Slow Painting: Contemplation and Critique in the Digital Age 9781788314046, 9781501353093, 9781501353086

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Photographs Transformed into Socio-critical Paintings
Chapter 1: Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos
Case Study of Daniel Richter’s Phienox (2000)
The Fast Immediacy of Action Photography Turned into the Slow Immediacy of Painting Actions
The Indirectness of Photo-reproducibility Slowing down the Perception of the Hosting Painting
The Corporality of Paintings That Include News Photos
Bridging Distances in Time through History Painting and Histories of Painting
Experiencing the Absence of Text: Mind the Gap
Chapter 2: Collage Paintings Sparring with Visual Propaganda
Two Case Studies: Kerry James Marshall’s Great America (1994) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Spam (1995)
Debates on Paintings Including Text
Collage Paintings Returning Physicality to Collages in the Digital Age
Feminists’ Aversion to and Rediscovery of Painting in Collage Paintings
The Power of Visual Political Propaganda Interrogated and Applied
The Rhetoric of Commercials Applied in Collage Paintings
Chapter 3: Slow and Socio-critical Painting-like Digital Photographs
Case Study of AES+F’s Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 (2006)
Debates on Digital Imagery’s Relationship with Painting
Parasitizing on the “Truthfulness” of War Photography and Artistic Truth in History Painting
Space-time Compressions and “Fakeness” in Constructed Digital Photographs
Part Two: Painting as Socio-critical Time-based Art
Chapter 4: Painting Actions Materializing Social Relationships
Two Case Studies: Paweł Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress (2012) and Artur Zmijewski’s Them (2007)
Painting as a Verb: From Action Painting to Painting as Socio-critical Action
Painting in the Expanded Field: Entering the Space of Paintings
Delegated Performance: The Social Space of Painting
Chapter 5: Socio-critical Expanded Paintings through Veiling and Unveiling
Case Study of Jasmina Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent (2011)
Video Art’s Relationship with Painting
The Screen as Canvas: Centripetal Images Evoking Critical Contemplation
Functionally Disturbed Moving Images as Video Paintings
The Dynamics of Digital Video Technology as Metaphor for Social Memory
Slow and Boring Videos Challenging Perception and Interrogating Stillness
Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Slow Painting

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Slow Painting Contemplation and Critique in the Digital Age Helen Westgeest

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Helen Westgeest, 2020 Helen Westgeest has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Alicia Freile Cover image: Phienox, Daniel Richter (1999), Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg Photo: Egbert Haneke All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Westgeest, Helen, 1958- author. Title: Slow painting: contemplation and critique in the digital age / Helen Westgeest. Description: London ; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034125 (print) | LCCN 2020034126 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788314046 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501353079 (epub) | ISBN 9781501353086 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Painting, Modern–20th century. | Painting, Modern–21st century. | Time and art. Classification: LCC ND195 .W455 2020 (print) | LCC ND195 (ebook) | DDC 759.06–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034125 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034126 ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1404-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5308-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-5307-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix 1

Part One  Photographs Transformed into Socio-critical Paintings 1

Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos 17 Case Study of Daniel Richter’s Phienox (2000) 19 The Fast Immediacy of Action Photography Turned into the Slow Immediacy of Painting Actions 22 The Indirectness of Photo-reproducibility Slowing down the Perception of the Hosting Painting 29 The Corporality of Paintings That Include News Photos 35 Bridging Distances in Time through History Painting and Histories of Painting 44 Experiencing the Absence of Text: Mind the Gap 54

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Collage Paintings Sparring with Visual Propaganda 64 Two Case Studies: Kerry James Marshall’s Great America (1994) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Spam (1995) 65 Debates on Paintings Including Text 69 Collage Paintings Returning Physicality to Collages in the Digital Age 75 Feminists’ Aversion to and Rediscovery of Painting in Collage Paintings 80 The Power of Visual Political Propaganda Interrogated and Applied 85 The Rhetoric of Commercials Applied in Collage Paintings 91

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Slow and Socio-critical Painting-like Digital Photographs 101 Case Study of AES+F’s Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 (2006) 102 Debates on Digital Imagery’s Relationship with Painting 105 Parasitizing on the “Truthfulness” of War Photography and Artistic Truth in History Painting 110 Space-time Compressions and “Fakeness” in Constructed Digital Photographs 120

Contents

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Part Two  Painting as Socio-critical Time-based Art 4

Painting Actions Materializing Social Relationships 133 Two Case Studies: Paweł Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress (2012) and Artur Zmijewski’s Them (2007) 134 Painting as a Verb: From Action Painting to Painting as Sociocritical Action 138 Painting in the Expanded Field: Entering the Space of Paintings 146 Delegated Performance: The Social Space of Painting 152

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Socio-critical Expanded Paintings through Veiling and Unveiling 162 Case Study of Jasmina Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent (2011) 164 Video Art’s Relationship with Painting 166 The Screen as Canvas: Centripetal Images Evoking Critical Contemplation 172 Functionally Disturbed Moving Images as Video Paintings 182 The Dynamics of Digital Video Technology as Metaphor for Social Memory 187 Slow and Boring Videos Challenging Perception and Interrogating Stillness 192

Concluding Remarks

201

Bibliography Index

209 219

Figures Daniel Richter, Phienox, 2000, oil on canvas 19 Sigmar Polke, Sieht man ja, was es ist, 1984, acrylic on canvas 24 Joris Ghekiere, Untitled, 2010, oil on canvas 27 Marlene Dumas, The Widow, 2013, oil on canvas 31 Luc Tuymans, Maypole, 2000, oil on canvas 45 Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994, acrylic and collage on canvas 66 2.2 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Spam, 1995, acrylic and mixed media 68 2.3 Jörg Immendorff, Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege? 1973, acrylic on canvas 72 2.4 Chéri Samba, Collège de la Sagesse, 2003, acrylic and glitter on canvas74 2.5 Avery Singer, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas 76 2.6 Wangechi Mutu, Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies, 2005, ink, acrylic, collage, and contact paper on Mylar 81 2.7 Johanna Kandl, Untitled (“Privatization is much more than an abstraction”), 2003, egg tempera on wood 87 2.8 Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism—Nike, 2005, oil on canvas 87 3.1 AES+F, Last Riot 2, Tondo #22, 2006, digital collage, c-print on canvas103 3.2 Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), 1992, transparency in light box 114 3.3 Catherine Balet, Strangers in the Light #2, 2009, Lambda c-print 120 3.4 Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács, Ruins in Reverse, 2014, c-print 123 4.1 Paweł Althamer, Draftmen’s Congress, 2012, installation view of project in St. Elisabeth-Kirche, Berlin 135 4.2 Artur Zmijewski, Them, 2007, video (PAL), color, sound, 27 minutes 136 4.3 Leidy Churchman, Painting Treatments, 2010, two-channel video, color, sound; 19 minutes 54 seconds, and 25 minutes, looped 143 4.4 Ivan Grubanov, United Dead Nations, 2015, installation artwork in Serbian Pavilion, Biennale Venice 144 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1

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4.5 Imran Qureshi, Blessings upon the Land of My Love, 2011. Acrylic and emulsion paint on brick pavement; site-specific installation, Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah 5.1 Jasmina Metwaly, Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, 2011, single-channel video, color, sound, 5 minutes 5.2 Mohau Modisakeng, Passage (video), 2017, triptych video screen, 17 minutes 34 seconds 5.3 Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013, one-channel video, color, sound, 14 minutes 5.4 Javier Téllez, Bourbaki Panorama, 2014, 35 mm film, no sound, 13 minutes 47 seconds

150 165 174 177 191

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Baillie Card for her invitation to meet at the CAA conference in Washington DC in February 2016 and her subsequent encouragement to submit a book proposal to I.B.Tauris, at present Bloomsbury Publishing. Moreover, the author is most grateful to editor Lisa Goodrum and text editor Ton Brouwers. She is also indebted to her students, enrolled in the Bachelor’s courses in Modern and Contemporary Art History and the Master’s Program in Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University, for their contributions to discussions about research into various media. In the last stage of the manuscript, peer reviewers offered some valuable suggestions. For a single author of a book manuscript, external critical views are indispensable. A special word of thanks as well to her colleagues at Leiden University who made it possible for her to concentrate on the manuscript next to the workload related to lectures and committees. Last but not least, she wants to render thanks to all artists and other copyright holders for their permission to reproduce the selected works in this book.

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Introduction

Our culture today is marked by the ever-growing presence of images, and because their rate of circulation also keeps going up, we are increasingly discouraged from engaging in critical reflection on the individual image. By contrast, the world of painting represents a long tradition of works of art that stimulate contemplation on strategies in visual communication. The case studies in this book demonstrate that the rich diversity of works of art that can be classified as contemporary painting may well serve as a kind of visual training for making us, consumers, aware of the tactics of the visual mediations we have to deal with on an ongoing basis in our everyday life. Although quite a few art critics expected painting to disappear in the digital age—much in the same way as anticipated after the invention of photography— current developments in photography, video, and new media art indicate a revived interest in visual strategies developed in painting. Moreover, the fleeting images of digital mass media seem to have fostered a longing for physical and more stable pictures, such as paintings. And for the last several years, during which “ever faster” became harder to attain, we have been witnessing a growing interest in “slowness” of different kinds (e.g., slow food), as well as a desire for more reflection on all sorts of stimuli in our increasingly digital daily environment. As argued by Derek Matravers, in “Ought Painting Be Allowed to Die?” (2005), “with respect to contemplation, the new media succeed inasmuch as they approach the spirit of painting.”1 Conversely, from the perspective of painting, the artworks I discuss in this study demonstrate that paintings have been influenced by developments in the digital age as well, be it through adapting characteristics to the needs of this age and/or by reacting to them. “Slow painting,” as essentially differing from the general idea of painting in this era, is explicitly considered a relevant factor. This study addresses painting as a “time-based art,” a term usually applied to media such as film, video, and performance art. The issue of time is equally at the center of debates on still images in the medium of photography, so it is striking that time-related issues

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hardly play a role in views on the medium of painting. While working on studies about photography theory and video art theory, I increasingly became interested in exploring the arguments I developed concerning photography and video art with respect to painting. This personal background influenced the structure of this book about contemporary painting to the extent that my arguments are partly founded on insights into current developments in painting that I derived from contemporary photography and video art. In the analyses presented here, the meaning of “slow” amounts to more than just the element of time added to painting. Common synonyms are lazy, unhurried, delayed, lack of speed, or proceeding with less than usual velocity. In this study, the use of the concept of slowness comes closest to Lutz Koepnick’s understanding of slowness in recent artistic work, in On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014), as “extended structures of temporality, with strategies of hesitation, delay, and deceleration, in an effort to make us pause and experience a passing present in all its heterogeneity and difference.”2 The various forms of “slowness” in the contemporary paintings discussed in my study include processes of production, mediation, perception, and (to a lesser degree) exposure, mainly resulting from the complexities on different levels related to the applied media and layered contents. A major slowing-down factor of the paintings discussed in this book is that all of them include another medium. This means that the viewer has to deal with the different conventions of both media when interpreting the image. After a discussion of paintings that integrate fleeting news photos, I will focus on paintings that include (photo)graphic media as applied in commercial and political propaganda, and, subsequently, on paintings that partly dissolve into digitally manipulated images. In the book’s second part, I look more closely at painting as included in performances and video art. Any study devoted to contemporary painting will need to motivate the content of what is “contemporary,” or, in other words, give a more specific sense of the period covered. The various books about contemporary painting published since the turn of the century do not display any consensus about when painting became contemporary. For instance, in Painting Today (2009), Tony Godfrey deals with developments in painting in the last forty years. This means that for Godfrey contemporary painting started about 1968, during the early years of conceptual art. This is remarkable, because he also states that many people began to proclaim painting dead at around 1968. He explains this contradictory position by concluding that it was not painting that died at the time but rather that a specific type of painting got “stuck in a cul-de-sac.”3

Introduction

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In the introduction of the anthology Painting (2011), editor Terry R. Myers explains why it is so hard to define the beginnings of contemporary painting. He considers the current interest for painting merely as the next episode of a story that started in the late nineteenth century and consists of “the perpetual cycle of its deaths and rebirths in the face of photography, conceptual art, installation, digital imaging technologies, the world wide web, or plain lack of interest.”4 As starting point of the debate about contemporary painting, he decided to select Douglas Crimp’s essay with the striking title “The End of Painting” (1981). In fact, the 1980s became known as the decade of neo-expressionism. In particular some Italian artists, such as Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi, and German artists, such as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, aimed at a reinvention of the artistic movements of expressionism of the early twentieth century and the 1950s. Even more explicitly than Myers, Suzanne Hudson informs the reader about her struggle to choose a starting point for her book called Painting Now (2015). At first, she considered the option of 2008, the year of the onset of the economic recession, but she identified this event as a false marker of change. The same conclusion she had to draw regarding 2001, because the tragic event of 9/11 did not dramatically influence the visual arts. Finally, she decided to take the turn of the century as starting point, merely because it marked the beginning of a new century.5 Some other authors downplayed the usefulness of any strict demarcation of “contemporary” as a label. For instance, Alison Rowley and Griselda Pollock argued in “Painting in a Hybrid Moment” (2003) that “contemporary” is an ambiguous term because it would merely underline the fact that the so-called work in an exhibition is of “our time,” as opposed to being historical, remote, and/or already framed. This is also why this concept is mainly a generalized museum category: curators like to use it for any art object that does not yet have a label, apart from its being current.6 The artworks I selected for this study cover a period of twenty-five years, so from the early 1990s to the present. As indicated by the subtitle, my various arguments about slow painting pertain to the digital age. Although the process of digitization in visual communication was slow to disseminate, I agree with William J. Mitchell, when he claims, in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992), that the opening of the 1990s will be remembered as “the time at which the computer-processed digital image began to supersede the image fixed in silver-based photographic emulsion.”7 Debates about contemporary painting, however, do not center on when it started, but rather on its importance or obsolescence. In her introduction of

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the anthology Contemporary Painting in Context (2010), Anne Ring Petersen identifies two contrasting attitudes that have been prevalent in the discourse on painting of the previous decades: there are those who say that as an institution painting has merely become part of the commercial art world, while others claim that painting still plays a significant role in contemporary avant-garde art. Ring Petersen mainly argues in favor of the latter attitude, but adds that painting has been fused into innovative hybrids with so many other art forms and media that by transcending its former limitations it transformed itself. This observation suggests that the medium of painting would be simultaneously exhausted and inexhaustible. On the one hand, it lost out in the rivalry with fast and farreaching electronic media and cheap, mass-reproduced kinds of pictures. On the other hand, visual and consumer culture, including relevant processes of transformation, also acted as vital resources for the self-renewal of painting and its inexhaustibility. Ring Petersen goes as far as to claim that contemporary painting has developed into “a ‘vampire’ that sucks blood of the other media.”8 In one of the essays in the same anthology, entitled “The Longing for Order: Painting as the Gatekeeper of Harmony,” Gitte Orskou underscores the importance of painting as outstandingly anti-spectacular in a world marked by an economics of experience, rather than meditation. Painting’s “authenticity, intimacy and sensual presence” would be needed in our culture of digitalized and incessantly reproducible images. Although she is aware that the anti-spectacular nature of painting may lead to its being dismissed as static and boring, she defends that quality as a proper strategy for opposing the world of commercials and entertainment.9 In 2003, art magazine Artforum convened a roundtable, entitled “The Mourning After,” in order critically to analyze the death of painting by reviewing about two decades of debate. Contributors to the panel were prominent art historians, such as David Joselit as moderator, Thierry de Duve, Yve-Alain Bois, Isabelle Graw, and the artist David Reed. Joselit noted that the participants seemed to agree that painting was not dead but that the “death” of the genius of the painter gave way to the “birth” of spectatorship. Regarding the focus of this study, it is also interesting that Reed saw agreement among the participants on painting’s greatest virtue, which they identified as its ease to absorb outside influences. After a long relationship with various belief systems, either religious or political, painters had begun to pursue working with new technologies as well as other artistic and cultural fields.10 One may conclude that theorists and practitioners who emphasized the ongoing importance of painting most often characterized contemporary

Introduction

5

painting in relationship with digitization in society. In 1995, Peter Weibel, in “Pittura/Immedia,” reflects on how in the preceding years painting gradually transformed after artists started to appropriate techniques and images from mechanical and electronic media. He establishes that paintings of the 1990s explored a technologically transformed environment that was dominated by abstract codes and mass media effects. He proposes to approach the new kinds of painting as an assembly of procedures and practices derived from cultural and technical processes used in electronic media and mechanical production.11 Unfortunately, he did not elaborate his thought-provoking suggestions in case studies, which makes it hard to conclude how his view could change our perception of paintings from that period. Twenty years later, in 2015, the exhibition catalog Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age was published, opening with the statement that “[i]t is no mere coincidence that the boom in contemporary painting coincides with the explosion of new digital technologies and media.”12 Achim Hochdörfer, in his contribution to this catalog, observes that painters increasingly aim at displaying tensions in societal contexts resulting from technological innovation. Particularly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, painting would have taken its position “between the mimetic, corporeal, and contemplative analog on the one hand and the immaterial, dissipated, abstract digital on the other.”13 Even though this positioning sounds rather concrete, this characterization is hardly helpful when it comes to providing insights into these paintings. In the present study, I discuss paintings that, on the one hand, have become less physical as a result of the digitization of painting, resulting in digital and manipulated painting-like images. This kind of pictures will be addressed in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5. On the other hand, however, in reaction to processes of dematerialization due to digitization of visual media, particular paintings developed even more into a physical object by means of extending their threedimensional appearance. As a result, some paintings entered the space of the spectator, rather than being confined to their conventional space within the frame. This kind of spatial paintings will be discussed in Chapter 4. In the first two chapters I pay close attention to so-called collage paintings, which have provided a specific physicality to the present digital collage culture. The previous reflections on contemporary painting call forth the question of whether authors have suggested that paintings still contain some timeless characteristics. Significantly, hardly any recent publication suggests that it is possible to define painting on the basis of medium-specific characteristics, while critics and scholars seem to agree that it does no longer suffice to claim

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that painting is simply a matter of applying paint on a flat canvas. The main reason for their caution is that probably they want to be accused neither of the essentialism related to art critic Clement Greenberg’s modernist characterization of painting nor of generalizing the diversity of paintings or of thinking about painting in physical terms only. Nevertheless, quite a few authors did not give up describing some characteristics applicable to most (contemporary) paintings. One of the best-known characterizations involves painting’s “twofoldness”—a notion popularized by Richard Wollheim in his many publications between the early 1960s and the 1980s. He discusses painting as a heterogeneous experience of the spectator: one sees something in the world as well as in the picture.14 More recently, Godfrey stressed that making a painting is in general “all about hand, eye, and brain coordination,” while also arguing that painting would distinguish itself through its rich past, and, as a result, its being part of collective memory.15 The impossibility of a general, comprehensive definition of contemporary painting also resulted in a lack of consensus among experts about categorization. Recent publications about this subject expressed a preference for a thematic approach that is also quite wide-ranging. For instance, Suzanne Hudson structured her Painting Now on the basis of six categories: “Appropriation,” “Attitude,” “Production and Distribution,” “The Body,” “Beyond Painting,” and “About Painting.” The sixteen themes chosen by Tony Godfrey for his Painting Today are even more varied, from “The Global Scene” to “Ambiguous Abstraction,” “Death and Life,” “Still Life,” and “Dresden and Leipzig.” The editors of the anthology Contemporary Painting in Context selected essays that provide a general overview of varieties of contemporary painting on the basis of five lines of inquiry, relating to the production side, the reception side, and institutional roles. For this present study, I designed a two-part structure around five thematic fields. Part One, “Photographs Transformed into Socio-critical Paintings,” deals with socio-critical paintings that in various ways turn the fleetingness associated with photography into slow, contemplative pictures. This first part consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on paintings that consolidate fleeting press photos. Chapter 2 discusses paintings that criticize as well as apply visual strategies found in commercials and political propaganda. The works addressed in Chapter 3 give priority to the slow techniques for manipulation of digital photographs at the expense of the handmade production of paintings. Whereas photography largely evolved as a medium that presented frozen moments from the past, digitally manipulated images, like paintings, resulted in new scenarios.

Introduction

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Part Two, “Painting as Socio-critical Time-Based-Art,” elaborates on how the slowness of painting as a process is applied to create socio-critical artworks. This part includes two chapters. Chapter 4 explores (interactive) painting performances that interrogate social relationships. Chapter 5 draws attention to an interesting recent preference among video artists for slowness, fixed frame, disturbances, and boredom. These painting-like videos encourage contemplation on specific current issues related to the role played by moving images in mass media. In my arguments, painting will be referred to as a medium, a qualification applied to photography and video as well. As a term, “medium” has invoked so much discussion and confusion in the past few decades that some authors started to doubt the relevance of the term, and even decided to avoid it in their arguments.16 Many of these skeptics implicitly referred to Rosalind E. Krauss, who coined the term “post-medium” in 2009, indicating that as a result of recent developments in contemporary art, such as installation art, the application of the concept of medium has become obsolescent. Interestingly, Krauss was also the one who in 2011 argued for renewed interest in those artists whom she referred to as “knights of the medium,” not because of their return to historical views on the concept but because of their reinventing an (obsolescent) medium through adaptations of new technologies. She also claimed that she would go on to use the word “medium,” in want of a better term.17 The debate about the importance of the artistic medium was initiated by Greenberg, who in his writings of the 1950s and early 1960s propagated that artists should strive for purity in their use of their selected medium. Krauss, initially a follower of Greenberg, suggested in the late 1970s, on the basis of developments in modern art such as Land Art, to redefine the medium on the basis of sets of conventions, rather than physical aspects, as Greenberg used to do.18 Anaël Lejeune, in the 2016 anthology In Terms of Painting, proposed to downplay the importance of this definition even more: “A medium is but a momentary state of consensus, on both practical and critical levels, about a certain number of conventions.”19 In this book, I will relate this consensus especially to expectations of spectators, based on general knowledge of the history of Western painting. But I should add that it is not my intention to define the medium of painting strictly. At the same time, readers of a book addressing artistic media as well as mass media should be aware that the debate about the role and definition of media in daily life emerged in about the same period, even if starting from different concerns. Marshall McLuhan is considered to be the initiator of this debate in

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the early 1960s. In his view, every medium could be considered as an extension of the human body and its senses, like a prosthesis. He even regarded the medium as equal to its message. How a medium transformed our relationship to the technological environment was more essential, according to McLuhan, than its informational content.20 Although Greenberg’s specific view on media has little following anymore, it is still being echoed in many texts, and the same is true of McLuhan’s view. An interesting example of such an echo, also because it bridges mass media and artistic media, is philosopher Jos de Mul’s claim in “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination” (2009) that media, in the broad sense of means for presenting information, play an important role in the configuration of the human mind and experience: “Media are interfaces that mediate not only between us and our world (designation), but also between us and our fellow man (communication), and between us and ourselves (selfunderstanding).” This would also include, according to De Mul, artistic media, which are “interfaces that not only structure the imagination of the artist, but the work of art and the aesthetic reception as well.”21 The processes that take place in my case studies are partly related to what was identified by Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin as “remediation” in 1999. This concept is applicable to mass media as well as artistic media. They define the double logic of remediation as “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion old media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.”22 A final concept relevant for my subsequent discussion of contemporary paintings originates from a philosophical reflection by Berys Gaut on a phenomenon he called “nesting,” which starts from the notion that media comprise other media.23 Gaut explains this phenomenon on the basis of the familiar practice of using the word “medium,” for instance, for prints but also for engravings or etchings as specific techniques of printing. Conversely, print, as a medium, is included in the broader medium of visual imagery. Particularly interesting is his more subtle reference to nesting when claiming a medium is constituted by a set of practices that determine which physical materials can realize it.24 In my case studies, nesting specifically takes place by applying practices from other media into painting-like artworks. This combination of conventions from various media in one artwork may invoke the question of whether one should identify this process as mixed-media, multimedia, or intermedia. Even though there is no consensus about the specific differences between those terms, in Chapter 1 I will briefly reflect on these concepts.

Introduction

9

If we have moved beyond the idea of the medium as the message, this means we should study a medium in close relationship with the contents communicated by the medium. Consequently, it is not productive to discuss paintings in general, because each painting mediates a specific content that is inextricably bound up with observing the object as a painting. This symbiosis prompts the question of what it means to focus on socio-critical paintings, as I do in this study. Does this concept merely concern the contents of a painting? Or should we also conceive of painting as a socio-critical medium? The challenge of the argument in this book is to develop a convincing, affirmative answer to this last question. The significance of socio-critical aspects associated with the medium of painting has probably been discussed most explicitly in texts about painting from a range of feminist perspectives. Griselda Pollock, for instance, in “Painting, Feminism, History” (1992), argues that since the late eighteenth century, the term painting referred to “the hegemonic cultural form which is constituted by the combination of a subject (the artist), an activity (the practice in the studio) and a web of symbolic meaning woven through that figure in that space by means of the economic investment in the commodity it produced.” However, she does not consider the various aspects as included in the medium, adding that painting is “simultaneously a medium, an expressive resource, an institutional practice, a critical category, a form of economic investment, a curatorial term and a symbolic system.”25 Whether or not these aspects are seen to be included in the medium, the focus on socio-critical reflection in artworks calls for an interdisciplinary theoretical framework. This should be based on views and concepts derived from art historical sources (primary and secondary ones),26 as combined with perspectives on the media of painting, photography, and video, as well as theories from media studies and social sciences. To discuss the age-old medium of painting from the perspective of theoretical debates on the younger disciplines of photography and video art is certainly an innovative dimension of the approach presented here. If the latter discourses still play a marginal role in the academic discipline of art history, this study aims to contribute to their renewed recognition. An interesting example of an earlier case of shifting media perspectives is Helmut Draxler’s effort to formulate “Painting as Apparatus” (2010). Inspired by film theorists who introduced the apparatus theory to discuss the medium of film, Draxler considers painting as a form of knowledge production, or modes for looking at the world, which turns painting into socially constructed knowledge. He discerns three parameters that have historically determined

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painting’s artistic autonomy: the movable tableau, which created a market; the developments of perspective, which added politics of perception to painting; and categorizations that led to professional and critical discourses about painting.27 My study does not address this apparatus of painting, yet like Draxler I draw on investigations into other media, in this case photography and video art. Another inspiring example of comparative media research is Lisa Saltzman’s Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (2015). She focuses on how photography as flexible medium lives on in other media, such as in graphic novels and video art. In line with that approach, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of this book will demonstrate how painting as flexible medium lives on in, respectively, digital photography, performance art, and video art. A specific concept of my interdisciplinary framework featuring more or less explicitly in most chapters of the book is “simultaneous adaptation.” Lindiwe Dovey, scholar in African film and performance arts, elaborates on this term in “Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of Adaptation Studies” (2012). She bases her understanding of the term “adaptation” on literary scholar Linda Hutcheon’s reflections in Theory of Adaptation (2006), in which she states that adaptation is not an exception but the norm in processes of human imagination. Our memories vibrate through repetition with variation.28 Adaptation has been extensively discussed regarding transports of the contents of literature to film, but scholars in the field of adaptation studies intend to broaden the scope to more general intermedial, intercultural, and cognitive approaches, and tend to consider adaptations as enrichments or reactualization, rather than in terms of loss.29 The phenomenon of appropriation, which will be addressed later in passing, could be considered as a specific form of adaptation. In the same vein, simultaneous adaptation is another specific form of adaptation. In general, Dovey applies this concept to the incorporation of two or more very different texts or objects into one adaptation, where they are deployed to inflect or conflict with each other, addressing intercultural sources in particular. In my study this concept relates as well to the adaptation of various conventions from diverse artistic media and art historical sources in one artwork, and to the various appropriated and interrogated aspects of mass media. What makes this concept even more interesting is Dovey’s call for attention to the spectators of this phenomenon. She explains that in this context readers or viewers are asked simultaneously to interpret two or more sources side by side, in their mutual dynamics; viewers thus become consumers as well as producers (“prosumers”) who create their own associations through the process of viewing.

Introduction

11

Furthermore, Dovey wonders about the significance for adaptation practitioners that scholars and audiences recognize and apprehend artworks as adaptations, or, in other words, whether practitioners should rely on their audience’s knowledge of the sources.30 This implies with regard to my case studies that in general it might be quite clear to most spectators of these paintings that they address issues regarding visual communication in our present, mediatized society. As such, spectators may also be aware of multiple adaptations, and even recognize some of them, but they will create their own associations during the slow processes of observation. In this process, the paintings may contribute to understanding how visual media communicate and generate meanings, which may give rise to a better understanding of how we deal with the world around us, and how the world deals with us. It is my hope that this study will intensify the interrelated experience involved. This general concern constituted the basis of the main question addressed in this study, which pertains to insights into how various forms of slowness included in the selected artworks may well reinforce painting as a medium to act as socio-critical artistic medium that interrogates the visual mediations we deal with in daily life. The five chapters of my study cover these various forms from specific focal points. In Chapter 1, I concentrate on the question of how and what the strategy of incorporating press photos contributes to the meanings of the selected, slowly made paintings, and, vice versa, how these paintings contribute to our understanding of the role of press photos. Chapter 2 scrutinizes in what ways debates on paintings including text and debates on strategies in commercial and political propaganda contribute to our understanding of paintings, which criticize visual-textual manipulations used in mass media and which also themselves apply some of the same strategies to attract the attention of their public. The main question addressed in Chapter 3 centers on what the selected digitally manipulated pictures, which critically address war photography in mass media, contribute to insights into slow painting as socio-critical medium. Chapter 4 concentrates on the results of the purported slowness of delegated painting performances in materializing and visualizing social relationships. The fifth and last chapter focuses on video works that express their critique through slowing strategies linked to disturbance, boredom, and processes of veiling and unveiling. Which insights, then, can we derive from concepts explored in video art theory, media theory, and classic and modern painting with respect to these strategies as applied in socio-critical, painting-like video art? The focus on artworks does not mean that artistic intentions are ignored. Quite often, artists’ statements can be considered as “extended titles” to the

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Slow Painting

paintings, and therefore they may well be discussed as meaningful aspects of the artworks. In some other cases, the critical potential of paintings is discussed without there being a need to involve particular intentions. Obviously, all the selected artworks leave space for associations and interpretations by spectators in their role as “prosumers.” In general, each chapter of this study has a quite similar structure, starting with a case study that subsequently is addressed from various perspectives. The second section of each chapter puts the confrontation of painting with another medium into a historical context, which will involve, respectively, painting and press photography, painting and text, painting and digital imagery, painting and (interactive) performance, and painting and video. The next sections in each chapter focus on specific issues related to the chapter’s main theme from interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. In each chapter I develop my argument on the basis of several artworks from various continents. I did not necessarily pick works from artists who are best known among general art lovers, which implies that many famous contemporary painters are absent in this study. I selected specific key works for their usefulness as case study for elaborating my arguments. To allow for more sustained analysis of individual works, I limited the number of artists, artworks, and illustrations that I discuss.31 In our digital age, in which we are constantly exposed to avalanches of images, the artworks under discussion make us stop and pause. They engender contemplation about visual communication in mass media. As such this study also encourages the reader to engage in a slow and close reading of the visual strategies in these paintings.

Notes 1 Matravers, Painting, 74. 2 Koepnick, On Slowness, 3. 3 Godfrey, Painting Today, 11, 17. 4 Myers, Painting, 12. 5 Hudson, Painting Now, 31. 6 Rowley and Pollock in Harris, Critical Perspectives, 40. 7 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 20. 8 Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 9, 10, 12. 9 Orskou in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 190–1. 10 Report of the roundtable “The Mourning After: A Roundtable” in Artforum (March 2003): 66–71.

Introduction

13

11 Weibel in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 59. The essay, written in German, was only recently translated in English and published in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting. 12 Preface by three museum directors in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 6. 13 Hochdörfer in Ammer, Hochdörfer, Joselit, Painting 2.0, 24. 14 Wollheim, Painting, 46, 360. This concept will be elaborated in Chapter 1. 15 Godfrey, Painting Today, 7–8. 16 For instance, Gaut, Cinematic Art, 287–8, quotes Monroe Beardsley and Noël Carroll as examples of critics who believe that the notion is so unclear that one should abandon it. 17 Krauss, Blue Cup, 19. 18 Krauss, “Sculpture,” 30–44. 19 Lejeune in Ehninger and Krause-Wahl, Terms of Painting, 199. 20 McLuhan particularly expressed this view on media in his Understanding Media (1964). 21 De Mul, “Work of Art,” 95. 22 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 15. 23 Gaut, Cinematic Art, 19. 24 Gaut, Cinematic Art, 288. 25 Pollock, “Painting,” 159, 173–4. Any analysis of painting should, according to Pollock, include all these interrelated facets. 26 The disciplinary background of authors addressed in this study is explicitly mentioned only when it falls outside the scope of art history. 27 Draxler quoted from “Painting as Apparatus: Twelve Theses” (2010) in Ehninger and Krause-Wahl, Terms of Painting, 71. 28 Hutcheon quoted in Nicklas and Lindner, Adaptation, 1, 18. Hutcheon’s view on the workings of adaptation served as a major inspiration for this volume’s editors and authors, including Lindiwe Dovey. 29 Nicklas and Lindner, Adaptation, 1–2. Cognitive approaches are concerned with historical, systematic, and theoretical approaches of aesthetic and epistemological implications of adaptation. 30 Dovey, “Fidelity,” 166, 169–71, 182. 31 For suggestions of many names of contemporary artists and a lot of full-color illustrations, readers should consult surveys, such as Hudson, Painting Now, and Godfrey, Painting Today.

