum, "The 401:Towards London" which took place in 1995. '^'His works are made by peeling off layers of white latex paint which have been allowed to dry over tar "resist*'which depict patterns or images. Each "painting" is one layer peeled off- In certain works, the viewer can see a whole sequence of these peelings from the same "resist1*:in the later peelings the image has usually deteriorated compared to the earlier ones, and is harder to make out, or is even disrupted by tears into th image made when the peeling was stripped off. After -the peeling has been peeled off, it is stretched over a wooden stretcher, and in being stretched, the latex often cracks, resulting in a cracked-day or cracked-skin-like surface. ''- Bois, op. dt., p.243. :'' bid, p.243. '""Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings and Interviews 1962-1993," edited Hans-Ulrich Obrist, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp 146- 148. :-" In answer to the question "Is painting still possible?" Richter replied "It is more difficult. On the one hand, there is photography, which is far better at depicting everything; there is the history of art, which has long since demonstrated everything; and there are the new media-video, Performance, and the rest-which get a far more contemporary grip on things." [bid, p.95. --"SeePaul Hills' excellent, The Light of Early Italian Painting for a discussion on how Giotto's use of colour perhaps escaped the church's doctrinal program where Taddeo Gaddi's paintings did not; and Jose Antonio Maravall's, The Spanish Baroque, for a discussion of the role painting and theatre played in furthering the notion of divine right of kings which helped sustain the Spanish monarchy. "' Richter (whose statements on art are as changeable as the weather) says that "Art has always been basically about agony, desperation and helplessness..." This is far too general: but if art has always been about helplessness, then perhaps those images of helplessness were nothing but an image projected outward about painting's frail existence and powerlessness. Richter, Ibid,p.l02. "Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 2969, # 2.9.16. 17 -. Bois, op. cit. p.200. -* "The wait is long, my dream of you has not ended" writes Eugenio Montale, the great Italian hermetic poet. ""Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining-in default of a better. For any general definition can be misunderstood too. The point is that this is how we play the game." Wittgenstein, 1963, op. cit. #71. Bnrrngnrz: The Complete Works, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996, p.169. .- -,, bid, pp.177-180. :g[bid, p.198. '" hid, p.27- Bibliography

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Bo is, Yve-Alain, e t al, Endgnrne: Reference nnd Simulation in Recent Pnirzting nnd Scnlptnre, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986.

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