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Fiona Rae, Hong Kong Garden, 2003, oil and acrylic on canvas 231.1 x 190.5 cms (97 x 75 inches). Courtesy: Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
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THE NIGHT SHIFT M ICK F INCH

SINCE I last wrote an article of the condition of painting, in 1997, (1)

the medium has found itself in a world that was unimaginable from the vantage point back then. Yet painting is still thriving and very much in business. Perhaps the reasons for this are entirely pragmatic and remote from the rhetoric of death and finality that have, for so long, surrounded discussions about painting. At a time of economic recession, when the public purse is tightened, the market invariably turns to painting, for it is always flexible, polyvalent, perfectly adapted to phases of downsizing. The 1980s saw a similar situation: economic uncertainty, a Republican in the White House and painting

more or less as painting. (3) An example of this has been a recontextualisation of painting in terms of the logic of the ‘expanded field’ that was formerly applied to the context of sculpture and, through its relationship to minimalism, was pitched against painting. Here painting is not limited to being wall bound, questions of surface and support lead to questions of volume and its status as an object. (4)

This strategy formally involves an idea of painting being in excess of itself, which in turn depends upon the categorical regime of medium specificity. In short, the possibility that painting can be somehow said to be ‘itself’. Other high modernist debating points such as shape and

hysterical allusions made throughout the 1980s and ’90s to a baroque free-fall renaissance in painting have come to seem tawdry

everywhere. Or perhaps, in a less Darwinian sense, the death knell so often ritually pronounced around painting throughout the 1980s and ‘90s was effective in recasting it in a kind of afterlife, less in terms of an incipient rebirth, more as a chimera haunting the wider culture, or perhaps as the afterglow of some spent radioactive substance. Such an awry perspective could make painting an appropriate signifying practice for such apocalyptic times. Both painting’s survival and its embedded position as a contemporary visual art practice (2) must in part be due to the fact that the diverse modernising strategies that painters have applied in response to the demands of ‘postconceptual’ protocols of practice can result in the realised work being identifiable as a specific medium and

pictoriality are arguably as important now as they were in the 1960s. However, the cogent aspect here is more to do with juxtaposing painting with questions of exhibition and presentation, questions that bring painting into line with a ‘postconceptual’ concern for context. (5)

If such a strategy can be broadly thought of as presentation or exhibition, its twin terms are invariably those of the studio and production. The last decade or so has found productivist attitudes to be popular with painters, likening the studio to the factory and distancing the artist from the point of production is familiar at least since Warhol. However the tiredness of such strategies has been noticeable, particularly in the work of artists like Bernard Frize. The questioning of ‘authorship’ and ‘expressivity’, by employing teams of assistants

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