14

Part One

Photographs Transformed into Socio-critical Paintings

16

1

Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos

The flow of news is occurring at an unprecedented speed in today’s accelerated world. News photos, made in split seconds, are constantly replaced by new ones. When these fleeting images become consolidated in slowly created paintings, the ensuing transformation has drastic consequences for the contents of both the painting and the photograph appropriated in the painting. Moreover, the perception of such artworks appears to be quite different from that of either a photograph or a painting. If news photography tends to be considered as an accurate or truthful means of presenting the world, the paintings discussed in this chapter interrogate how the appropriated photographs represent reality. Moreover, paintings that integrate an adopted image through added-on painterly effects will normally require a larger effort on the part of the beholder. For instance, when a particular painting evokes associations with so-called action paintings as well as action photographs, this may prompt questions about the relationship between these two terms. Another example pertains to the materiality of news photos, which is commonly ignored in favor of their contents, but in paintings the corporality of the picture is much harder to ignore. Compared to the effort involved in our everyday scanning of news photos, a more sustained effort is needed to look at and interpret the decontextualized photographs and often somewhat blurred paintings discussed here. But these mental and visual exertions will also come with the reward of intriguing insights. In particular since the 1960s, it has been quite a common strategy in modern and contemporary paintings to make explicit usage of photographs as main source. The appropriation of vernacular photography (such as family photography), images from commercials, or iconic photographs has produced different kinds of confrontational effects in the final paintings.1 In this chapter I focus on the appropriation of press photos by painters in their work. Although

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the fleetingness or informative function of such photos is often tied to social unrest or conflict, there is still much variety in the resulting paintings to be found. One painting in particular drew my attention because it deals in intriguing ways with the issues I intended to address. This painting, entitled Phienox, was created by the German artist Daniel Richter in 2000. In the course of this chapter I will explore how and what the strategy of incorporating press photos contributes to the meanings of this slowly made painting, and, vice versa, how this painting contributes to our understanding of the role of press photos. I will discuss Richter’s painting through comparison with several other, partly interrelated contemporary paintings and by organizing my argument around several key issues. After introducing the painting by Daniel Richter, I critically consider some of the general consequences of adding the slow immediacy of painting to the fast immediacy of photography. In the next section, I discuss the results of the indirectness of the reproductive and multi-mediating process for paintings like that of Richter, followed by addressing several insights into the consequences of adding the corporality of paint to a photograph. This materiality of a painting contributes to its experience as “presence.” Quite differently, photographs, in their references to the past, often evoke associations with “absence.” In this context, I develop the argument that allusions to the history of painting and the genre of history painting relate to sociocultural memory, while news photos are usually experienced as a kind of presentness. Finally, I deal with the implications of decontextualizing news photos from their captions and journalistic reports for slow paintings. As it will become clear, the interrelated concerns all center on the dependency of the resulting paintings on the appropriated photographs when it comes to the meaning and interpretation of these paintings. A recurring concept in the various sections is the notion of “simultaneous adaptation,” as defined by Lindiwe Dovey in her essay “Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of Adaptation Studies” (2012). In her general definition, simultaneous adaptation means that two or more very different sources are incorporated in one adaptation, and that spectators are asked to draw parallels and create associations through a process of viewing. These diverse sources usually do not remain intact but are confronted in order to inflect or conflict with each other, thereby alluding to the complexities of our era of globalization.2 I will argue that the concept of “simultaneous adaptation,” as a critical, slowingdown factor in the creation and perception of the selected artworks, proves to be more useful for my discussion than several similar concepts, including “appropriation.”

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Case Study of Daniel Richter’s Phienox (2000) More than a dozen human figures are grouped in the foreground of a large painting before a bright red background, and in the center a yellow-colored body is lifted over a wall. This is the first impression of most spectators when approaching Daniel Richter’s painting Phienox (book cover and Figure 1.1). After that initial moment, however, the painting will only appear to raise more and more questions. A better understanding of what one is looking at will require some profound observation indeed. Although hardly any specific question related to the meanings in the painting will be definitively answered through mere contemplation, the image may invoke many different associations. It is easy to imagine various kinds of events being represented in the painting. The lifted body could be part of a tragedy or a liberation. Because the depicted event calls forth familiar images from newspapers and news websites, it is difficult to conclude to which particular news photo the painting refers. The bright colors of the skins of the figures make it difficult to link the scene to a specific ethnic group or a particular location. Closer inspection of the figures reveals that most heads look like skulls in X-ray photographs.

Figure 1.1  Daniel Richter, Phienox, 2000, oil on canvas, 252 × 368 cm. Courtesy Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg. Photograph: Egbert Haneke © Daniel Richter c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2020.

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Slow Painting

Because so many of these associations are related to the fields of photography and other image recording technologies, as well as the history of painting, I selected Phienox as a case study that preeminently fits the issues discussed in this chapter. To learn more about Richter’s sources for this work, it proved useful to consult published interviews with the artist, look up biographical information in catalogs, draw visual comparisons with his other paintings, and study analyses of his paintings by critics and scholars. But, as will become clear, such critical consideration gave rise to additional questions as well. Daniel Richter was born in Hamburg in 1962. He also grew up there and became part of the left-wing radical punk movement when he was in his twenties. Sympathizing with the urban squatters, he started putting works of graffiti on surfaces in public spaces as part of their social protest. In so doing, urban graffiti artists can be said to have brought painting from the private spaces of studios and museums into the informal, public realm. It is easy to discern Richter’s skill at creating large wall paintings out of brightly colored contours and decorative patterns in Phienox. Most literally, a graffiti piece is applied to the wall at the center of the painting. Not until he reached the age of thirty-one he decided to apply for admission to the study of visual arts at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. He explained his choice for the medium of painting in 1997 as “Painting is the most lethargic, slowest and most tradition-burdened medium and the hardest to expand. There, the challenge is greatest.”3 After scrutiny from up close, interestingly, the immediate association of Phienox with sketchy sprayed graffiti painting turns into an awareness of the rich diversity of small dynamic brushstrokes. In this respect, David Hughes has called Richter’s decision to focus on painting a political act in the form of a rejection of the ideology of technological progress.4 Considering his background in sociopolitical activism, it is quite surprising that Richter at first chose to make abstract paintings crowded with ornaments. As he explained in an interview with Philipp Kaiser, nonrepresentative painting attracted him as idea of radicalism and freedom.5 In 1998, Ulrike Rüdiger went as far as to link up Richter’s abstract paintings with increasingly violent inclinations in society, defining their images as battlefields of colors, forms, and styles.6 By 1999, Richter started inserting slightly distorted faces into his abstract paintings. Phienox, created one year later, is considered to be his first figurative painting. For his shift from abstract to figurative painting, he provided various reasons. One of them emerged from the need “to get closer to a present that I

Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos

21

find unappetising. My need to express myself as a social being was so strong that I wanted to communicate it to others.”7 For this first figurative painting, Richter used news photos. In an interview he remarked that he was aware that when he first exhibited the painting in Berlin in 2000, just after the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, visitors would think that he used news photos of that historical event. The photograph that he actually “appropriated,” however, was a press photo in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung taken after the bombing of the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998.8 In more general terms, Richter said the following about the use of photographs (when discussing another painting): “I realized how little it takes to render a photo readable or unreadable. It basically depends on tiny details and poses, it being important to understand how much more these paintings have to do with an idea than with their appearance.”9 This claim, which actually addresses the immediacy of both photography and painting, will be discussed in more detail in the next section. Hughes explained Richter’s preference for the medium of painting as a deliberate rejection of the ideology of technological progress, but this hardly implies that the artist was not interested in the increasing role of technology in today’s society. As he said in an interview with Andreas Hoffer and Mela Maresch, “The figures in my paintings arise from a disembodied view and from my interest in infrared heat, CCTV, night vision devices . . .”10 Through the painter K. P. Brehmer, one of his professors at the academy of arts, he learned about thermography (the recording of infrared heat). In thermography, heatdetecting cameras are employed to “photograph” the warmth emitted by bodies exposed to stimuli, resulting, as it were, in a scientific objectification of subjective inner experience. In fact, thermography records information from beneath the surface/skin of an object or human being.11 A quick search on the internet reveals many still and moving images of bodies made by means of thermography. The similarity with in particular the central figure in Phienox is striking: a flat pattern of yellow, orange, and red stains. The striking bright shiny colors in Phienox appear to include even more technological relationships, as Richter states: “My work reflects the flicker of the monitor, the hastiness of images, the changing tempo, the density of information and its specific colourfulness.”12 This is underscored by the applied manipulations of the photographic images, which call forth associations with low-quality, slightly deformed digital images on the internet. In particular the blurred outlines—resulting from either fast sprayed lines or numerous juxtaposed short brushstrokes—and the overlaps turn the slightly deformed human figures into

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Slow Painting

a jumble of disturbances, evoking associations with the circulation rate of lowquality images on the internet, rather than with formal characteristics of avantgarde painting from the early twentieth century. In the paintings discussed in this chapter, media are not only added but also removed. News photographs usually have explanatory captions, but paintings commonly have titles that are fairly descriptive, or directive for the meaning of the picture, while the artist may also decide to leave out any specific reference by choosing “Untitled” as a label, either followed by a code or not. Yet Richter’s titles move away from these common options. He plays with words, for instance, through exchanging vowels. In the last section of this chapter I discuss the implications of decontextualizing press photographs from their textual context when they are transformed into paintings, either titled or not. So far, I situated Daniel Richter’s Phienox in the early developments of his artistic career, offering information that explained some of this intriguing picture’s characteristics. But the various details do not add up yet to a clear interpretation of the painting or its possible meanings. Some of the features discussed can be interpreted in multiple ways, and this complicates the possibility of consensus about any meaning. At the same time, Richter’s paintings from the first decade of the twenty-first century do have a recurring theme. In 2001, the artist said about the topicality of the subjects of his works that “the paintings may brutally attack the spectator, but they reproduce a reality that is present daily in the news whenever there are racially motivated attacks on foreigners somewhere in Germany again.”13 In this respect, Hughes boldly interpreted the compositional downward direction in Phienox quite literally as a metaphor for the descent of man, as degenerating from a dressed, upright figure into a gorilla-like being in the graffiti-like image on the wall.14 The next sections will disclose some of the multiple meanings Phienox can have for the contemporary spectator through elaborating on the key issues identified, and discussing them in comparison with several other contemporary paintings in which news photos are appropriated.

The Fast Immediacy of Action Photography Turned into the Slow Immediacy of Painting Actions We hardly look at things in a direct way anymore. We know far more people or places in the world mediated by photography and television than we personally met or visited. Painting, however, is not considered primarily as a visual source

Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos

23

of information anymore. This has raised painting’s potential as a most suitable medium for drawing attention to itself as visual mediator. Jonathan Harris addressed this difference in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting (2003) in terms of a “scopic regime,” which deals with means of seeing and knowing the world, through representational machines for seeing, such as cameras, and representational forms for showing, such as paintings.15 This dissimilarity between photography and painting is also present in the differences between the well-known terms “action photography” and “action painting.” The former is used to define the subject as “caught in full swing,” whereas the latter is applied to refer to American abstract expressionist paintings of the 1950s (and alike successors) in which the production process of painting was considered to be more important than the final product. With regard to Phienox and two other cases, this section explores the implications for the perception of the spectator when action photography is integrated in a process of transformation from photograph into painting that draws attention to the painting process (which might be called a “painting action,” or even “action painting,” when defined more broadly than the twentieth-century art movement). About two decades after the invention of photographic techniques, only a few seconds of light on light-sensitive material were enough to produce a photographic imprint. This speed would never allow painters to rival photographers, but these few seconds still appeared to be too long to record events that involved human beings. As a result, it is not surprising that Charles Baudelaire, in “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), urged painters to capture impressions of the fast-changing world, in particular modern life in Paris. In a painting, he felt, one could, and therefore should, present people in the context of their daily activities.16 In 2007, almost one century and a half later, an exhibition in the Hayward Gallery in London reflected on “the painting of modern life” from the 1960s on. Most of the selected painters made use of photographs, as did many painters in the second half of the nineteenth century, which implies that it was far from new to use photographs as basis for paintings. Quite soon after the invention of photography (officially in 1839), an increasing number of, in particular, French painters used photographs next to sketches as models.17 But these nineteenthcentury painters used photography in ways that significantly differed from the practice of painters from the 1960s on. Ralph Rugoff argues in the exhibition catalog that works by artists such as Gerhard Richter in Cologne and Andy Warhol and Richard Artschwager in New York “explicitly addressed the nature of its source material in ways that profoundly explored not only the relationship

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Slow Painting

of painting and photography, but also the nature of how we forge our pictures of ‘reality.’”18 In some respects, both this quote and Rugoff ’s general description of paintings that are based on snapshot photography and produced in the period from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century are applicable to my selection of paintings for this chapter. As Rugoff continues, the work of these artists embodied a sophisticated play with pictorial conventions. It brought to bear on photographic imagery the accumulated memory of painterly traditions, framing the immediacy of contemporary experience within the history of an ancient medium, so that the subject of even the most casual snapshot took on an unexpected gravity when translated to the canvas.19

The photographic source material of the paintings presented at the exhibition and in its catalog consisted of snapshots, family portraits, archival photos, as well as news images. The paintings selected for my case studies are all based (or seem to be based) on news photos. As a result of various technological developments, the quality of press photographs dramatically improved toward the end of the twentieth century. This also gave rise to radical changes in the integration of press photographs into paintings. One can see, for instance, a clear difference between the painting of a news photo from the 1980s (Figure 1.2)

Figure 1.2  Sigmar Polke, Sieht man ja, was es ist, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 224 × 298 cm. Courtesy The Estate of Sigmar Polke / Pictoright Amsterdam 2020.

Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos

25

and the more recent paintings (Figure 1.1, Figure 1.3). If for decades published press photos were characteristic for their coarse screen printing and being black and white, in the last two decades color has increasingly become present in newspapers. It is still possible, however, to characterize these press photos as action photographs. So what are the main differences between how, for example, Sigmar Polke critically addressed news photos in the early 1980s and Daniel Richter or Joris Ghekiere did so in their paintings in the early twentyfirst century? For his painting, Sieht man ja, was es ist (Do you see in fact what it is, 1984), the German artist Sigmar Polke blew up what looks like a dot-screen news photo of four men—two of whom are apparently policemen—to a large scale (224 × 298 centimeters), resulting in painted coarse grains. From a distance, the grainy effect emphasizes the fast and cheap process involved in the production of mass media. The closer the spectator approaches the painting, the more elusive the four men become. The figuration turns into an abstract painting, then, but instead of looking like a composition of geometrical mechanical dots, the grains appear to have been painted by hand and all have slightly different forms, which makes the painting in close-up quite similar to little splashes of ink or paint as details in a dynamic action painting. What happened in that process to the meaning of the photographic image? Charles Haxthausen, for instance, discussed Polke’s appropriation of light erotic dot-screen images, concluding that the artist in the process of transformation and abstraction frustrated the desire of many male viewers.20 But in Sieht man ja, was es ist, Polke seemed to have selected a news photo that in fact does not give more information than that two of the men are certainly policemen. What kind of action are we looking at? Interestingly, the title (“Do you see in fact what it is”) challenges us already to be cautious.21 According to Martin Hentschel, we are witnessing a police identity check, as found all over the world. The familiarity of the subject and the dot-screen do not raise any doubt about it being originally a press photograph. Yet the suggestion of immediacy appears to be an illusion. Polke took a film still from the Italian movie Cercasi Gesù, directed by Luigi Comencini, and produced in 1982. The film criticized the double moral standard and hypocrisy of Christian society, and was distributed in Germany with the title Keine Zeit für Wunder (No time for miracles).22 From the late 1960s on, Polke’s works have contained subtle critiques of authorities, much in line with the protest generation’s fight against hierarchies in society. It is more surprising, therefore, that he turned a movie still into an unreadable news photo. Compared to the famous moment in the 1966 film Blow-Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, in which the protagonist discovers a murder thanks to

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Slow Painting

the scanning of a photograph through a magnifier, Polke’s photographic image played an almost opposite role in relation to the movie. When approaching the painting by Polke and look at it from more up close, the image does not elucidate more details. This is in fact only surprising when considering the work as a photograph. After all, the history of painting knows many examples of paintings that increasingly lose their figuration, as it were, when approaching them. Consider, for instance, Georges Seurat’s pointillistic paintings or Claude Monet’s Nymphéas paintings from the late nineteenth century. Moreover, Titian’s and Rembrandt’s late paintings, which partly consist of stains of paint created through dynamic short brushstrokes, demonstrate that as early as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the immediacy of the painting process could be perceived in close-up, while turning into figuration only when seen from a distance. The quasi-spontaneity was appreciated as a quality of liveliness and was called sprezzatura. In fact, Polke continues this tradition in painting, in which the painting in close-up could be observed as a fascinating “construction” of the painter, and from a distance as a narrative. By applying this familiar process to a news-like photo, the dot-screen paintings addressed debates about mass media, emphasizing that news photos require some distance from the beholders while lacking attraction in close-up contemplation, in a literal sense as well as a figurative one. Polke started appropriating trivial photographs from mass media in his paintings in the 1960s, but did artists who used press photos for their paintings in the early twenty-first century merely adopt the same strategy? A major change in mass media over the past few decades pertains to the avalanche of images and information and its global scale due to the digitization of the mass media. Moreover, it has become harder than ever to establish the quality of sources and subjects addressed through a radical blurring of boundaries.23 Commercials for luxury goods are juxtaposed with new reports on dramatic incidents on television, in newspapers, and in particular on the internet. In 2010, the Belgian artist Joris Ghekiere selected two photographs of “global events” as basis for two large oil paintings (Figure 1.3). From a distance, the two paintings present overcrowded places and evoke associations with crowded metropoles. But when approaching one of the paintings, the words “Art Basel” become legible in de canvas’ bottom right corner, right where the crowd appears. The original action photograph apparently portrayed visitors of this elite Art Fair in Switzerland. It is easy, then, to recognize the walls as gallery stands and people as art public. In 2011, in his exhibition entitled California in De Garage in Mechelen, Belgium, Ghekiere presented this painting side by side with the other painting.

Paintings Consolidating Fleeting Press Photos

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Figure 1.3  Joris Ghekiere, Untitled, 2010, oil on canvas, both 160 × 200 cm. Courtesy Inge Henneman.

This second painting appears quite similarly crowded, but it is mainly filled with blocklike buildings. Moreover, it looks like a quiet place, less hectic than the Art Fair, if not as “peaceful” as a holiday park. The similarity of both paintings is strongest in the colors and the style of painting. Both paintings are filled with a primary layer of dark grey at the edges that becomes a lighter pinkish grey toward the center—as if lighted by a spotlight, which is also emphasized by the concentric circles. The figuration is added in loose and spare brushstrokes in various tones of the pinkish grey, leaving much of the primary layer visible. These similarities certainly contributed to the shocking conclusion one had to draw when approaching the second painting and reading “UNHCR Patras Greece” in the corner. We appear to look, in other words, at one of the refugee tent camps in Patras, and have to realize that, although we only see a few scrolling and sitting figures, this camp probably is far more crowded than Art Basel. The juxtaposition of the two paintings painstakingly reveals the social visibility of groups of art collectors/lovers versus the invisibility of groups of refugees in society. Wim Van Mulders described the artist’s aim in general as searching for “the catastrophic reality” that is camouflaged by the surface of everyday life.24 More in particular he concluded that what we are looking at is defined by an infrastructural network, and that both paintings confront the viewer with “the consequences of a rampant neoliberalism that makes some people rich, while at the same time it makes other people poor.”25 When drawing up closely to the paintings, the sketchily painted figures appear to be hardly different in both paintings, as is true of the “basic blocks” of gallery stands, cafés, and tents. Both paintings present tents, if kitschy ones at the fair. Finally, in close-up all details clearly appear to consist of the same material—the same paint in the same subdued colors—and they are created in the same way,

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which triggers thoughts on social inequality and the disparaging gaps between groups. By turning the two detailed press photographs of actions in our present global society into the immediacy of a basic-painting vocabulary, the painter facilitated basic comparisons. How, then, does Richter’s Phienox relate to the paintings by Polke and Ghekiere from the perspective of combining the immediacy of photography and painting? The variety of numerous, spontaneously applied short brushstrokes and expressive long paint strokes, combined with loosely painted fields, provides Richter’s picture a dynamic and energetic appearance—one that is similar to, for instance, Willem de Kooning’s series of action paintings of women. Regarding the immediacy of photography, the striking radiance of light in the painting brings to mind that the directness of photography is included in the name of the medium, as writing with light. In line with this observation, it is noteworthy that Christoph Heinrich called Richter’s work “light paintings,” not in the sense of traditional chiaroscuro painting but through relating it to more contemporary forms of light, such as artificial light, camera flash, thermal photography, X-rays, or atomic glow.26 The immediacy of photography is nowadays connected to the immediacy of its disappearance as well. Here we meet a paradox in contemporary photography. On the one hand, an event seems to be of any importance only if it is recorded. What is not recorded does not seem to have happened. This might explain why people take so many photographs. On the other hand, it is hard to understand why so many photographs are removed so quickly from smartphones or allowed to be “grinded” in a digital cloud. This immediacy of photography in its appearance and disappearance is strengthened by the dynamism of Richter’s action painting. My conclusion may explain Hughes’s astonishment that “many of the figures look as though they have achieved but a momentary existence, flickering and shimmering like a flame about to be extinguished any second.”27 Qualifications such as immediacy, directness, liveness, and real-time experience are often used to characterize our digital age, in particular when addressing how information from all over the world on the internet invades our life. In The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, the catalog of an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014, Laura Hoptman characterizes the present world as “atemporal,” inspired by science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the word “atemporality” in 2003 to describe “a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the internet, all eras seem to exist at once.”28 This view leads Hoptman to an interesting metaphor: “[to] picture the eternal present as an endlessly flat surface with vistas in every direction—not unlike the surface of a painting.”29

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In this statement, she seems to motivate her preference for selecting mainly abstract paintings for this exhibition. Nevertheless, her observations could also be translated to the flattening character of the backgrounds of the paintings of Richter and Ghekiere, which emphasizes the directness of the application of paint on the flat support. This liveness seems to draw the news photos from the past into an eternal present. The paintings discussed in this section present the appropriated news photographs as suggestive of real events only from a distance. In approaching the picture, the spectator’s experience gradually shifts from looking at a photograph toward looking at a painting. These case studies also demonstrate that the paintings in particular interrogate the transparency of the photographs, through showing that the news photos only provide the immediacy of an action photograph, being a semblance of a moment from an event, but that they hardly answer additional questions after closer inspection, be it in a literal or figurative sense. This absence is “compensated” by affects evoked by the results of the immediacy included in the painting action as response to the image.

The Indirectness of Photo-reproducibility Slowing down the Perception of the Hosting Painting If the previous discussion of aspects of immediacy problematized “directness,” I will now zoom in on “indirectness,” resulting from the tension between the autonomous character of paintings and the reproductive character of photographs. In 1979, Rosalind E. Krauss, who as an art critic became known in particular for her search for new ways to define media in other ways than in terms of applied materials, suggested in an essay on sculpture in the context of the oppositional pair architecture-landscape that contemporary painting “would probably turn on the opposition uniqueness-reproducibility.”30 As early as 1936, in fact, Walter Benjamin, in his seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” predicted that paintings will have to anticipate to the increasing importance of reproduction techniques such as photography. From the 1960s, and particularly in the 1980s, artists have addressed the tension between uniqueness and reproducibility. For instance, Sigmar Polke manipulated reproduced images and techniques of reproduction to confirm the uniqueness of the work of art, and by doing so, even rendered them unreproducible. In the previous section I discussed one of Polke’s dot-screen paintings from the perspective of the shift of attention from the immediacy of photography toward

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the immediacy of the painting action. Regarding the concept of reproducibility, it is interesting to note that dot-screen photographic images have hardly gained attention from photography theorists. An interesting exception is Charles Haxthausen in an essay about Polke’s work with the meaningful title “The Work of Art in the Age of Its (Al)Chemical Transmutability: Rethinking Painting and Photography after Polke” (1997). Haxthausen observed that influential theoretical texts on photography did not make distinctions between actual photographs and their autotype reproductions, although people perceive more photographs in the form of reproductions than original ones.31 This statement may apply to analog photography only, but also in the digital age most photographs are published in other resolutions/formats—thus other qualities—than the ones used originally. This means that the spectator remains deprived from the experience of the original recording.32 And when painters like Polke appropriate such a transformed image, any connection to the original photograph is further reduced. At the same time, however, the uniqueness of the painting will increase. In another striking way, the South African/Dutch artist Marlene Dumas has addressed the uniqueness-reproducibility opposition when she selected a photo reproduced in newspapers in February 1961 and translated it into two somewhat different paintings (Figure 1.4). The two 2013 paintings are entitled The Widow, which refers to the woman in the foreground, Pauline Lumumba, who is mourning the murder of her husband, the former prime minister of the Republic of the Congo. In an interview Dumas explained that without additional information it is hard to tell whether the people surrounding her are with or against Pauline. She added that she was intrigued by the bare-breasted appearance of the widow, indicating that “naked breasts might have nothing to do with sexuality but everything with vulnerability, and elsewhere how nakedness might show a certain freedom of spirit.”33 She contrasted this observation with the bare-breasted women in the monumental paintings of the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens in another time and discourse. Dumas appropriated the news photo uncropped in a small painting. By reducing details in the background and heightening the contrasts, the attention became more focused on the widow. And through applying artificial greenish colors, the “paintingness” of the picture was stressed. In “Less Dead,” Richard Shiff stresses—based on comments by the artist—that in our culture black and white are matters of race, whereas in painting they are just colors.34 The latter is equally true, I should point out, of green, the color added to Pauline’s body by Dumas. Moreover, as noted by Shiff after looking at a painting by Dumas,

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Figure 1.4  Marlene Dumas, The Widow, 2013, oil on canvas, 150 × 140 cm and 60 × 80 cm. Photographer: Peter Cox. Courtesy the artist and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

“you feel that you can count the separate marks that made it,” because instead of seeking to let her brushstrokes dissolve she rather retains their visibility “as fluid gestures.”35 This observation emphasizes the strongly felt presence of the medium of painting when looking at the photographic image. Regarding the tension between the seemingly uniqueness of painting and reproducibility of photography, it is interesting to note that Dumas “reproduced” the “unique moment” in the photograph twice. In the larger square painting the photograph was cropped at the bottom right side as well as mainly at the left side, which positioned Pauline even more in the center and up front, while particular details were also more reduced in this version. The result is an extra impressive picture, but one that is even more cryptic through the loss of context and the sharpened contrasts that turned Pauline’s skin darker and that of the surrounding men whiter. Photography not only has a long tradition of cropping images; considered as an act of framing, it is even a fundamental aspect of the medium. As framed recordings of the world before the camera, photographs have thus created a specific awareness of the absence of the outer-frame world. A cropped photograph adds an extra act of framing, often in order to adjust the

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composition. In a quite similar way, the large square painting of the cropped photograph, in which attention is immediately drawn to the woman in the center, appears to be strikingly different from perceiving the smaller painting of the uncropped photograph. This difference could be explained with reference to the terms “gazing” and “glancing,” as applied by Norman Bryson in Vision and Painting (1983). Bryson categorized the strategy of Renaissance paintings, in which the viewer is directed to a focus point by means of central perspective and composition, in terms of “gaze.” He opposed them to paintings lacking such focus points, thus stimulating a “glance” over the picture. Through close-up, symmetrical composition, selective elaboration, and heightened contrasts, Dumas created a main focus point and stimulated a gaze at the center, in line with traditional painting. Returning from here once again to Richter’s Phienox, the yellow figure in the center may be called a focus point, but the rest of the painting rather evokes a glance than a gaze. The viewer even has to walk along the painting to take in the details. Bryson conveys that the glance, in contrast to the gaze, makes the spectator aware of looking as a bodily experience.36 In this viewing process, Phienox certainly evokes awareness of news photos as source, but does not suggest the existence of an appropriated (or cropped) image, as in the case of The Widow. This difference calls forth Lindiwe Dovey’s pondering about the importance of whether audiences recognize and apprehend adaptations. This question resulted from her proposal to pay particular attention to the relationship between adaptation and audience. She observed attempts by artists to try “to meet everyday audiences of adaptations halfway.” This emergent form of adaptation would not require of the audience much background knowledge in order to experience “the pleasures of adaptation.”37 Spectators are just asked to measure two or more aspects against each other—rather than consider how the adaptation is an adaptation of originals—turning the viewer into both a consumer and producer (a “prosumer”) who creates own associations during the process of viewing. This means that an awareness of the sources does not have to determine the viewer’s understanding of the work.38 The latter conclusion is also applicable to Dumas’s diptych, where background information may add to the meaning of the paintings while not being necessary to appreciate them. The complexity of Phienox and the two versions of The Widow that resulted from their obvious accumulation of various media encouraged slow spectatorship. In the past, many painters did not explicitly include characteristics of the media of their sources, be it drawings or photographs; they only reproduced the contents. When artists such as Polke, Dumas, and Richter explicitly display

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their dealing with more than one medium, is it appropriate then to use the terms “mixed media” and “multimedia”? And could we use them as synonyms? Yvonne Spielmann defined and compared the notions of intermedia, mixed media, and multimedia in her essay “Intermedia in Electronic Images” (2001). She applied “mixed media” to works that include elements of another medium (e.g., the use of a photograph in film), without (formal) transformation in either one. “Multimedia” would be more appropriate for the synchronous existence of diverse art forms within an integral medium (such as in theater), while they remain distinct from each other. “Intermedia,” according to Spielmann, deals with the interrelationship between or among distinct media that do merge with each other, even though the various media elements remain recognizable. The transformative processes resulting from the collision would also be reflected in the final images.39 In her essay, Spielmann deals with electronic images, but her definition of “intermedia” well fits the paintings discussed in this chapter. The snapshot character of the photographs, resulting from the split-second recording by the camera, remained recognizable after merging with the materiality of the paintings. Importantly, we should not ignore that what happens to a photograph when it is nested in or transformed into a painting can only be experienced in front of that painting. Tony Godfrey reminded his readers that they know most paintings as a photographic reproduction, not from an original experience of standing in front of them. A similar concern pertains to the paintings discussed in this chapter, because the painted photographs are included as digitized photographic illustrations, which turned these artworks into “photographs” again, be it photographic art reproductions.40 Godfrey underscored his observation with the example of Gerhard Richter, who emphasized that he wanted to make photographs through painting and therefore he tried to restrict the reproduction of his photo-paintings, especially those featuring members of the BaaderMeinhof group.41 In this context it is relevant to observe that lens-based media made it possible not only to reproduce artworks but, as David Reed has argued, also caused us, in particular after the introduction of film and video, to look in a different way to paintings.42 Although the same applies to photography, moving images have made us look even more differently to still images. An interesting artwork to demonstrate this issue is a painting by Vija Celmins, entitled TV (1964). It presents a frontal view at a television screen that displays a crashing airplane in the air. This dramatic moment as presented in a television news show was halted by Celmins when she made a screenshot, turning the moving news images into

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a news photo—a still image in both the meaning of motionless and soundless. Subsequently, the photograph was transformed into a painting with a meditative quality, in particular as a result of the “soft” brushstrokes and contours. By turning the housing of the television screen as well as the background into black and white, the painting emphasizes that news and, in fact, the world, both on television and in newspapers, was presented to its public in grey scales. In the view of Godfrey, paintings of violent events that are presented in an “utterly calm way,” such as those by Celmins, create a distance, a space for contemplation. As such, “painting became a still voice in the tempest.”43 The crashing airplane was framed by the painting frame, after being framed by the television camera and, next, the television screen, and followed by the photo camera and photographs as frames. Each frame increased the distance between what actually happened and the spectator, but the frames do not necessarily extend the time needed by the spectator to understand what he/she is looking at. Moreover, the beholder can quite easily reconstruct the process of multimediation. The latter becomes more complicated when we return to Richter’s Phienox. As concluded in the previous sections, spectators appear to associate the picture with news photos already at first glance, because they have become familiar with such images. In this respect, Phienox and TV do not differ so much. But if in the case of the painting TV the displacement from one medium frame to the next was easy to reconstruct as a linear process, the process of “intermediality” in Phienox rather resembles a rhizome network, whose structure without a clear origin looks more like the World Wide Web than a spider web. Not only does the painting not provide any answers to the who, where, and what, the use of recordings by X-ray and infrared cameras further complicated the understanding of the process of mediation. Should we conclude, then, that in Phienox the painting actually masked the original news photos? The issue of whether this process involves a kind of “masking,” instead of just appropriation, brings to mind anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Way of the Masks (1982). In this book he stated that a mask, just like a painting or a sculpture, does not exist in isolation; a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, or, actually, what it chooses not to represent. When comparing a mask with a myth, both deny as much as they affirm. A mask, thus, not only displays what it says or might say but also what it “excluded.”44 When in this logic we substitute the mask by the medium of painting, it can be said to deny as well affirm photography. In other words, Phienox does not represent a transparent photographic truth, but it does

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affirm the associations evoked by press photography in stressing the importance of an event. At the same time, the painter denies painting to be a personal visual statement or a transparent general statement, but he affirms painting as an appropriate medium for evoking contemplation on meaning production in pictures. The concept of masking also triggers the question of whether the corporality of painting masks the lack of materiality of press photos, the issue at the center of the next section. As illustrated by the aforementioned paintings, the act of reproducing a photograph in paint may engender thoughts about the uniqueness of the painting. In fact, the issue of reproducibility of photographs turned into the “photo-reproductive” nature of these paintings. What was reproduced was mainly the snapshot character of the news photos that included unique moments. The latter feature could even turn a screenshot from a movie or television into what is seemingly a news photo. But if reproducibility was part of the acceleration of image production in society, the photo-reproductive nature of the paintings rather slowed down our perception as a result of the indirectness of the process involved: it takes time after all to understand what we see. And if we conceive of photographs as more closely related to seeing and of paintings as more linked to showing, the paintings under discussion “critically and slowly showed seeing.”

