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PROVISIONAL PAINTING

by raphael rubinstein5/4/09

For the past year or so Ive become increasingly aware of a kind of

provisionality within the practice of painting. I first noticed it pervading thecanvases of Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, MaryHeilmann and Michael Krebber, artists who have long made works that lookcasual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling. In differentways, they all deliberately turn away from strong painting for somethingthat seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.

VIEW SLIDESHOWRaoul De Keyser: Untitled, 2006, oil on canvas, 3512 by 4938 inches. Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery, New York, and

Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.; Albert Oehlen: Chlo, 2008, oil and paper on canvas, 10614 by 118 inches. Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia,

Paris.;

Why would an artist demur at the prospect of a finished work, court self-

sabotaging strategies, sign his or her name to a painting that looks, fromsome perspectives, like an utter failure? It might have something to do witha foundational skepticism that runs through the history of modern art: wesee it in Czannes infinite, agonized adjustments of Mont St. Victoire, inDadas noisy denunciations (typified by Picabias blasphemousPortrait ofCzanne), in Giacomettis endless obliterations and restartings of hispainted portraits, in Sigmar Polkes gloriously dumb compositions of the1960s. Something similar can be found in other art forms, in Paul Valrysinsistence that a poem is never finished, only abandoned, in Artauds callfor no more masterpieces, and in punks knowing embrace of the

amateurish and fucked-up. The history of modernism is full of strategies ofrefusal and acts of negation.

The genealogy of what I refer to as provisional painting includes RichardTuttles decades-long pursuit of humble beauty, Nol Dollas still-radicalstained-handkerchief paintings of the late 1960s, Robert Rauschenbergscardboards of the 1970s, David Salles intentionally feeble early canvases

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and the first-thought/best-thought whirlwind that was Martin Kippenberger. Itake such work to be, in part, a struggle with a medium that can seem tooinvested in permanence and virtuosity, in carefully planned-outcompositions and layered meanings, in artistic authority and creativestrength, in all the qualities that make the fine arts fine. As employed byyounger artists, provisionality may also be an attempt to spurn theblandishments of the art marketwhat seemed, until only yesterday, aninsatiable appetite for smart, stylish, immaculately executed canvases,paintings that left no doubt as to the artists technical competence, refinedsensibility and solid work ethic.

Five Provisional PaintersRaoul De Keysers paintings tend to be modest in size, so that they havealready forfeited heroic ambitions even before the first mark is made.

Unlike many painters who wield impressive techniques in small-scale work(Tomma Abts, James Siena, Merlin James), De Keyser doesntcompensate for modesty of size with complex compositions or dazzlingbrushwork. On the contrary, he works in a manner so low-key that evensympathetic critics can be unsure how to evaluate his paintings. In2006, New York Timesreviewer Roberta Smith noted his weirdcombination of deliberation and indecision;1 in 2004, Barry Schwabsky,writing in Artforum, described the oscillating responses De Keysers workcan inspire: Slapdash handling gradually begins to seem surpassinglysensitiveor is it? The grubby color, fresh and beautifully calibratedbut isit, really? The sense of doubt never quite goes away.2

In truth, when you encounter a De Keyser it doesnt take too muchimagination to attribute it to an amateur painter having a try at abstractionafter seeing reproductions somewhere of paintings by Clyfford Still andJean Arp. He manages to lay down a few jagged shapes, usually all thesame color, against a monochrome ground. The limited palette suggestsnot any reductivist strategy but a novice who has invested in only a coupleof tubes of paint. No effort is made to hide the laborious adjustments to the

contours of the shapes or preliminary pencil markings. No line is quitestraight; placement of shapes and dots of color appear either senselesslyrandom or stiffly coordinated. As French curator Jean-Charles Vergne putsit, De Keysers work constantly asserts the impossibility of painting free oftouch-ups, mistakes, accidents, set on laying bare the seams, the secondtries and the failures. . . . [There is] a constant stuttering in the painting.3

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Unlike De Keyser, Albert Oehlen paints big and avails himself of far morethan two or three colors, but his canvases also seem rife with mistakesand second tries. Oehlen does not bother to hide his reliance on standardgraphic design software for many of his compositions. Even after more thana decade of experiment, he wields these basic digital tools with apparentclumsiness; his computer-assisted paintings can sometimes bring to mindPaper Rad, the U.S. art collective that fetishizes the clunky graphics ofearly video games. Oehlens paintings usually begin with collage-basedinkjet images, over which he layers dirty-looking swaths of thin paint andwhacked-out meandering lines. Canvases in a recent show of less digitalwork at Nathalie Obadia in Paris feature smudges of oil paint atopfragments of Spanish advertising posters; many of them look as if someonehad inadvertently spilled paint onto a poster and, in the attempt to clean itoff, had only made matters worse. This one-time purveyor of bad Neo-

Expressionism has been committed to large-scale abstraction since the late1980s (when, in his own words, he started making an effort to be seen asa serious painter4), but his work, which manages to be at once antisepticand messy, continues to draw great pictorial force from its abjectawkwardness.

