We noticed there has been a return to tradition in painting, what could be some of the causes? Do you mean folks like Tomma Abts and Mark Grotjhan? I think their stuff looks like 1910s abstraction, talk about traditional, or maybe I should say conservative. Why this now seems prevalent is a good question. And maybe it dovetails with another question that came up about where formalism stands today. Definitely formalism today will function differently, since its appearances earlier in modernism had heavily to do with its ability to propel forward the historical project of "advanced" painting. Today few if any are going to base their practice on some idea of historical project. Also, to quote Nicos Papastergiadis, "The formal innovations of abstraction were believed to be the foundations of a new universal language." He's talking about people like Kupka, Kandinsky, Malevich. But who today believes in that idea of abstraction? I talk a little about how formalism gets situated today here. Remember the Ken Johnson quote about why Mary Heilmann looks so relevant today: "she is a postmodern scavenger but unlike Sherrie Levine and Peter Halley whose parodic abstractions deconstruct modernist myths she takes 20th-century art history as her personal toy box." Discussion? I'll bring beer.
Tomma Abts
Why is it considered necessary, by many, to live in NY to be an artist? I know a young artist, Matt Greene, who after moving from LA to Brooklyn after only one year packed up again and moved to New Mexico, just outside of Sante Fe. You can't just go anywhere, but you can now be in Santa Fe, which is amazing. But only if, like Matt, you already have a gallery or two and are well connected within networks of effective artworld operators. As I say here, in the midst of a longer discussion about painting today, "artists in New York now face the same problem as artists anywhere. Showing only in town is no longer enough; one needs to always show elsewhere. Mobility is power now, and the hierarchy that exists is not between New York and others. It's between those who can leave town - those who can travel - and those who can't."
(If Reed is reading this, I was just kidding about beer earlier on...)
One way to approach thinking about painting, and getting some clarity about what we mean by the term, is to break it down somewhat: it could refer to the current state of a certain discourse (with its own particular use of keywords and issues like abstraction, representation, edge, surface all organized in a way to give each a sense of stakes, greater and lesser urgency, etc.); it could refer to a particular history, tradition, canon (and how that's defined, who's in and who's out and why); it could be about the specifics of a situated material practice (the studio, the tools, the actual practice, which is where a lot of interest is today, Gerhard Richter is a great example, whereas as painting, his painting, used to be about theory and history, etc, now its something one/he does on a daily basis, the everyday practice of painting - but this gets interesting since sitting alone boxed up in a studio, cut off from the world, that doesn't really go with today's networking model); and then there's painting as a pop/anthro/sociological phenomenon (the reaction you get from your parents when you say you're a painter, how the image of the painter is used in ads, how you use or could use it as cultural capital, etc.). After breaking it down like this, it's easier to start putting together a more complex sense of things by seeing how all the above does or doesn't connect...
Translate current theoretical discussions regarding agency, criticality and globalization. What are the formal components and possibilities of the Internet? How do you perceive the relationship between painting and the study of informatics? Which mediums do you feel are the most relevant in contemporary art? And, how do you feel painting fits in to this? These are things I will, and hopefully already am, addressing in my lectures, discussion sessions and reading packet materials. So hopefully through those vehicles we'll get more into this. But feel free to post more specific opinions, challenges, questions on this site.
Has the importance of the market (think Damien Hirst) reduced the relevance of critical theory? As artists, how do we overcome the loss of theory or critical framework? Do you think that art PhDs would help? One argument for the PhD is that it would make the grad art program less marginalized at research universities, thus opening up more potential sources of funding through grants, etc. I don't see it, I think it's a bad idea. And that's because I think that the rise of networks and databases has increased the importance of art schools (for manufacturing professional networks for artists, which you only need two years for, at the most) and at the same time decreased the relevance of criticism (while good for networking, it's more and more of a struggle in grad programs to put together a compelling seminar). But again, this is one of the issues to be addressed in the lectures, discussions and readings.
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