The Corporality of Paintings That Include News Photos The key works of this chapter were all made with the traditional material of oil paint applied on canvas. The incorporated news photos are thus transformed into oil paint, but they had lost their original materiality already when reproduced in a newspaper, or they never had a physical appearance beyond that of a digital image uploaded on the internet. The question is how various views on the corporality of paintings, and oil paint in particular, could contribute to our understanding of the effects of this physical transformation. In the age-old history of painting, the corporality of painting has been discussed from several perspectives. The differences in characterizations mainly resulted from the cultural-historical context and the nature of the comparison. For instance, in the era from the Renaissance until the late nineteenth century, marked increasingly by the pursuit of knowledge of the surrounding world, the illusionistic ability of oil paint was mainly praised. And in comparison with previously used paints, such as tempera, oil paint was considered to be a fairly

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“fast” material to work with for painters. Only after the invention of new synthetic, quickly drying paints in the second half of the twentieth century, such as acrylic paint, did oil paint become a “slower” material. In 1984, remarkably, Polke chose acrylic for the production of his aforementioned painting (Figure 1.2), which heightened its graphic character, whereas about two decades later, Richter, Dumas, and Ghekiere preferred using the slower traditional paint. The twentieth century saw many revolutionary developments in painting, but it was mainly the corporality of paintings that was addressed in discussions about how photography differed from the older medium of painting. The modernist debates underscored the physicality of the painting as an object, the attention for the texture of the surface, and its being handmade. Although more recently, and in particular in the digital age, comparative studies of photography and painting paid more attention to similarities between these two media,45 the materiality of photographs has hardly been addressed.46 A most persistent difference between photography and painting pertains to the scholarly ignorance of photographic surfaces versus the sustained interest in those of paintings. An early explicit modernist reference to the medium-specific materiality of paintings can be found in the French painter Maurice Denis’s statement in his article “Definition of Neo-Traditionalism” (1890): “It is well to remember that a picture—before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”47 A few decades before Denis’s statement, the new medium photography was considered to be the new window to the world, partly taking over that role from painting. About a century later, in the 1950s, commercials promoting the introduction of television defined this new medium also as the new window to the world, causing photography to undergo a change in reception similar to that of painting earlier. Increasingly, the photograph became identified as a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world. Continuing this line, it is striking that in 1964 Celmins presented her painting TV as well as the television screen in the painting as a flat screen. In the 1950s, the art critic Clement Greenberg had pursued views like Denis’s in his modernist characterization of a painting as self-referential—that is, drawing attention to the flat surface of the canvas covered with paint. Greenberg even presented the history of modern painting as an inevitable development toward abstract painting. Subsequent critical responses by artists as well as art critics to this view of Modernism, in particular from the mid-1960s on, resulted in less interest in the corporality of painting, if not in disinterest in painting in general. Although some critics even announced the death of painting,

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numerous paintings continued to be made, while considering a painting as a flat surface (rather than an illusionistic window to the world) did not fully lose its importance. The paintings under discussion support this observation. Not only quite a few artists continued to paint in the 1960s and 1970s; theorists also continued to reflect on painting as a medium, for instance, the art philosopher Hubert Damisch. In 1984, Damisch’s essays about painting from the period 1958–84 were compiled and published under the title Fenêtre jaune cadmium (Cadmium yellow window). His general approach started from an interest in the role of formal and material aspects in the visual communication of a painting. Interest in the correlation between content and materiality in the meaning production of paintings continued to be part of the debates on the medium-specificity of painting. In 2003, for instance, Alison Rowley, in a dialogue with her colleague Griselda Pollock about contemporary painting, argued that the balance between surface and subject was restored again in contemporary art. Rowley called it painting’s double operation, or “the potential to oscillate between its materiality and its capacity to evoke an illusion of something in the world or in the imagination.”48 This definition echoes philosopher Richard Wollheim’s discussion of “twofoldness” in painting in his publications from the early 1960s on. Wollheim criticized Ernst Gombrich, who in his Art and Illusion (1959) stated that the viewer looks at paint either as substance or illusion of what it depicts, comparable to looking at the duck-rabbit figure, where one sees either the duck or the rabbit. According to Wollheim, in the duck-rabbit case the two experiences are homogeneous, representing both an animal in the real world. But looking at a painting would be a heterogeneous experience: one sees something in the world and something in the picture. These two aspects are distinguishable but also inseparable.49 An insightful example of twofoldness for my Phienox case study I found in Painting as an Art (1987). In the last chapter of this book, Wollheim discussed some paintings that would metaphorize the body and heighten the experience of corporeality. The way he articulated his analysis of the late paintings of Titian (1560s–early 1570s) appears to be surprisingly appropriate to describe Daniel Richter’s Phienox: The paint skin becomes just that: it becomes a skin. This aim is served by the  patterning of texture; by the inconspicuousness of perspective; by the anonymity, the explosive anonymity, of the figures, throbbing with life, but beyond individuality; and, above all, by Titian’s new use of colour. . . . It consists, in other words, of an overwhelming sense of vibrancy, the energy, of colour as such.50

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But if Wollheim’s aim is to gain insight into the intentions and mental state of the artist, my interest lies in the effects of the observed twofoldness on the adaptation of the news photos. The texture of the oil paint in Phienox “humanized” the flat human figures copied from the used photographs. And although the red background cannot be related to a photographic image, its vibrant skin contributes to the simultaneous adaptations. Wollheim even suggested that a painting can metaphorize the body without representing it.51 This possibility certainly applies to the bloodred background. The various views on the corporality of painting discussed so far focus mainly on the surface of the painting, consisting of paint applied on a flat support. A broader approach was taken up by the American artist Sharon Orleans Lawrence in 2013, in a passionate plea for the oil painting based on extensive research of statements about oil paint by artists and scholars from the Renaissance up to the present. She defined the materiality of the oil painting as “the embodiment of the painting’s ontology, distilled from the characteristics of the paint, the painter’s experience with the paint, and its presentation to the viewer in such a way as to evoke a visceral response.”52 Lawrence stressed the liveliness of the process of painting, not only in the dynamics of creation and the experience of the spectator but also in the paint itself, which “behaves like a living thing in the process of drying, evaporating out water in the case of water media, and grabbing oxygen from the air in the case of oil paint.”53 This attention for the role of the characteristics of oil paint in the perception of paintings calls forth James Elkins’s What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy (2000). His observations on the nature of paint—“The paint depicts skin, but it also is skin. . . . Just looking at it is feeling age and decay”—and his consideration of paints as liquids, which are elements of life, offer support for his experience of paintings as organisms.54 His reflections on paint, notably its juxtaposition with blood, are corroborated through close-up observation of Phienox’s richly varied texture and the red background. Some other authors have more specifically addressed the brushstrokes as qualities of paint that constitute the surface. Godfrey, for instance, has claimed that although painting and photography, unlike television and film, share the absence of sound, painting is, compared with photography’s silence, “noisy” through its layering and brushmarks.55 As an example he mentioned Celmins’s brushstrokes that represented the airplane crash in TV and seemed to add more “noise” than the smooth surface of a photograph. David Joselit has drawn attention to dynamic brush marks by opening his essay “Reassembling Painting” (2015) with the sentence: “A mark in paint

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registers the passage of force through matter.” This statement was inspired by the American painter Cy Twombly, who claimed that each line was the event of its own materialization.56 This is not to suggest that Joselit devoted his essay to painting as physical object. In Chapter 4, I will elaborate on how Joselit’s view of “reassembling painting” is tributary to Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005). Here, it is more relevant to discuss Joselit’s critique of colleagues who value autonomous paintings and collages based on appropriated material as different entities that are not supposed to mingle. In contrast, he considered them to be complementary. Paintings would be a passage of force through paint, whereas collages would be a passage of attention through pictures. Between 1960 and 2015, there has been a development in painting, according to Joselit, whereby passage and transitivity were combined to form networks: the paradigmatic form of the information age. Such “network paintings” would render the plasticity of networks visual and palpable.57 Joselit’s analysis of contemporary painting appears to be applicable to the processes that took place in the production of this chapter’s key works. In Richter’s Phienox, for instance, the marks in paint can certainly be defined as passages of force through matter: firmly applied impastos and brushstrokes are striking in contrast to thin washes. The overall composition of two dozen of figures painted in various styles and based on various sources (such as news photos, thermography, X-ray photos) makes Phienox look like a (painted) collage that could be characterized as a passage of attention through pictures. As the artist remarked about his archive of found images, newspaper clippings, comics, film stills, and so on, “it is quite simply the material through which the world has avowed itself to me. I am my own assemblage movement.”58 Also, transitivity in the sense of an action of dislocation, which reanimates pictures drawn from anywhere, is certainly happening in Phienox as a result of the lively translations into paint of mechanical, and even scientific, photographs. Moreover, Phienox, when exhibited in Berlin just after it was finished, was interpreted as representing the fall of the Berlin Wall, even though the painting was based on press photos of a news event in Tanzania. If the context of Berlin apparently added to the interpretative scope of the painting, it is interesting to realize that its reproductions are now circulating on the internet. Because infrared heat and X-ray photographs present universal images of human beings, many internet users will be able to relate the event presented in Phienox to familiar local events. If Joselit emphasized the dynamic processes in the production, perception, and distribution of contemporary painting that started with the materialized force in brushstrokes, Isabelle Graw discussed brushstrokes in relationship to

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painting’s specific indexicality. In Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas (2012) and “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success Medium and the Value of Liveliness” (2015), she stressed the strong indexical relationship between the product and the (absent) person of its maker as most important characteristic of painting. Graw is critical about the prevailing view that photography became the indexical art form par excellence because it automatically inscribed the object without presupposing an author. She presented the view of Charles Peirce—the founding father of the semiotic triangle of index, icon, and symbol as an analytical instrument to deal with sign systems—that an index shows something of a thing because of its physical connection to it, and that thus an index would be physically connected with its object, and even make an organic pair. Graw accordingly related indexicality to the production process of painting, rather than to issues of representation. Brushstrokes are obviously physical traces of the moving hand of the producing person.59 As a result, a painting should be perceived as a physical manifestation of its absent author, regardless of the depiction or reference. The viewer, however, can only imagine the artist because the painting cannot be reduced to the painter—after its completion it takes on a life of its own.60 Another result of painting’s specific indexicality that she noted is its vitality, its liveliness: “[a painting] produces a sense of liveliness through the implication of the life and the labor time of its author.” These observations go back to Alfred Gell’s views as expressed in Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1999), such as his notion that a painter leaves traces, even when the painting is produced mechanically, and that these can be read as “emanation(s) or manifestation(s) of agency.”61 But the liveliness of painting should not be confused with Leon Battista Alberti’s characterization of the mission of painting—in his Della Pittura, considered to be the first European treatise of painting—to create life, which mainly involved an aesthetic notion of liveliness. According to Graw, the value of painting lies in experiencing through its liveliness the presence of the artist.62 The main problem of this generalizing view of painting is that it is inadequate for evaluating each individual (contemporary) painting. The liveliness of brushstrokes in paintings such as Ghekiere’s with press photos of Art Basel and tent camps in Patras appears to be more interesting as additional filter for the images to draw attention to their similarity (see Figure 1.3). However, as my analysis of Richter’s Phienox established, consideration of the personal life and interests of this artist as a kind of fingerprint (presented in the painting techniques) contributed to the meanings (and as a result the value) of his

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painting. In this respect, Graw’s thesis has limited significance for the kind of analysis presented here. Both Joselit and Graw contributed to the catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (2015), which centered on three themes: Gesture and Spectacle, Eccentric Figuration, and Social Networks. Although the main theme of the project is closely related to the theme of my study, the project did not focus in particular on the slowness of painting as critical strategy. But the general characterization of the theme of Gesture and Spectacle, given its focus on painterly gestures, does apply to the paintings discussed in this chapter. As argued by the editors, Since the rise of expressionism in the early twentieth century, painterly gesture has been associated with human agency through its connection to the unconscious discharge of emotion and the artist’s liberation from any constraint in realistically representing the world. This section of “Painting 2.0” considers ways in which gestural techniques were mobilized after 1960 to combat or “humanize” what the Situationist theorist Guy Debord famously diagnosed as spectacle in his watershed book The Society of the Spectacle (1967).63

The authors account for this reference to Debord’s book by suggesting that his concept of the spectacle encompassed new media, but also, and even more important, it addressed the accumulation of images as capital and commodification of images. In line with this observation, most of the aforementioned paintings appropriated images from daily life. It is well possible to understand the ways in which Celmins, Polke, Richter, and Ghekiere translated news photos into brushstrokes as efforts at combating or humanizing images that are part of the “society of the spectacle.” After having addressed the corporality of the surface of paintings, including the role of brushstrokes in dealing with the fluid material of paint, it is questionable whether the painting’s materialization started with the act of adding to the empty canvas. The paintings discussed in this chapter actually started with the materiality of the appropriated photographs, if not the materiality of the screens of the (digital) devices but as a subtractive process rather than an additional one. For understanding this process, it is interesting to address first Gilles Deleuze’s reflection on the working process of the Irish/English artist Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003, originally published in 1981). In discussing Bacon’s use of photographs, he quoted the artist who claimed that he considered photographs not as figuration but as what modern people see.64 Generalizing his analysis, Deleuze argued that even before a painter starts to

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work, the canvas is already inhabited by photographs or all kinds of other clichés. As a result, the painter does not begin adding to the canvas, but to empty it from these clichés. Everything a painter has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. . . . He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model; he paints on images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relations between model and copy.65

If Deleuze articulated this view on Bacon and other painters in reference to the pre-digital age, his view seems even more applicable to my key works, created in an age of accumulating (digital) images. Moreover, it is interesting to perceive Richter’s Phienox not as a collection of reproduced images but as a canvas filled with his archive that is emptied out toward a model. Considering that most brushstrokes in Phienox do not result from the figuration in the appropriated images, Deleuze’s claim regarding Bacon’s brushstrokes is interesting: . . . it is like the emergence of another world. For these marks, these traits, are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: they are asignifying traits. They are traits of sensation, but of confused sensations. . . . And above all, they are manual traits. These almost blind manual marks attest to the intrusion of another world into the visual world of figuration. . . . this is the turning point of the painting.66

Finally, one may wonder, what happens to the embodied spectator when perceiving a news photo incorporated in a painting? Much depends on the main interest of the viewer in either the painterly aspects or the presented subject in the photograph of course. At the same time, it is interesting to contemplate the differences between photographer and photo theorist Victor Burgin’s description of the general perception of a photograph and Brice Marden’s take by a painter on looking at a painting, because they both have addressed the physical response of the viewer. As argued by Burgin, the nature of photographs makes it necessary to be presented as series. Staring too long at a single photograph is “to lose the imaginary command of the look. . . . As alienation intrudes into our captation by the still image we can only regain the imaginary, and reinvest our looking with authority, by averting our gaze, redirecting it to another image elsewhere.” It may be hardly arbitrary, then, that photographs are deployed to be looked at only briefly, and that almost invariably another photograph is waiting to receive the

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displaced look.67 Brice Marden, however, described another kind of movement while observing a painting: How you look at a painting physically is very important. A good way to approach a painting is to look at it from a distance roughly equivalent to its height, then double the distance, then go back and look at it in detail where you begin to answer the questions you’ve posed at each of these various viewing distances. If you go through a museum and you look at a lot of paintings in that way, it’s like a little dance; it’s almost a ritual of involvement.68

Godfrey described this kind of behavior before paintings as “the sense of one’s own body in motion is an integral part of the experience of looking at paintings.”69 It is evident that the paintings discussed in this chapter call for such a “ritual dance” on the part of the spectator looking at them. It takes definitely more time to observe and understand these all somewhat blurred paintings— presumably more blurred than the photographs they were based on—than is needed for looking at the original news photos. Moreover, the spectator is aware that the appropriated news photo was decontextualized from the series of press photographs it originally belonged to. Scanning the lively surfaces of these paintings may also lead to the awareness that although the news photos gained materiality, liveliness, contemplation, and even “eternity,” they stopped being press photos that need to be perceived as fugitive images that accompany the fastness of news events, so their shortcomings in corporality particularly strengthen their effectiveness. The lively corporality of the paintings sucked the life out of the news photos. Moreover, the appropriated images did not become more famous as a result of their adaptation. They were actually turned into experimental subjects of laboratory research on fugitive news photos. The various discussed views on the corporality of paintings, and oil paint in particular, contributed to a more positive understanding of the consequences of the physical transformation of news photos in Phienox. In particular Wollheim’s concept of twofoldness and Elkins’s reflection on the skin of a painting contributed to a better understanding of what the editors of Painting 2.0 called combating or humanizing images from the society of the spectacle, which is applicable to Richter’s painting. Godfrey’s view on the character of brushstrokes drew attention to the noise they added to still images, whereas Deleuze’s concept of the painting as emptying out an archive of images and clichés underscored that paintings such as Phienox are based on such processes of subtraction as well as on additional processes regarding meaningful affectraising brushstrokes.

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Bridging Distances in Time through History Painting and Histories of Painting Painting and photography can deal with history in strikingly different ways. Photographs usually remind us of moments that passed by, which led Roland Barthes in his seminal book Camera Lucida to coin the term “that-has-been” (ça-a-été) to characterize the essence of photographs.70 That a camera needs to be available to take a picture strengthens the truthfulness of the result on the one hand, but, on the other hand, this makes it impossible to have images of events that took place before the photographer arrived (which continues to be a frustration for many photojournalists). Making a painting, by contrast, takes too much time to register a passing moment for remembrance, yet it is possible to paint a historical (re)construction of historical events, either on the basis of recorded moments in photographs71 or other more or less specific sources, including memory. However, if in the past history painting was expected to represent a historical event in a truthful way, today we distrust the truthfulness of reconstructions of events more than ever, like we also increasingly distrust memories. In the field of contemporary art, the paintings of the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans have been discussed in particular in relation to a critical dealing with collective historical memories. In the following I will briefly discuss Tuymans’s preoccupations with memory and history in relation to the way he deals with appropriated photographs in his paintings, in order to consider the presence of such processes in Richter’s Phienox. Next I examine how the latter painting relates to traditions in history painting as well as to specific aspects from the histories of painting, and how those relationships affect the perception of the included news photos. Comments by Richter on his work often implicitly relate to memory, representations of histories, and the history of painting. For example, he made the following claim about Phienox: “If the work is read as depicting the fall of the Berlin Wall, it yields a rather paranoid version of the historical event. Phienox is fraught and angst-ridden, a strange blend of Hollywood war movie and abstract painting, which incidentally was based on a photo in the Neue Zürcher.”72 Most paintings by Luc Tuymans share a quite similar style of painting. They consist of thin layers of paint applied by means of coarse parallel brushstrokes in subdued colors. These pictures allude to faded, color-leached photographs, while also being characterized by their lack of detail. In particular his paintings that present people carrying out nonspectacular activities evoke associations with press photographs that refer to events or people important enough to

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Figure 1.5  Luc Tuymans, Maypole, 2000, oil on canvas, 234 × 116 cm. Photographer: Felix Tirry. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

record and publish but which do not themselves display the importance of the people or the event. Such information is articulated in their captions. In Maypole (2000) (Figure 1.5), for instance, we see some young men involved in raising poles. Spectators familiar with Central-European cultures will recognize the trousers as lederhosen and the poles as maypoles, which were raised in May, at the beginning of summer, and decorated in a way reminiscent of ageold fertility cults to honor nature. Thus, the subject of this painting marks the start of the celebration of summer. Surprisingly, the painting does not express cheerfulness. The suggestion that this painting looks based on a partly decolored old photograph from the mid-twentieth century, and the vague presence of flags in the background, combined with the depicted German or Austrian guys who look quite tough, may lead us to interpret the painting as referring to the Hitler Youth. Such interpretation is more likely to be common among those spectators who know that Tuymans made quite a few works that include references to the Holocaust and the two world wars. In response to specific questions in interviews, Tuymans has indicated which source images he used for his paintings. In this case, he used images from Signal—a Nazi propaganda magazine. As he commented, this magazine was distributed for free in occupied

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and neutral countries but never in Germany. What especially fascinated him was that it was the first magazine that used a procedure, invented by dr. Wolff, for color printing in magazines.73 Quite similar to the paintings discussed in this chapter, Tuymans’s main goal did not appear to be to inform spectators about a specific event, which indeed would be rather the motivation expected from a photojournalist not from an artist. Moreover, unlike the tradition of history painting, whereby painters often sought to draw in the compassionate spectator through displaying a narrative condensed into a meaningful moment including meaningful details, the paintings by Tuymans present seemingly insignificant elements.74 That does not mean that he does not want to trigger his audience, but rather than aiming at easily evoking emotions he seems intent on stimulating contemplation about what we see, as appears from remarks such as Art can’t change the world, but there’s a difference between real and painted time. Painted time is contemplative, it can allow for thought and make people reassess, and the assessment of power is important; it gives one a sense of its stupidity. . . . in my work you will always be confronted with history and memory, in one way or another.75

It is striking that Tuymans leaves out informative details of the appropriated photographs. This decision calls forth Siegfried Kracauer’s critique of the often suggested relationship between memory-images and photographs. In 1927, reacting to the increasing appearance of magazines including images, he warned that photographs may replace and revise memories: “Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory-images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. . . . [F]rom the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage.”76 Most of Tuymans’s paintings seem to present that garbage part—the part that is expected soon to disappear from memory-images, even though trivial details may sometimes survive. The artist appears to be aware that his strategy may suggest indifference, but he explained it as, “My paintings have a sense of being cosy that turns into something terrifying, violent. The work revolves around the idea of indifference, which makes it even more violent. . . . pictures, if they are to have any effect, must have the tremendous intensity of silence—the silence before the storm.”77 Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, who in 2011 curated a solo exhibition of Tuymans’s paintings and edited the catalog, drew quite similar conclusions, but they based them on the significance of his working process for

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understanding his work. Tuymans collected various kinds of images from mass media, dealing either with important historical events or just trivial subjects, but no iconic news photos. For each painting, he selected an image, scrutinized its subject, and made sketches to elaborate his concept. Finally he would execute the actual painting in a one-day session (only performing some subtle changes at a later stage). He applied the paint only in horizontal brushstrokes, which emphasizes the flat nature of the canvas and blocks the illusion of depth. The resulting painting has a chilly appearance that keeps the spectator at a distance.78 This procedure resulted in a picture that in multiple ways is removed from its original source, but also displays a sense of incompletion: “a precise, haunting record of the imprecision of memory, both personal and collective” in which the subjects “play with the appearance of significance but exist only as fragments salvaged from an imprecise historical memory.”79 One of the most striking differences between Maypole and Phienox is that the former deploys muted colors to indicate a distant past, while the colors in the latter, conversely, suggest that the appropriated news photos were quite recently presented on computer monitors. With a background in political activism, Richter was concerned with the integration of East and West Germany and the consequences of the end of the Cold War when he lived and worked in Berlin. This interest echoed in his remark about the photographs he selected for Phienox as well as in the allusions in the resulting painting to the fall of the Berlin Wall: “in each case, the event in Tanzania and Berlin were about an erosion of apparently absolute structures. I believe that the structural decay, which symbolically began with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, was in part a pre-condition of the attack on the U.S. Embassy.”80 As a result of the bombing on July 7, 1998, twelve people were killed and more than eighty injured, almost all African civilians. All bodies had to be pulled over the wall that surrounded the site of the embassy. But rather than as a local drama, or as a conflict between North and South (as previously between West and East), Richter, according to David Hughes, would connect all these kinds of conflicts to the globalization of capitalism.81 The aforementioned references to histories and memories lead us once again to aspects of Dovey’s definition of simultaneous adaptations. In her view, these adaptations are distinctive in their ability simultaneously to display the present and the past, thereby activating histories and memories. As discussed in relationship to Dumas’s The Widow, Dovey, when considering the importance of the recognition of adaptations by audiences, claimed that it appeared to be possible to invest a work with meaningful traits of adaptation without having to rely on the audience’s detailed knowledge of the sources.82 With the observed

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ambiguity concerning the specifics of the represented historical event in Maypole and Phienox in the back of our minds, it is interesting to note how much their works deviate from the criteria of traditional academic history painting as common during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 2000, the very year Maypole and Phienox were created, David Green and Peter Seddon published the edited volume History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art. In their introduction, the editors wrote that the past exists for us at all only through forms of representation, and this is also how we define and invent the past.83 Consequently, reflection on the reassessment of history painting also includes a reassessment of history itself, inclusive of artistic practices as part of (art) history. Green and Seddon discussed a number of criteria of traditional academic history painting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A significant action or moment had to be chosen from a specific story. The resulting painting should depict the selected subject in such a way that immediate antecedents and consequences of the action are suggested in a clear and meaningful way. Moreover, history painting should not only display narrativity but also didactic intents, related to ethical and moral intentions: viewers should perceive virtues relevant both to their own time and universally or eternally.84 Green and Seddon subsequently elaborated on how much had changed in the next centuries. They characterized the historical genre painting of the nineteenth century in general as “little more than costume drama offering anecdotal and bowdlerized versions of history.” In the early part of the twentieth century, the interest in history paintings among modernist painters disappeared. One of the reasons might have been that paintings were created for individual viewers, rather than for a public function.85 After a specific intermezzo in the interwar period, in which artists devoted to socialist realism had a renewed interest in history painting, Green and Seddon noted special fascination among scholars and artists for debates about how to deal with representations of history after the end of the Cold War. Although the works of Luc Tuymans and Daniel Richter are not addressed in their book, they certainly relate to the following observations. The impact of the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of Eastern Europe—including all their social, political, and economic consequences—supposedly resulted in a reassessment of how we should deal with history in the complexities of a new world order. This came with the implication for the view on history painting that artists had to reflect on how to respond to the fact that previously dominant historical narratives no longer prevailed. At the same time, traditional

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representations of history were interrogated in critical postcolonial and feminist debates about race and gender.86 Of the nine case studies included in History Painting Reassessed, David Green’s essay about the series of paintings 18 October 1977 (1988) by the German artist Gerhard Richter is the most interesting for my argument. Green motivates his choice for this series in calling them “one of the most ambitious and ambivalent attempts to produce a form of contemporary history painting in recent times.”87 Gerhard Richter belonged to an older generation than Daniel Richter, but they shared an interest in the political division between Western and Eastern Europe, symbolized by the Berlin Wall. Gerhard Richter even personally underwent the consequences of the so-called Iron Curtain. He was born in 1932 in Dresden and after he had crossed the border to West Germany in 1961, just before the Wall went up, he continued to be interested in the political conflicts between Leftist activists and the state. He started to create an image archive, consisting of images from mass media, among which news photos, but also photographs of his own family, as well as vernacular photographs of trivial objects. This archive provided a basic source for his paintings usually called “photo-paintings.” One of his most famous series is entitled 18 October 1977, consisting of fifteen blackand-white blurred paintings depicting the arrest and death of members of the Baader-Meinhof group of activists. The source images included photographs from police archives and the press, stills from recordings by a television crew, and a posed studio-portrait of Meinhof as a teenager. By turning these images into a cycle of paintings, the diverse origins were obviated. The uniformity not only resulted from the “overruling” materiality of the oil paint but also from the finishing touch. While the paint was still wet, the artist mechanically worked over the surface with a squeegee in horizontal directions, blurring the outlines and consequently the image. Richter in fact added a mechanical second stage to the medium of painting: if photography belongs to the two-stages media (a photograph is taken by a camera and created as image in a next stage), painting is commonly directly produced by hand. One of Green’s most insightful observations on the 18 October 1977 cycle is his description of the process whereby the medium of painting “stalls the recession of the photograph into the past, holding it before us and forcing us to confront what is there and made ‘present’ . . . refusing, as paintings, the transparency of the photographs.”88 This observation also concerns the subject; there has not yet been any transparency, after all, about what exactly led to the death or suicide of these activists.

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Alex Danchev, scholar in International Relations and relationships between art and war, described 18 October 1977 as history paintings but also as “memory paintings,” based on Gerhard Storck’s characterization of “this blind spot where ‘being unable to forget’ and ‘not wanting to remember’ cross paths.”89 Danchev noted that Richter started with painting this cycle of paintings in 1987, exactly a decade after the event, but also amid the German Historikerstreit—the serious quarrel among German historians concerning the proper interpretation of the German past, in particular the National Socialist past. Crucial questions were asked, such as how history could be understood and communicated. It is not sure whether Richter was fully aware of this publicly conducted debate, but it is interesting that he preferred to use mainly police photographs as perspective for his October series.90 Gerhard Richter’s 18 October 1977 obviously related to a specific historical event, in contrast to Daniel Richter’s painting, but none of these paintings explicitly displayed violence. It is only suggested. The appropriated photographs were once related to stories about violent events, left unrecorded by the photo journalist because of his/her being too late. At this point, it is instructive to have a closer look at the series of paintings called Srebrenica (2004–8) by the Dutch artist Ronald Ophuis, which displays scenes of explicit violence. This series depicts a traumatic episode in Bosnian, Dutch, and international history that took place in July 1995. More than 7,000 Bosniaks (Muslim residents) were killed by Serbian troops in what became known as the Srebrenica massacre. The Dutch UN battalion present in the region failed to prevent the genocide. Although the Srebrenica series by Ophuis also seems to consist of appropriations of press photos, the artistic process in his case significantly differed from that of the aforementioned artists. In 2003, eight years after the genocide, Ophuis traveled to Srebrenica, where he talked with survivors and visited sites of the violent actions. Back home in his studio he hired actors and staged the horrible scenes he had heard about. He took photographs of the staged scenes and based his paintings on these photographs, which basically simulated news photos of incidents that would have taken place there. The nature of these photographs is intriguing, in particular in the light of the observation at the start of this section on the notion that photo cameras can only take pictures of the present and never of the past. In fact, Ophuis took photographs of the past. But these photographs were obviously taken in his studio, so they rather look weird than horrifying. His paintings, which look like being based on eyewitness photographs, are often too atrocious to look at, also because of their monumental size that turns the perpetrators and victims into life-size human beings, which further strengthens

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the impact of the paintings. The shocking nature of some of his paintings, in particular those of explicit rapes, evoked discussion about the ethical aspects of artisthood. In interviews Ophuis reacted with statements such as this: “The most dangerous aspect of violence lies essentially in its denial.”91 The approach taken by Ophuis does not differ so much from that of artists who made history paintings in the early nineteenth century. He mentioned French painter Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), which he first saw during his study at the academy of arts, as a referential point for his work.92 Géricault’s painting displayed the shipwreck of the French frigate Medusa in 1816. Due to the incompetence of the captain, the ship ran aground on a reef. Of the approximately 150 passengers who tried to survive on a raft only 15 are assumed to have been rescued. Géricault based his painting on interviews with survivors and constructed a model of the raft in his studio. This all took place some decades before the invention of photography. Almost two centuries later, when Ophuis produced his series, analog photography was already replaced by digital photography, but press photos still depended on the presence of photojournalists. In his studio, he reconstructed the news photos that might have been taken if a photographer had been present. In other words, both his starting point and his solution were quite similar as those of Géricault. Ophuis created his series about ten years after the genocide, and this is a similar distance in time as was needed by Gerhard Richter to produce his series. Daniel Richter was also believed to have created a painting of the fall of the Berlin Wall after exactly ten years. Yet his Phienox was based on news photos taken only two years before, after the bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania. It is striking perhaps that also Géricault started his “historical project” two years after the tragedy. The interest of Ophuis in a famous history painting from the nineteenth century invites us to shift our reflection from history painting to artists’ interest in the history of painting. How does the work of artists discussed here relate to art history? Gerhard Richter, for example, once observed that art “has always been basically about agony, desperation and helplessness,” whereby he specifically referred to “crucifixion narratives, from the Middle Ages to Grünewald.”93 But in general it can be argued that Richter’s work does not evoke strong associations with famous paintings from art history. Likewise, the paintings by Tuymans have hardly been discussed in relationship to the history of art. Yet the lack of such context became in particular clear when investigating the work of Daniel Richter. In reviews of his paintings, critics have dropped many a name for the sake of comparison, such as James Ensor, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and even as

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far back as Francisco José de Goya. In an interview, Richter mentioned that it was actually a visit to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris that inspired him to start painting figuratively in 2000. His visit caused him to grow intrigued by the paintings of artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Félix Valotton.94 The most insightful comparisons, however, appear to be the ones that juxtapose Daniel Richter’s work with paintings of early twentieth-century German expressionists, and with paintings by Max Beckmann and James Ensor. The contrasting colors and deformations of bodies in Daniel Richter’s paintings demonstrate a strong affinity to expressionist paintings. In the 1910s, artists groups such as Die Brücke strongly believed in the power of the artist to intervene in social relations, but by the 1980s many artists, such as Richter’s teacher Werner Büttner, considered the role of the artist as that of a cynical witness, having no ambition to change the world.95 Phienox could be called a product of the latter attitude. The German artist Max Beckmann painted many of his works in an expressionist-like style in the interwar period. One of his typical visual strategies is that the space in the painting does not open toward the background (the traditional view on painting as looking through a window to the world) but forward, in the direction of the spectator. As a result, the beholder becomes part of the presented event, rather than just an onlooker. This is what also happens in Richter’s Phienox: the figures jostle each other in the foreground, and the reversed opening of space is strengthened by the bright red background.96 Yet presumably the most striking art historical reference regarding Phienox is the affinity with James Ensor’s The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, created in 1889. This Belgian symbolist painter provided the figures in his picture with carnivalesque masks and highly imaginative details. The background of this painting is bright red. The work alludes to a crucial historical event: the French Revolution that changed society dramatically.97 Thus, next to formal similarities, both paintings combine various influential historical events that happened at different moments and in other places. Ensor’s 1889 painting did not meet the criteria of history painting anymore as listed by Green and Seddon. It might even be called an early example of simultaneous adaptations. The many faces of the figures that look like carnivalesque masks seem to echo in the faces of Richter’s figures.98 Godfrey related Richter’s paintings more in general to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses in his influential book Rabelais and his World (1968, originally published in Russian in 1965). Bakhtin described the carnivalesque as a complex phenomenon where people merge in a tumultuous crowd and the world is turned upside down (e.g., masters serving servants, and ordinary logic

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and morals are suspended). The masks enabled one to play with other identities, while the experience of the body as being incomplete or grotesque is lauded rather than ignored.99 If Ensor integrated a biblical event in a political painting, the same may be true of Richter in Phienox. The body that is pulled over the wall calls forth the many Christian paintings representing the Deposition (Descent from the Cross) after the crucifixion, such as the famous paintings by Raphael or Rogier van der Weyden on this episode. Richter said about this reference that he created a painting in which, among other things, the descent of the cross and the fall of the Berlin Wall are interwoven.100 The artist’s observation was certainly not new. Photo journalists consciously or unconsciously carry the cultural conventions and histories of pictures with them in their work. The same goes for the future viewers of their images. The news photo of Pauline Lumumba, for instance, selected by Dumas, also calls forth Christian paintings and history paintings. Having analyzed the art historical references in some paintings from the twenty-first century, it is interesting to look back to statements by scholars from the late twentieth century in which they express their expectations on the future of painting. In this respect, Yve-Alain Bois has made an intriguing statement. In 1990, in his Painting as Model Bois expressed the next prediction: “It will not be easier than before, but my bet is that the potential for painting will emerge in the conjunctive deconstruction of the three instances that modernist painting has dissociated (the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic).”101 It is well possible to consider the works by Luc Tuymans, Daniel Richter, Gerhard Richter, and Ronald Ophuis in this light. In comparison to the aforementioned paintings by Gerhard Richter and Ophuis, Phienox appears to invoke memories of a specific event less explicitly. Quite similar to Tuymans’s Maypole, Phienox suggests that the appropriated photographs are probably related to meaningful events. They certainly look somehow familiar. Paradoxically, this familiarity makes them recognizable as press photos, even if at the same time they are not specific enough to be identified. If, for this reason, Phienox does not meet the required recognition of traditional history painting, it does fit into the contemporary reassessments of history painting as described by Green and Seddon. Artists increasingly had to deal with history in connection with the complexities of a new world order, as well as to respond to the fact that previously dominant historical narratives no longer prevailed. The confirmation that Daniel Richter inserted references to histories of painting invites us to explore the consequences of adding the memory of these

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traditions to news photographs. On the one hand, the fact that quite a number of spectators will assume that news photos are used as source confirms that the painting still contains snapshot-characteristics of that genre of photographs. Yet, on the other hand, the associations evoked with paintings from the prephotographic age and with early avant-garde painting underline that one can also make a case for the continuation of interrelated conventions in news photos.

Experiencing the Absence of Text: Mind the Gap Press photographs are inextricably bound up with their captions. The caption needs the image, and the image needs the information in the caption to clearly inform the reader/viewer. In this chapter I discussed the consequences of the transformation of press photographs into paintings, focusing on the loss of photographic appearance and materiality, as well as of the original context of newspaper or magazine. The most important loss for the understanding of the photograph, however, occurred immediately: when the artist severed the image from its caption. The resulting painting could regain a caption-like addition in the form of its title. Interestingly, Ophuis, who intended to suggest the appropriation of news photographs, chose titles for his paintings that are quite similar to captions, for instance, The suicide of Mala Zimetbaum before her execution or Yusuf carries his executed brother Adem. A remarkable defect is the mention of the names of the recorded persons. It makes us realize that captions usually mention names only in the case of well-known people, not those of unknown civilian victims in wartime. In general, titles of paintings are different from the contents of captions, though descriptive titles are not exceptional for figurative paintings. But most of the titles of the figurative paintings discussed in this chapter differ substantially from common captions of news photos. The extent varies from a vague indication, such as Maypole, to cryptic titles, such as Sieht man ja, was es ist and Phienox. To gain more insights into the contribution of cryptic titles to the perception of these paintings, this section will first discuss the relationship between captions and press photos and the consequences of disconnection. In particular, semiotician Clive Scott, in The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (1999), elaborated on these issues, which turned his book into an insightful source for this aspect. Yet I derive specific insights into the role of the titles of paintings for the perception and interpretation of paintings from case studies executed by some art historians and psychologists.