The grisaille abstractions Christopher Wool has been making since about2006 share a lot with Oehlens work. (The resemblance is more thancoincidental: these two artists enjoy a longstanding dialogue, most recentlyevidenced by the Oehlen painting Wool selected for his section of the artist-curated show Sardines and Oranges at the Hammer Museum.) Thesmudged passages of paint defacing parts of Oehlens canvases become,in Wools work, something like the ground of the composition. Both artistsalso make Photoshop, or similar software, part of their painting process.For some works, Wool takes photographs of brushstrokes in his ownprevious paintings, which he manipulates digitally. These altered imagesare silkscreened onto aluminum or linen. Other more straightforwardpaintings employ enamel paint (sprayed and brushed on) to similar effect.The compositions feature large clumps of broad back-and-forth gray and

white brushstrokesthink of whitewashed windows or rubbed-out chalk onblackboardsthrough which wander black spray-painted lines of varyingthickness that suggest bent rebar or mangled wire coat hangers. There areechoes of de Koonings light-filled landscape-inspired paintings of the1960s and 70s, though Wools engrained chromophobia (over severaldecades of painting he has hardly ever strayed from a palette of black andwhite) keeps nature at bay. What we get instead are paradoxical pictures in

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which the artist seems to have obliterated a painting-in-progress and thenpresented this sum of erasures as the finished work. But has anythingactually been covered up? Is there something under Wools erasures?

From one angle, Mary Heilmann is the unlikeliest of candidates for paintingstardom: over nearly four decades she has relied on a few off-the-rackmodernist structuresgenerally grids or blocks of color over solidgroundswhich she deploys with a nonchalance that seems to border oncarelessness. Like De Keyser, she favors the slightly wobbly over thestraight and true, and an unflashy way of handling paint. Her paletteacidic primaries and an occasional black-and-white compositionis moreattention-getting than his, and she has always been adept at slipping littlevisual conundrums into her paintings. (Theres an almost Escher-likeoscillation of figure and ground in many of her works.) But for an abstract

painter of her generation, she displays remarkably little sense of programor agenda. Because each painting is self-contained and unassuming, itdoesnt seem to invite any transcendent reading. Where so many otherpainters seek to convey their artistic ambitions through signs of intensivelabor, grand scale, daunting complexity or serious themes, Heilmann, whobegan as a ceramist, seems to position painting as ceramics by othermeans. In her recent retrospective [see A.i.A., Nov. 07], the presence ofsome of her ceramic vessels and dishes and funky painted chairs invitedviewers to look at the painterly qualities of these objects. Far moreinterestingly, their inclusion suggested that treating painting as if it wereceramics, that is, as a medium free of weighty cultural expectations, is keyto Heilmanns art.

If one could measure provisionality in painting, then Michael Krebber wouldprobably score off the charts. Much of his work, although ostensibly aboutpainting, uses none of its accepted componentshis most recent show inNew York, at Greene Naftali Gallery, centered on sliced-up windsurfingboardsand when he does engage brush and canvas, the results canseem laughably thin. Many of his paintings consist of a few bits of sketchy

brushwork that might or might not represent an object or body part slappedover a white or pastel ground. At other times, he has painted white blockyshapes over kitschy bed linens, or glued single newspaper spreads ontocursorily painted grounds. Confronted with a bakers dozen of Krebberspaintings, London critic (and Krebber fan) Adrian Searle once observed:How long did each painting takefive minutes, 10 minutes max, a lifetimeof experience?5 Theres nothing inherently noteworthy about a quickly

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executed painting, but Krebbers hastiness seems closer to a prostituteshurried coupling than to the rapid elegance of a Chinese ink painting. Itappears to say, Painting is what I do but lets not get sentimental about i t orwaste unnecessary time or materials; this is all youre getting for yourmoney. And yet, Krebbers disdain for painting could equally be interpretedas a sign of overvaluation of the mediumhe holds it in such high esteemthat hes afraid of besmirching it through excessive contact.

The dandyish, self-lacerating wit that runs through Krebbers work (this maybe the real basis of his critical association with Kippenberger) extends tosome of his titles. A 2004 show at Dpendance gallery in Brussels ofnewspaper-spread paintings was named Unfinished too soon, a phrasethat suggests an artist failing to achieve nonfinitovitality out of sheerimpatience. In 2001 he titled an especially sketchy painting Contempt for

ones own work as planning for career. It would be a mistake, however, toequate Krebbers contempt with cynicism. His attitude to painting ultimatelyseems to echo Marianne Moores to poetry: I, too, dislike it,/ Reading it,however, with a perfect contempt for it,/ One discovers in/ It, after all, aplace for the genuine.

Three ReappearancesThe historical context of the quintet of artists above may become clearerwith the new accessibility of bodies of work by Joan Mir, Martin Barr andKimber Smith. Until Joan Mir: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937, at

the Museum of Modern Art in New York last fall, Id relegated Mir to thestatus of Boring Modern Master, an artist whose once radical innovationshad long ago been tamed and diluted by overexposure. The 12 series ofworks gathered by MoMA curator Anne Umland made me dump thisridiculous misperception once and for all.

Mirs aim in this period was, as he told a Spanish journalist in 1931, todestroy everything that exists in painting.6 Two works in particularexemplify this agenda. Painting (Cloud and Birds), 1927, is a big unprimed

canvas with a giant clump of white paint into which Mir has scribbled acursory series of looping black lines; some incomplete featherlike shapesare scattered below. Painting (Head), 1930, a 7-by-5-foot white groundcanvas, has been . . . defaced is the first word that comes to mind, by aschematically outlined, giant pink head, large blotches of black and pinkpaint and a huge tangle of looping blue lines similar to the black onesin Cloud and Birds. The images in Painting (Head) are lined up on a

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diagonal (lower left to upper right), and the entire composition iscrisscrossed with rapidly drawn pencil lines and a smattering of dots anddashes. The lack of finish, aggressively crude figuration, and extensivedoodling and cancellation marks suggest a painter at war with his medium.That Mir dared such provocations at this scale more than 75 years ago isastounding; he looks like a contemporary of Polke or Kippenberger.

