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NEW TRICKS FOR AN OLD DOG: THE RETURN OF PAINTING L INDA N OCHLIN

Opposite: Glenn Brown, I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper, 1996, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cms (26 x 21 inches). Courtesy: Patrick Painter Inc, Los Angeles
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PAINTING is dead. Painting is totally passé; it’s all video, performance, installation and photography in its various hyped-up forms. Painting is reactionary; it belongs to a lost age of heroic individualism utterly foreign to the postmodern sensibility of the present. How often have we heard this said recently, either sadly or with triumph. Here are just two examples: in his new book, American Art Since 1945, Yale art historian David Joselit reproduces only five paintings created since 1965. There is not a word of explanation about this striking omission. Presumably, the period has produced only five paintings that are worth discussing. When the pioneering Cher Peintre show, featuring a wonderful mix of representational painting, old and new, from Picabia to Elizabeth Peyton, appeared in Paris in the spring of 2002, it was generally greeted with such apathy or outright hostility that when I went to see it, the galleries were empty except for a few American tourists who apparently didn’t know any better. But painting is far from dead and certainly not totally peripheral. If it is not the central issue it was during the reign of Clement Greenberg, late guru of modernist criticism, it is certainly resuming a significant and exciting place within the spectrum of art practices. Greenberg was both right and wrong about the future of painting. He was right when

Take Glenn Brown’s exaggeratedly impastoed works, for example Ride with the Devil, Sympathy with the Poor(2001). Grotesquely viscous in appearance, this panel painting is actually smooth as silk to the touch, parodying the manly, self-expressive ejaculation of pigment onto surface characteristic of the heroic days of Abstract Expressionism. The smoothness, of course, is a wry homage to the preeminence of the reproduction to the postmodernist sensibility. The case of his retooled Rembrandt self portrait, I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper (1996), Brown implies that the Great Artist’s original canvas would profit from a make-over by tactfully removing all those unsightly bumps and lumps of pigment in his repro-based version. Cecily Brown and Jenny Saville exploit the painterly surface to their own, quite different, ends. In the work of neither artist is intensely, or old-masterishly painterly facture a parodic usage. On the contrary, it is dead serious: sensuous, lusty, often extraordinarily violent. That both of these brilliant pictorialists are women thickens the plot because the cliché of the male painter, from Renoir to Jackson Pollock implies that people without pricks can’t do really big-time painting – perhaps a little flower or a nice impressionist landscape, but not the big, sexy stuff. Ha! For Cicely Brown, it is as though the swirling, violently animated

being aware of the painterly means, and making the spectator aware of them, may now be more a matter of amplification and pictorial shock

he declared that painting was developing in the direction of greater and greater awareness of and self-consciousness about the nature of the medium. He was wrong when he maintained that that selfconsciousness always and inevitably manifested itself as a reductionof the means: less and less leading quite literally to less and less, until ultimately the painted object could be reduced to a mere abstract stain on the surface of the canvas. Obviously, this Hegelian teleology finally played itself out in the painting of minor stainers and slabbers such as Morris Lewis or Darby Bannard, while Greenberg himself lost credibility as a critical authority as a result of his staunch defense of such obvious second-raters as Jules Olitsky and Kenneth Noland. Today, the best painting maintains and even exaggerates selfconsciousness about the means of painting, but it does this in ways Greenberg would never have dreamed of and certainly would never have sanctioned. It may be manifested in the complexity, richness or even riotous ambiguity of the pictorial structure as much as in flatness or reduction; in outrageous subject matter or wacky, pop-cult narrative rather than purified abstraction. Being aware of the painterly means, and making the spectator aware of them, may now be more a matter of amplification and pictorial shock than the reduction of pigment to a mere stain on the support: indeed, a parody of the pictorial means may be as effective a strategy as reduction or simplification.

surface pre-exists the piecemeal figuration that emerges – a breast here, a penis there, sometimes, as in Performance(1999), a totally visible but vastly agitated fuck-scene – in wild but controlled swirls of pink, cream, blue, green or flesh-colour. In some of her more recent, smaller work, recently on view at Gagosian, New York, the great French romantics Géricault and Delacroix were in the mix, startlingly dissolved in the paint medium itself but, as inspiration, congealing into little islands of historical reference in the midst of free-flowing brushwork, calling up the spectre of The Raft of the Medusa (1819) or The Massacres of Chios(1823–4) to those familiar with these paradigms of French romantic painting, from the whirlpool of vibrant abstraction. Equally heroic in both scale and ambition is the painting of Jenny Saville. Dwelling more on pain and fleshly injury than on sex per sein her recent show, also at Gagosian, New York, she continues to build up surfaces in slathers and slabs of molten pigment, playing aggressive corporeal volume against attentiveness to the surface grid, balancing gorgeous effects of brilliant impasto with almost unbearable images of bodies torn, injured and suffering. In Pig(2002), one of the most memorable, and enormous, images from the recent show, the dead animal, laid out on his slab and thickly painted in the most luscious gouts of pink and red, extends his foreshortened trotter to the spectator like Christ’s hand in a Titian Pietà.

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