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Scott noted that a caption invests an image with the desired proximity and actuality. He even claims that a photograph is so vulnerable that it appears to be entirely title-dependent, in an effort to escape its own gratuitousness: “Entitling and encaptioning are delicate matters, because the status and reception of the photograph depend so much upon it, as does the nature of the photograph’s survival.”102 Consequently, merely a change of title or context can already change an image’s generical status and intentions. Especially the “photojournalization” of photographs is relevant here.103 This step was the first stage the photographs went through before being appropriated by the painters, who added a new phase of contextualization to the images. It is highly relevant, then, to reflect on this first stadium as basis for the next transformation. Scott’s starting point was that newspapers transform events in the world into news, or they actually predigest experiences in order to facilitate readers to communicate them to others. As part of that process, many news photos are not significant in themselves but are emblematic or representative; they have to authenticate rather than to depict. As a result, the caption does not serve the photograph; the caption rather is the voice of the newspaper, not of the news. The process of reporting, editing, and composing the newspaper would take the photograph as well as the reader further away from the news source. And instead of evoking thoughts about the photograph’s “blind fields” (whatever was outside of the frame), the adjoining captions and reports suppress those contemplations. Moreover, the next pages, and the next issue of the newspaper, are waiting for the reader/viewer’s attention.104 Scott’s in-depth analysis leads him, later in the book, to the thesis that the problematization of the photograph’s relationship with evidence and truth, its instability and vulnerability to language, would make it supremely unreliable and elusive—a site of many paradoxes, highly parasitical on other codes and suspending between different media.105 The described process of “photojournalization” is, in fact, reversed by Sigmar Polke in adding the confusing title (caption) You can see what it is to the photographic image. We cannot see what is happening exactly, nor when, where, and to whom something is happening. The blind fields of the image are opened for our attention. And after being informed that we are looking at a film still— thus at actors rather than policemen—new blind fields related to the movie are released for thoughts. And approaching the painting literally creates even more blind fields due to the coarse hand-painted dots. If Scott focused on how captions direct the interpretation of press photographs, fifteen years earlier, Peter Wollen, in his essay “Fire and Ice” (1984), zoomed in on verb forms used in captions. He noted that news photographs tend to be

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captioned with a narrative present, because they deal with events, whereas art photographs are usually captioned with noun phrases, often even lacking verb forms, since they concern states.106 Translating this notion to the aforementioned paintings, it is obvious that Polke’s title is more related to captions of news photographs, and, for instance, Tuymans’s title Maypole is more in line with how art-like pictures are captioned. Although titles are not considered to be similar to captions, the differences are not crystal clear. If titles are usually considered to be inextricably connected to a particular photograph or painting, a caption can vary from one context to another. Titles may also change over time, however. In Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (2015), Ruth Bernard Yeazell has demonstrated on the basis of in-depth historical research that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—after many centuries in which there appeared to be no need for titles of paintings—many canvases acquired their titles from middlemen, such as dealers, thus not from the artists, and many of them were changed at one point. Only by the end of the eighteenth century, artists were expected to supplement their submissions to the Paris Salon or Royal Academy with “some identifying language” for the catalog.107 Because in the distant past most pictures lacked titles in the modern sense, only in modern times the label Untitled became meaningful. Only after the public came to expect a title, the artist could express a preference that a painting should speak for itself.108 Yeazell also addressed basic issues such as what counts as a title. Some scholars argue that only numbers or some words should not be regarded as titles, whereas some others limit their definition on the basis of authorship, contending that “only artists are entitled to title their work.”109 According to Yeazell, any kind of title serves as a directive for spectators, a first key to interpretation.110 With regard to the cryptic titles of the contemporary paintings discussed in this chapter, it is interesting that she notes that probably no nineteenth-century artist more consistently frustrated spectators who sought to read paintings in accord with their titles than Joseph Mallord William Turner. His titles promised a recognizable subject, but the paintings themselves appeared to renege on that promise.111 Yeazell’s research in fact elaborated on some earlier concise publications about these issues, such as Stephan Bann’s “The Mythical Conception Is the Name: Titles and Names in Modern and Postmodern Painting” (1985). Bann discussed titles in this essay from both a historical and a semiotic approach. He noted that particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century it was new that some unusual titles did not make clear what the painting was about.

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He mentioned as one of his examples Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner (1863). Manet would have deliberately interrupted indexicality, making the meaning of the title problematic: “Manet is engaged in a kind of antithetical play with the expectations of his public. The very refusal of the title to indicate what is there (or to make sense of it) becomes an accessory to the sophisticated placing of the spectator both inside and outside the virtual space.”112 Predominantly, however, it were the dadaists and surrealists who played with titles in the first half of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp’s ridiculing the indexical capacity of titles serving as an intriguing case in point.113 The increasing variety in titles—such as more mythic and psychological functions of the name—only strengthened Bann’s conclusion that titles could be read as faithful indicators not only of the meaning of the individual work but of the relationship which the artist had established (or tried to establish) with the ideal spectator.114 Although Bann’s essay dates from the 1980s, the relevance of his conclusion still holds, judged by Yeazell’s quite similar conclusion. And Polke and Tuymans, among others, were certainly aware that using a nonmatching title might extend the time the spectator would need to search for a match between the title and the subject of the painting. Today’s common practice to add titles to paintings prompts questions about its consequences for the spectator’s appreciation of an artwork. A speculative reflection on this question was conducted by philosopher Arthur Danto in “Works of Art and Mere Real Things” (1981), who wrote a fable about six red monochrome paintings, each of which had a different title.115 Furthermore, and more relevant perhaps for my case studies, several scholars have studied the role of titles in the perception of paintings, relying on different categories. For instance, the psychologists Gernot Gerger and Helmut Leder, in “Titles Change the Esthetic Appreciations of Paintings” (2015), identified three title types as category of control: semantically matching (fluent), semantically nonmatching (non-fluent), and an “untitled” condition. Yet it is not possible to call the titles of aforementioned paintings by Polke and Tuymans either matching/fluent or nonmatching/non-fluent. Interestingly, Gerger and Leder conclude that, next to the obvious outcome that spectators appreciate matching titles, certain levels of disfluency (i.e., disfluent processed stimuli) due to novelty, complexity, or ambiguity are often liked as well.116 The psychologists Margery Franklin, Robert Becklen, and Charlotte Doyle researched painting titles from a slightly different perspective in 1993, focusing on how spectators responded to paintings under different titling conditions. Aside from the observation that titles function as guides to interpretation,

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they concluded that a completely different title did not rigorously influence the perception of a painting, understood as the process of how viewers visually scrutinize the picture.117 Thus, specifically the configuration of the painting appeared to direct the attention of the spectator, which partly refuted Bann’s view that artists have used titles not only to guide the spectator’s interpretation but also his attention.118 If Polke’s and Tuymans’s titles themselves are not problematic because their spelling is correct, the title Phienox chosen by Daniel Richter immediately blocks comprehension. Just like the titles of his other paintings from the early twentyfirst century, Richter plays with the title word(s), usually exchanging vowels. In this case, exchanging two vowels leads to Phoenix. If the spectator decides to use this clue as key to interpretation, the title refers to the mythical bird that was reborn continuously on the ashes of its predecessor, and may refer to Christ (a not uncommon metaphor), or to reunited Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to survivors of the attack on the US embassy, and probably, finally, even to the human being after the destruction of humanity. I would argue that it is useful to discuss titles of contemporary paintings in investigations, such as the present one, that center on the roles of contemplation, critique, and various forms of slowness in the visual communication of these paintings. Although psychological research projects proved that titles do not influence the way the eyes scan a painting, there appears to be a consensus of opinion on the indicative role of titles in the process of interpretation among most spectators. And with regard to our digital age, Yeazell reminds us that until visual recognition software will become as accurate as the verbal ones, people who search for a particular painting on the internet will continue to do so by means of its title. Unlike the other painters discussed here, Ghekiere did not link titles to his paintings but added phrases that seem to function as captions. The phrases “Art Basel” and “UNHCR Patras Greece” are clearly legible in the bottom right corner of the two canvases addressed. The names of those locations are highly meaningful indications regarding their subject. In this respect, Yeazell’s remark that artists apply the label Untitled when a painting should speak for itself is not applicable in this case. Here, the title seems to have moved from an external location to the surface of the painting. The words do not become part of the image, however. In the next chapter I discuss paintings that do include text in the picture. Although it is perhaps to be expected that only detailed paintings slow down the perception of them, the paintings discussed—in which details of the photographs were left out—in fact managed to provide “thinking time” for the

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spectator to fill in the missing information about what is going on. Because each of the paintings is (or seems to be) reminiscent of the genre of press photos, the spectator assumes that the event was important enough to be photographed and published. But thinking time here also results from the absence of text: newspapers usually do not provide the opportunity to think about what you are looking at. The reader of a newspaper will almost automatically consume the caption and accompanying heading after seeing a photograph. The slowness of perception is likely to go up on account of the absence of details and text. But also the very materiality of the paintings may add slowness to their contemplation. Moreover, slowness of perception appeared to be required to understand immediacy and indirectness as complementary characteristics of both media, particularly in their different ways. In the case of the confrontation of the presentness of press photos with historical references in the paintings, however, the contrast was reduced through some similarities between news photos and history paintings. The simultaneous presence of all these various aspects within one painting renders the term “simultaneous adaptation” very well applicable. My argument has established that the combination of the aforementioned factors in durable paintings contribute to a slowed-down perception, even if we experience a contrary effect of superficiality, when dealing with the increasing simultaneous adaptation in our digital age, in which the turnover rate of images usually does not facilitate critical contemplation. More specifically applied to Daniel Richter’s Phienox, the main case study of this chapter, I argued that the consolidated fleeting press photos, in combination with these other adaptations, influence the meanings of this artwork, notably in being an intensified simultaneous adaptation that expresses the complexity of the visual culture in our digital and globalized era. The complexity already inhabited in the original, appropriated press photos, yet overruled by captions and journalistic interpretations, was enhanced by the nesting into additional adaptations. In allowing spectators to make sense of the press photos, the painting offers various “routes” to choose from, most of which challenge us to reflect on the disturbed and fragmented nature of visual communications in our digital age.

Notes 1 The term “appropriation,” in its broadest sense, refers here to the use by artists of an existing image in their work. When in the 1970s several artists began to put a

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specific (known) image at the center of the critical comment in their work, these artworks were often addressed as Appropriation Art. The paintings discussed in this chapter are not addressed as Appropriation Art, yet because of the significant role of the appropriation these works are certainly connected to this tradition. 2 Dovey, “Fidelity,” 169–71. 3 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 153. 4 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 153. 5 Richter in an interview with Philipp Kaiser, in Kaiser and Uhlmann, Daniel Richter, 198. 6 Rüdiger quoted in Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 148. 7 Richter quoted by Jan-Hendrik Wentrup, in Heynen and Kramer, Daniel Richter, 107. 8 Richter in an interview with Philipp Kaiser, in Kaiser and Uhlmann, Daniel Richter, 212. 9 Kaiser and Uhlmann, Daniel Richter, 206. 10 Interview with Richter in Hoffer and Essl, Daniel Richter, 14. 11 Heinrich, “Watch Out,” 21. 12 Quoted in Godfrey, Painting Today, 429. 13 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 148. 14 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 155. 15 Harris, Critical Perspectives, 20. The film critic Christian Metz coined the term in the early 1980s but addressed film in comparison to theater. 16 Baudelaire and Mayne, Painter of Modern Life. 17 In Chapter 3, digital manipulated photographs will be discussed that were produced according to a pretty similar procedures. 18 Rugoff, Painting of Modern Life, 10. 19 Rugoff, Painting of Modern Life, 11. 20 Haxthausen, “Work of Art,” 189. 21 The last section of this chapter will address the interrelationship between press photos and captions. 22 Hentschel, Sigmar Polke, 80. 23 The issues of pluriformity of sources and multi-mediation will be addressed in the next section. 24 Van Mulders, “The Illusion of the Postmodern Explanation,” in Leemans, Joris Ghekiere, 24. 25 Van Mulders in Leemans, Joris Ghekiere, 26. 26 Heinrich, “Watch Out,” 21. 27 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 160. 28 Hoptman, Forever Now, 13. 29 Hoptman, Forever Now, 16. 30 Krauss, “Sculpture,” 43. 31 Haxthausen, “Work of Art,” 189.

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32 Haxthausen, “Work of Art,” 189. 33 www​.n​​ytime​​s​.com​​/2014​​/08​/2​​0​/t​-m​​agazi​​ne​/th​​e​-mak​​ing​-o​​f​-mar​​lene-​​dumas​​s​-the​​ -wido​​w​.htm​l (accessed August 6, 2017). 34 Shiff, “Less Dead,” 158. 35 Shiff, “Less Dead,” 150. 36 Bryson, Vision and Painting, 94–5. 37 Dovey, “Fidelity,” 169. 38 Dovey, “Fidelity,” 170–1. 39 Spielmann, “Intermedia,” 56–7. 40 Godfrey, Painting Today, 93. 41 Godfrey, Painting Today, 90. See my discussion of this series of paintings in the second last section of this chapter. 42 Reed quoted by Peter Weibel in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 63. 43 Godfrey, Painting Today, 96. 44 Lévi-Strauss, Way of the Masks. 45 See Chapter 3. 46 Interesting exception: Science4Arts NWO project The Materiality of Photographs (2014–18). 47 Quoted in Chipp, Theories, 94. 48 Rowley in Harris, Critical Perspectives, 44. 49 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 46, 360. The duck-rabbit figure referred to by Wollheim and Gombrich became famous by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who included it in his Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical investigations) as an example of an ambiguous image that could be seen as a rabbit or duck. This drawing was published in a German magazine in 1892 as a kind of joke. 50 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 318–9. 51 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 338. 52 Lawrence, Materiality of Paint, 17. 53 Lawrence, Materiality of Paint, 67. 54 Elkins, What Painting Is, 38, 166 (emphasis in original). 55 Godfrey, Painting Today, 90. 56 Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 169. 57 Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 178–9. In Chapter 4 the concept of “Network Paintings” will be elaborated. 58 Richter quoted in Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 141. 59 Graw in Graw, Birnbaum, and Hirsch, Thinking through Painting, 50. 60 Graw in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 260. 61 Graw in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 261. 62 Graw in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 261. 63 Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 28 (emphasis in original).

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64 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 10–11. 65 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 86. 66 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100–1. 67 Burgin, Thinking Photography, 191. 68 Quoted in Godfrey, Painting Today, 355. 69 Godfrey, Painting Today, 355. 70 The original French version was published in 1980 as La chambre claire, and translated into English in 1981. 71 Before the invention of photography textual and oral reports played that role. 72 Richter in an interview with Philipp Kaiser, in Kaiser and Uhlmann, Daniel Richter, 212. 73 Tuymans quoted in Vermeiren, Luc Tuymans, 58. 74 Hudson, Painting Now, 133. Later in this section I will elaborate on history painting. 75 Tuymans quoted in Godfrey, Painting Today, 319. 76 Kracauer, “Photography,” 425–6. 77 Tuymans quoted in Godfrey, Painting Today, 274. 78 Grynsztejn and Molesworth, Luc Tuymans, 11, 18. 79 Dorin, “Luc Tuymans,” 49. 80 Richter quoted by Jan-Hendrik Wentrup, in Heynen and Kramer, Daniel Richter, 108. 81 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 159. 82 Dovey, “Fidelity,” 169. In these reflections, the author mainly refers to sources from literature and, as a result, to intertextuality. 83 Green and Seddon, History Painting, 1. 84 Green and Seddon, History Painting, 7. 85 Green and Seddon, History Painting, 10. 86 Green and Seddon, History Painting, 14. 87 Green in Green and Seddon, History Painting, 33. 88 Green in Green and Seddon, History Painting, 46. 89 Danchev, “Artist and the Terrorist,” 97. Storck was quoted from an exhibition catalog of Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal of 1990. 90 Danchev, “Artist and the Terrorist,” 101, quoted from an interview in 1990. 91 Ophuis quoted by Lilian Bense in Dutch on January 29, 2009, http:​/​/met​​ropol​​ism​.c​​ om​/re​​views​​/rona​​l​d​-op​​huis/​ (accessed July 30, 2016). 92 http:​/​/hol​​lands​​emees​​ters.​​info/​​posts​​/sh​ow​​/7735​ (accessed July 30, 2016). 93 Richter quoted in Danchev, “Artist and the Terrorist,” 103. 94 Richter quoted in Kaiser and Uhlmann, Daniel Richter, 202. 95 Hughes, “Daniel Richter,” 143. 96 This association, which was evoked while standing in front of Phienox, was confirmed by reading David Hughes’s analysis in Hughes “Daniel Richter,” 145.

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97 David Hughes used Stefan Jonsson’s analysis of this painting by Ensor as part of his analysis of Phienox in Hughes “Daniel Richter,” 158. 98 Hughes (“Daniel Richter,” 157) identified a presumable self-portrait of the artist in the middle of the painting, just above the head of the lifted yellow figure. Remarkably, also Ensor included his self-portrait in his 1889 painting. 99 Godfrey, Painting Today, 283–4. 100 Richter in an interview with Philipp Kaiser, in Kaiser and Uhlmann, Daniel Richter, 212. 101 Bois, Painting as Model, 243. 102 Scott, Spoken Image, 61, 74. 103 Scott, Spoken Image, 99. 104 Scott, Spoken Image, 102, 114, 106–7. 105 Scott, Spoken Image, 294. 106 Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” 77–8. 107 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 8. 108 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 19. 109 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 4. 110 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 81. 111 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 137–8. 112 Bann, “Mythical Conception,” 181. 113 Bann, “Mythical Conception,” 183. 114 Bann, “Mythical Conception,” 185, 189. 115 Danto quoted in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 78. 116 Gerger and Leder, “Titles Change,” unpaged. 117 Franklin, Becklen, and Doyle, “Influence of Titles,” 108. 118 Bann, “Mythical Conception,” 176–90.

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Collage Paintings Sparring with Visual Propaganda

Contrary to the paintings discussed in the first chapter that isolated photographs from their textual context, this chapter deals with paintings with inserted text. This combination is quite unusual in the history of painting, but it is a common practice in mass media. This practice relates to the increasing importance of visual communication, in particular as integration of word and image in the present (digital) age, which already in 1994 led W.  J.  T. Mitchell to identify this tendency as the “pictorial turn.” By coining this term, Mitchell suggested that Richard Rorty’s characterization of the twentieth century as period of the “linguistic turn” had to be replaced by an alternative one. This chapter, more specifically, addresses some contemporary paintings on the intriguing relationship between image and text, which also interrogate such integration in commercials and political propaganda. My interest in these works triggered the question of the potential contribution of debates on paintings including text and on strategies in commercial and political propaganda to our understanding of such paintings, which both criticize visual-textual manipulations used in mass media and themselves apply some of the same strategies to attract the attention of their public. This chapter covers several relevant debates on modern paintings that include text. The introductory sections zoom in on the importance of “collage painting” as a genre. Collage paintings appear to return physicality to collages in the digital age, and are part of the rediscovery of painting by some feminist artists. I also discuss collage paintings in their strained relationship with visual political propaganda and the rhetoric of commercials. From an art historical perspective, the paintings selected for this chapter have a range of interesting predecessors. If pop art and conceptual art are usually discussed as art movements on the basis of their differences, being, respectively, popular and elitist intellectual, they both experiment with texts in visual representations.

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Photographic representations play a role in the paintings discussed in this chapter as well, but less explicitly so than in the previous chapter. There is also a significant difference with respect to the paint applied: whereas oil paint obviously added texture to the appropriated photographs in the artworks discussed earlier, the key paintings addressed in this chapter were mainly created with acrylic paint. This paint provides a more decorative or watercolor-like appearance and refers to conventions of graphic design. An even more striking difference—next to the obvious presence of text—is specification. If the paintings in the former chapter asked for more attention and slow spectatorship through leaving out details of the appropriated photographs, the objects of research in this chapter require more time of the beholder due to the subtle, ingenious combinations of visual details and text. And if my arguments so far mainly dealt with white-male Northwest-European artists, the key works in this chapter are created by artists from Afro-American, Native American, East-European, Asian, and African backgrounds, while about half of them are female.

Two Case Studies: Kerry James Marshall’s Great America (1994) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Spam (1995) Three young women and a man are crammed in a canoe-like boat that looks like the ones we know from amusements parks (Figure 2.1). In combination with the texts “wow” in the word balloon and “Great America” on a ribbon, this brightly colored painting immediately evokes associations with a commercial billboard—an advertisement to attract visitors. But in Western countries such billboards will usually depict white people. From this point, we start looking more closely at this picture, and soon other details will challenge us to raise more questions. The information that the painting in question was created by the AfroAmerican artist Kerry James Marshall may provide further clues, even if they are not easy to interpret. Marshall’s paintings became known in the 1990s for adding a black perspective to American history. This painting, created in 1994, may therefore be associated with the world’s collective cultural history of passages of slaves from Africa to the so-called New World. In the upper right corner we can see a fifth figure that seems to be drowning. And what about the dark tunnel the boat appears to be entering? The suggestion of a dramatic, insecure future quite conflicts with an understanding of the image as being related to promoting spooky entertainment.

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Figure 2.1  Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994, acrylic and collage on canvas, 262 × 290 cm. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

In an interview with Deborah Smith, Marshall remarked about the origin of his interest: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t . . . grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters and see the kinds of things I saw . . . and not speak about it.”1 And in another interview with Charles Gaines, he explained his choice for a critical perspective on American history by claiming that black people will probably never have the independent capacity rigorously to change views on histories. As a result, he did not aim at “revisions of the historical narrative” but “addendums to it.”2 Most of his paintings, in particular those from the 1990s, demonstrate that his strategy is to locate historical issues in present-day society. In Great America, this location is an amusement park. According to the artist, he struggled with how to reflect on the dramatic history of transportation of enslaved people from Africa to the New World. He considered the amusement park’s haunted tunnel ride as the closest he could get to something that suggests fright and anticipation.3 Moreover, by exaggerating the dark skin of the protagonists (“blacker-thanblack”4 figures) he emphasized the relationship with politics based on skin color.

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What is more, the huge size of his paintings calls forth the tradition of history painting. In an interview with Dieter Roelstraete, Marshall claimed that he never had seen “a grand, epic narrative painting with black figures in it.”5 The large size also relates his work to mural painting, in particular the work of AfroAmerican artist Charles White, who drew, painted, and made large murals of black people.6 However, the artist’s choice to present the Great America canvas stretched directly on the wall makes it also look like a backdrop in a commercial photo studio. But what can be said about some of the curious specific details in Great America? On the left side of the painting, we see a red cross. According to Marshall, it both refers to the familiar Red Cross and to one of the diagrams of Haitian “veves”—religious symbols of West African origin associated with Haitian voodoo. In both meanings it would refer to crossroads, rescue, and distress.7 The two rings of golden stars might refer to the European Union (officially founded in 1993, one year before this painting was made), even though they both comprise sixteen stars rather than twelve.8 In particular from today’s perspective, this painting and these symbols have become topical matter, given that almost daily we hear about refugees from Africa fleeing to Europe in overcrowded small boats. Thousands of them have drowned before reaching “Great Europe.” Ironically, Marshall’s reference to history has become painfully applicable to the present day. Although it proved possible to derive specific insights into Great America from Marshall’s statements in interviews and observations by several art critics, further insights into this kind of paintings may be generated by studying debates on text applied in paintings, on collage cultures, and on visual propaganda in commercials and political strategies. Before discussing the work systematically from those perspectives, I introduce another painting as second key work for this chapter, because in various ways it is not only related to Marshall’s artwork but also complementary to it. If Marshall became known for paintings that critically address the history and social contexts of Afro-American people, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a female Native American artist, concentrated on the history and social contexts of her ethnic background. Her painting Spam (1995) (Figure 2.2) displays a black line drawing of a buffalo and a sunlike flower. The drawing is applied to a surface that includes many fragments from magazines and newspapers that mainly consist of short headings and phrases. This collage was overpainted with transparent layers of acrylic paint in warm colors. Initially, however, the viewer’s attention may well be attracted to four orange-red capitals forming the word “SPAM.” Many

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Figure 2.2  Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Spam, 1995, acrylic and mixed media, total dimensions 152 × 254 cm (diptych, each panel 152 × 127 cm). Collection of The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; Museum Purchase with funds provided by Edward J. Gallagher, Jr. Memorial Fund. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

twenty-first-century spectators will link this word to unwanted e-mail messages and even, potentially, as an increasing plague. Outside the United States, people are hardly aware that the term originated in canned meat produced for poor and lower-class people, among them many Native Americans. This explanation turns the word into a reference to the tall animal. The drawing itself, however, rather calls forth associations with prehistorical murals, from an era long before Europeans colonized the Americas. Interestingly, when juxtaposing this painting with Marshall’s Great America, we realize that the white men also originally entered America by boat. An important point of reference in Smith’s work is the political and cultural history of the Salish Kootenai tribe. As the artist commented on her website, “My work is philosophically centered by my strong traditional Salish beliefs.”9 Elsewhere, she more explicitly explained her painting as “[to] tell a story about the Indian peoples’ loss of the buffalo and having to eat commodity food or poor people’s food such as Spam. This is not a story of yesteryear but today’s story as well.”10 For centuries, the buffalo was a crucial animal for Native Americans, but due to killing campaigns in the nineteenth century it virtually became extinct.11 Contrasting past and present, in Spam Smith puts ancient petroglyphs side by side with clippings from contemporary newspapers. The texts include phrases

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such as “Put Your Trust in the Land,” “Thanks a Million,” “Out to Lunch,” “Look at the Record,” “Honoring Native Foods,” “The Inside Story on a New Level of Closeness and Comfort,” “Finding Drama in the Lives of Ordinary People,” “Share Our Heritage,” and a recipe including Spam. According to Carolyn Kastner, Smith began applying the technique of collage in the late 1980s and 1990s to further her political goal of disseminating a fragmented and complex understanding of being female, indigenous, urban, and a resident of the United States.12 In this way, the drawing and headings in Spam appear to bridge the far past with the present, in a manner similar to the approach of Marshall in Great America. Smith has also commented on the role of humor in her work to reflect on ethical treatment of animals, human beings, and our planet as related to her background: “Humour has been a panacea for what ails. . . . Humour is a mainstay of Indian life.”13 Marshall’s playful combinations of imagery with a sad undertone can also be considered humorous. This aspect of their work may seem exceptional because humor has long been a highly unusual phenomenon in traditional Western arts, but as discussed in the next section about text inserted in paintings, there have been more deviations in modern art. The main texts in the two aforementioned works are applied through or in red paint. The graphic letters of the word “SPAM” have an orange-red color, different from the font and yellow letters on the label of the canned meat. In her study on the artist, Kastner devoted a whole chapter on how Smith used red as metaphor for proud identity and to express a heritage of violence.14 And in her close reading of Great America, Tracy Zwick has drawn attention to the red word balloon including the word “wow,” which drips from the edges as if it were blood.15 In this chapter’s last two sections I will examine how this preference for red might relate to an effective communication of slogans. But first, in the next three sections, I discuss both paintings as socio-critical collage paintings, consisting of an amalgamation of vernacular images, painting styles, and texts, in order to understand their ambiguous relationship with mass media.

Debates on Paintings Including Text If Chapter 1 ended with a discussion about the role of titles in the interpretation of paintings, this chapter’s key works deal with text in a different way by including it in the painting. Several other arguments in Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s Picture Titles are relevant here. In the introduction of her book, she presents the

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term “title space,” which she adopted from Anne Ferry’s study of titles of poems. Paintings, unlike poems, lack a “title space” in the sense of a fixed location where the spectator can expect to find its “name.” Likewise, curators tend to struggle with finding an appropriate place for the label of a painting on display. Should it be put near the painting on the wall or at some distance? Or should relevant data be mentioned in a booklet or only in the catalog? Moreover, the text and the title of a poem are presented in the same medium, which obviously strengthens their connection. In this respect, Yeazell notes that “[e]ven when an artist has painted a title directly on the canvas, reading the words remains different from looking at the image.”16 Obviously, reading differs from looking, but the words included in the paintings under discussion in this chapter appear to relate to the picture in other ways than just as an added title. So, how do text and image meaningfully interrelate in paintings such as Marshall’s Great America, Smith’s Spam, and Congolese artist Chéri Samba’s painting College de la Sagesse (2003)? Although this section does not aim to provide a historical overview of the inclusion of words in paintings, it is insightful briefly to discuss the selected contemporary paintings in the light of their forerunners in surrealist art, pop art, and conceptual art. Modern painting in the Euro-American tradition is often said to have progressively released itself from language, in particular in its development toward abstract art. This observation mainly applies to language as an included narrative. To address text as included in the picture in a literal sense, we have to go further back in time because from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, text was almost completely banned from paintings. In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to insert an explanatory note in a text scroll that obviously had an explicit educational function, even if it could not be localized exactly in relation to the depicted scene. Interestingly, the text scrolls in Marshall’s paintings function in a quite similar way: the text cannot be localized in the represented place, but adds to the meaning of the picture, albeit in a more ambiguous way than in the Christian pictures. In the transition period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, text gradually disappeared from paintings, in particular because it would disturb the illusion of a view through a window at the world. After modern artists began to reject the illusion of the window, text was included again in pictures. For instance, the letters and parts of words included in cubist paintings by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the 1910s could be positioned anywhere in the composition without disturbing its unity. Whereas these textual elements mainly had a formal function, words were given a quite playful function in some

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dadaist works (e.g., by Marcel Duchamp) and a political function in paintings by Italian futurists. Although the texts selected by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith for the background of the picture can certainly be called political, the most eye-catching word “SPAM” is more in line with Duchamp’s sophisticated wordplay. The same goes for Marshall’s “Great America.” In the 1920s, some artists critically applied textual elements in their paintings in ways relevant to my argument here. A case in point is the Belgian artist René Magritte, who made paintings in which he inserted not just words but even whole sentences. By using a teacher’s style of handwriting on a blackboard, it became possible for anyone to read the text. But spectators who do not know French will only recognize the object(s) in the paintings and the words as foreign. One of Magritte’s most famous paintings shows an easy to recognize pipe, accompanied by the sentence “Ceci n’ est pas une pipe.”17 Interestingly, Magritte made a second (smaller) version of the original 1929 work for an exhibition in New York and translated the text on the canvas into “This is not a pipe.”18 Apparently, understanding the text was more important for Magritte than the autonomy of the original painting. Pictures, unlike texts, are rarely “translated” when moving from one culture to another, but one may wonder whether the “language of images” is a universal language not in need of translation. Interesting exceptions can be found in advertising campaigns, in which not only texts but also visual aspects are “translated” for applications in other cultures. If Magritte became known for his intriguing image-text interactions in the period of the 1930s to the early 1960s, the American artist Jasper Johns became one of the painters most involved in image-text relationships in the 1960s’ pop art movement. Yeazell even found a personal connection between these two artists. In 1954, Johns had visited Magritte’s exhibition in New York, entitled Word vs. Image. When Magritte visited the United States in 1965 they met, and Johns bought one of his paintings.19 Their paintings deal in different ways with the combination of text and images, however. In Magritte’s paintings, language is presented next to objects as a kind of caption, whereas Johns often turned words into the subject of his painting. For instance, Liar (1961) consists of the letters of this word integrated in an abstract painting. Furthermore, while Magritte preferred handwritten text, Johns applied in his paintings graphic letters as used in mass media, as was first done by cubist painters. Although most will associate lettering stencils with popular culture and pop art, various works of conceptual art used this medium to react to the use of traditional artistic brushstrokes in order to emphasize the concept rather than the aesthetics of an artwork. For instance, the Japanese/American artist On

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Kawara just painted the date in white graphic letters and figures on his numerous small “Date Paintings” in the series Today (1966–2013), in which the date refers to when they were made and the notation system to the location. Both Johns and Kawara reflected on their experiences as human beings in daily life, rather than addressing sociopolitical issues. When toward the end of the 1960s activists groups including artists began to flourish, these artists increasingly opted for media other than painting. For instance, the feminist Guerrilla Girls included texts on posters, billboards, and stickers. Even though not all feminist activists abandoned painting (see the following and Chapter 4), most activist artists preferred in particular photography, performance art, and video art to express political ideas. One of the most explicitly “political activist paintings” from the 1970s is Jörg Immendorff ’s Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege? (Where do you belong with your art, colleague?, 1973). A phrase, similar to the title, is added to the painting as if quoting the man in the center of the painting (Figure 2.3). Other texts in the painting are the list of names of art movements on the wall of the studio (“Pop Art, Neuer Realismus, Conzept-Art, Land Art, Op-Art, etc.”) and on the banner carried by the activists outside in the street (“Lohnraub—Arbeitshetze, Teurerung—politische Unterdrückung”). If the message of the painting is crystal clear, Helmut Draxler presented interesting commentary in his essay “Wo  stehst

Figure 2.3  Jörg Immendorff, Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege? 1973, acrylic on canvas, 130.2 × 210.2 cm. © The Estate of Jörg Immendorff, Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner Märkisch Wilmersdorf, Cologne and New York.