I think the source of Mirs daring, and the reason why his work is so closeto what Im calling provisional painting, resides in his rejection of the ideaof a finished, durable work. In 1928, he confessed to Francesc Trabal thatafter completing a painting he had his dealer take it away as quickly aspossible: I cant bear to have it there in front of me. . . . [When] Ivefinished something I discover its just a basis for what Ive got to do next.Its never anything more than a point of departure. . . . Do I have to remind

you that what I detest most is lasting?7

The paintings of Martin Barr (1924-1996) remained little known in thiscountry until last year, when they were the subject of a show at AndrewKreps Gallery inNew York and a monograph by Yve-Alain Bois[seeA.i.A.,Jan. 09]. Emerging in mid-1950s Paris as a gesturalabstractionist, Barr went against the grain by working with thin paint. But,as he explained to Catherine Millet in 1974, what bumped up against thetaste or style of the period was not so much this lack of thickness as theimpression of emptiness, of nonwork.8 In the early 1960s, he embarked on

a series of paintings with stripes and grids (he also used arrow motifs),sometimes made with spray-paint applied through stencils. Even now, thepictures look strikingly preliminary and offhand, like the underpainting ofsome never-finished work. Its common to locate the zero-degree ofpainting in the realm of white or black monochromes, but Barrs skewedgrids and free-floating signs can make Ryman or Reinhardt look positivelyold masterish. And yet he insisted that his paintings should not beunderstood as neo-Dada critique. What I was doing, he clarified to Millet,could well appear as antipainting, whereas what I wanted to show, through

the traces or points of impact in a clear surface, was what a painting couldbe if disencumbered of object, color, and form.9

Unlike Mir and Barr, the American painter Kimber Smith (1922-1981)was not out to destroy or to disencumber his chosen medium, and yet hemade paintings, especially toward the end of his life, that hover at the edgeof dissolution, that seem radically unfinished. Smiths career can be divided

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into two parts: the decade he spent in Paris (1954-64), where he wasparticularly close to fellow expatriates Shirley Jaffe and Sam Francis, andthe years after his return to the U.S., when he divided his time betweenNew York City and the Hamptons. The best recent presentation of Smithswork was a 2004 retrospective at the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur,Switzerland, which included paintings such as KirchnersGarden(1976),Prague(1977) and Nissa(1980). In these works, Smithtreated the canvas as a giant sketch pad. He generally combined sets ofwavy lines, floating bars of loosely applied paint, some approximately filled-in shapes and lots of empty primed canvas. The marks seem notational, asif this were a preparatory gouache that somehow ended up as the finalpainting. Smiths signaturea penciled-in KS that seems as iffy as thecomposition it claimsidentifies these as finished works. In a stylisticfusion that anticipates Heilmanns informal formalism, Smith splashed

Matissean insouciance over the serious-minded legacy of AbstractExpressionism. Reviewing a show of Smiths paintings forArtforumin1979, Hal Foster noted the artists apparent nonchalance and freedomfrom anxiety in relation to his immediate predecessors. Smith, he wrote,does not fight at the fore, but neither does he fight at the rear; indeed, hefights not at all.10 Although chiefly concerned with how Smith faced thedilemma of being a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter at theend of the 70s, years that were so inhospitable to the style, Fosterbroaches a much larger issue. It is precisely in declining to fight thatpainters such as Smith, Heilmann and De Keyser make their attacks onreceived ideas about painting.

Painting and Its ImpossibilityWhat makes painting impossible? What makes great paintingimpossible? Perhaps it is a sense of belatedness, a conviction that anearlier generation or artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up. Ormaybe, at a particular moment, in a particular life and history, nothing couldseem more presumptuous or inappropriatemaybe even obscenethanto set out to create a masterpiece. Impossibility can also be the result of the

artist making excessive demands on the work, demands to which currentpractice has no reply. At a certain moment, in a certain studio, it appearsthat great painting may be impossible, that painting of any kind may beimpossible. Nonetheless, for whatever reasons pertaining to a particularpainter at a particular time, painting must be done, must go on.

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A growing number of younger artists (and a few who have been showingfor longer) are entertaining the idea of impossibility in painting. This has ledthem to reject a sense of finish in their work, or to rely on acts of negation.An Austrian artist based in Vienna, Stefan Sandner works mostly withfound texts and documentsscrawled notes, agenda pages and enigmaticsketcheswhich he paints in a greatly enlarged format onto his largemonochrome canvases. Some of the texts are obviously self-referential(see me before you go! pleaded one painting in his 2008 show in NewYork at Museum 52); others recycle inscriptions by famous people (the textof a 2004 diptych is cribbed from Kurt Cobains journals), handmade publicnotices and art-world ephemera (e.g., a playlist for a Stephen Prinaperformance). The initial sense of disconnect between the triviality of thetexts and the way they have been reproduced (often at imposing scale, onfaultlessly executed canvases) gives way to a new synthesis. Its as if

conceptualist Joseph Grigely were supplying material to Ellsworth Kelly.(Lest viewers be tempted to pigeonhole him as a textual appropriator,Sandner usually includes at least one textless monochrome painting, oftenon a shaped canvas, in each of his solo shows.) Rather than turningabstraction into a jokelike Richard Prince, with whom he has beenunfavorably comparedSandner gives it a serious task: to bridge the gapbetween the everyday and the ideal.

The 20 paintings in Richard Aldrichs show this winter at Bortolami in NewYork rehearse nearly that many modernist modes: there were gesturalpaintings that look like details from late 50s Gustons, deconstructedcanvases, essays in oblique figuration, compositions that verge on patternpainting. Aldrich uses collage elements (pieces of cloth and artreproduction postcards), cuts away sections of canvas to reveal stretcherbars, slathers on oil paint and wax, reduces a composition to a scattering ofseemingly random marks, paints copies of his own work. Rather than anexercise in stylistic pastiche, however, or suggesting that the artist wereassuming different personae, the show looked very much of a piece, heldtogether by a curious awkwardness, even incompetence, that persisted

across the different modes. Accommodating slightly irregular stretchers anda lack of perfect right angles, several canvases are badly wrinkled andfolded at the edges. In one work, four thin lengths of snapped-off woodemployed as improvised pins hold together two pieces of black cloth. Thebottom third of a large portrait is abruptly cut away to reveal the flimsy-looking stretcher underneath. Attached to a large painting featuringpostcards of Whistlers from the Frick are four large sheets of paper, one of

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which is crumpled in a corner and already peeling away from its canvasbacking. Another painting looks like a half-finished canvas that somesecond-string abstractionist had stuck in the racks circa 1960. One way oranother, every painting has something wrong with it: sloppy craft,outmoded style, impenetrable obscurity. Taken together, these flawedworks seem less about offering yet another critique of painting thansecuring permission for the artist to pursue every potentially interestingidea that crosses his mind.

While Cheryl Donegan has long explored painting issues in video to muchacclaim, her actual paintings garner much less notice. Given her mode ofworking, her choices of materials and forms, this isnt so surprising.Donegans last show of paintings in New York, Luxury Dust in September2007 at the now-defunct Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, included about a dozen

works on 24-by-18-inch pieces of corrugated cardboard. Some of themfeature crowded, triangle-laden compositions executed in water-based oils;in others she covered the cardboard with gold or silver tape and then slicedaway at the tape to create spiky, reflective arrays. The cheap materials,generic imagery (Donegans claustrophobic Cubo-Futurist compositionssometimes include clips grabbed from eBay), modest size and hasty-looking facture seem to beg for the works to be dismissed. The title of theshow should give us pause. These are just about the most unluxuriouspaintings imaginable (an effect heightened by the fluorescent lights theartist requested for her show): as such they can be interpreted as detritusof the boom or as strangely prophesying a post-crash economy.

Restless painters tend to work in several different manners at once orembark on new approaches in serial order. Jacqueline Humphries does thelatter. Each of her phases displays her gift for linear mark-making and acuriosity about paints material possibilities, though one feels she neverlingers as long as she could. Yet, her show in winter 2006 at Greene Naftaliin New York was one of her best. In silvery oil paintings, gestures seem toerase one another in a flurry of marks, always obliterating some underlying

composition of greater order and grace. Though long based in New York,Humphries is a New Orleans native, and it doesnt seem far-fetched to readthese turbulent paintings as visions of a location overwhelmed by chaoticnatural forces. There are clear echoes of Wools self-erasing gestures inHumphriess paintings (as well as borrowings from Rosenquists shardpaintings of the 1980s), but her cancellations are more immediate and lessself-conscious than Wools.

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Wendy White also employs the obliterative qualities of paint, though she ismore likely to use a spray-gun than a brush. The paintings she showed atLeo Koenig in New York last summer are multipanel, with three to fivevariously sized canvases abutted in irregular formations. Dense, sootyaccumulations of black spray paint are randomly dispersed across thepanels, sometimes partially covering more open tangles of Day-Glo lines.Echoing the irregularity of the outer edges, the units of paint avoid neatenclosure; their edges fray, disperse and fade out, as if the artist simplyruns out of paint. The sense of random defacement evokes graffiti art, butone could equally think of Tpies and Motherwellas in Humphriess work,there is an affinity between some kinds of provisionality and gesturalabstraction.

Provisionality is visible in a number of current artists nominally identified as

sculptors, including Sarah Braman, Alexandra Bircken and Gedi Sibony;much of the work in the New Museums Unmonumental exhibition of2007-08, which included Bircken and Sibony along with many others,embodied the provisional sensibility in three dimensions. Although notpresent in Unmonumental, sculptor Peter Soriano has recently beenmaking extremely provisional three-dimensional works. Each consists of alength of aluminum tubing projecting from the wall. Steel cables stretchfrom the tube to anchors on the wall. These points are linked by spray-painted lines and arrows (mostly in bright colors), and sometimes markedwith circles and Xs or crossed out with brief squiggles. Usually executed bythe artist, these wall works can also be made by others following a set ofinstructions. Owing as much to Con Ed street markings as to conceptualwall works (LeWitt, Bochner), Sorianos structures diagram their ownmaking, but with their cancellations and misdirections (arrows sometimesseem to be suggesting a particular element, or even the entire work, shouldbe moved over several feet), and work-in-progress status conveyed by thespray-painted signs, they also entertain the possibility that they could beremade in another way. This comes about not only because the metalstructures and spray-painted marks must be constructed afresh for each

showing, but also because the viewer is always being invited to second-guess the artists decisions, to imagine other configurations.

At times provisional painting overlaps with bad painting, a mode with rootsin the 1970s that continues to offer artists means of engaging the mediumwithout having to take on all of its unwanted trappings. When Kippenbergeremployed techniques that give the impression of haste and clumsiness, it

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allowed him to mock the market along with the medium (though he alsosnuck in some virtuosic painting that doesnt seem pretentious). Butprovisionality can also be taken to a point where there is not even a remotepossibility of bad concealing good. That seems to be where JoeBradleys intent in the Schmagoo Paintings that he showed at Canadagallery in New York last fall. A distinction needs to be made betweenBradley and the other artists I have been discussing here. Their work mayat times come off as uncertain, incomplete, casual, self-cancelling orunfinished, but each of them is fully committed to the project of painting. Ifthey seek to break existing, perhaps unspoken, contracts with painting, it isonly in order to draw up other protocols that will renew the medium.Bradleys work, which sometimes shares the guttersnipe esthetics of artistssuch as Dan Colen and Dash Snow, seems more like a willful artisticgesture than part of a painters necessary process.