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du, Kollege” (2011). He notes that the man in the middle of the painting, probably the artist himself, accuses his colleague of sitting in his studio to make a painting, rather than demonstrating on the street. But Immendorff also made this painting in his studio on canvas to be presented in a gallery, not as a banner to be carried around by activists.20 This paradox gives rise to a more in-depth contemplation of the painting as well as its context. As regards to the incorporation of text in the picture, Immendorff ’s painting unambiguously invokes the word-image conflict that has been around for the last five centuries. As mentioned earlier, text disappeared from paintings because it would disturb the illusion of a view through a window at the world. An exception to the rule applied to texts on depicted objects. In Immendorff ’s painting, the texts on the poster on the wall and on the banner carried by the protesters are in line with that convention. The view into the studio and through the doorway to the street agrees with the traditional “view through the window-illusion.” Through writing the question over the spatial illusion, the most conflicting element in this painting appears to be this word-image combination. In Magritte’s and Ghekiere’s paintings, the texts were applied on a flat and “empty” part of the canvas (zones more often present in drawings), strengthening the common use of writing on a flat surface. The observation that text on a picture emphasizes the flatness of the surface calls forth Clement Greenberg’s definition of the modernist painting as a painted flat surface. Although contemporary artists have tended to oppose Greenberg’s formalist Modernism, they were in fact dealing with flatness as well, as, among other things, resulting from and in support of the included text. But if Greenberg promoted flatness to emphasize the self-referentiality of paintings, the contemporary artists who included texts in their paintings often added depth through spatial illusions, and, more figuratively, through the meanings of the figuration and text. For understanding this tension between flatness and meaningful depth, an essay by David Joselit, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness” (2000), is helpful. Addressing a flatness-depth paradox in contemporary art, he wondered whether postmodernist philosopher Fredric Jameson’s flatness is “the same species of flatness” as the one posited by Greenberg as a fundamental characteristic of modern painting. While Joselit argues that the “flatness” of the modernist painting evoked psychological depth in the viewer, image production in the postmodern period is often associated with psychological flatness. He even considers the latter flatness as a metaphor of the consequences of transforming ourselves into images to be able to enter the public sphere in the era of late capitalism.21 Conversely, in his case study of an artwork by the African

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American artist Kara Walker, consisting of flat large-scale black paper cutouts that exaggerate stereotypes of black people, he has demonstrated that this kind of artwork evokes debates about the psychological depths in various negative and positive ways.22 As a result, he displays how in this work physical flatness referred to psychological flatness in stereotypes, while evoking psychological depth. The physical flatness of the paintings by Immendorff, Marshall, and Smith that was stressed by the inserted text also increased psychological depth in the viewer, rather than flattening it, as commercial billboards or political banners usually do. In line with Joselit’s case study, the flatness of their paintings might be said to interrogate the psychological flatness of the latter.23 Different from Walker, however, Marshall and Smith did not appropriate stereotypes in order to exaggerate them (which raised negative comments); their strategy is more related to Lindiwe Dovey’s concept of simultaneous adaptation, as discussed in the former chapter, and to which I will return in the conclusion of this chapter. So far, all of the aforementioned paintings included writing in Western script. The Congolese artist Chéri Samba created several almost identical paintings entitled College de la Sagesse (2003) (Figure 2.4) or Kalasi ki nduenga (2004 and 2005), which in the background and the lower right corner include text in a Bantu language. In College de la Sagesse only one sentence—similar to the painting’s title—is in French (in English, “school of wisdom”). Without knowing the translation of the other included texts, it is hard to understand the word-image relationships. The three faces in the foreground are made out of ribbons, which enhance the graphic rhythm in the background. Strikingly, these ribbons call forth the discussed text scrolls in medieval paintings and Marshall’s painting. In Samba’s painting, they present three ethnicities: African, EuroAmerican, and Asian. Putting the African man in front suggests the seniority of Africa. The hanging tongues of the African and Euro-American faces seem to

Figure 2.4  Chéri Samba, Collège de la Sagesse, 2003, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 81 × 100 cm by courtesy of Galerie Pascal Polar, Brussels.

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indicate exhaustion, suggesting that Asia is in charge of the world. The picture therefore seems to be a cynical view on the equality of ethnicities. Rather than further interpreting the subject of this painting, I like to turn to Samba’s earliest artistic work, in order to understand the formal relationship between painting and text in this work. Tony Godfrey described some of his early paintings on sackcloth and explained that the artist was rooted in a local tradition of popular painting: small paintings for ordinary people with moral messages and topical subjects. Often they came with direct messages expressed in speech bubbles, just like in comics. Samba remarked that he had noticed that people in the street usually walked by pictures; they glanced at them but kept going: “I thought that if I added a bit of text people would have to stop and take time to read it to get more into the paintings and admire it.”24 Although it is not clear to me why Samba created almost similar paintings in which the title words are translated from French, the language of the Belgian colonizer of Congo, into one of the indigenous languages, this issue reminds one of Belgian artist Magritte’s production of another version of his painting of the pipe in which the French text was replaced by the English translation. But if the Western script looked very different from Magritte’s depicted objects, there is a striking similarity between the rhythm of the calligraphic writing in a Bantu script in the background and the circling ribbon. Time is literally enfolding in both the text and the image. In comparison to Immendorff ’s painting, it is obvious that there is more of a balance between image and text in Samba’s work. In the last sections of this chapter I address the issue of visual propaganda, which also aims at this unity. Strikingly, not only Samba but also some of the other artists under discussion appear to have started out in the world of advertising or as artists they have relied on strategies similar to those of that world.

Collage Paintings Returning Physicality to Collages in the Digital Age Marshall’s Great America and Smith’s Spam evoke associations with collages. Both works literally comprise collage-technique elements, in the sense of cut and pasted fragments. This is most evident in the newspaper clippings in Spam. In this section I argue that certain paintings merely consisting of acrylic on canvas, such as Avery Singer’s untitled painting from 2016 (Figure 2.5), can also

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Figure 2.5  Avery Singer, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 196.85 × 154.94 × 3.81 cm, unique. Courtesy Ringier Collection, Switzerland.

be called a collage, or, rather, a contemporary “collage painting,” discerning it from the early twentieth-century avant-garde practice of collage-making. Here I will explore how in the present “collage culture” this new tradition of collage painting contributes to our understanding of Marshall’s Great America and Smith’s Spam. In Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption (2013), the literature scholar David Banash has discussed the artistic technique of collage in the context of the developments of mass production and mass media in the capitalist economies of the so-called Global North in the course of the twentieth century. These economies have drastically transformed everyday life, relating most activities to consumption. By means of collage, according to Banash, artists were able to find ways “to evade, negotiate, reflect, or sometimes undo the reification of commodity culture.”25 In doing so, they adopted either the strategy of resisting any relationship or they engaged with what Jean Baudrillard called a “fatal” strategy: “becoming the very thing the system demands, but pushing this process to such an extreme that it is dialectically transformed.”26 The focus of Banash is on the latter category, whereby he highlights various media, notably literature and film (while ignoring paintings). Marshall’s and Smith’s paintings

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actually bridge the two aforementioned strategies by explicitly using aspects from mass culture in an “extreme” way, as well as parrying the evanescence of mass media through slow painting. In discussing the formative decades of collages in the early twentieth century, Banash concentrates on collages by dadaist and surrealists—which would relate more to the present interest in collages—rather than on cubist and futurist collages. Yet in his view, all collages are products of more or less deliberate acts of selection or cutups and arrangement. Moreover, his argument stresses the importance of investigating collages in the context of the development of newspapers, because this early mass medium was structured in the logic of a collage. Readers of newspapers had to run through long columns juxtaposed with words and images comprising different kinds of information.27 The newspaper clippings pasted in the background of Spam underscore that typical order. Their structure also calls forth media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s description of the press, which requires readers to deal with “a riotous mosaic of voices” rather than with the single author’s perspective as found in books.28 Relevant for my argument in particular is the description by Banash of the development from the collage as the art of the assembly line, the newspaper, the film, and the fragment, to exceeded and enmeshed forms and processes of copying in the digital age. Should the name “collage” be limited to works on which cutout fragments are pasted, because, originally, the name was derived from the French verb coller (to paste)? In this respect, Banash mentions that both the French words collecter (to collect) and “collage” draw on the Latin verb of colligere, which means “to gather together.”29 American artist Avery Singer’s untitled painting from 2016 gathers together two different worlds: the “digital” world on the multicolor screen of the smartphone in the center and the surrounding “real” world that looks even more artificial, due to the lack of color and stylized forms. The blue-colored background of the screen presents a photograph of a mountainous landscape. The upper and lower parts of the screen are filled with icons, references to other places, and information. The familiar columns of the traditional newspaper have become enmeshed in the World Wide Web. The collage-like amalgamation on the smooth surface of the smartphone’s screen is copied by Singer through the use of paint sprays. Even more obvious is that she did not cut and paste but seems to have copied her desktop. Remarkably, this observation is quite similar to Banash’s final conclusion, even though he does not mention paintings. He observes that “the most subtle and apt concept to emerge for this new world of digital codes is

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copying.” Unlike the emphasis in collages on fragmentation and rearrangement, the copy stresses radical dissemination of the infinitely identical. We even hardly realize anymore that the “paste” function on the personal computer still refers to collage-making, whereas what we do is actually copying. According to Banash, one might suggest “that Facebook pages are a collage, that they depend on the very dynamics of cutting and pasting, selection and arrangement, the very structure at work in synthetic cubism or a photomontage,” but that “[i]n some sense this is true, but only as a kind of sublation, for the meanings of the cutting and pasting are quite different.”30 In the arrangement of icons on the desktop in her painting, Singer presents the world as a patchwork of icons. This observation confirms a statement by Dennis Busch and Robert Klanten in their introductory essay to The Age of Collage (2016). They argue that today’s collage can be understood as “mirroring the patchwork experience of globalization, through which elements that carry differing—sometimes even opposing—histories are brought together in a layering of cultures.” They consider collage as the medium of our epoch, because it reflects and responds to some of these key issues of modern life.31 Singer does not only present the desktop of her smartphone in her painting, however. The world surrounding the colorful screen consists of abstract black forms on a white background, including the stylized form of a hand that holds the smartphone. Especially the color photograph of the mountainous landscape on her desktop seems to refer to the achievement that the digital world has become “more real” than the physical world in which our bodies operate. One might also interpret the stylized black-and-white environment as a kind of video game, with the smartphone serving as navigation device. Approaching Singer’s painting from this perspective puts the reality of the World Wide Web on the smartphone into the fictitious world of the video game. But it is crucial that Singer created a painting, not an artwork through new media. If Banash stressed the shift from the physicality of avant-garde collage to acts of immaterial copying of codes in the digital age, Singer added physicality to the copy of the digital screen, even though the painting was mechanically produced by means of airbrushes. In “Collecting Echoes: The Poetic Power of Collage,” Busch and Klanten add another perspective, referring to fragments of images that include associations ingrained in collective memory that lead to unexpected experiences by displaying “poignant messages while sparking a smile.”32 This observation does not so much apply to Singer’s painting as to Smith’s Spam and Marshall’s Great America. Moreover, also the claim that “subversion is at the core of collage” is

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applicable to the latter paintings. The act of subversion may be found in stripping images from their original context and including them in new compositions. Although it may also involve a form of protest, it at least serves as a “control over the flood of images we are confronted with daily by usurping them and twisting, ignoring, defying, or mocking their original implications.”33 These aspects of contemporary collages apply even more to the paintings by Smith and Marshall as a whole, rather than merely to their small cut-and-paste parts, and they also contribute to the meaning productions of these paintings. If Banash decided to consider the digital copy as a contemporary immaterial version of the twentieth-century physical collage, in my view the painted parts of images and text in these two collage paintings represent a next contemporary post-digital stage of collage, because these parts primarily reflect on the collage nature of society. Singer’s painting can even more literally be called a next step through its materializing of the immaterial digital copy. By considering the collage a result of dealing with the present flood of images and mass media, we might even call the collage a form of (cutup) network. An essay by David Joselit, “Reassembling Painting” (2015), contains interesting observations regarding the decision to call the works discussed in this section collage paintings. Specifically he argues that in the information age, when images were dramatically multiplied in space and speeded up in time, the discourse of painting not only remained relevant but also appeared to be able to “visualize the imperative of networks to make everything into a consumable picture easily transmissible in time and space. Painting embodies dislocation, the affect of networks.”34 And it is true, when our eyes glance over the very diverse details found throughout Great America and Spam, establishing a variety of connections, we actually surf through dislocated networks of our collage cultures. This observation leads me, finally, to the issue of representation in collages and collage paintings. After struggling with the term “representation” throughout his book Picture Theory, Mitchell concluded with the suggestion to think of representation as a multidimensional and heterogeneous terrain, a collage or patchwork quilt assembled over time out of fragments. Suppose further that this quilt was torn, folded, wrinkled, covered with accidental stains, traces of the bodies it has enfolded. This model might help us understand a number of things about representation. It would make materially visible the structure of representation as a trace of temporality and exchange, the fragments as mementos, as “presents” re-presented in the ongoing process of assemblage, of stitching in and tearing

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This reflection on representation perhaps triggers the question of why I did not explicitly address Singer’s and Smith’s collage paintings as works made by female painters. The reason is that they mainly address how people deal with, respectively, digitization and ethnic diversity. Artists such as Wangechi Mutu, however, have explicitly used the collage technique in their paintings to react to feminist issues. Here I discuss this kind of collage paintings in the context of debates among feminists on the medium of painting, also in order to trace gender-related issues in the works by Marshall and Smith.

Feminists’ Aversion to and Rediscovery of Painting in Collage Paintings A woman is squatting amid grass stalks (Figure 2.6). Her face appears to betray her African ethnicity. Her body is colorfully decorated, and a smaller humanlike creature stands on her back. As the Kenya-born artist Wangechi Mutu stated with regard to her paintings such as this one, entitled Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies, “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.”36 This painting includes cutouts from mainly pornographic and motorcycle magazines, sources which commonly strengthen traditional gender differences. As a carrier for this picture, Mutu used glossy Mylar, a polyester film made from stretched polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is still visible in the empty spots in the background. In combination with the huge format, the work evokes associations with large commercial banners. With respect to the unnatural creature on the female figure’s back, Mutu has indicated, “A lot of my work shows these humanoid, animal-type creatures sitting/standing on top of each other, like the caste systems that we have. As much as we talk about democracy and freedom, we still have no problem mistreating and devaluing people.”37 The unnatural being mainly consists of parts of white women, and the profile of the face has some Asian features, suggesting higher hierarchical stages (which calls forth Samba’s faces of three ethnicities). The female white high-heeled foot on the woman’s black back seems to refer to racism by white women. It may remind the spectator of the first generation of

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Figure 2.6 Wangechi Mutu, Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies, 2005, ink, acrylic, collage, and contact paper on Mylar, 205.74 × 132.08 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase through a gift of The Buddy Taub Foundation, Jill and Dennis Roach, Directors. © Wangechi Mutu. Photograph: Ben Blackwell.

feminists, which consisted of “white elite” women who have been accused of ignoring “colored” women, if not excluding them. The large black woman is presented as a creature close to the earth. The decoration-like colors and patterns on the skin of the woman could be interpreted as interrogation of the “exotic” appearance in stereotypes of African women, but also as bruises, traces of violence. The red splashes in the background look like bloodstains. As Mutu explained in an interview in 2013 regarding this work, “There are a lot of explosions in my work: They look like blood spurts, but also, from a distance, like blossoms.”38 The painted parts are prominently present in the artwork. Ink and acrylic colors were applied by means of airbrush, stenciling, and detailed as well as expressive brushwork. Mutu’s choice for painting in combination with collage deviates from the preference among first-generation feminist artists for media such as photography, performance art, and video art. For most of the first generation of feminists, painting was too much associated with the white-male history of art. In 2007, Linda Nochlin observed, looking back to the 1960s and 1970s, “Only by rejecting the tyranny of painting, traditional medium of

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heroic male self-expression, could women establish their own independent territory.” She added that many women artists with feminist dispositions have recently returned to painting, however differently. Considering the historical resonances of the medium, painting had to be reinvented as a medium that could be reconstructed as well as deconstructed as a kind of antithesis of heroic individualism.39 Mutu’s “multilayered bodies” also call forth Rosemary Betterton’s description, in An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (1996), of a shift from issues of representation—how the female body should be represented—to questions of subjectivity in female painting about what it means to inhabit that body. Or, as she puts it, “from the problem of looking (distance) to the problem of embodiment (touch).”40 If women were to be shown as active desiring agents, according to Betterton, a return to their bodies, figuratively or metaphorically, would be necessary. But this option implies that the female body has to be represented in ways different from the frame of the male gaze. As an example of the shift from looking to embodiment, she points to a new tactility in women’s paintings.41 In line with this view, Fran Lloyd has argued that painting, after having been associated with the disembodied eye of pure vision for so long, increasingly operates as a radical and critical practice on various levels, for instance, at the level of mark-making. On this level, “where traces of the gendered body reside,” the material of paint, which had long been associated with the skin of the body,42 would even have an impact on the body of the viewer.43 Lloyd underscores this view through elaborating on British artist Jenny Saville’s 1994 painting of a female nude. The excess of flesh, heightened by the tactile materiality of the painted surface, would force an awareness of the body as living flesh. The bloodred marks on the knee and the grey-yellow skin tones would suggest wounds, and through them decay and the hidden, visceral interior. The latter observation is especially interesting in comparison with my analysis of the female skin as created by Mutu. Lloyd discussed this detail in terms of Julia Kristeva as an aspect of the “abject,” as the recognition of the body, and hence identity, as unstable, evanescent, and continuously changing, a state that Western cultures tended to repress.44 Different from Saville, Mutu combined painting and collage techniques. Critics in particular correlated the strategy of collage with the contents of her work. For instance, in Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (2013), Kristine Stiles has suggested that by creating new images out of disparate parts, Mutu would bring traumatic dissociations to the surface, turning her artworks into “a

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veritable metonymy of pain sufficient to testify to ‘cultures of trauma,’ especially the cultures of trauma produced by colonialism and its attendant racism.”45 In the previous section, I discussed Busch and Klanten’s argument that today’s practice of collage can be understood as “mirroring the patchwork experience of globalization,” which they specifically related to layered cultures. With respect to the focus of this section on feminist collage paintings, it is interesting to note that quite a few feminists applied collage techniques to emphasize gender issues as cultural constructions. Given my interest in art in the digital age, it is productive to discuss Mutu’s collage paintings here in the context of “digital feminist patchworks.” A seminal work in this field is American artist Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (1995). Jackson constructed a digital collage sequence on the basis of her own words and woodcuts as well as some quotes through which she retells the story of Frankenstein from the perspective of the female monster he assembled. He had torn her to bits, but Jackson let the author, Mary Shelley, reassemble her again. Jackson traversed the female body with multiple dotted lines that evoke associations with scars. Similar to the body of this female monster, the body of the hypertext is alternately ruptured and seamed. By clicking on the body parts, the reader enters the text and follows the limbs or links through various sections. In an analysis of the influence of Patchwork Girl on the younger generation of female artists, Sally Evans argues that although there are different approaches to cyberfeminism, they share the concern that electronic environments might reproduce existing gender inequality.46 The motorcycle fragments included in Mutu’s representation of the black woman, which turn her into a cyborg or cyber-feminine black patchwork woman, explicitly address gender inequality through exaggeration of stereotypes, rather than only reproducing it. Although most scholars identify several universal elements in the status of women in society, differences have been increasingly noted as well. For instance, in the preface of Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (2007), the editors Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin claim that “feminist” may be interpreted in a particular way in one context and differently in another. These varieties mainly result from ethnic and national political issues and sociocultural histories. As a result, feminist arts also differ—in terms of modes of expression, formal languages, and subject matter47—and studies about art by female artists should somehow reflect this reality. Regarding Wangechi Mutu’s Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies, N’Goné Fall’s essay “Providing a Space of Freedom:

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Women Artists from Africa” (2007) offers some interesting observations. While being aware that the African continent itself includes many different ethnicities and cultures, Fall discusses artists who reflect not only on their position in African societies as women but also on how they relate to the world as Africans. With regard to the former aspect, she observes, “As the exercise of violence to conquer a land or to possess a body, war and rape share a long history. The act of rape leaves a mark on the mind, as, in olden days, a warrior might plant a flag in the land to mark it as his own (an image that harks back to an animal pissing to mark its territory). A woman will always be a good war trophy.”48 This statement reminds one of Mutu’s story about why she became a feminist in 1991. At the time, she was eighteen years old and still living in Kenya, when a group of men entered a girls’ dormitory, killing nineteen girls and raping seventy of them. Mutu was equally shocked by the reactions of the local public that “only a few girls died.”49 If Mutu opted to discuss culture-related and intercultural feminist issues by means of contemporary painting techniques (intermedia paintings including acrylic paint on large polyester supports), the work of Pakistani US-based artist Ambreen Butt provides an interesting counterpoint. She in fact addressed quite similar issues in the same period by means of traditional Indian painting techniques. In the series with the cynical title I Need a Hero (2005), for instance, Butt used watercolor and gold leaf on traditional small sheets of Wasli paper to paint motifs (such as dragons) from Indian miniatures to enhance the contrast with the heroic figure depicted, which is a woman dressed in casual “universal” workout clothes. The female hero contrasts with Mutu’s oppressed black woman, but is not exceptional anymore. Over the past few decades, feminine heroism has gradually emerged as a theme in cinema, literature, and the visual arts in Western cultures and several non-Western cultures. What about the gender roles in the multicultural key works of this chapter? The black women in Great America seem to play a passive role at first sight, but when we look more closely at the people in the boat we notice that the man sits in between the three women, whereas his usual position will be at one end of the boat—a detail suggesting a subtle gender-critical approach. From an opposite perspective, the bull in Smith’s Spam might confirm superior male power, but the title of the work downplays that status. In many other collage paintings by Smith, a fragmented female body and female clothes are in the center. For many female artists like Smith it has been problematic to sustain the traditional way of representing female bodies in paintings (a convention continued by Marshall).

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The case study of the collage painting by Mutu made clear in particular how she, and female artists such as Smith, succeeded in turning female bodies and interrelated issues of ethnic discrimination into socio-critical paintings through integrating collage techniques. As a stepping-stone to the next section on the power of visual political propaganda interrogated by paintings, Johanna Kandl’s work, discussed in more detail later, is relevant here for its concern with the position of women in Eastern Europe. Kandl was born in Vienna, but after her year of study at the Art Academy of Belgrade in 1980 she visited many Eastern European countries. Quite a few of her paintings relate to sociopolitical crises in Eastern and Central Europe. The role of women in her work is not addressed in ways explicitly different from that of men. If the social position of women differed distinctively from that of men in the aforementioned works related to Africa, America, and Southeast Asia, this hierarchy is more complicated in Eastern Europe. In “Post-Totalitarian Art: Eastern and Central Europe,” Charlotta Kotik has discussed the totalitarian claim that men and women would have achieved equality already as a matter of official state policy in the former East Bloc countries, as suggested by images of strong heroic women on tractors and muscular women engaged in factory work. But such images of tough women, Kotik argues, should not be mixed up with having accomplished particular feminist aims. They rather inform us about the distinctive nature of the feminist agenda in Eastern Europe, and how it differed from that in the West.50

The Power of Visual Political Propaganda Interrogated and Applied Visual propaganda is usually associated with political strategies, in particular in relation to communist or fascist regimes. By broadly conceiving propaganda as a specific strategy, however, it becomes an interesting concept for investigating strategies applied in artworks. In Propaganda & Persuasion (2015), Garth S.  Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell characterize propaganda as a “deliberate systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.” Yet this shaping of people’s perceptions always involves “complex psychological, philosophical, and practical habitual thought patterns” carried over from past experiences.51 Many artists are also struggling with these kinds

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of interrelated complexities and aims. In this respect, communications expert Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy argued, in Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction (2004), that even the arts function like propaganda, adding that this observation by no means implies contempt.52 Some may argue that propaganda has become an obsolete term, now that in our postmodern age the grand narratives of traditional ideologies have lost validity. But according to O’Shaughnessy, one can rather notice a rise of propagandistic forms of persuasion in today’s society, marked as it is by the pressure and overload of multiple information sources, the judgments they demand, and the need to digest information quickly. He even looks at the universe of postmodernism as the universe of propaganda, because postmodernists tend to reject notions of objective standards and absolutes, as well as the sovereignty of truth, turning everything into a matter of interpretation. When reason became more suspect, and the border between the real and the simulated got blurred, emotional judgments acquired greater legitimacy.53 In his afterword, O’Shaughnessy warns that propaganda, being an obvious characteristic of totalitarian regimes, is a more concealed factor in democracies, where it would turn into something more sophisticated and naturalized as part of a supposedly objective world of mass media communication.54 It is interesting to apply these various considerations about propaganda to paintings such as Johanna Kandl’s untitled painting (Figure 2.7) and Wang Guangyi’s Nike (Figure 2.8), as well as Marshall’s Great America and Smith’s Spam, because these artworks critically address visual political propaganda, while applying some of the strategies they interrogate. How, then, do insights associated with propaganda contribute to our understanding of the contents and strategies of these paintings? Kandl and Wang both focus on the clashing ideologies of capitalism and communism in today’s Eastern Europe and China, respectively. Many of Kandl’s paintings address the societal dilemmas in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Her untitled painting created in 2003 shows parked cars of an Eastern European make against a skyline of tall apartment buildings, with the words “Privatization is much more than an abstraction” as basic message along the upper edge of the image. At first sight, the sunlight and bright colors suggest a rather positive scene, whereby common citizens are allowed to trade in cars and other products in a context of private business. This impression goes together with a positive meaning of the words in the painting. Upon closer inspection, however, the depicted people appear to find themselves in a dismal situation. They look like victims of the system of privatization, many of them

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Figure 2.7  Johanna Kandl, Untitled (“Privatization is much more than an abstraction”), 2003, egg tempera on wood, 115 × 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.8  Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism—Nike, 2005, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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being subject to losing all sense of security from one day to the next, as well as being condemned to live on the outskirts of society in non-places in-between scrapped cars. This interpretation goes together with a painful meaning of the painting’s slogan, as a critical reflection on the dramatic changes in the wake of the collapse of communism. In this respect, Charlotta Kotik has suggested, in “Post-Totalitarian Art: Eastern and Central Europe,” that after 1989 every facet of life in Eastern Europe was affected by the resulting sociopolitical changes: along with the movement toward more democracy came another crucial change, the development from state socialism to a consumer economy.55 Interestingly, Kandl has applied a plain style of painting that evokes associations with the socialist realist style common in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, a style discussed by philosopher and media theorist Boris Groys in his essay “Educating the Masses: Socialist Realist Art” (2008). Socialist realism propagated the ideal communist society. Instead of depicting an ambiguous situation as the one in the painting by Kandl, the facts of socialist life had to be presented as a kind of virtual photograph, a realistic image rendering the depicted situation visually credible.56 As noted by Groys, the paintings of leading socialist realist artists referred primarily to the aesthetics of posters, color photography, or cinema. The successful paintings could be seen throughout the country, reproduced on countless posters and in endless numbers of books.57 Rather than pursuing individual styles, as in West-European art, the Soviet Union became saturated with painted images that all seemed to have been produced by one and the same artist. Groys explained this difference by the fact that the primary interest of socialist realism was not the artwork but the viewer, who was conceived as an integral part of the artwork and, “at the same time, as its final product.”58 Before addressing the implications of propaganda and socialist realism for the meanings of Kandl’s painting, I first want to introduce a second case study from China: Wang Guangyi’s Nike (2005). Even more literally than Kandl, Wang appropriated visual strategies from political propaganda, which he combined with elements from commercials. Nike presents three stereotypical figures from Chinese propaganda posters from the Maoist era next to the logo of the internationally famous American brand of sportswear. The positive image of smiling people, a common appearance in communist, propagandistic visual culture, became a recurring phenomenon in Chinese modern painting.59 In particular Fang Lijun became famous for his paintings depicting smiling, pinkishskinned Chinese men as main subject. Wang and Fang, who are considered to be artists of “cynical realism,” both criticized the aesthetics of Chinese social realism and the commercialism of Western capitalism.

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Nike is part of a large series of paintings entitled Great Criticism begun in the early 1990s. All paintings address the clashing ideologies of socialism and consumerism. According to Karen Smith, however, these paintings represent “a visual harmony” of images from two contexts: socialist propaganda art depicting China as heading for an ideal future and famous Western designer labels proclaiming a better life for those who can afford them. As Smith put it, “The same ends, just different means and different social values.”60 Another similarity between Cultural Revolution political posters and consumer ads, according to Yan Shanchun, is the anonymity of the artists involved: the former were made by a group of ordinary artists, while the names of the designers who created the logos of the famous brands seen everywhere are unknown as well. At the same time, in the view of Shanchun, the names of these unknown artists might in fact be easier to trace than the names of the craftsmen who carved the numeral stamps used by Wang in the background of his series of paintings.61 In an interview, Wang called himself a social critic.62 But it is also true that both Wang and Kandl adopted the successful realistic painting styles of visual propaganda that they themselves more or less critically explore. How, then, do their strategies relate to commonly applied strategies in propaganda? A brief consideration of several insights from the field of propaganda studies will help us to put this issue into perspective. For example, in Politics and Propaganda, O’Shaughnessy has explained that if propaganda is a way of “mediating our response to social phenomena and our relationship with society,” the strategies have to relate to familiar forms of communication in society, in one way or another. He identifies two approved methods: subversion, through which situations are redefined, and the interrogative approach that includes questions to make people rethink existing perspectives.63 The latter calls forth Immendorff ’s question “Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege?,” whereas subversion as method in order to rethink existing perspectives certainly applies to all my case studies. In Propaganda & Persuasion, Jowett and O’Donnell consider propaganda as a subcategory of persuasion as well as information.64 As they argue, most scholars agree that propaganda is persuasion on a one-to-many basis; it tends to be linked with a general societal process, whereas persuasion is regarded as an individual psychological process.65 In their definition of propaganda, they emphasize deliberately and systematically attempts to influence perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors. Not all experts agree on the criterion of propaganda having to be intentional or deliberate. In the view of O’Shaughnessy, for instance, the best propaganda is sometimes the most unconscious.66 He argues that much propaganda is founded on utopian visions. The thirst for utopia would explain

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the success of illusions of a perfect or perfectible world order in phenomena as diverse as socialist realist painting and the advertising industry. He also stresses that persuasion strategies are foremost emotional, thus the power of propaganda would mainly exist in the power of emotional appeal.67 How does the decision of Kandl and Wang to embrace a socialist realist style contribute to the propagandist character of their paintings? To understand the power of pictures, Mitchell argues that we need to look at their internal relations of domination and resistance, as well as their external relations with spectators and with the world.68 He addresses this issue through opposing “illusionism” and “realism” as two visual strategies. He relates illusionism to the power of pictures over the beholder, through deceiving, delighting, astonishing, and so on. Realism, by contrast, has been associated with the capacity of pictures to show “the truth” about things, which he called “an embodiment of a socially authorized and credible ‘eyewitness’ perspective.” The spectator of realist representation was, according to Mitchell, not supposed to be under the power of such representation but used representation in order to take power over the world. Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in common language, he underscores their differences, for instance, by relating illusionism to spectacle and realism to surveillance in society. Nevertheless, pictures can combine both strategies. He mentions, for instance, Magritte’s painting of the pipe that could be understood as a collision of an illusionist image with a realist text.69 Regarding Kandl’s and Wang’s paintings, Mitchell’s view that truth, certainty, and knowledge would be structurally connoted in realistic representation is interesting in particular. He even characterizes realism as “an apt vehicle for spreading lies, confusion, and disinformation, for wielding power over mass publics, or for projecting fantasy. The great achievements of modern technologies of representation—propaganda, advertising, surveillance—are scarcely conceivable without modes of realistic representation.”70 Even though the visual strategy of realism might strengthen the potential propagandist character of Kandl’s and Wang’s paintings, their artworks hardly communicate a clear message, let alone a well-defined utopian view. What, then, do these artworks in fact communicate to their spectators? Which kinds of perception and cognitions do they shape? A plausible answer can be found in Boris Groys’s Art Power (2008). Reflecting on the power of modern and contemporary art, Groys argues that such artworks may seem to allow for an infinite plurality of interpretations and do not impose on the beholder any specific ideology, but this is an illusion. These works invite one to interpret them as “paradox-objects,” requiring a “perfectly paradoxical, self-contradictory

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reaction,” because the only adequate interpretation of a paradox-object would be a paradoxical interpretation. On the part of the spectator this requires a willingness to accept “paradoxical, self-contradictory interpretations as adequate and true.”71 Let me conclude by summing up the insights provided by debates on propaganda into the contents and strategies of the paintings by Kandl, Wang, Marshall, and Smith. First of all, their strategy of “realism” can be related to a specific convention of realism, one that appears to be meaningful for the particular painting. On the basis of Mitchell’s definition of realism as a proper tool for spreading lies, confusion, and disinformation, and for exerting power over mass publics, one could state that Kandl and Wang refer to this aspect of socialist realist art, Marshall to that of American Dream realism, and Smith to a supposed native primitive realism. The general definition of propaganda as persuasion on a one-to-many basis and power of emotional appeal is not much different from general views about the implicit power of art. Yet regarding the key works discussed here it is more insightful to note that if propaganda appeals to the thirst for utopia, these paintings critically interrogate that method. Their use of tools such as subversion and interrogation are also approved methods in propaganda, but they add a paradoxical perspective. In fact, they seem to appeal to a thirst for critical paradoxes concerning societal issues among lovers of contemporary art. Moreover, these artworks do not intend to become as anonymous and familiar as possible for the sake of their message’s quick readability, as is true of visual propaganda. The artists developed their own adaptations of strategies from visual political propaganda to apply them in their paradoxical socio-critical paintings, which can only be perceived and unpacked slowly. This is in fact the most important difference with propaganda: while propaganda aims to block critical contemplation, these paintings intend to stimulate it.