Provisional painting is not about making last paintings, nor is it about thedeconstruction of painting. Its the finished product disguised as apreliminary stage, or a body double standing in for a star/masterpiecewhose value would put a stop to artistic risk. To put it another way:provisional painting is major painting masquerading as minor painting. Intheir book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature(1986), Gilles Deleuze andFlix Guattari described how Kafkas linguistic and cultural condition (as aJewish author writing in German in Prague where the type of German hespoke was minor in relation both to the locally dominant Czech languageand to standard German) involved the impossibility of writing in Germanand the impossibility of not writing. Kafkas solution was to fashion amode of writing that seemed to erase all literary precedents, and to createan oeuvre that barely survived into the future. Faced with paintingsimposing history and the diminishment of the medium by newer art forms,recent painters may have found themselves in similarly minor situations;the provisionality of their work is an index of the impossibility of paintingand the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.

1 Roberta Smith, Art in Review, New York Times, Nov. 17, 2006, p. E37.

2 Barry Schwabsky, Raoul de Keyser, Artforum, Summer 2004, p. 240.

3 Jean-Charles Vergne, Small things aspirate the world and they becomethe world, in Raoul de Keyser, Clermont-Ferrand, FRAC Auvergne, 2008,p. 15.

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4 Albert Oehlen talks to Eric Banks, Artforum, April 2003, pp. 182 -83.

5 Adrian Searle, Never Trust a Painter, The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2001.

6 Quoted in Anne Umland, Joan Mir: Painting and Anti-Painting, New

York, Museum of Modern Art, 2008, p. 2.

7 Ibid., p. 91.

8 Catherine Millet, Interview with Martin Barr, in Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville, As Painting: Division and Displacement,Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2001, p. 190.

9 Ibid., p. 193. 10 Hal Foster, in Artforum, April 1979, p. 71.

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based writer who teaches critical studiesat the University of Houston.

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PROVISIONAL PAINTING PART 2: TO REST LIGHTLY ONEARTH

by raphael rubinstein2/1/12

VIEW SLIDESHOWView of Sergej Jensen's exhibition of textile paintings, at MoMA PS1, New York, 2011. Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery,

New York. Photo Thomas Muller. ; Cover of James Lord's book, first published in 1965. Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ;

1. PAINTING IS IMPOSSIBLE

At the opening of his compact memoir A Giacometti Portrait(1965), JamesLord is on a 1964 visit to Paris. He agrees to pose for Giacometti, who hasproposed a "sketch" on canvas of his young American friend which isexpected to require only a single sitting. They set to work in Giacometti'sdilapidated studio, situated in an alleyway in the 14th arrondissement.Things start well, but at the end of the sitting, Giacometti announces his

deep dissatisfaction with the results and obliterates most of the image. Heasks Lord to pose again the next day, when the process repeats itself. Asmore days, then weeks, go by, the artist increasingly despairs of his task,canceling out each day's efforts as Lord remains a virtual prisoner in Paris,waiting for his portrait to be finished, changing his travel reservations againand again. Finally, late one afternoon, on the 18th sitting, as the last light isgoing, he is able to dissuade Giacometti from painting out that day's work,and the portrait is . . . "finished" isn't the right word. Let's say abandoned.

Throughout Lord's little book, which lays out the ground for his subsequentfull-scale biography of the artist, published in 1997, we get to hear repeatedexpressions of Giacometti's profound self-doubt. "If only I could accomplishsomething in drawing or painting or sculpture," he tells Lord on the first day,"it wouldn't be so bad. If I could just do a head, one head, just once, thenmaybe I'd have a chance of doing the rest, a landscape, a still life. But it'simpossible."1 On the seventh day Giacometti laments: "The painting's

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going worse and worse. . . . It's impossible to do it. Maybe I'd better give uppainting forever. But the trouble is if I can't do a painting, I can't do asculpture either."2 On day 13: "What I'm doing is negative work. . . . Youhave to do something by undoing it. Everything is disappearing once more.You have to dare to give the final brush stroke that makes everythingdisappear."3 Some of Giacometti's artistic pessimism might be put down toa superstitious artist not wanting to jinx his work in progress, but hisrelentless undoings and restartings suggest that he really did mean it, thathe really did feel that artachieving what he desired in a painting orsculpture-was, as he says, "impossible."

2. I HAVE BEEN "WANTING TO PAINT THIS PAINTING"In the postwar Parisian milieu Giacometti inhabited, "negative work" was

considered inescapable. Its classic expression is Jean-Paul Sartre's Beingand Nothingness. (Sartre and Giacometti were close friends and thephilosopher penned numerous essays about the artist.) At one pointin Being and Nothingness, Sartre conjures up a struggling writer to illustratewhat he calls "the origin of negation." Here's the passage, which I havealtered, substituting the act of painting for that of writing:

In order for my freedom to be anguished in connection with the paintingthat I am painting, this painting must appear in its relation with me. On theone hand, I must discover my essence as what I have been-I have been"wanting to paint this painting," I have conceived it, I have believed that itwould be interesting to paint it, and I have constituted myself in such a waythat it is not possible to understand me without taking into account the factthat this painting has been my essential possibility. On the other hand, Imust discover the nothingness which separates my freedom from thisessence: I have been "wanting to paint," but nothing, not even what I havebeen, can compel me to paint it. Finally, I must discover the nothingnesswhich separates me from what I shall be: I discover that the permanent

possibility of abandoning the painting is the very condition of the possibilityof painting it and the very meaning of my freedom.4

There's little surprise in the idea that wanting to write a book or to paint apainting can define an individual, can be their "project." What's importanthere is Sartre's insistence that one is only free if one can abandon thatproject at any moment. But what sort of book is written under such