The Rhetoric of Commercials Applied in Collage Paintings Political propaganda and commercial advertisements are commonly thought to be part of very different worlds, but, as demonstrated in the previous section, their propagandistic strategies can be closely related. The paintings by Kandl, Wang, Marshall, and Smith address political notions critically, but also the consequences of commercialism. In this section I investigate how strategies of slogans and text-image connections from the field of commercials, as

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scrutinized by some experts of that discourse, relate to the strategies in this chapter’s key paintings, which at the same time critically address that kind of visual communication. In Propaganda (1995), anthropologist Janice M. Hirota refers to art directors and copywriters in advertising agencies as the “paradigmatic mass symbolmakers” in our society. Their enthralling images are everywhere around us. Hardly any aspect of our life has been left untouched by advertising and mass symbols.72 In contrast to artworks, we usually think of advertising images as telling simplistic truths. According to Hirota, however, creating advertisements also requires an ability for symbolic inversion—for turning visual symbols upside down and transforming weaknesses into strengths.73 Because the communicative power of those images most of all appears to reside in an effective combination of images and text, I will first address some explicit involvements of artists with the field of advertising before they started applying texts in their artistic work. Some of the artists who became most famous in art history for the application of text in artworks started out as designer of commercials (e.g., Andy Warhol) or combined this practice with their artistic career. For instance, René Magritte’s early experience as a commercial artist would have heightened his alertness to the (ab)uses of the language that accompanied his images. Yeazell has discussed how Magritte, for several years in the 1920s and intermittently throughout his artistic career, supplemented his income by designing posters and advertisements for magazines.74 In the 2016 Magritte retrospective exhibition in Centre Pompidou, Paris, a few of his early advertisements were presented side by side with his paintings. The stylized way of drawing in Magritte’s advertisements shows in fact many similarities with his oil painting techniques. This juxtaposition makes us also realize that Marshall, Kandl, Wang, and Smith use austere styles of visualization as applied in painted commercials as well. In commercials, however, the reduction of visual details has to avoid distraction from the verbal message. Conversely, in the paintings discussed the visual parts will draw immediate and most attraction from spectators. The explicit integration of commercials in pictures is often associated with pop art of the 1960s. In this context hardly anyone will think of the 1950s’ American photographer Walker Evans, whose pictures influenced generations of photographers. Being the son of an advertising agent, Evans loved to take pictures of posters that include slogans on urban walls. And from childhood on, until the end of his life, he collected commercials, such as enameled advertising signs, and decorated the walls of his home with them. In a large retrospective exhibition in 2017, the Centre Pompidou paid much attention to this aspect

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of Evans’s work, as a continuation of the same aspect in the 2016 retrospective of Magritte. It was evident that the posters and advertisements designed by Magritte were more decorative and subtle than the stylized ones of the 1950s marked by contrast. The exhibition explicitly underscored the influence of the communicative power of these commercials in Evans’s photographic work. The 1960s’ pop art movement expressed even more interest in consumer society, including commercials in which text and image were combined. Strikingly, perhaps, artists from the conceptual art movement shared this same interest, but from a more critical perspective. If pop artists were accused by the art elite of producing too popular pictures, the conceptual artists were condemned by the general public as too elitist and intellectual. This opposition may explain why art historical surveys most often neglect the similarities between those artworks. Some interesting comparisons between the role of advertisements in pop art and conceptual art are made by Joan Gibbons in Art & Advertising (2005). For example, she observes that the word combinations applied in art do not appear to be very different from those used in advertising. Often, they are all idiomatic, concise, and rich in suggestive language and implications. Moreover, they frequently belong to the vernacular and the popular.75 Most authors discussing the revival of painting in the 1980s agreed that artists did not just return to painting traditions from before the 1960s. In particular some traces of conceptual art continued to be present in contemporary painting, such as communicating critical views. But also the conceptual artists’ choice of medium for expressing their views was often meaningful. This means that the importance of the concept did not go at the expense of attention for the medium, as is often suggested. Quite the opposite, conceptual artists could (and had to) choose from numerous media—even plants or food—for the best mediator for their concept, often in combination with text. The preference for transitory materials resulted in temporary modes of artistic communication. As a result, many works of conceptual art—like commercials—were designed to react to the present time, rather than being made for eternity. In this context it is remarkable that Jenny Holzer, who became known for her conceptual artworks such as billboards and LED installations that included text aiming at social critique, has recently turned to painting. Her War Paintings (ca. 2007– 15) present censored governmental documents of military operations that are reproduced as monumental pictures. The large desensitized reports stimulate slow spectatorship on and imagination about what is blackened in the texts, and the resulting normalization of torture. Her use of oil paint and canvas, materials usually applied in history painting to commemorate victories, now “eternalize”

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this side of war history (cf. Chapter 3 for more in-depth discussion of war imagery). Most artworks discussed in this chapter are painted with acrylics, a modern lasting synthetic paint that does not darken through time, like oil paint, and that provides a flatter skin of paint than oil paint.76 Moreover, its fast-drying characteristic, common for industrial paints, contributes to a more bright and decorative appearance of acrylic paintings. Accordingly, a preference for using acrylics may be considered being one for a medium in-between traditional art historical oil paint and commercial materials. For examining the consequences of specific preferences for image/text combinations and the nature of the inserted phrases, it is interesting to consult literature about the rhetoric of commercials. In Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design (2001), cultural critic Maud Lavin defines graphic design as an art form that is dependent for its efficacy on how strongly words and images together communicate a coherent message. Designers are expected to promise a clean new world, even if this is impossible: “they just cover, wrap, accent, or put into a clean envelope some messy realities.”77 The use of bright colors certainly contributes to the appearance of the clean envelope. Many commercials, as well as the artworks under discussion, apply red and yellow as signaling colors. According to Lavin, graphic design is so powerful in its ability to communicate because it provides an exaggerated model for the same questions that arise in other fields of communication.78 As examples she mentions media such as photography, film, the internet, and writing, but I would add painting to this list as well. Still, most commercials clearly lack the complexities of the discussed paintings. Moreover, as observed by Lavin, advertising has long been criticized for promoting self-centered behavior as opposed to cooperative action. In this regard, the objectives of the painters under discussion, who aim at stimulating cooperative action through addressing societal rather than personal issues, clearly differ from the aims of advertising.79 Part of the powerful communication of the graphic design of commercials is the use of slogans. In “The Persuasive Functions of Slogans” (1989), communication theorists Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton define slogans as imperative statements and tools of persuasion, including a variety of persuasive strategies, such as providing stimuli. While emphasizing that we should not underestimate the persuasive power of slogans, the authors also note that slogans as social symbols may not have the same meaning for specific individuals or groups. Their ambiguity permits various different interpretations.80 Does this suggest a similarity between commercials

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and artworks? Only at first glance, because most slogans are successful because they simplify complex problems and provide easy solutions, while inciting instant corrective actions.81 What about the slogans in my key works? The slogan “Great America,” in combination with the catchwords “WoW” and “Fun” (written on the white square), could be part of a successful advertisement on the basis of the aforementioned characteristics, such as applying stimuli and evoking emotions.82 The newspaper clippings selected by Smith, such as “Share Our Heritage” and “Honoring Native Foods,” could also be called a collection of successful slogans. And, as argued by Hirota, advertisements also use symbolic inversion as a tool. Marshall exchanged white visitors for black visitors, and Smith played with SPAM, to address the poverty among Native Americans. Although the latter catchword does not seem to have an obvious persuasive function, the painting as a whole certainly aims at persuading spectators to reflect on their attitude. “Privatization is much more than an abstraction” will not function as a good slogan in an advertisement, the phrase being too complex for easy persuasion. “Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege?” certainly comes across as a slogan aimed at inciting instant corrective actions. In this chapter’s first section I mentioned humor as a subtle component of both Marshall’s and Smith’s pictures. In the field of commercials, humor is an approved method for persuasion. In Humor in Advertising (2006), Charles Gulas and Marc Weinberger have discussed this phenomenon in depth. They classify humor as part of a set of stimuli that may provide pleasure but can also be used to enlighten, offend, confuse, and distract.83 They argue that a common aspect of generating humor is the notion of challenging the normal order. Familiarity with that order is a precondition for the audience to recognize a deviation from the norm,84 which is also applicable to the aforementioned collage paintings. Interestingly, in contemporary art, humor is usually related to a postmodernist effort at seeing all things as relative, actually a goal opposite to persuasion. Returning once again to Wang’s painting Nike, we can note that the promise of a clean new world, as discussed by Lavin, is quite similar in commercial and political propaganda. Both forms of visual communication use physiognomic expressions as visual strategy. In her essay “The Laughter behind the Painted Smile,” Sondra Bacharach argued in an in-depth analysis of an untitled painting from 2005 by the Chinese artist Yue Minjun, a work quite closely related to Wang’s painting discussed in the previous section, that the smiling appearance of the people in these pictures can simultaneously be considered as a critique of Western consumerism: “What difference is there really, between

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a propaganda poster encouraging us to take pride in our hard work, and a computer advertisement encouraging us to take pride in getting our jobs done no matter where we might be?”85 Bacharach concludes that Yue’s work has even more serious implications for Western society, because our society does idealize this artificial physiognomic expression in the name of valuing individuality and personal expression.86 Her observation underscores Karen Smith’s statement of the “visual harmony,” applied in the previous section to Wang’s Nike. Finally, I would like to approach the rhetoric of commercials from the other way around. Marshall and Smith deal in their work with ethnical political issues. This subject in itself does not make the works essentially different from commercials. Although most commercials use images with positive connotations, such as amusement parks or commodities, a brand such as Benetton started in the mid1980s a multiracial campaign accompanied by the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” executed by the photographer Olivero Toscani. Many were shocked by advertisements showing, for instance, in blown-up detail a “white” baby breastfed by a “black” woman. Being an advertisement, the image was designed to have an immediate impact on the spectator, which contrasts with the much more layered and complex visual language in the artworks under discussion. Returning at the end of this chapter to my case study of Marshall’s Great America, I conclude that this collage painting certainly uses the seductive images of entertainment parks in advertising in its subversive strategy. The explicit critique in this and the other aforementioned works of stereotypes in mass media, in particular political and commercial propaganda, appears to rely on some strategies common to those kinds of propaganda. Examples are the notion that words and images strongly communicate together, and that the main challenge is how to integrate these two very different media within one picture, even though text is subordinated to the image in these paintings. Symbolic inversion and slogans are applied, but in a less explicit way, and with a preference for paradoxes. And connection to current social issues is present, but in a way that contemplation and awareness about those issues are evoked. In particular addressing conventions from the past provides interesting parallels. The second section of this chapter discussed various conventions of image-text relationships in art history that served as an influence on the key works. One may wonder whether some of the same conventions also underlie commercial and political propaganda. Emotional appeal also plays a role in the paintings, but more subtle and less directive. The artists refute what Joselit identified as the psychological flatness

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of commercials. Moreover, the physicality of collage paintings engenders contemplation or at least extra effort in perceiving, because the spectator is confronted with image-text combinations that also draw attention to their materiality. This aspect was obviously absent in literature about propaganda. In fact, one of the most evident strategies aimed at rethinking prevailing perspectives and simplistic truths in visual mass media is to capitalize on slowness, both for the artist and the viewer, and on top of the already inherent slowness in the multilayered techniques of painting and collage. Simultaneous adaptations, rather than a coherent message, contribute to enhancing a sloweddown process of perceiving these paintings. Let me finish this chapter with a brief reflection on the exposure and societal impact of the artworks discussed here. Hirota identified advertising agencies as the paradigmatic mass symbol-makers in our society, while the protagonist in Immendorff ’s painting encouraged the artist to leave the studio and join the political activists on the street. In fact, all paintings discussed in this chapter, as well as in the other chapters of this study, are created to be presented in art institutions. As a result, the scope of their visual communication remains limited to the visitors of those sites. If these works are to function as a critical laboratory of visual communication in society at large, however, it is crucial that more attention be paid to them in educational environments, mass media, and other contexts. Thus these works will have a more comprehensive cultural impact as embodiments of slowness.

Notes 1 Marshall quoted from interview with Deborah Smith, published in 2015, in FrankWitt, “Kerry James Marshall,” 388. 2 Marshall in Gaines, Tate, and Rassel, Kerry James Marshall, 37. 3 Marshall in Meyer, In the Tower, unpaged. 4 Expression used by Greg Tate to characterize this aspect of Marshall’s paintings in Gaines, Tate, and Rassel, Kerry James Marshall, 54. 5 Marshall in Haq, Kerry James Marshall, 21. 6 Haq, Kerry James Marshall, 18. 7 Marshall in Meyer, In the Tower, unpaged. 8 The European emblem was designed in 1955 already. In a statement by the Council of Europe (dated December 9, 1955) it is described as follows: “Against the blue sky of the Western world, the stars symbolize the peoples of Europe in the form of a circle, the sign of union. The number of stars is invariably twelve, the figure twelve being the symbol of perfection and entirety.” https​:/​/we​​b​.arc​​hive.​​org​/w​​eb​/20​​09052​​

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81959​​31​/ht​​tp://​​www​.c​​oe​.in​​t​/t​/d​​gal​/d​​it​/il​​cd​/Fo​​nds​/T​​h emes​​/​Flag​​s​/Res​​%2855​​%2932​​ _en​.p​​df (accessed November 1, 2017). 9 http://jaunequick​-to​-seesmith​.com​/bio​-4/ (accessed October 15, 2017). 10 Artist in personal communication with anonymous author on May 7, 2013. http:​/​/ art​​museu​​m​.ari​​zona.​​edu​/a​​rtwri​​te​/ja​​une​-q​​uick-​​​to​-se​​e​-smi​​th (accessed October 15, 2017). Spam can be observed in detail in this website. 11 http:​/​/art​​museu​​m​.ari​​zona.​​edu​/a​​rtwri​​te​/ja​​une​-q​​uick-​​​to​-se​​e​-smi​​th (accessed October 15, 2017). 12 Kastner, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 9. 13 Hammond and Smith, Women of Sweetgrass, 1985. 14 Kastner, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 17. 15 http:​/​/www​​.arti​​namer​​icama​​gazin​​e​.com​​/news​​-feat​​ures/​​inter​​views​​/stor​​ytell​​ing​-a​​n​ -int​​ervie​​w​-wit​​h​-k​er​​ry​-ja​​mes​-m​​arsha​​ll/ (accessed October 28, 2017). 16 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 1. 17 With regard to the topic of the last section in the previous chapter, it is interesting that the original title of the work was La trahison des images (the treasures of images); later it became well-known under the title Ceci n’est pas une pipe, turning the text on the canvas into the title of the painting. 18 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 1–2. 19 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 243. 20 Draxler, “Wo stehst du,” unpaged. 21 Joselit, “Notes on Surface,” 20. 22 Joselit, “Notes on Surface,” 30–1. 23 This observation will be elaborated in the fifth and sixth section of this chapter. 24 Godfrey, Painting Today, 25; and Samba quoted there. 25 Banash, Collage Culture, 11–12. 26 Banash, Collage Culture, 13. 27 Banash, Collage Culture, 14, 30, 16. 28 McLuhan quoted in Banash, Collage Culture, 89. 29 Banash, Collage Culture, 29, 181. 30 Banash, Collage Culture, 259–60, 262. 31 Busch and Klanten, Age of Collage, 3. 32 Busch and Klanten, Age of Collage, 3. 33 Busch and Klanten, Age of Collage, 2. 34 Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, Joselit, Painting 2.0, 180; italics in original. 35 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 419. 36 www​.a​​zquot​​es​.co​​m​/aut​​hor​/5​​6863-​​Wange​​chi​_M​​utu (accessed November 21, 2016). 37 Interview by Benjy Hansen-Bundy, October 12, 2013. http:​/​/www​​.moth​​erjon​​es​.co​​m​/med​​ia​/20​​13​/10​​/inte​​rview​​-coll​​age​-a​​rtist​​-wang​​echi-​​ mutu-​​​fanta​​stic-​​journ​​ey (accessed December 18, 2016).

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38 Interview by Benjy Hansen-Bundy, October 12, 2013. http:​/​/www​​.moth​​erjon​​es​.co​​m​/med​​ia​/20​​13​/10​​/inte​​rview​​-coll​​age​-a​​rtist​​-wang​​echi-​​ mutu-​​​fanta​​stic-​​journ​​ey (accessed December 18, 2016). 39 Nochlin in Reilly and Nochlin, Global Feminism, 49. 40 Betterton, Intimate Distance, 7. 41 Betterton, Intimate Distance, 11, 18. 42 See also Chapter 1, section “The Corporality of Paintings.” 43 Lloyd, “Painting,” 44. 44 Lloyd, “Painting,” 45. 45 Stiles in Schoonmaker, Wangechi Mutu, 72. 46 Evans, “Patchwork Girl,” 206–12. 47 Reilly and Nochlin, Global Feminism, 12. 48 Fall in Reilly and Nochlin, Global Feminism, 72. 49 Mutu quoted by Kristine Stiles in Schoonmaker, Wangechi Mutu, 67. 50 Kotik in Reilly and Nochlin, Global Feminism, 157. 51 Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, 7–8. 52 O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 30. 53 O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 50–1, 54. 54 O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 244. 55 Kotik in Reilly and Nochlin, Global Feminism, 153. 56 Groys, Art Power, 6/11. 57 Groys, Art Power, 7/11. 58 Groys, Art Power, 10/11. 59 It is interesting that Suzanne Hudson related laughing men in the paintings of Yue Minjun, a contemporary of Wang, to images of the Laughing Buddha. Hudson, Painting Now, 124. 60 Smith in Smith et al., Wang Guangyi, 11. 61 Shanchun in Smith et al., Wang Guangyi, 20. 62 Interview with Charles Merewether, published in Smith et al., Wang Guangyi, 29. 63 O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 62, 116, 117. 64 Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, xiii, in the “Preface” to the sixth edition: “It seems as if the concept of propaganda and its very ubiquity in the world has finally alerted scholars to examine how within their own areas of specialization techniques of propaganda have been used and are being used to shape human beliefs and behavior.” 65 Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, 33. 66 O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 20. 67 O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 4. 68 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 324. 69 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 325–6.

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70 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 357. 71 Groys, Art Power, 3–4. 72 Hirota in Jackall, Propaganda, 329–30. 73 Hirota in Jackall, Propaganda, 345. 74 Yeazell, Picture Titles, 237. Conversely, a cross-fertilization took place in the development of designs of ads. A study by Georges Roque demonstrated the omnipresence of typical Magritte-like imagery in late twentieth-century advertising; this study is mentioned in Yeazell, Picture Titles, 237. 75 Gibbons, Art & Advertising, 10. 76 Remarkably, Kandl opted for egg tempera, the slower predecessor of oil paint. And regarding her interest in social realism from Eastern Europe, it is noteworthy that egg tempera was still used for painting Russian Byzantine orthodox icons. 77 Lavin, Clean New World, 2. 78 Lavin, Clean New World, 3. 79 Lavin, Clean New World, 73. 80 Reprinted in Jackall, Propaganda, 401–3. 81 Reprinted in Jackall, Propaganda, 413, 420. 82 The latter aspect is particularly stressed by O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda, 4. 83 Gulas and Weinberger, Humor in Advertising, 95, 193. 84 Gulas and Weinberger, Humor in Advertising, 191. 85 Bacharach in Freeman and Matravers, Figuring Out, 182–3. 86 Bacharach in Freeman and Matravers, Figuring Out, 183.

3

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The shift from analog to digital photography is discussed by quite a few scholars as a transformation from fairly truthful photographs to digital images, which are more akin with the constructed nature of paintings. Particularly the manipulated digital images in tableau-size, to be hung on exhibition walls, do not have the sense of intimacy one associates with vernacular family photography and developed into a more public, display-oriented mode of painting. Moreover, the slow production process of these pictures is rather reminiscent of painting than snapshot photography. If the paintings discussed in the first chapter could be called “photo-like paintings,” this chapter deals with “painting-like digital photographs.” I chose this term instead of “painting-like digital images,” because the artworks under discussion are firmly rooted in the tradition of analog photography. The opening case study will allow me to delve into this particular identity of digital pictures. The subject of this case study and the next ones mainly concerns social critique of images of war and violence. This theme relates to press photography discussed in Chapter 1 and strategies of propaganda as discussed in Chapter 2. The present chapter more specifically explores what the selected digitally manipulated pictures, including their critical position regarding war photography in mass media, contribute to our understanding of slow painting as socio-critical medium. The sections will address this question from various perspectives. The theoretical framework I present is based in several relevant arguments from debates on digital imagery’s relationship with painting. By discussing the supposed “truthfulness” of news photography in relation to pictorial conventions in paintings, I will unpack the critical approach of the slowly constructed digital war images. Finally, I examine views on space-time compressions and fakeness in photography and painting to comprehend how the complexity of these strategies deployed in the key artworks contributes to slowing down our perception of them, as well as heightening our insights into these pictures.

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By arguing that painting-like digital photographs appear to parasitize on traditions in analog photography as well as traditional painting, I support the view of quite a few scholars and artists that painting should be defined beyond the Greenbergian view of painting as mere paint on canvas. Slow digital photographs will be addressed as socio-critical paintings, which—unlike the artworks in the previous two chapters—do not contain any conventional physical paint. As early as 1970, Stephen Bann concluded his Experimental Painting: Construction, Abstraction, Destruction, Reduction, with the sentence, “Painting may have lost the semiological richness which it traditionally possessed. But this does not necessarily imply that the types of sign previously employed in painting will not be extended and developed in another medium.”1 Bann hinted at analog photography. One may wonder whether digital images became an even more “other” kind of medium into which painting developed. Although one can say that numeral codes sacrificed materiality, the present era, more often called “post-digital” already, shows a renewed interest in the materiality of various supports for the printed images. Moreover, while in the various techniques of analog color photography the layers of color were included in the photo paper waiting to become partly visible during the image’s development in the dark room, the recent technology of ink jet printing consists of applying colored inks on a support, thus in fact creating a sprayed painting. Although the artwork discussed as first case study in this chapter was produced through a photographic c-print technique, it was printed on light-sensitized canvas, which provided the digital image a physical surface associated with traditional painting.

Case Study of AES+F’s Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 (2006) A large circular canvas presents a group of youngsters from various ethnicities on the verge of attacking each other (Figure 3.1). Closer observation shows that the two white males are presented as losers, because they are unarmed and their hands are bandaged. Women, a child, and people with non-Euramerican ethnicities seem to have taken charge of them. Last Riot, the title of the series to which this picture belongs, suggests the start of the last apocalyptic fight. It is up to the spectator to decide whether this means that it will be peace forever hereafter or the end of the world. Quite a few spectators will judge this picture as a kind of kitschy painting. The artificial setting and warm attractive colors contrast with familiar images of riots

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Figure 3.1  AES+F, Last Riot 2, Tondo #22, 2006, digital collage, c-print on canvas, 150 cm. © AES+F c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2020.

from photojournalism. This obvious difference mainly motivated my selection of this picture here. Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 (2006) is a digital collage, executed as c-print on a large circular canvas. AES+F, the name of the Russian artists group that created this picture, consists of the conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich, multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky, and fashion photographer Vladimir Fridkes. The Last Riot project includes panoramas, circular stills, and an animated video. The works by AES+F address global issues, but the artists explained their interest in the relationship between youth and violence in 2016 as follows: “The era of rapid social and economic transformation in Russia, which came after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, saw an increase in the level of aggression and criminalization in society, including among adolescents. This actualized the traditional Russian ethical questions of good and evil, crime and punishment.”2 Some of the most intriguing aspects of Tondo #22, as well as of the other works from this and many other AES+F series, are the lack of mutual exchanges, the similar neutral expressions of the protagonists, and their appearances tending toward androgyny. As the AES+F collective put it, “everyone is fighting against the others and against themselves. There is no difference between victim

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and aggressor, male and female.”3 The subordinated position of the white males in Tondo #22 can be seen as exceptional. Although the protagonists confront each other, they hardly make any contact, most of them just holding swords and baseball bats at the ready. In a volume devoted to the theme of children and war, pedagogue Doris Kessler has observed that if in the past children played together with swords and guns made of wood and plastics, only quite recently their playing began to shift to the virtual world of computer games and movies. Usually this play takes place in isolated situations, where communication has become impossible.4 The youngsters in Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 still hold swords that look like obsolete toys, but also some video games reintroduced these kinds of weapons. As the artists explained, the children/youngsters were photographed individually and digitally assembled into groups “specifically to achieve the effect of alienation, as though each character was imprisoned in his own invisible capsule,”5 which confirms Kessler’s observation about playing by contemporary kids. The Tondo series also seems to address contemporary heroism in an era when everything, including wars, appears sanitized.6 Rather than presenting violence as horrific, in this image there are no wounds, blood, and pain, while the aesthetic appearances of the bodies dominate its overall look. In Tondo #16, for instance, even the torpedoes are metallic pink. The baseball bats and the clothes, apart from the camouflage trousers, evoke associations with sports. The knowledge that the picture was created by Russian artists may give rise to associations with the disciplined hard lives of children and adolescents who are trained to defeat others in sports (even if the reference to baseball provides the sportswomen a more international appearance). The artists appear to have recruited their models from local model agencies, but also from sports clubs and ballet schools. They dressed the girls in generic white clothes, which is suggestive of sportswear as well as underwear.7 The latter association calls up James Kincaid’s remark that the child is officially defined as a creature outside of sexuality while at the same time it is loaded with qualities designated as erotic in many cultures, such as purity, naivete, freshness, big eyes, and narrow chins.8 These various contemplations about the protagonists prompt the question of what kinds of information the environment of the figures adds to the meanings of the picture. For example, one can interpret the sand as a beach, suggesting entertainment on the beach, but also as disappearance of nature resulting in desert. The reptile in the foreground and the dragons in the background may evoke associations with amusement parks, but also with a return to the

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prehistorical state of the earth without human beings. And there are more ambiguous objects: the primitive airplane reminds one of world wars, but was also the beginning of worldwide tourism; the industry, symbolized by chimneys, generated prosperity as well as climate change. Thus, the rebels are situated in a hard to identify virtual world combining paradisiacal and catastrophic elements. The latter associations remind one of the settings in video games, which is confirmed by the aestheticized riot. Others have even compared the world presented by AES+F with the games on the website of the American Army.9 The AES+F pictures have also triggered associations with Hollywood film extravaganzas, fashion photography, advertising, mass media, popular culture, and the classical aesthetic of old masters’ paintings.10 To develop this chapter’s main focus on slow and socio-critical aspects in painting-like digital photographs, the next sections will address Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 from the perspective of debates on digital imagery’s relationship with painting, parasitizing on the truthfulness of analog photography in constructed war images and pictorial conventions in history paintings, as well as space-time compressions in digital collages and devices. Finally, I will discuss the additional value and meanings of this picture resulting from its being a slow painting-like digital photograph, rather than just a slow (history) painting or an analog (war) photograph.

Debates on Digital Imagery’s Relationship with Painting At the start of the digital age, William J. Mitchell argued in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992) that the early 1990s will be remembered as “the time at which the computer-processed digital image began to supersede the image fixed in silver-based photographic emulsion.”11 To underscore the consequences of this shift, Mitchell suggested that the digital image will be closer related to painting than to analog photography: Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments are to the painter, and an understanding of them is the foundation of the craft of digital imaging. Furthermore, since captured, “painted,” and synthesized pixel values can be combined seamlessly, the digital image blurs the customary distinctions between painting and photography and between mechanical and handmade pictures.12

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Even though both the painter and the digital image-capture device apply sampling and filtering strategies, the painter performs those strategies manually, subjectively, and probably pretty inconsistently, whereas the latter would conduct them mechanically, objectively, and consistently.13 Already in 1984, Peter Weibel, in “On the History and Aesthetics of the Digital Image,” had claimed that the digital image united possibilities of painting (such as subjectivity, freedom, and unreality) and of photography (e.g., objectivity, mechanics, and reality): “Reproduction and fantasy, the two excluded sisters, are reconciled in the digital image . . . which allows one to intervene in each section of the picture surface as freely as the artist can in the canvas to form each portion of the picture.”14 Although Mitchell was right to suggest that digital photography would gradually replace analog photography, his prognosis of extreme changes was soon put into perspective by other scholars. Theorist of digital media Peter Lunenfeld, for instance, in Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (2000), argued that even though it is possible for digital imaging to take input from various sources and be displayed on monitors or in hard copy outputs, including dye transfer, inkjet, laser printing, and so on, “those who, like Mitchell, insist that there has been a revolutionary, systemic shift between chemical and digital imagery on a formal level, are overstating their case.” Lunenfeld even observed closer alignment between analog and digital photography rather than their alienation from each other. When the resolution of digital imaging improved, it became increasingly harder for the human eye to distinguish the fine details of the chemical processes from the pixelated pictures of electronic systems.15 The AES+F images are high resolution digital images. The Last Riot 2, Tondo series provide fine details, but they have an artificial, stylized look and as a result they seem “too perfect.” This observation fits into Lunenfeld’s argument that the radical transformation would not concern the shift from chemical to digital systems of production but the composition of the output, which changed from discrete photographs to photographs submerged into graphic environments.16 We may conclude that Mitchell and Lunenfeld, like many other scholars, put emphasis in particular on the great variety of possibilities and flexibility in the creation of digital images. Martin Lister articulated this difference by suggesting that while “the traditional photographic image was fixed, its digital version was mutable.”17 Linking this character to the slow production process, Lunenfeld noted that the digital photographic apparatus approached what the photographer and filmmaker Hollis Frampton coined as painting’s “dubitative” process: like the painter, the digital photographer “fiddles around with the

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picture till it looks right.”18 This means that this kind of digital image-making turned photography into a slow medium, an intriguing development, because photography was praised for decades because of its fastness. It is well possible that the artists of AES+F invested more time in creating a picture than many a painter. The flexible and dubitative production process also came with new possibilities for representations of the world. As commented by Fred Ritchin in After Photography (2009), the digital image as a new kind of photography is neither a mirror nor a window, common metaphors used for both painting and analog photography. The digital image would rather be a mosaic or a mirror like the one of Alice, which can lead the viewer to the other side.19 In particular Ritchin’s view on the shift from recording the present to recording the future is interesting for my case study: The photograph in the digital environment can envision the future with enough realism to elicit responses before the depicted future occurs. Whereas analog documentary photography shows what has already happened when it is often too late to help, a proactive photography might show the future, according to expert predictions, as a way of trying to prevent it from happening. . . . Photography, rather than reacting to apocalypse, can now try to help us avoid them.20

This statement certainly applies to the depiction of “the apocalyptic last riot” depicted by AES+F. According to Ritchin, the new digital images would even help us to understand the present world better than analog photographs. He reminded us of the argument by Susan Sontag that analog photography suggested that we know about the world if we accept it as it is recorded by the camera, but that this would be the opposite of understanding because such approach in fact starts from not merely accepting the world as it looks. The “hypertextual photograph,” which even includes links to other points of view both amplifying and contradicting its own, would start a process of understanding, and “given the malleability of the pixel-based photo, appearance is only the starting point.”21 Ritchin thus praised the digital image for its ability to hold up to the spectators’ faces a critical mirror that included warnings for undesirable developments. The history of painting also includes the age-old tradition of holding up a mirror to its spectators, to show them the consequences of unwanted behavior, such as ending up in hell. Ever since the invention of photography, however, we have come to believe its images more than paintings. Interestingly, both media were invented to mirror the world. Hubertus von Amelunxen, like Mitchell,

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has underscored this parallel through bringing up that one of the myths of the origins of painting actually comprised the idea of the technically analogical image. According to Pliny the Elder, painting was born when Dibutades drew the outlines of the shadow of her departing lover, which had been cast onto the wall by candlelight. This so-called skiagraphy, writing with shadows, would also have been suggested by Fox Talbot as a name before deciding to call his new invention photography.22 The history of photography also includes more specific affiliations with painting. An often-neglected aspect is the common rectangular format of photographs. The circular lens of cameras would expectably have led to circular images, but the rectangular cutout was preferred for its relationship with painting. Although most paintings in the history of art were rectangular, circular canvases (and reliefs) were a popular form in the Italian Renaissance. They were called “Tondo,” derived from the Italian rotondo (round). Accordingly, and as reflected by its title, the AES+F’s Tondo series rather refers to that tradition than to the form of lenses of cameras. A comparison with this traditional tondo demonstrates interesting similarities in composition: the symmetrically grouped figures are directed toward the center, while the circular format caused adults to be depicted as sitting or bending forward, in contrast with children in an upright position. Some other relationships with painting in the history of photography concerned painterly aspects considered as either a kind of lyrical addition to a truthful representation, or a “corrected” representation. For instance, the pictorialist photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century aimed for a painterly style of photography through blurredness (which strongly differs from the pinpoint sharpness of the AES+F painting-like digital photographs). And in the nineteenth century, photographers would learn how to add paint to negatives in order to eliminate flaws, to add highlights to eyes in photo portraits, remove or change backgrounds, strengthen contours, and elaborate details.23 From the beginnings of photography, moreover, quite a few black-and-white photographs, given the absence of color, were overpainted, either partly or completely. In these examples the physicality of paintings was added to the physicality of analog photography. The digitization of photography is commonly considered to be a dematerialization of the medium. Printing a digital photograph would only be a matter of adding a processing stage similar to that of its obsolete predecessor. Interestingly, AES+F printed their tondo pictures on canvas to relate to an even older tradition. This is hardly a curious exception. Ann-Sophie Lehmann, in

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“Hidden Practice: Artists’ Working Spaces, Tools, and Materials in the Digital Domain” (2012), has drawn attention to a current development of design software that strives for a perfect imitation of the materiality and even tangibility of traditional artistic tools: The desire for a reconciliation of the senses of vision and touch, . . . is present in the amazingly precise imitation of artistic materials, from different sorts of digital canvas to virtual oil-paint that actually needs to dry, to applications simulating the direct/immediate touch and feel of virtual paint and brushes in 3D environments.24

In debates on the various differences or similarities between analog photography, digital images, and painting there appears to be most consensus on the differences between conventions in genres. In “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography” (1995), Lev Manovich opposed the realistic tradition to the traditions of montage and collage, which for ages have been two traditions of visual culture and which persisted in such photographic genres as portrait photography versus advertisements. As a result, the former category did not change very much when digital manipulation became quite easy. Martin Lister concluded his essay “Photography in the Age of Electronic Imaging” (2004) by qualifying that “images that have their source in a camera lens pointed at objects and events in the world and with a destination in the ink on a printed page are clearly as numerous and culturally important as ever.”25 In this essay, he also argues that the ability to manipulate and synthesize elements of photographs appears to strike at the heart of certain kinds of photography, such as documentary photography, photojournalism, and other forms of straight photography, where the “truth value” and photography’s usage as evidence and testimony are extremely important. Conversely, the recent technological changes have hardly been experienced as a threat in genres such as advertising, fashion, or art photography.26 As mentioned earlier in my analysis of Last Riot 2, Tondo #22, some critics associated the series with fashion or advertising photography. The picture certainly belongs to art photography as well. Although it does not comprise any references to family or tourist photography, or to documentaries or straight images, the subject matter does allude to photojournalism or war photography. In the next section I demonstrate that this genre has a long history of tensions between straight and manipulated image-making. In this section, I touched on some relevant positions in debates on digital imagery’s relationship with painting to motivate my labeling pictures such as Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 as painting-like digital photographs. This conceptual

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preference will also explain my disagreement with Timothy Druckrey’s claim that electronic images no longer legitimate anything photographic, because these “post-photographic” images would not be concerned anymore with verification, classification, or any of the systematic epistemologies of the camera.27 Conversely, my case studies offer support to Martin Lister’s statement that the digital image still refers to other photographs: “In fact the whole motivation in the generation of many such images is that they carry the authority and information of a photographic image.”28 He even argues that “digital imaging software can be a means of understanding photographic representation and the nature of photographic ‘language.’ Digital technology became a critical tool which could demonstrate in practice what had been argued in theory for some three decades: that photographic images are themselves special kinds of constructions.”29 The arguments in the next sections will endorse this view.

Parasitizing on the “Truthfulness” of War Photography and Artistic Truth in History Painting In the early eighteenth century, the art critic Roger de Piles identified three categories of artistic truth in his Cours de peinture par principes (1708). Simple truth, at the lowest level, pertained to presenting the mere appearance of things, reproducing reality in a most immediate form. At a more elevated level there was ideal truth, implying a selective combination of a variety of beautiful parts in order to obtain a desired effect, rather than merely reproducing reality. Regarding history painting, this meant that the artist had to filter historical events, and to choose appropriate orderings and poses that were instrumental in idealizing sheer reality. As a result, at this level the concern about historical truth was subordinated to the underlying message that the artist wanted to communicate. The highest level of artistic truth identified by de Piles was perfect truth, which should be the goal of each painter. He defined this category as “a simple truth that carries so beautiful a probability” that it would appear “more true than truth itself.” The latter category seemed to aim at a symbolic level, more removed from reality.30 This contemplation by de Piles is included in Images of War and War of Images (2008), a volume edited by Karine Hildenbrand and Gérard Hugues consisting of case studies on visual representations of war. Images of war are discussed as the most contested images when it comes to their truth claim. Most of the visual

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witnesses discussed by the contributors pertain to historical military events. Some observations, such as that the photographer and the editor had to submit themselves to cheating with reality in order to satisfy the public’s demand, turning manipulation more commercial than ideological,31 might be applicable more broadly than only for the postcards of war from about 1900. The very specific case-related observations in the volume by Hildenbrand and Hugues make this source less applicable for my arguments than the somewhat more general contemplations by Wendy Kozol in Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (2014), in which she critically approaches the tensions between spectacle and empathy provoked by looking at military atrocities. Kozol argues that even the images by the photojournalists who attempted to provide alternative reports of extreme vulnerability outside combat zones remained connected to dominant paradigms of witnessing humanitarian crisis and victimization, mainly because they depended on the genre to be comprehensible.32 An important concept in Kozol’s argument is “ambivalence,” either in reference to contradictions and tensions immanent in representation, or with respect to her understanding of how discursive practices may stimulate frictional conditions of witnessing.33 Another crucial paradox at stake in lens-based images of war was identified by Caroline Brothers in War and Photography (1997). On the one hand, war photography magnifies the ability of photographs to engage spectators in a kind of mourning for past innocence, even the sense of their own mortality. On the other hand, the camera’s cool, mechanical gaze contradicts the passions of conflict.34 Judging by the tension observed by Brothers, one might wonder whether the medium of painting, with its long history of visually communicating emotions, could be more appropriate for presenting images of war. Remarkably, in his essay “Picturing the Oslo Process: Photography, Painting and the Belated Occupation” (2008), Simon Faulkner argues the opposite. On the basis of some of Israeli artist David Reeb’s paintings, he demonstrates that painting appears to be an appropriate medium to reflect critically from some distance on the experience of looking at photographs forming the dominant mediations of political situations. As he notes, one of the advantages of painting over lensbased images would be its lack of an indexical or strong denotative relationship to its referent. Paintings do not give the illusion that the viewer has access to the real. This means that it would be harder to provide critical commentary through photography than through the manifestly constructed nature of painting, which might easier generate a space for reflection upon the ways conflicts have been framed in the media.35

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Reeb’s series of paintings Let’s Have Another War (1997) were based on press photographs of the so-called Tunnel War, which took place in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1996. Each painting combines contrasting press photos and texts. Some paintings even presented contact sheets in which series of photo shots were presented next to each other. Thus, the spectator is stimulated to reflect on the choices made by the press photographer during shooting and the selection process afterward. The large size of the paintings, about 160 × 140 centimeters, allows for easy comparison of the images. Faulkner concludes that if the ability of press photos to explain political events was defined by how they were presented in communication channels, such as newspapers, the context of the art world enabled contemplation on multi-interpretable images.36 If Faulkner considered painting an interesting medium to evoke reflection on visual representation in conflict photography, Paul X. Rutz even went one step further by suggesting the idea of painting as journalism in “What a Painter of ‘Historical Narrative’ Can Show Us about War Photography” (2010). Rutz bases his argument on Jean Baudrillard’s provocative statements in his “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (1995), claiming, for instance, that faster and more information did not lead to clearer understanding of what happened in the Gulf War. To present a contrast to this tendency of faster and more information about war, Rutz discusses several watercolors made by the American artist Steve Mumford in Bagdad in 2003, using his camera as an aid in creating his paintings. The watercolors, based on his photographs, were subsequently photographed and adjusted by the use of photoshop. He finally posted the pictures on the internet along with descriptive captions as legitimate news reports from the battlefield. In his conclusion, Rutz argues that “we can present Mumford’s project as an effort—frustrating and problematic—that has potential to address Baudrillard’s concerns about the glut of digital media by asking audiences to slow down and look again at a kind of war picture we are not used to seeing.”37 Although this statement pertains to representations of a specific war, it is well possible to apply it to the AES+F images of a fictive riot in the future. In debates about the functions and effects of war photography in our present society, Susan Sontag’s arguments in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) are often addressed. This study is based in her personal search for how to respond to her own experiences. She starts from the assumption that if the horror of war could be made to be sufficiently intense, most people would finally take in “the outrageousness, the insanity of war.” To underscore this postulation, she elaborates on the case study of Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 photo album Krieg dem Kriege! (War against war), which included more than 100 atrocious images of

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the First World War. By 1930, many editions were published in Germany and abroad. Anti-war leagues as well as left-wing writers, artists, and intellectuals predicted that this book would have a decisive influence on public opinion. But, as Sontag concludes, this publication—like other examples from the late 1930s— in no way prevented the outbreak of the Second World War.38 Regarding the present era, Sontag focuses on the avalanche of violent images in television news shows and in newspapers, which due to fast-changing news reports cause images quickly to disappear and fade from view. She also notes that when photographs were more ferocious, their news value would go up accordingly. This in turn would have had the effect of people’s increasing ignorance of violent images, and they would be indifferent in particular when feeling safe. Part of this tendency was also the mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture, such as television, cinema, comics, and computer games. As she argues, imagery that still had a huge impact on audiences about forty years ago was now received quite indifferently by teenagers.39 With respect to my case study of Last Riot, it is interesting to note that this picture obviously refers to violent images but cannot be called a violent image itself. In fact, that lack of ferocity makes the spectator pause to reflect on its consequence for the meaning of the picture. If Sontag seems to have mainly a negative view of the nature and proliferation of violent images, she also addresses various advantages of war photography. In an era of information overload, the photograph, in comparison to television feeds, would have the advantage of providing a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it, because photographs have “a deeper bite.” Moreover, she confirms the importance of the role of photography as witness, because “there is no war without photography,” as Ernst Jünger already observed in 1930.40 In her search for how to deal with images of violence in the future, Sontag included a search for historical examples. With regard to my focus on slow painting, it is interesting that she quoted Leonardo da Vinci, who in the heydays of the Italian Renaissance wrote the following instructions for creating a battle painting, insisting that artists should have the courage and the imagination to show war in all its gruesomeness: Make the conquered and beaten pale, . . . the skin above their brows furrowed with pain . . . and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation . . . let the blood be seen by its color flowing in sinuous stream. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted.41

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This advice culminated in current news photographs, defined by Sontag as violent images. Her main case study from art history is Francisco José de Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The disasters of war), consisting of a sequence of thirty-eight etchings made between 1810 and 1820. According to Sontag, the depicted cruelties were meant to awaken, shock, and wound the viewer. Goya even added captions such as: “This is bad,” “This is the worst!,” “One can’t look,” “This is too much!,” “Why?”42 Unlike Reeb’s painted reproductions of straight news photos, Goya himself chose the composition and components of his images. Early war photography from the late nineteenth century was partly composed as well, but this convention was gradually superseded by a preference for straight war photographs. Accordingly, Sontag observes that “the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seemed on its way to becoming a lost art.”43 In this light, it is possible to consider the constructed digital images by AES+F as exaggerated examples of the reinvention of this practice. In the last passage of her book, Sontag addresses her final question: “is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war?” by giving an elaborate description of a picture by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, which to her is a thoughtful example of an anti-war image as well as the antithesis of a document. Wall’s 1992 huge transparency in a light box,44 entitled Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) (Figure 3.2), shows thirteen Russian soldiers in bulky winter uniforms,

Figure 3.2  Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), 1992, transparency in light box, 229 × 417 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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who are scattered over a bare hillside. In fact, they are models that pose as “dead” soldiers on a slope constructed in Wall’s studio. The title of the picture referred to an event that happened in Afghanistan. The artist never went there but was informed about this war episode through the mass media. According to Kozol, contemporary artists often remained involved in the dominant visual regimes that they criticized. The artworks she discussed in Distant Wars Visible deal with historical witnessing by means of imaginary processes of remembering, retelling, and reconstructing traces of conflicts from the past.45 Although she does not mention Wall’s picture, her observation is well applicable to his work. In reflections on his artworks, Wall showed his awareness of the ambiguities associated with his work. In his art he has pursued a contemporary relationship with reportage quality—as assumed to be unique to photography—in the sense that his photographs may strongly remind people of snapshots without his pretending them to be snapshots.46 This implies that spectators may initially look at his photographs on the basis of expectations related to photojournalism, while closer reading of the pictures will subsequently reveal that in fact they were meticulously composed. An unwanted consequence of this shift in perception, according to Wall, is that the viewer might get the feeling “that the construction contains everything, that there is no ‘outside’ to it the way there is with photography in general.”47 In particular in photojournalism, the image is obviously a fragment of a greater whole which cannot be experienced directly, while awareness of an outer-frame presence may significantly contribute to the meaning of the image. Wall has expressed his worries that spectators who assume that his pictures lack such “outside” will miss the importance of it for understanding his work.48 Building on this observation, it is interesting to apply Wall’s thoughts on the supposed lack in constructed images of a relationship with the outer world in the form of outer frame to paintings. For example, the outer-frame reality of a painting can be seen as that which was left out by the artist, so as to widen the common focus on what is present. Wall’s reflection on the loss of framing as drawn boundaries may also be approached from other perspectives. Victor Burgin, in “The Image in Pieces: Digital Photography and the Location of Cultural Experience” (1996), has argued that while photography in the nineteenth century emerged at a time when the West was drawing boundaries (e.g., the 1884 Berlin Conference, where Western nations divided Africa among themselves as their colonies), digital photography arose in a period of shifting or disappearing boundaries. In other words, not only geopolitical borders vanished but also borders within (and between) media.49 Most literally, this comment relates to Wall’s remark that computer

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technology mainly helped him to soften the boundaries between “the probable and the improbable.”50 More in general, the boundaries between the inner- and outer-frame worlds in pictures such as Dead Troops Talk and Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 are not just a matter of transcending a photographic frame. The issue is more complicated, and such boundaries call to mind Ritchen’s aforementioned definition of the digital image as a mirror like the one of Alice: one that can lead the viewer to the other side. More specifically regarding the role of computer technology in the construction process, Wall has argued that although it provided new possibilities and approaches, these digital montages often resulted into a “very everyday, very ‘probable’ scene,” rather than overtly fantastic images.51 This statement reminds one of de Piles’s definition of the highest level of artistic truth as “a simple truth that carries so beautiful a probability.” Mentioning Dead Troops Talk as a case in point, Wall explains that subtle special effects were applied to create what he called a “philosophical comedy,” in which the spectator is invited into a “field of reflection in which humanity appears as infinitely imperfectible.”52 The constructive character of Dead Troops Talk is underscored by the paradox that, at first sight, one sees corpses of soldiers, but, upon a closer look, some of them appear to chat with each other. The blood on the bodies is fake, and so are other injuries. Severe injuries, such as missing limbs (e.g., the partly amputated hand of the man sitting in the foreground at the right-hand side), were digitally manipulated. In fact, the viewer fails to get a handle on the situation, which may evoke the awareness that one cannot imagine war, nor understand it, if one did not experience it. In the same vein, the spectator will not be drawn into Last Riot, which runs counter to the aim of war films. In this digital painting, war and conflict are presented as unnatural and inhuman, something of which human beings need to be aware. The aforementioned work by Jeff Wall refers to a specific military conflict in the past, which used to be a common convention in history painting. Conversely, AES+F’s The Last Riot series refers to a fictive battle, which is supposed to take place in the future, and this is a theme in paintings of fictitious events. In line with this difference, Dead Troops Talk shows horrible things that already happened, whereas the casualties in Last Riot still have to become real. If to painters both temporal situations merely involve two different genres, for photojournalists the sense of being too late to witness has always been a factor, if not a source of frustration. Last Riot plays with this issue by being on the scene “too early.”

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Both artworks share a kind of beauty. As observed by Sontag, it is allowed for gruesome pictures of war made by artists to look beautiful (either in the sublime, awesome, or tragic category of the beautiful), but this commonplace did not agree well with images taken by cameras because it is seen as heartless to find beauty in war photography.53 Wall and AES+F produced digital manifestly posed and manipulated “war” photographs, which provide them an in-between position. A highly informative source for understanding how both case studies relate to history painting is History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art. In the introduction, David Green and Peter Seddon explain that the term “history painting” refers to a complex genre of art, which can be traced in art history from the post-Renaissance to the present time and which comprises some continuing characteristics as well as an unstable set of redefinitions. The genre of history painting developed in particular through theoretical discussions among French academicians in the late seventeenth century and throughout the next century, reaching maturity toward the beginning of the revolutionary period in the late eighteenth century.54 Green and Seddon base their characterizations of history painting on writings by de Piles and texts by apologists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds. The evident formal characteristic of being large in scale and grandly public is certainly applicable to my case studies as well. Regarding the composed nature of these pictures, it is interesting that history painting often relied on a combination of drawing from the living model and sketches from plaster casts of antique statuary, collected and installed in academy studios, as well as on copying images, such as prints of canonical Renaissance masterpieces.55 The convention of drawing from the living model is echoed by Wall and AES+F by their taking photographs of models in their studios, while they combine their appropriation of pictures from the past with images from mass media. Some other features of traditional history painting rather emphasize differences with contemporary works. Most prominent in the tradition is the required emphasis on the significant moment or action in the story chosen. Moreover, there was the moral dimension in which viewers had to perceive virtue, both relevant to their own time and as something universal. Dead Troops Talk and Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 do not represent a significant moment from a specific story, even though Wall provided details about time and location. If the “last riot” is even less specified, it seems to represent a moment from a story about “the values, vices, and conflicts of contemporary culture in the global sphere.”56 Their stories

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are certainly open to multiple interpretations. A characteristic of their subject matter is confusion, which is exactly that which had to be avoided in the past. Moreover, an overtly moralistic or didactic intention is absent. However, intentional or not, both pictures definitely draw the attention of spectators to the mediation of violence in mass media, and this can be seen as a didactic aspect of these artworks. And what about the focus in academic practice on ideal forms, included in de Piles’s second category of artistic truths? Wall’s picture ironically presents the beauty of heroic soldiers, while AES+F continues the aim of ideal forms in the beautiful young bodies depicted. In reviews of their work, however, their extreme beautification is interpreted as critique on commercials and other mass media.57 Both pictures, in referring to a long history of pictures displaying ferocity, also evoke the question of why human beings not only turn to violence but also like to look at it. This is also an issue Sontag struggled with. Although she explicitly articulated her abhorrence of having to look at violent images, she argued that human beings generally like to see something ghastly. That humans have an appetite for sights of degradation, pain, and mutilation appears to have been taken for granted by Plato already. Furthermore, Sontag referred to Edmund Burke, who partly based his theory of the sublime on the notion that people like to look at images of suffering.58 Even more specific, with regard to the aggressive poses of younglings in Last Riot 2, Tondo #22, Doris Kessler’s question comes to mind of why children turn to violence. One of the reasons she brought up is longing for power over others. Her subsequent question is whether war is an expression of human nature. Admitting that aggression belongs to human nature and that enjoying destruction and violence would even be a primordial feature, she suggests that the question should be how to deal with our inclination to aggression.59 The latter concluding remark reminds us of the persistent concern in our present society on whether or not certain violent images or images of victims should be published. A striking example in relation to the AES+F pictures, including the Last Riot series, involves their choice to depict children in white underwear, as discussed by Elana Zaitseva. She notes that they appear in their pictures from 2001 on already, probably to stress their innocence and “neutral” identity, if we consider this basic garment as almost universal at the moment. Yet the interpretation of this motif radically changed on September 1, 2004, when terrorists took hostage hundreds of staff and pupils in a school in the Russian town of Beslan. The hostages were herded into the school’s gym, where they were stripped to their underwear. Finally, over 300 hostages were killed, among them about 170 children. Some children, who had managed to

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escape or were released on several occasions, were photographed while fleeing in their underclothes. At the time, media were criticized for publishing images of these traumatized children.60 After having read Zaitseva’s essay, it is hard to ignore this association when looking at the young girl with the baseball bat in Last Riot 2, Tondo #22, produced in 2005. This association turns a picture of a nice little girl into a kind of war image. This actually is the main paradox in this artwork: the obvious constructed nature of the digital image presents war and violence as inhumane, while the fact of children using common objects as weapons to “play war” makes us painfully realize that war is not as inhumane as we would like it to be. Finally, regarding the issue of the “truthfulness” of images, it is relevant to consider Florian Rötzer’s argument in “Re: Photography” (1996), claiming that, in the end, our visual perceptions, too, like photographic images, are only models of a world which is not directly accessible to us. These models also depend on interfaces and are guided by interests. In fact, we may arrive at this insight merely through the irritations potentially triggered by manipulated digital images.61 It is well possible to characterize the untruthfully looking picture by AES+F as quite “nonhuman,” certainly in comparison to common journalistic photographs. But if in the past straight photographs were associated with the presence of a photographer on the spot, direct recording of events is nowadays increasingly associated with images taken by surveillance cameras. In “The Creative Power of Nonhuman Photography” (2016), Joanna Zylinska states, inspired by Ritchin, that although nonhuman (aspects of) photography produce inhumane practices, it is also precisely through these nonhuman aspects, such as in CCTV recordings, that photography can explore the “posthuman.”62 However, AES+F opted for an opposite approach to scrutinize “posthuman” aspects marked not by nonhuman photography but by manipulation of images by humans. This is of course an age-old strategy of painters. Based on this and other insights provided in this section, we can conclude that fictive constructions in painting-like digital war photographs may contain “realist” and “truthful” reflections on “probabilities” of war and violence, which potentially give rise to critical observations regarding representations of war in mass media. Notwithstanding this observation, it is hard to deny Sontag’s conclusion: that these pictures will not prevent any future violence. However, looking away from the subject of war images is neither an option for this kind of artists, and their pictures will certainly outlive most of the war images in mass media. The artistic images may even come to serve as visual testimony of topical debates on these issues.

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Space-time Compressions and “Fakeness” in Constructed Digital Photographs A group of people has gathered around a newborn child (Figure 3.3). At first sight, it looks like a pleasant maternity visit, where the visitors take pictures of the baby. At a closer look, though, the attending children and adults appear to be mainly interested in their own screens. None of them is looking directly at the central subject. They are all involved in their individual activity with their digital device. The only “interaction” taking place is the reflecting light of the device on their faces. This photograph is part of a series entitled Strangers in the Light (2009), consisting of seventy photographs that all present people absorbed by digital devices. The French artist Catherine Balet describes her series as “an exploration of the intricate relationship between man and technology. . . . The images are lit exclusively with the devices amplifying the feeling of a 21st-century chiaroscuro and suggesting connections to old masters.”63 And, more specifically, as she comments about the people in her pictures, “My models are reliant on the digital prosthesis. They contemplate their life through a screen, hypnotized by another place.”64 But not only the people present in the photograph perceive the world through the mediation of their digital device; also Balet herself was

Figure 3.3  Catherine Balet, Strangers in the Light #2, 2009, Lambda c-print on Kodak Endura metallic paper, 73 × 101 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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there, in her studio, with her camera to take photographs, watching her own screen. And, we, spectators, finally look at the result, which only existed on her computer screen and was presented to us as a large print. Even though this photograph is all but a war photograph, one can find some striking resemblances with AES+F’s Last Riot 2, Tondo #22. In both works a group of seven people is positioned toward the center of the picture, but they do not interact with each other. A child dressed in white draws the attention of the viewer—as apparently representative of the symbolic tradition in Western culture of the “innocent creature.” As confirmed by Balet’s quote, her photographs are inspired by paintings from Western art history, both in composition and in chiaroscuro effects of light. Similarly, the pictures by AES+F can be linked to traditions of the old masters, who under the guise of allegorical or biblical evocations created compositions that included allusions to the world in which they lived. This observation is also applicable to Strangers in the Light, which continues a long tradition of paintings situating the birth of Jesus in a contemporary setting. Balet, unlike AES+F, even trained and worked as a painter before she switched to photography. In that period of transition she became interested in sociological issues, in particular the transformations of society and searches for identity.65 The Strangers in the Light photographs are digital, but less manipulated than the aforementioned digital images. They can nevertheless be called slow digital images, as a result of “slow,” precise staging and the slow spectatorship needed to take in all details. What seems absent in the images by Balet is the direct relationship with journalistic photography as found in Reeb’s and Wall’s pictures (and the reference to it in the AES+F project). But professional journalism is increasingly turning into citizen journalism, with amateurs who gather and disseminate news and news photographs, and Balet’s work certainly relates to this development. On social media these amateurs mainly post commonplace images. Here, too, just another baby was born, even though some spectators will immediately relate the picture to images depicting the birth of Jesus. Space as well as time are compressed in this photograph. The minds of the models who are absorbed by their screen are located in other spaces than their physical bodies. And their devices refer to the present day, but allusions to traditional paintings relate the present to the past. As Balet has said about this issue, “it questions how the ubiquity offered by technology has opened to a new space time in a compressed reality somewhere between past, present and future.”66 Remarkably, Jeff Wall has mentioned in an interview that for a long time such a compressed reality was possible in painting only. He calls it part of

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the poetry of traditional painting to create the illusion that the picture displayed a single moment in which past, present, and future were simultaneously present, and even played with each other or clashed, adding that in his computer pictures he was also able to create an assemblage of elements as a pictorial unification.67 Compressions of moments through time may be associated with shortening of time, rather than with characteristics of slowness, such as delay and deceleration. However, Lutz Koepnick’s understanding of slowness as extended structures of temporality, which make us pause and experience time in all its heterogeneity and difference, underscores that the complex structure of temporality in the compression of time delays perception, in a way that is quite similar to the consequences of simultaneous adaptation.68 As discussed in the first chapter, Lindiwe Dovey argued that simultaneous adaptations are able to display the present and the past simultaneously, thereby activating histories as well as memories. Compressions of various spaces and moments through time call for “slow unpacking,” as in the case of the intermedia discussed here and much in the same way as how we prepare instant pudding for consumption—by adding water slowly. Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 also contains space and time compressions. The picture includes references to different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, but also to objects and creatures from long ago, such as historical airplanes and prehistorical animals. It is striking that those historical influences make the work look like quite a few video games. Video games, however, look even more like science fiction films, which not only include wars, but also apocalyptic views of our world. These apocalyptic scenes in various sci-fi films served as basis of Ruins in Reverse (2014), a digital photo collage, created by the Dutch artist Persijn Broersen and Dutch-Hungarian artist Margit Lukács as site-specific work along the escalator in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, measuring 56 meters (Figure 3.4). Reviews of this artwork particularly stress that filmmakers appear to struggle with views of apocalypses in the future. Burned down buildings, cars, and nature look like familiar present-day images of war.69 The long compilation makes one aware of clichés used not only in sci-fi movies but also in mass media, and some ruins in fire even look like depictions of hell in age-old paintings of biblical themes. In fact, only the futuristic spaceships indicate the origins of the appropriated images. The automatic way in which the viewer on the escalator passes by the images may afford the long image a rather filmic appearance. However, the look at the whole image from the start and the practice of passing by render the viewing experience into one that is more related to passing large wall paintings or

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Figure 3.4 Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács, Ruins in Reverse, 2014, c-print, 5600 cm (detail). Courtesy of the artists.

mosaics, as were quite common already in Byzantine and medieval churches. This similarity may also be applied to another striking aspect of Ruins in Reverse. The work is accompanied by a piece of music, composed for this work by Natalia Dominguez Rangel. Looking at still artworks while listening to music has become unusual in museums, but was common in churches. Moreover, in nineteenth-century panoramas the visual illusion of the panorama painting was often strengthened by the use of sound, lighting effects, or smoke.70 In the late twentieth century, as reaction to the isolated visual experiences in the white cube museums of modern art, and in line with the introduction of video art, artists started to experiment with sound accompanying still images. For instance, South African visual artist Beezy Baily and British composer and musician Brian Eno together created so-called sound paintings to which music was added, presented by means of headphones next to the picture. At the Venice Biennial of 2015, they presented a series of these abstract paintings along the grand staircase of the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music. It was possible to try out both experiences: looking with music at these sound paintings and doing so without music. In general, the music added various specific “moods” to the pictures. In Ruins in Reverse, which could only be viewed while hearing the music, the unmelodious “collage” of sounds added an uncanny mood. The Last Riot project included not only circular stills and panoramas but also an animated video, including sound. As a result of the sci-fi movie-like experience, this video comes across as closely related to Ruins in Reverse.

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Reflection on the consequences of adding sound to a photograph or painting cause us also to rethink the concerns of perceiving silent images. From this perspective it is interesting to note Jeff Wall’s comment on references to talking in his Dead Troops Talk. The title and the picture not only address the paradox of dead soldiers who are talking but also the impossibility to hear people talk in a silent image.71 It makes us realize as well that the histories of painting and photography, which include many representations of actions, hardly contain depictions of “talking people.” In Ruins in Reverse, spaces from various filmsets and fictive locations are compressed, while different periods of time are combined, both fictive times and various years in which the films were recorded. Upon realizing that one is perceiving shots from movies instead of “real” war images, the term “fake” might come to mind. Regarding my comparative research of digital photography and painting, Clive Scott brought up an intriguing comparison between the meaning of the term “fake” in the field of photography and painting. With regard to a painting, it is common to use it for a forgery, which involves another producer than assumed. As a result, it concerns the relationship between painting and painter. A photograph is usually called fake when the image is manipulated, or, in other words, when the relationship between image, camera, and referent differs from what one expects from a straight photograph.72 This distinction appears to provide an interesting insight into the manipulated photographs under discussion. For instance, Mary Warner Marien discussed Wall’s Dead Troops Talk as example of post-photography, which serves as the last category in her Photography: A Cultural History (2002). Mentioning that computer-assisted image production did not completely supersede traditional skills, she argued that this might explain why critics praised Wall for having reinvented painting in the 1990s. It is striking however, that in this context she also mentioned “the obviously fake blood that stains the clothing of troops” as a clear clue to the image’s artificiality.73 This fakery relates to its meaning in photography. When perceiving a painting no one would think of the blood on victims as fake. And if one may think from a distance that one is looking at an enlarged war photograph, looked at from up close Wall’s picture will be judged as fake. But if we approach Dead Troops Talk and Ruins in Reverse as kinds of paintings (or even as stills from cinema), the term “fake” does not seem relevant. Observing these pictures from a spectatorship positioned in 2018, it is interesting to note that the term “fake” has recently gained additional connotations. After the inauguration of American president Donald Trump, the phrase “fake news” entered the debates about the “truthfulness” of images and

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information in mass media. If in the past consumers of news shows were warned by critics not to take the news “for granted,” spectators (including this president) now tend to call any news (including “fact checkers”) fake that does not suit their own viewpoints. In Ruins in Reverse above all the inserted stills from animation cartoons look like fake, manipulated photographs. Recently, an increasing number of tools have become available, in particular for amateurs, to turn digital photographs into painting-like images. As noted by Mitchell in 1992, image-processing software made it possible to program a cursor to behave like a brush, pencil, pen, or eraser.74 Nowadays, some apps even provide the option to turn your photograph into a specific favorite painting style, such as cubist, expressionist, or impressionist, only through one click. It brings to mind the famous late nineteenth-century Kodak slogan: “you press the button, we do the rest.” Interestingly, the transformations into modernist painting styles most often still reveal the original vernacular photograph.75 In conclusion, I would argue that space-time compressions that have been common in painting for ages also became part of digital manipulated photographs, making both media increasingly converge. However, Dead Troops Talk, Strangers in the Light, Ruins in Reverse, and Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 would definitely be less interesting as paintings created in the traditional way through paint on canvas. Also, these works should not be confused with straight news photographs. By addressing them on the basis of discourses on painting as well as photography, my discussion provided insights into how these artworks deploy the strategy of being obviously composed to stimulate slow spectatorship, but they do so not to the extent that they become completely disconnected from their roots in the relative “truthfulness” of press photography. From the perspective of media studies, war photographs are often called clichés, and quite often the suggestion is evoked that this tendency started with the birth of lens-based media. In this chapter, I have demonstrated that these so-called clichés have roots in the history of painting, where terms such as “pictorial conventions” are used. The artworks under discussion could be linked to the tradition of both history paintings and Christian art. Moreover, the increasing interest for the materiality of the support underscores that the artworks rather continue the physicality of painting than emphasize the immateriality of the numeral codes as basis of digital imagery. The likeness with analog photography differed in the various case studies, but in all cases the photographic aspects appealed to the familiar “truthfulness”

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of press photography, where drastic manipulation is still unacceptable. The complexity of the meaning of “truthfulness,” however, did not have its beginning in the digital age. Throughout the history of painting, truthfulness had different meanings for portraits than for history paintings, and in the latter even various categories of artistic truth were established. In the contemporary works under discussion, truthfulness did not just disappear through manipulation. Social critique appears to be truthful here in the ambitions to stimulate contemplation among spectators about visual communication in society. Accordingly, from the perspective of classical photography theory this chapter’s key works should be called “untruthful” and “fake.” From the perspective of the history of painting they should not be called fake or untruthful. If war photography in mass media and depictions of war in history painting represent wars that took place in the past or are taking place in the present and which, consequently, relate to a specific enemy, it is interesting that Last Riot refers to a riot in an undefined moment in the future and that it does not specify a specific enemy. This observation perhaps underscores that it was often possible to project the “next” enemy (shifting in the Western world from Russia to the Islamic World), but that we are increasingly in the dark about the nature of our future enemies or rebels—which also makes it hard to visualize future apocalypses. Rather than nations or ideological groups, these enemies may be individuals, or so-called lone wolves of any ethnicity. And because we have become quite ignorant of violent images, one may wonder whether the chilly, sanitized, and individualized “silent violence” in the digital manipulated picture Last Riot 2 Tondo #22 of a future riot is more disturbing than the known images of identified wars and riots. Finally, I would like to provide a last comment on this picture’s additional value and meanings to its being a slow painting-like digital photograph, rather than just a slow (history) painting or an analog (war) photograph. In particular because it is a digital image, it stimulates the spectator to reflect not only on sanitized riots, wars, or violence in the present digital age and near future but also on the future development of visual evidence. If for ages we were used to paintings as constructed vehicles of visual information, we have become accustomed to informative straight photographs in photojournalism. An ambivalent picture such as Last Riot 2 Tondo #22 makes us wonder about what the future status of manipulated digital images will be: A continuation of the art history of painting or an extension of photojournalism? Or even a new function as socio-critical pictures warning against the consequences of our present behavior and decisions? This role would definitely contribute to the concept of slow painting as socio-critical medium.

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Notes 1 Bann, Experimental Painting, 138. 2 Explanatory text next to AES+F’s photo series The Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous (1997) in exhibition Kollektsia! Contemporary Art in the USSR and Russia, 1950–2000, Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 2016 to March 2017. 3 AES+F quoted on https​:/​/wh​​iteho​​tmaga​​zine.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/so​​theby​​-s​-in​​stitu​​te​-a​r​​t​ -lon​​don​/4​​95 (accessed January 2, 2017). 4 Kessler in Hochleitner, Krieg der Knöpfe, 51–2. 5 AES+F cited in “A Brave New World; AES+F: Oleysya Turkina interviews AES+F Group” in exhibition catalog AES+F, St. Petersburg, The Ludwig Museum in the Russian Museum, 2006, 10, included on http:​/​/www​​.soth​​ebys.​​com​/f​​r​/auc​​tions​​/ecat​​ alogu​​e​/lot​​.141.​​html/​​2008/​​russi​​an​-co​​ntemp​​​orary​​-sale​​-l081​​10 (accessed January 3, 2017). 6 https​:/​/wh​​iteho​​tmaga​​zine.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/so​​theby​​-s​-in​​stitu​​te​-a​r​​t​-lon​​don​/4​​95 (accessed January 2, 2017). 7 Craw and Leonard, Mixed-up Childhood, 160. 8 Kincaid, scholar in constructions of childhood, in Craw and Leonard, Mixed-up Childhood, 17. 9 www​.americasarmy​.com; suggestion on www​.knollgalerie​.at​/last​_riot0​.html?​&L=1 (accessed January 3, 2017). 10 www​.a​​rtnet​​.com/​​galle​​ries/​​art​-s​​tatem​​ents/​​aesf-​​last-​​riot-​​2​-act​​ion​-h​​alf/ (accessed January 2, 2017). 11 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 20. 12 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 7. 13 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 60. 14 Weibel in Campany, Cinematic, 53. 15 Lunenfeld, “Digital Photography,” 58. 16 Lunenfeld, “Digital Photography,” 59. 17 Lister, “Age of Electronic Imaging,” 298. 18 Lunenfeld, “Digital Dialectics,” 1993, 5–7. 19 Ritchin, After Photography, 70. 20 Ritchin, After Photography, 149–50. 21 Ritchin, After Photography, 76. 22 Von Amelunxen in Von Amelunxen, Iglhaut, and Rötzer, Photography after Photography, 119; Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 1. 23 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 182. 24 Lehmann, “Hidden Practice,” 274. As an example, she refers to Baxter, William, Jeremy Wendt, and Ming C. Lin. 2004. “IMPaSTo: A Realistic, Interactive Model for Paint.” NPAR‘04: Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on nonphotorealistic animation and rendering. ACM June 2004.

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25 Lister, “Age of Electronic Imaging,” 300. 26 Lister, “Age of Electronic Imaging,” 302. 27 Druckrey in Von Amelunxen, Iglhaut, and Rötzer, Photography after Photography, 87. 28 Lister, “Age of Electronic Imaging,” 300. 29 Lister, “Age of Electronic Imaging,” 316. 30 De Piles paraphrased, quoted and commented on by Gérard Hugues in “John Trumbull: painter/historiographer of the American Revolution,” in: Hildenbrand and Hugues, Images of War, 48. 31 Gilles Teulié in Hildenbrand and Hugues, Images of War, 107. 32 Kozol, Distant Wars, 7, 9–10, 58. 33 Kozol, Distant Wars, 11. 34 Brothers, War and Photography, xi. 35 Faulkner, “Oslo Process,” 104. 36 Faulkner, “Oslo Process,” 118. 37 Rutz, “Historical Narrative,” unpaged. 38 Sontag, Pain of Others, 14–16. 39 Sontag, Pain of Others, 18–20, 100. 40 Sontag, Pain of Others, 22, 66. 41 Sontag, Pain of Others, 74. 42 Sontag, Pain of Others, 44–7. 43 Sontag, Pain of Others, 53, 57–8. 44 With respect to my discussion of the added materiality of canvas to the conflict photography by AES+F, Wall’s manipulation of the press photos that lost their specific materiality in the printed newspaper serves as an interesting case: he turned them into physical surfaces of voluminous light boxes. 45 Kozol, Distant Wars, 166. 46 Wall in De Wolf, Jeff Wall, 108. 47 Wall in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 9. 48 Wall in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 9. 49 Burgin in Von Amelunxen, Iglhaut, and Rötzer, Photography after Photography, 30. 50 Wall in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 13. 51 Wall in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 13. 52 Wall in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 21. 53 Sontag, Pain of Others, 75. 54 Green and Seddon, History Painting, 6. See also Chapter 1, where this publication was introduced. 55 Green and Seddon, History Painting, 7. 56 https​:/​/ww​​w​.art​​space​​.com/​​aesf/​​last-​​riot-​​2​​-ton​​do​-17​ (accessed January 2, 2017). 57 See section “Case Study of AES+F.” 58 Sontag, Pain of Others, 96–7.