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conditions, what sort of painting gets painted? What does it mean tobelieve that in order to create a work of art one must entertain the"permanent possibility" of abandoning and to believe that something called"freedom" inheres in this situation? What does it mean to say, withGiacometti, that art is "impossible"? What are the consequences if a workof art is produced under the sign of abandonment, negation, impossibility?Until very recently, these questions sounded very old-fashioned. Theexistential selfquestioning, the doubt, the anguish, all those hallmarks ofmid-20th-century art, have been long put aside, superseded, forgotten,laughed out of the room. With the eclipse of Abstract Expressionism circa1960, new modes of artmaking were discovered in which the kinds ofdoubts that troubled artists from Czanne to Giacometti became largelyirrelevant. They were replaced by a solid work ethic, by an emphasis onproduction, by attention to surfaces (in both a material and a psychological

sense), by coolness, by social rather than individual identity; in short,Giacometti's gloomy, doubt-filled studio was replaced by Warhol's Factory.Even as James Lord was faithfully recording it, Giacometti's artistic anguishwas already obsolete.

3. DRIVEN INTO A CORNER

Although he came late to abstraction and turned away from it after lessthan two decades, Philip Guston was able to articulate better than anyonethe central experience of Abstract Expressionism. He summed up hisattitude in the 1965 statement "Faith, Hope, and Impossibility," in which hedescribes his studio situation in terms that sound like they were taken rightout of Being and Nothingness: "You begin to feel as you go on working thatunless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, ithas no reason to exist at all-or is not even possible."5 As we well know,within two years of saying this Guston concluded that no abstract paintinghe might attempt had a "reason to exist."

The year after he wrote "Faith, Hope, and Impossibility," Guston spokeabout his work in a public forum at Boston University. The transcript is fullof his characteristic brilliance and self-analysis.6 One of the mostinteresting passages is one in which he discusses what he feels is stillimportant about Abstract Expressionism. Guston insists that the issuesAbstract Expressionism raised regarding painting were "the mostrevolutionary problems posed and still are," despite the fact that so many

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people (artists, critics, curators) had tried to kill the movement off. The errorof these would-be murderers is to mistake Abstract Expressionism as amere "style, as a certain way of painting." It's a cinch to get rid of a style; asGuston says, "After 10 years or 15 years, you're bored sick of it. Youngerpainters come along and want to react against it." The revolution ofAbstract Expressionism, however, was not a matter of any stylisticinnovation; instead, Guston says, it "revolves around the issue of whetherit's possible to cre ate in our society at all." He immediately draws adistinction between "creating" and simply producing art:

Everybody can make pictures, thousands of people go to school,thousands go to galleries, museums, it becomes not only a way of life now,it becomes a way to make a living. In our kind of democracy this is going toproliferate like mad. In the next ten years there will be even much more

than there is now. There'll be tons of art centers and galleries and pictures.Everybody will be making pictures.

Guston is being impressively prophetic here, even if the present level ofpicture-making (and every other kind of artmaking) is beyond anything hecould have imagined. Guston's main point at Boston University was that thestate of things in 1966 was very different from the original experience of theAbstract Expressionists around 1950 when, in his words, you felt as if youwere driven into a corner against the wall with no place to stand, just theplace you occupied, as if the act of painting itself was not making a picture,there are plenty of pictures in the worldwhy clutter up the world withpictures?it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act ofcreation was still possible. Whether it was just possible.

INTERLUDE I: The artist has chosen not to let us see the entirety of any ofthe paintings in the show. One has an old armoire jammed up against it,leaving only the margins of the painted canvas visible (broad gestures,drips, areas of scumbling and glimpses of spilling de Kooningesque light).

Another is barely visible through a much-creased and torn piece of plasticsheeting. Multiple layers of plastic sheeting, black or transparent, aredraped over another painting, though one of the bottom corners has beenleft uncovered and a tear in the black plastic reveals an area of paintedcanvas, but visible only dimly through the underlayer of transparent plastic;onto the surface of a third painting the artist has glued a frayed blanket,colored drab brown like a piece of army surplus. Rather than being

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smoothed out flat, the brown fabric has been irregularly gathered andfolded to resemble both classical drapery and an unmade bed.

Having previously avoided the medium of painting throughout his lengthycareer as a maker of sculptures, performances and conceptualprovocations, the artist has now insured that there will always be somethingbetween the viewer and the painting; the painting will never give all of itself,nor will the artist ever give all of himself; something will always escape us,and maybe even something that is at the center of the work. But though itremains partially shrouded by failuresthe artist's, the viewer's, society'sthe painting is nonetheless there, in all its occluded and shabby beauty.

4. FINISHED/UNFINISHED

Once upon a time, New York painters tore themselves apart trying todetermine what constituted a "finished" painting. During the famous Studio35 conference of Abstract Expressionists, William Baziotes tied himself intoverbal knots trying to clarify what he and his fellow painters thought aboutthe subject: "In talking about the necessity to finish' a thing, we then said

American painters finish' a thing that looks unfinished,' and the French,they finish' it. I have seen Matisses that were more unfinished' and yetmore finished' than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in aterrific emotion at the time and he was more unfinished' than finished.'"7

Time plays a curious role in the perception of finish or its lack. MostAbstract Expressionist paintings now seem quite finished to us. But insome canvasesI'm thinking of mid-1950s Joan Mitchell and mid-1960sGustonthe flurries of marks have yet to settle down. It's rare to find acompleted work that can retain an unfinished aura for several decades;Mir's white-ground anti-paintings of the 1930s are another strikingexception. Long before Studio 35, Chinese artists had pondered thequestion of finished/unfinished. In his invaluable book on Chinese

painting, Empty and Full, French scholar Franois Cheng quotes ChangYen-Yuan, a Tang dynasty historian, in praise of the incomplete:

In painting, one should avoid worrying about accomplishing a work that is

too diligent and too finished in the depiction of forms and the notation of

colors or one that makes too great a display of one's technique, thus

depriving it of mystery and aura. That is why one should not fear the

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incomplete, but quite to the contrary, one should deplore that which is too

complete. From the moment one knows that a thing is complete, what need

is there to complete it? For the incomplete does not necessarily mean the

unfulfilled.8

This text, from the year 847written, one can't help noticing, when the best

artists of Carolingian Europe were spending their lives applying gold leaf

details to illuminated manuscripts and crafting decorative metalworkcould

easily be a commentary on 20th-century modernism. "One should not fear

the incomplete, but quite to the contrary, one should deplore that which is

too complete. From the moment one knows that a thing is complete, what

need is there to complete it?" This sounds like something Duchamp might

have said. How curious that the prospect of leaving a work intentionallyunfinished remained controversial in Western esthetics some 10 centuries

after its virtues had been recognized in Chinese painting, and some four

centuries after Michelangelo's ambiguous embrace of the non finito.

5. PROVISIONAL PAINTINGS, LAST PAINTINGS It's important to make a

distinction between provisional paintings and last paintings. Last paintings

appear within a narrative about the end of painting, an art history that

believes (or believed) in a certain progressive logic; they occur within an

esthetic dialogue in which artists feel compelled to finesse or outmaneuver

art of the recent past. Provisional painters know that such conditions no

longer prevail, and yet they don't want to give up the sense of difficulty that

energized the painters of last paintings, such as Ad Reinhardt. I am

tempted to say that the provisional painting is what follows after the last

painting, except that doing so would entail a teleological scheme that the

last painting was supposed to have brought to a close, and that is, anyway,

no longer tenable.

In the 1980s, it was thought that last paintings would be followed by

simulacra of paintings. Emptied of all transcendence, all utopian

pretensions, all expressive qualities, proffered as signs of painting rather

than the thing itself, "simulated" paintings like Peter Halley's were first and

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foremost a measure of diminishment, which seemed like a natural direction

to go after the last painting, after the failure of the last painting to be the last

painting. Does provisional painting appear when last paintings are no

longer possible to paint? Maybe it's wrong to talk, as I have done, about

painting being "impossible." It's impossibility itself that has becomeimpossible.

Visiting the Brooklyn studio of one of the artists I wrote about in "Provisional

Painting" [A.i.A., May 2009], I get into a discussion about "impossibility."

The artist thinks I've misunderstood something fundamental about his work.

For him, painting is never impossiblejust the opposite. I realize that I

have committed one of the worst, if most common, critical (and curatorial)

sins: recruiting an artist into a compelling critical narrative while missingsomething fundamental about his or her work.

INTERLUDE II: Among one Berlin-based artist's favorite materials are

ammonia, hydrochloric acid and chlorine bleach. He applies these

corrosive substances to pieces of canvas, linen or jute fabric, sometimes to

create pale patterns, but more often to make the painting support look like

something that's been left out in the rain or pulled from a mildewed

basement. Using gouache or other thin paints, he will then add a few shaky

geometric designs or stray gestures to his damaged fabrics. In other works,

he sews strips and patches of colored or beaded fabric that seem to float

atop the gently distressed, subtly atmospheric grounds. Sometimes he will

stitch up a tear in the fabric. Delicacy and a sense of loving attention

coexist with a mood of neglect and abandonment.

When the artist exhibits his work, he generally leaves the gallery or

museum lighting exactly as it had been arranged for whatever show was

previously in the space. But for all the desultoriness that seems to go into

their making and presentation, his paintings have a remarkably consistent

focus. His compositions resemble fragments salvaged from the shipwreck

of modernist abstraction: melancholy, vulnerable, absolutely convinced of

their own necessity, lying in quiet wait for viewers willing to give a piece of

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their lives to a rectangle of barely-thereness.

6. IT JUST HAPPENED . . .

Provisional paintings can show signs of struggle and can also look "too

easy." In the case of easy-looking provisionality, we encounter a paradox:

the struggle with the problematics of painting results in a painting that

shows no signs of struggle in the sense that the finished piece displays a

minimum amount of work (Michael Krebber, for instance). But in other

cases we can see the record of the artist's struggles, though not

necessarily accompanied by Giacometti-style anguish (Raoul De Keyser).

But whether it looks easy or arduous, the provisional work is alwaysopposed to the monumental, the official, the permanent. It closes the door

on the era of the high-production-value art market (Hirst-Koons-Murakami-

Currin). It wants to hover at the edge of nonexistence. It wants to rest lightly

on the earth.

Robert Ryman is often cited as a maker of "last paintings," but read this

quote from him and ask yourself if he doesn't sound more like Matisse than

Reinhardt: "The one quality I look for and I think is in all good painting, is

that it has to look as if no struggle was involved. It has to look as if it was

the most natural thing-it just happened and you don't have to think about

how it happened. It has to look very easy even though it wasn't."9 In a 1974

interview, Martin Barr, a French painter whose work was often fiercely

provisional, approvingly quotes Jean Cocteau: "The work must erase the

work; people must be able to say, I could have done that."

7. AUTO-ICONOCLASM

Provisionality inoculates the painting, conveys to us the dissidence of the

painter from a prevailing style. Once, not all that long ago, artists could

establish their dissidence through the innovative originality of their work,

but the avant-garde strategy of rupture, the creation of an iconoclastic

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artwork, has become so thoroughly assimilated as to no longer serve as

proof of anything more than that the artist is a good student. Perhaps the

only time that iconoclasm retains its power is when the icon that is broken

is the artist's very own work. This is what a provisional work can do:

demolish its own iconic status before it ever attains any such thing. Theprovisional is born in the moment when the painter hesitates between

painting and not-painting-and then begins to paint nonetheless.

INTERLUDE III: The scene is Paris in the early 1960s. An art critic remarks

to a young expatriate American painter enjoying his gallery debut of thinly

painted abstractions, "I see you're not very interested in matire." The artist

replies, with a deceptive nonchalance, "Well, I'm interested enough that Itry to eliminate it." Within a few years the materiality of oil paint takes on a

more central role in his work when he begins to make paintings by

depositing small amounts of liquid paint onto his canvases and tilting them

this way and that to direct the paint toward the edges of some faint pencil

markings. He never knows exactly what will happen, how a painting will

look when it is finished; it often seems to be "doing" itself. Thin color has

flooded the canvas or, as he increasingly turns to smaller formats, sheets

of paper, and receded, leaving visible a residue of barely emerged imagery:

hutlike structures, wobbly Roman numerals, luminous grids that suggest an

archeological dig seen through patchy fog. Rather than minimalist, they are

subliminalist. For a 1987 show of small gray paintings he has a passage

from the French writer Maurice Blanchot typed up and affixed to a wall of

the gallery. "Speech," the quotation ends, "is the replacement of a

presence by an absence and the pursuit, through presences ever more

fragile, of an absence ever more all-sufficing."

8. AND WHAT IF?

And what if provisional painting is an implicit critique of human ambition, a

kind of vanitas?

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And what if provisional painting is a response to the renewed

dematerialization of art that has accompanied the rise of digital mobility, a

way for painting to say "I, too, am just a momentary image on a screen?"

But what if provisionality is nothing more than a stylistic trope, rather than amatter of profound artistic conviction and philosophical reflection? I keep

rereading a sentence I came across in one of Frank O'Hara's art reviews:

"It is simply a property of Bonnard's mature work, and one of its most

fragile charms, to look slightly washed-out, to look what every sophisticated

person let alone artist wants to look: a little down,' a little effortless and

helpless." Could provisional painting, or at least some of it, be merely the

medium on a casual Friday?

9. FAILING BETTER

How does one respond, as a critic, to a provisional work of art? Can one

practice provisional criticism? What would this look like? Given the way that

every judgment, evaluation and interpretation is subject to revisionif not

total rejectionby the passage of time, isn't every piece of criticism

provisional? Maybe. But at the same time, doesn't every critic also try to

offer something that will be completely nonprovisional, i.e., durable and

confident? After a long period when painting was frequently dismissed as a

complacent, indulgent, narcissistic medium in contrast to other modes

(conceptual art, relational esthetics, etc.) that were supposed to be more

faithful to the skeptical, oppositional character of historic avant-gardes,

some painters have been rediscovering doubt as an aspect of their

medium, reclaiming Czanne as an ancestor and nominating as their

tutelary spirit Samuel Beckett, a writer who favored paintings where he

found "no trace of one-upmanship, either in excess or deficiency. But the

acceptance, as little satisfied as bitter, of all that is immaterial and paltry, as

among shadows, in the shock from which a work emerges."10

INTERLUDE IV: Words painted quickly over other words, some of which

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have been obscured by equally speedy painterly gestures. The letters,

always uppercase, are neither crude nor graceful. They can be thick or thin,

but always look like the artist was in a hurry to get from one edge of the

canvas to the other. Along the way, spaces are opened and closed, flipped

and flopped; color is summoned but with no more ceremony than when youswitch on a light. The paintings contain ordinary words or phrases that,

because they seem to point to no obvious external referent, sometimes ask

to be read as descriptions of the painting in which they appear: "CUTE

AND USELESS" or "DISASTER." Others might be admonitions to the

viewer-"THINK"-and some could be both self-referential and the artist

talking to herself"PAINT!" If the painterly side of this work looks back to

de Kooning's practice of hanging abstract compositions on letter shapes,

and the linguistic aspect engages conceptual art, it's the apparentnonchalance of the paintings, their complete lack of pretense or fussiness,

that marks them as belonging to NOW.

1 James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, rev. ed., New York, Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1980, pp. 9-10. 2 Ibid., p. 44. 3 Ibid., p. 79. 4 Cf. Jean-Paul

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, New York,

Philosophical Library, 1948, p. 37. 5 Philip Guston, "Faith, Hope, and

Impossibility," ARTnews Annual, October 1966, reprinted in Clifford

Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, An Anthology, New

York, Abrams, 1990, pp. 62-63. 6 Philip Guston, "Public Forum with Joseph

Ablow, 1966." The transcript appears in Clifford Ross, Abstract

Expressionism: Creators and Critics, pp. 63-75; my quotes from Guston

appear in this source. 7 William Baziotes, transcript of Artists Session at

Studio 35, 1950, in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, p. 216. 8

Chang Yen-Yuan, quoted in Franois Cheng, Empty and Full: The

Language of Chinese Painting, trans. Michael H. Kohn, Boston and

London, Shambhala, 1994, p. 76. 9 Robert Ryman, "Interview with Robert

Storr, Oct. 17, 1986," in Abstrakte Malerei aus Amerika und

Europa/Abstract Painting of America and Europe, Vienna, Galerie Nacht St.

Stephan, 1988. 10 Samuel Beckett, "Henri Hayden, hommepeintre,"

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in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, New York,

Grove Press, 1984, p. 146; trans. by Lois Oppenheim in The Painted Word:

Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan

Press, 2000, p. 103.