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59 Kessler in Hochleitner, Krieg der Knöpfe, 54–7. 60 Zaitseva in Craw and Leonard, Mixed-Up Childhood, 161. 61 Rötzer in Von Amelunxen, Iglhaut, and Rötzer, Photography after Photography, 25. 62 Zylinska in Kuc and Zylinska, Photomediations, 207. 63 Balet, Catherine Balet, 7–8; http:​/​/www​​.cath​​erine​​balet​​.com/​​index​​.php?​​page=​​stran​​ gers-​​in​​-th​​e​-lig​​ht (accessed August 18, 2017). 64 Balet, Catherine Balet, 7. 65 http:​/​/www​​.thep​​hotop​​hore.​​com​/c​​ather​​in​e​-b​​alet/​ (accessed August 18, 2017). 66 Balet, Catherine Balet, 8; http:​/​/www​​.cath​​erine​​balet​​.com/​​index​​.php?​​page=​​stran​​ gers-​​in​​-th​​e​-lig​​ht (accessed August 18, 2017). 67 Wall in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 134–5. 68 Koepnick, On Slowness, 3. 69 Ruygt and Van Bracht, On the Move, 21. 70 See also the case study of Javier Téllez’s Bourbaki Panorama in Chapter 5. 71 Wall in interview with Arielle Pelenc in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 10. 72 Scott, Spoken Image, 28. 73 Marien, Photography, 489. 74 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 183. 75 Also some artists turned to the digital brush. Suzanne Hudson (Painting Now, 117) mentions that David Hockney began creating iPhone paintings in 2009 by means of the brush application on his handheld device. These images do no longer include any photographic references, which makes them irrelevant for my research.

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4

Painting Actions Materializing Social Relationships

The slowness of the medium of painting mainly results from its labor-intensive production process. Action painting of the 1950s was the first art movement in Western art history in which artists intended to shift the importance of the painting as final product to the act of painting. However, only after the introduction of performance art in the 1960s did painting become integrated in socio-critical artistic interventions. In recent years, painting has also been inserted into interactive socio-critical art projects. Some of those projects (e.g., by Paweł Althamer and Artur Zmijewski) turned spectators into participants in the act of painting, whereas in some other projects (e.g., by Imran Qureshi) visitors were invited to walk through or over a spatially “expanded” painting. Again other projects have centered on the reverse of the creative act: the destruction or disintegration of “paintings” (e.g., by Ivan Grubanov). These and other kinds of painting performances often included institutional critique as well: a painting was no longer synonymous with a flat picture hung on the wall that circulated as a commodity only. The painting performances interrogated the whole system or mythology of a painting’s conception and production, as well as the channels of its circulation. Specifically, this chapter mainly deals with the results of the purported slowness of delegated painting performances in materializing and visualizing social relationships. As such, this chapter does not so much address “finished” paintings but processes involving painting that do not result in any final object. In 1980, Richard Wollheim wrote that to see a painting as a physical object as well as an illusory image is a necessary condition of seeing a work as a painting, and, remarkably perhaps, this view is still applicable to the works under discussion.1 In other words, the characteristic integration of optical and haptic aspects in paintings continues to play a role in this chapter’s argument. The spectators who participate in a painting’s creation become physically involved in the tactility of paintings, rather than merely experiencing a haptic visuality.2

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If the medium of performance art has usually been discussed as one very different from painting, the volume In Terms of Painting (2016), edited by Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl, addresses the ambivalent history of painting’s relation to the new avant-garde forms of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the included essays provide historical backgrounds for my arguments, even though they mainly focus on abstract painting. Moreover, in the painting actions covered the artists involved continue to be the producers. For studying the active contribution to paintings by the public, particularly Claire Bishop’s anthology Participation (2006) appeared to be a helpful source. Her starting point is the social dimension of participation in contemporary art, the works at issue going beyond performance art in “striving to collapse the distinction between performer and audience, professional and amateur, production and reception. Their emphasis is on collaboration, and the collective dimension of social experience.”3 For her volume Bishop selected texts by philosophers and other theorists of culture, such as Jacques Rancière, next to artists’ texts. Although she hardly addresses painting actions, some of the included texts provide insights into relevant aspects of my case studies. Bishop’s more recent book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) is even more important here, as it addresses the shift from performance art to so-called delegated performance, in which spectators become producers. David Joselit’s “Reassembling Painting” (2015) provides an insightful complementary perspective. After introducing this chapter’s two key works here, I will successively discuss painting as a verb, the spatial expansion of painting, and painting as a social practice. This chapter, in other words, shifts from a focus on visual analysis of a practice to more sustained reflection on the theoretical issues involved.

Two Case Studies: Paweł Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress (2012) and Artur Zmijewski’s Them (2007) A continuous meeting of people who talk by means of creating images instead of words—this was the central action in Polish artist Paweł Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress, a performance staged in 2012 (Figure 4.1). The “congress” took place in the St. Elisabeth Church in Berlin—a location in use for religious services as well as cultural events—and was part of the seventh Berlin Biennale. The church’s walls were covered by white panels and also the floor was covered by a white material. Each visitor was invited to join the discussion through drawing or painting a visual statement on the walls and floors by choosing paint, charcoal,

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Figure 4.1  Paweł Althamer, Draftmen’s Congress, 2012, installation view of project in St. Elisabeth-Kirche, Berlin. Courtesy of Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. © Sandra Teitge.

or any of the other traditional artistic materials available. The assistants would ask participants to react to issues such as current politics, symbols of power, religion, economic disasters, and so on, thereby suggesting that it was perfectly okay to take up a paintbrush and cover images created by others about which one was unhappy. As indicated by Artur Zmijewski and Joanna Warsza, the curators of this edition of the Berlin Biennale, in their announcement of this artwork, “in this project, authorship, hierarchies of expertise, and qualifications are blurred into an enterprise of illustrating excess, which is free and open to all. . . . The use of visual language is democratized in a mass conversation that only looks like an exhibition.”4 Indeed, Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress could be described as an unusual collective painting performance reflecting on social-political issues. Even though painting does not play an important role in this artist’s oeuvre, the project fits into the general characterization of his oeuvre as work that “bears marks of a social, collaborative, participatory art that is concerned less with producing objects than with composing human interactions.”5 This specific project, including painting actions, could be considered an extension—albeit a milder

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Figure 4.2 Artur Zmijewski, Them, 2007, video (PAL), color, sound, 27 minutes. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Courtesy of the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation.

version—of Them, a project executed by Zmijewski in 2007 (Figure 4.2). This project brought Zmijewski international recognition after it was presented as video artwork at Documenta XII. It started by inviting representatives from four Polish social groups with contrasting ideological views to participate in a sevenday painting workshop in Warsaw. The groups he selected were the nationalist All-Polish Youth, left-wing social activists, a young Jewish liberals group, and an elderly Catholic women’s cluster. They were asked to paint murals and banners that represented their idea of Poland, including their values and beliefs, in order to elucidate their disparate beliefs and political convictions to the other participants.6 In between the painting actions the participants passionately discussed their contrasting ideals. In the second session the participants were given T-shirts decorated with the images they had created during the previous workshop meeting. The resulting visual relationship between each participant and his or her ideology, as well as the communal visual appearance of each team, emphasized the conflicting viewpoints dividing the groups. If there was hardly any real interest in each other’s ideas in the first session, the consolidated visual differences further

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diminished mutual understanding. Moreover, Zmijewski encouraged the groups to critique and interrogate each other’s work through instructions such as “If you feel like you don’t like something about this situation you can change it. You can re-edit it, rewrite it, draw it again, destroy it, or add something.”7 The participants started adding to the paintings of other groups, and these actions culminated in painting over, and eventually setting fire to and destroying, other groups’ paintings. Interestingly, in these last stages quite a few of them shifted from employing visual imagery to written slogans, suggesting that imagery alone may not be explicit enough in expressing their ideology—an observation in line with my arguments in Chapter 2. Zmijewski recorded the workshop and edited his recordings into a onechannel video of twenty-seven minutes. Reviews of Them and similar projects by him do not address the work as film or video art, however. For instance, film critic Jakub Majmurek emphasized that these projects took place beyond the film space, as “live experiments,” in an encounter of participants and the artist.8 Zmijewski himself described his working process by claiming that he recorded situations he “provoked and set in motion.”9 Like in anthropology he tried to study, describe, and understand human behavior and ritual, rather than judging or evaluating people.10 (I will discuss his role as initiating artist in more detail elsewhere in this chapter.) Majmurek mainly emphasized that Zmijewski explored how tools of political expression other than striking, voting, and street protest can be put into people’s hands.11 In the MA thesis Zmijewski wrote at Warsaw University in 1995, entitled A Favorite Theory of Art, he provided an important theoretical foundation for his later work already. The following remark clearly anticipates a project such as Them: “it is difficult to accept oneself—a producer of things (sculptures, objects, etc), after experiencing the art of arranging situations, or after reading a fragment like ‘creation is something other than arranging forms and objects; it is inventing new rules for their arrangement.’”12 As suggested by Zmijewski in this statement, his view on art should be understood in its proper educational and cultural context. According to art critic and curator Joanna Mytkowska, Zmijewski belongs to a generation of Polish artists who experienced a radical transformation of their world in the 1990s, even amounting to a crisis of social communication.13 Zmijewski’s specific interest in arranging social situations seems to have been stimulated by his teacher Grzegorz Kowalski, who was fascinated, according to Jane Farver, by “an ongoing negotiation between personal (inner and artistic) space and common (social or external reality) space” and investigated that through experiments with events occurring between

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two persons after forcing them “to cross barriers of intimacy, untouchability and privacy.”14 Kowalski stimulated his students to execute collaborative activities. In 1994 Zmijewski arranged a series of performances, Monologi do ludzi (Monologs to people), addressing particular people.15 After he graduated, he continued to use performance techniques. Today Zmijewski does not only work as an artist, but he is also art director of Krytyka Polityczna—a highly respected sociopolitical magazine in Poland. In 2007, he published his article “Stosowane Sztuki Społeczne” (Applied social arts) in this magazine. The text is a kind of manifesto, addressing the crucial question of whether contemporary art has any substantial impact on society. The author advocates art that is political without politics, for instance, in a gallery where art can fulfill its political potential outside of more conventional arenas of political contestation, such as the media.16 Krytyka Polityczna also published Polish translations of texts about the relationship between art and society. In the introduction to Jacques Rancière’s book Estetyka jako polityka (The politics of aesthetics), Zmijewski wrote, “The meaning is nothing but a social fact, it takes place between people that communicate and act. The politics of art germinates from this mode of thinking.” This view is in line with his choice to call his own projects “social studios,” motivated by the aim to make art regain its value in society through exposing societal conflicts and display the conditions that cultivate those clashes.17 In fact, both Zmijewski’s Them and Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress were conceived as interactive performance projects and as such they centered on painting as a verb, rather than as a noun. In the next section I address the contribution of this shift toward the meanings of these projects. Moreover, their works materialized as paintings in expanded fields, while making the participants experience paintings as indexes of acts of painting, an issue addressed in greater detail in the subsequent section. Finally, the last section of this chapter will deal with the role of painting in the constructed social spaces on the basis of concepts such as participatory art, delegated performance, passage and transitivity, and relational aesthetics.

Painting as a Verb: From Action Painting to Painting as Socio-critical Action “Painting” is a noun as well as a verb’s present continuous tense. In this respect, as suggested by Tony Godfrey, the English language comes with the assumption that

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the making of a painting is synonymous with the painting itself.18 Film theorist Garrett Stewart described this doubling by indicating that unlike “filming,” the term “painting” is a gerund that on canvas dries into a noun.19 This said, it is also true that nearly all paintings that belong to Europe’s painterly tradition were produced behind closed doors, where more often than not the artist (alone or with help from assistants) will have experienced the painting’s production as a slow and time-consuming process. The public generally perceives the final result only, whereby the moment of its viewing can be interpreted as a mode of sustaining the artist’s effort, as well as adding to the individual painting’s living biography. One of the best-known exceptions to the rule of paintings being created behind closed doors involve the paintings created in front of an audience by the French painter George Mathieu in the late 1950s. In my study on artists’ interest in Japanese arts and Zen Buddhism in that period, I related Mathieu’s painting performances to his interest in Japanese traditions of martial arts, theater, and painting actions in public.20 His emphasis on the action of painting rather than its result was obviously inspired as well by American Action Painting, practiced by artists such as Jackson Pollock. The art critic Harold Rosenberg coined this name for abstract expressionist artists, such as Pollock and Willem de Kooning, in his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters.” He described their working process as follows: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”21 The arena was the artist’s studio, however, where the action took place without anyone watching. Pollock’s working process became publicly known through about 7 films and some 500 photographs taken by Hans Namuth in the artist’s studio. If in my previous chapters photography played a crucial role as integral part of paintings or even as alternative painting technique, in this chapter the slowing factor of photography (and moving images) in painting basically consists of extending the time of the painting by including the visualization of the preceding production process. In “Jackson Pollock, Painting, and the Myth of Photography” (1983), Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock have drawn attention to the fact that Namuth’s published photographs were often cropped to make it look as if the artist was closer to the viewer, in order to create a sense of the viewer as being more immersed in the painting process. Orton and Pollock also observe that some of the images were blurred, due to a problem with one of Namuth’s cameras. This serendipitous accident actually contributed to emphasize the experience of motion in the still image.22

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On the basis of these insights, Kristine Stiles has elaborated on the importance of Namuth’s recordings in “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions” (1998), which focuses on action in modern art. According to Stiles, the evolution of action painting into action art—stimulated through the documenting photographs— identified how the hegemony of the stable aesthetic medium of painting shifted toward the unstable medium of the body, adding that, paradoxically, “as the vehicle for the presentation of ephemeral actions, it was also the technological apparatus of reproduction that displaced painted representations of figurative subject matter with photographic ones, stabilizing action in a conventional form.”23 Photography appeared to be the best means to convey the presentational medium of action as alternative for the representational medium of painting. The photographs actually functioned to materialize as images the contiguity from object to action. And showing the body in action as part of the artwork would also emphasize “the interdependence of one human subject (the artist) identified with another human subject (the viewer).”24 The argument of Stiles explains how Namuth’s images added a social and cultural context to the discussions surrounding Pollock’s paintings, after they were published in 1950.25 Mathieu would have been the first artist who realized the powerful potential relationship between painting, photography, performance, and the public, which led him to stage live action painting sessions before a public and to take them as subject of series of photographs.26 In 1957, he created as many as some twenty paintings before an audience in Tokyo. The interest of Mathieu in Japanese martial arts made him congenial to his fellow Frenchman Yves Klein, whose famous painting performances, in which he used his models as paintbrushes, also appear to have been inspired by Japanese martial arts, in this case judo. Following Klein’s instructions, the models pressed their bodies smeared with blue paint to blank canvases. These so-called anthropométries were created during performances before an audience, sometimes even accompanied by a small orchestra playing a symphony of only one note. Most of these performances took place in 1960. In terms of the theme of this book, the painting actions by Mathieu and Klein, as well as by the Japanese Gutai artists,27 seem more related to contemplation on the here and now than to social critique. Painting performances aiming to express both artistic and social critique can rather be found in the 1960s and 1970s in art projects performed by female artists, in which they criticized not only the macho nature of American abstract expressionism but also discrimination on the basis of gender in society. Stiles has expressed a preference for the term “action” rather than “performance” to address these kinds of artworks, because

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the former stresses the difference with objects and relates more directly to “activism” as a term, which includes a sense of political reference, an implicit factor in many actions by female artists.28 Four years before Stiles, Katy Deepwell drew a quite similar conclusion in her 1994 essay “Paint Stripping,” which even more specifically concerned painting actions. In the 1960s and 1970s, in her view, the theory and practice of painting by female artists shifted from the notion of “personal” expression toward theories of communication, analyses of the signifying field, and critique of the politics of representation.29 As early as in 1961, the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle started her series of Tirs (Shootings). The works consisted of rectangular supports covered with little bags filled with differently colored paint. The surface was covered with a blank canvas. The artist finished the work in a public performance by shooting with a rifle at the canvas. The paint splashed out of the holes. At some sessions, people in the public were even invited to participate. The final paintings could be interpreted as “bleeding” artworks or abstract expressionist paintings. The former association was related by some critics to de Saint Phalle’s references to violence and paternalistic repression in religion and politics, as well as the memory of the Second World War. The latter was associated with a critique of the male art world, to which it was hard to get access for women.30 Isabelle Graw, in her essay “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success Medium and the Value of Liveliness” (2015), has argued that art forms such as performance generate a stronger bond between artist and product than a painting. A performance cannot exist without a performer, whereas in painting the person and the product remain two entities.31 Even though Niki de Saint Phalle was at the center of her painting performance, she did not converge with her painting. This unity, in fact, did take place in American artist Carolee Schneemann’s series of Eye Body (1963). In these works, she placed her paint-smeared naked body at the center of painted panels, to become an integral part of it, as if she reclaimed the female nude. She performed not only the role of the image but also that of the image-maker.32 Regarding this action, Schneemann has made the following comment: “Covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, . . . I establish[ed] my body as visual territory,” marking it as “an integral material” within a dramatic environmental construction of mirrors and painted panels.33 An explanation of the title of this artwork can be found in her personal notes from 1963, in which she stated that “the body is in the eye,” because visual sensations would take hold of the whole body, and bring the total personality into excitement.34 Schneemann mainly executed these kinds of painting performances in her studio and displayed them in the form of

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photographs. She also made use of film, a medium she described as a moving aspect of painting.35 Schneemann also presented some public performances, sometimes together with Fluxus artists, in which paint played a role. But a performance before a public in which the painter and painting most literally converged was presented by the Japanese Fluxus artist Shigeko Kubota. She performed her Vagina Painting at the 1965 so-called Perpetual Fluxus Festival in New York. By means of a brush with red paint, fastened to her underpants, she squatted over a large sheet of paper and produced a kind of “action painting,” an evident allusion to abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock. De Saint Phalle, Schneemann, and Kubota used “neutral” paint in their feminist painting performances, even though the latter suggested that the red paint she used was menstruation blood. A more unambiguous gender component in the use of painting materials was put forward by Caribbean/ American artist Janine Antoni, among others, who used hair dye as paint. In her 1993 performance Loving Care at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, she soaked her hair in the hair dye, subsequently mopping the gallery floor with it. In this performance, she addressed the stereotype of women obsessed with cosmetics, as well as that of the job of cleaning woman. Yet at the same time she presented herself as a female alternative to the male action painters. Thus far, I discussed some painting performances from the early 1960s in which, notably in the public feminist painting performances, the artist and painting fused in order to discuss gender issues in art and society. The role of the spectator remained a passive one however. Typically, the perception and “the experience” of a painting by the spectator have amounted to being passive activities from a distance, due to the physical space between the painting and the viewer. This asymmetric relationship of the active painter versus the passive viewer has been critically addressed—and caricatured—in American artist Leidy Churchman’s performance series Painting Treatments (2009–10). Quite exceptionally, the artist, the painting, and the public physically converge in this performance, which goes much further than the intention on the part of the artist to connect with the audience (Figure 4.3). The artist and his assistant Anna Rosen performed improvisational acts of painting upon bodies of friends and critics they invited. Like in spa resorts, they had to take off their clothes and were covered with towels. Amy Sillman, in “AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II” (2011), has provided a detailed report of how she underwent these “treatments.”36 Pieces of fruits and vegetables were dipped into different colors of paint and rubbed against the covered body parts as well as

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Figure 4.3  Leidy Churchman, Painting Treatments, 2010, video contribution by A. L. Steiner; assisted by MPA and Anna Rosen; two-channel video, color, sound; 19 minutes 54 seconds, and 25 minutes 1 second, looped. © Leidy Churchman, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery and RODEO.

the naked ones. Churchman presented his performances in the form of videos in which we only see the hands or an elbow of the artist. As a result, in these recordings the focus shifts from the performance artist to the experience of the painting performance by the “visitors,” turning the “visitor-paintings” into a time-based art, including the sound of splashes. On the one hand, we may consider Churchman’s Painting Treatments performances as a critical interrogation of art’s assumed healing power (in the view of some modernist critics). On the other hand, the common passive experience of art has been turned into a social event by the artist. Sillman’s report of the painting treatment she underwent clearly underscores the exciting nature of the social event. But, obviously, the final videos turn viewers again into passive spectators at a distance. A way to turn visitors into “physically active users” of paintings was elaborated by the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo in his performances, from about 2013, in which he turned paintings into yoga mats.37 The painted canvases included dirt from the floor of the artist’s studio, while the visitors of the gallery further affected the surfaces by using them collectively with their whole bodies for yoga exercises. If we consider treatments with paint and yoga mats as projects that included a subtle critique of the popularity of “feel good” institutes in our contemporary culture, a more overt political and socio-critical comment can be found in Ivan

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Figure 4.4  Ivan Grubanov, United Dead Nations, 2015, installation artwork in Serbian Pavilion, Biennale Venice. Courtesy of the artist, Loock Galerie Berlin and Ron Mandos Amsterdam.

Grubanov’s painting performance with flags. The project United Dead Nations of this Serbian artist resulted in a floor painting that filled the whole floor of the Serbian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2015 (Figure 4.4). This work evokes a scene, in the words of Jovan Despotovic in the accompanying catalog, “reminiscent of an aftermath of a monumental battle without victors.”38 The first international art exhibition in Venice took place in 1895. From 1907 on, various nations added own pavilions to this recurring international Biennale. The number increased over time, but in the past few decades this international fair had to struggle as well with changing geopolitical situations, resulting in disappearing nations and some split-up nations with new names. Grubanov, who experienced this process in his home country of Yugoslavia, started to collect flags of nations that “disappeared” during the 120-year history of the Venice Biennale. His collection included about 100 flags from, for example, the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, South Vietnam, Tibet, and Yugoslavia. The names of these nations and the years of their existence were presented in relief on the wall in the style of texts on official monuments. Statements by the artist in interviews reveal his interest in collective and cultural memory, as well as in the symbolic values of flags.39 The explanatory text of his project on the website of

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the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade underscores that the installation United Dead Nations aims to establish a dialogue on what “the notion of the nation represent[s] in our post-global times by putting in focus the nations that no longer exist as such, but whose ghosts are still conditioning the geo-spheres they had occupied.”40 The artist treated the flags as painting material through partly disintegrating and “reactivating” them. He poured chemicals and paint over them, and dragged them over or pressed them to the floor. Finally the flags were left as a kind of “heaps of garbage” on the floor. The painting performance was recorded on video and presented in the hall of the pavilion during the exhibition. Even though there was no public present during Grubanov’s painting action, the work is certainly related to performance art, not in the least because quite a few performance artists created video performances in their studio before a camera and without visitors. The artist himself also stressed the importance of the working process rather than the result in his comment to an earlier related project with flags in 2014, mentioning that “the key expressive medium is not the finished painting but the whole ritual of reviving a dead flag, a dead nation, creating new life, renewing an authority that continues to fight for its place in the field of the observable.”41 The visitors were invited to walk over the floor painting, measuring 200 square meters, and along the heaps of flags. This could be considered as a direct physical experience of the painting process. Does this mean that the beholder becomes more immersed in the painting process while scrolling over the floor, exactly copying the movements of the artist, or by watching the artist in action in the video? This complex question calls forth philosopher and literary critic M. M. Bakhtin’s thoughts in his Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1919–21). Bakhtin wondered about the difference between what is now and what is after-now, as well as what kind of connection could bridge that dissimilarity. What is happening in life in the now is compared by Bakhtin with magma before it cools down. And just as lava differs from the rock it will become, the lived experience and the systems for registering such experience are fundamentally different from each other. Stiles has translated this view into the observation that objects that result from actions are also other than the action itself. Bakhtin adds, however, that if lava may vary from the rock it will become, it is also the same as what it was. Applied to the objects used in an action, or which have become relics of one, this means that they extend the implicit temporality experiences in the now beyond the now to the after-now.42 Returning to Grubanov’s United Dead Nations, one may conclude that both the

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video and the installation are different from the artist’s action, just as cooled down rocks are different from the lava, but in essence the two are similar as well. The video as well as the installation presented the now of the artist as extended in the after-now. The temporality and slowness of the painting ritual were extended to the after-now in the complementary combination of moving images and still installation. With respect to the key works of this chapter, the arguments in this section clarify the substantial indebtedness of Zmijewski’s Them and Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress to developments in modern art from action painting to feminist performance art (preferably called actions), as well as to more interactive or more political painting actions. Zmijewski and Althamer established a much closer link between their participants and the artist, and they did so even beyond the traditional division of roles, by inviting them to become critical painters themselves, who visually communicate about relationships in society. At this point in my argument, after this section’s gradual shift in focus from the time of the maker to the time of the viewer/participant and, in particular, to the experience of the spatiality of extended painting in Grubanov’s project, the transition to my focus in the next section is a smooth one.

Painting in the Expanded Field: Entering the Space of Paintings The contemporary artworks discussed in the previous section have in common that the artists did decide neither to present paintings on a wall nor to create them vertically, but to relate them in one way or another to the floor, the ground to which the spectator is physically attached. Because in the history of Western art spectators have almost never been allowed to touch a painting, they were only physically connected to the floor before the wall on which the painting was presented. As a result, it can hardly be called surprising that artists discovered the floor’s potential once they began to explore ways of connecting physically with their public. Moreover, in the age of globalization, Western artists increasingly became interested in artistic practices in other cultures, characterized by more integration of body and mind, as well as by the practice of creating paintings on the floor rather than on easels. Two early examples are the interest of Yves Klein in Japanese art and that of Pollock in Native American cultures. The previous section ended with a discussion of Grubanov’s United Dead Nations, where the visitors literally stepped into and onto the painting.

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This means that their body became literally involved in the process of perception. This position is related to that of the visitor of Land Art projects, as discussed by Eva Ehninger in “Moving Landscape: Walter De Maria’s Spatial Renegotiation of the Pictorial,” included in the volume In Terms of Painting coedited by her. She addressed De Maria’s Land Art projects as expansions that are literally transmissions of pictorial means into space. Visitors of Land Art projects walk within the space of the artwork, where they have to rethink their usual standpoint and perspective toward artworks. One of Ehninger’s descriptions of the experience of the visitor of De Maria’s work could be applied to Grubanov’s floor painting: “it mediates between visual and tactile experience, between viewing and walking, an ambiguity of perception that has no moment of release but exists as an end of its own.”43 A crucial difference is that Grubanov aimed to turn this experience of the visitor into an awareness of becoming part of a sociocritical comment on current society. Still, an intriguing similarity is to be found in the unusual perspective of viewing by the visitors of Grubanov’s floor painting and those of most Land Art projects: they look down onto the horizontal picture on which they are standing or walk through. This perspective is similar to Pollock’s perspective when he made his drip paintings, but the ultimate result was presented to the public in an upright position, hung against the wall. Ehninger addresses the switch from a horizontal artwork to its vertical presentation as the opposition of “horizontality versus tableau.” She explains that De Maria’s preliminary drawings were often created from a vertical perspective. For instance, his project of drawing two parallel, one-mile lines in the desert started as a preliminary sketch of two parallel lines. The 1969 film Two Lines Three Circles on the Desert, which includes this work in its final form, presents it from a horizontal perspective, and, as usual, it is to be projected on a screen in vertical position. The artist recorded the site while standing before and in the work and looking around and forward to the horizon, which turned the parallel lines into converting perspectival lines in a familiar perspective used in landscape painting and photography. The video of Grubanov’s action alternated horizontal views of the artist at work with vertical close-ups. The visitors of the floor painting were forced into the same behavior: to watch the degraded flags and painting they had to look downward, while the names of the forgotten countries on the wall made them look into the distance (literally as well as figuratively toward the distant past). Ehninger relates her observations also to the description of horizontality by Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois as one characteristic of the postmodern “formless.” As they argue, the horizontality of artworks reacted to the modernist

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emphasis on visuality that required a vertical stance, which caused viewers to forget they were standing on their feet.44 Anaël Lejeune, in her contribution to In Terms of Painting, adds to this argument in her reflection on Mel Bochner’s critical use of the medium of painting that by turning the traditional vertical axis of painting to a horizontal plane, the artwork underscores the materiality of the paint as well as the pictorial surface, as they are bound to the floor, due to their subordination to gravity.45 With respect to Grubanov’s installation, the connection to the earth prompted associations such as in the preceding quote by Despotovic on the scene being reminiscent of an aftermath of a monumental battle without victors. All the artworks discussed so far have in common that they exceed the traditional, framed painting. This is why they can be referred to as “expanded painting.” The word “expanded,” especially when used in relationship to the role of the medium in modern artworks, cannot be applied without reference to Krauss’s seminal essay about this issue. After her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in which she focused on new relationships with place after the shift in the domain of sculpture from objects to Land Art projects, the term “expanded” has been applied also to other media, by her as well as by other scholars. In line with her argument, Stephen Moonie, for instance, has claimed that in that same epoch, painting left its modernist, inward-oriented self-reflexivity and pushed “beyond the limits of the frame.”46 Regarding the medium of photography, the expanded field mainly applied to a temporal extension toward slideshows and moving images.47 In the past few decades, when artists’ interest in installation art increased, experiments with spatial forms of photographs and paintings also became a common phenomenon. In How the Materiality of Paint Is Intrinsic to the Work of Art (2013), Sharon Orleans Lawrence writes about The Expanded Painting Show (2007) curated by Paco Barragan. In the context of this show, expanded painting was defined as “the relationship and interaction of painting with other media such as photography, video, installation, sculpture or the digital, and on any kind of support.” Barragan even offered a diagram of different media that sprouted from painting: video-moving painting, installation-space painting, performanceliving painting, sculpture-volume painting, photography-photo painting, and the digital medium-techno painting. According to Lawrence, however, painting itself was in fact not expanded, “but subsumed, diluted and ultimately lost in the other arts.”48 This does not apply to the case studies I selected for this study; after all, they still rely primarily on painting as a way to generate critical reflections and social interactions.

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In her introduction to the volume Contemporary Painting in Context (2010), Anne Ring Petersen addresses the applicability of Krauss’s view on the expanded field of sculpture for painting, emphasizing that Krauss did not aim to expand the discipline of sculpture, but that she sought to identify a new set of relations between sculpture and categories beyond this artistic medium, such as landscape and architecture. Krauss mainly explored the consequences of those new combinations and interrelations, aiming at providing a set of cultural terms and structural principles to work with.49 In line with this observation, the contributions in Contemporary Painting in Context deal with painting as a medium in its interrelationship with contemporary visual culture and consumer culture. German artist Katharina Grosse’s artworks feature as the main case study in this volume. In the late 1990s, Grosse started to use a spray gun to execute paintings directly on built spaces as support for her artworks. The illusionistic space of a conventional painting was exchanged for the physical space of her supports. Subsequently, she would spray various colors of paint in her bedroom, covering clothes, books, her bed, and her writing desk, including little paintings and photographs that laid on top of it.50 As a result, the painting transgressed vertical as well as horizontal planes. The next step in her oeuvre was filling exhibition spaces with piles of pigments, combined with sprayed paint. Motivating the selection of Grosse as key artist, Ring Petersen explains that this artist addresses the drifting perspective of the mobile spectator and transformed the meaning of the support of paintings. In line with the approach of Krauss, Ring Petersen discusses the work of Grosse in relation to architecture, choosing a set of cultural terms and structural principles for analyzing her work, such as the strategy of “leaving the borders of the work of art wide open so that social reality can pour into the work while the work itself seizes control of the surrounding space.”51 To demonstrate the difference with my book’s focus, I briefly address Imran Qureshi’s untitled floor painting from 2013 (Figure 4.5). In the past few years, the Pakistani artist Qureshi has created several floor paintings with red paint in public space in the context of international art exhibitions or festivals. He found inspiration in the style of the miniaturists who worked for the Mughal court (1526–1857); he in fact attended classes for miniature painting in Lahore. Some of Qureshi’s works look quite similar to traditional miniatures, but he adapted the subject and details to contemporary society. At a certain point, he chose to extend the scale of his pictures to specific architectural environments. After brutal bombings in Lahore, he decided to start his floor paintings with splashing red acrylic paint to the floor. In this first stage the connotations with splashes

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Figure 4.5  Imran Qureshi, Blessings upon the Land of My Love, 2011. Acrylic and emulsion paint on brick pavement; site-specific installation, Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah. Photograph: Alfredo Rubio.

of blood that remain after violent attacks are explicit. But in the next stage he reworked all the red stains with detailed brushstrokes, creating ornamental leaves in the style of the miniatures. The artist has explained his intriguing blooms of paint as follows: “these forms stem from the effects of violence. . . . They are mingled with the color of blood, but, at the same time, this is where a dialogue with life, with new beginnings and fresh hope starts.”52 His floor paintings often gain meaning in relationship to the specific site of their display. For both Qureshi and Grubanov, then, their use of the floor as support of their painting involved a significant decision. What would have looked like a decorative mural when presented vertically evoked associations with remnants of violent events displayed horizontally. And as a result of this positioning, the spectators were forced to walk over the pictures to be able to perceive it. The paintings were thus turned into silent sites of societal critique, while as some kind of monumental ruins they encourage contemplation. Conversely, the sites in Zmijewski’s Them and Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress were rather noisy, and the painting supports were mainly positioned upright. Yet the floors were certainly crucial because the social interactions, related to the painting actions, took place there. And either during, in between, or after

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the painting actions, both artists aimed to evoke contemplation among the participants on current issues. Before addressing relational aspects in the social space of interactive painting actions, I like to conclude this section by juxtaposing several different views on “painting space.” Tony Godfrey discussed this term in his Painting Today quite in general, claiming that there are three places for space to expand in or change: in the painting, in our mind, and between us and the painting.53 In “Painting in a Hybrid Moment,” Alison Rowley and Griselda Pollock more specifically state that the space of painting could be found neither strictly within its frame  or as a matter of its surface nor purely external to it, in the exhibition space or critical discourse. They draw attention in particular to paintings marked by a more physical, three-dimensional appearance, as a reaction to processes of dematerialization resulting from the digitization of visual media. These paintings invite spectators to walk along and around the work, also to see the back of the spatially positioned paintings.54 In particular in Zmijewski’s Them, we saw the participants cutting, carrying, turning, and burning paintings as objects that were positioned in the center of the workshop space. The paintings did not only become part of their ideology in a figurative sense but also literally became extensions of the participants’ bodies, their paintings being printed on the shirts they were wearing during the workshop. Rather than the common use of owners who frame their paintings, in Them the paintings seemed to become the frames (as materialized ideological frameworks) of the makers. I became aware of this change in the “painting space” after reading David Joselit’s case study of Jutta Koether’s 2009 exhibition Lux Interior in “Painting Beside Itself ” (2009). Joselit provides a description of her 2009 painting Hot Rod (after Poussin) as positioned in the space of the gallery and combined with a lecture performance by the artist in which she moved around her canvas. This action, according to Joselit, literally turned her body and text into a frame of her canvas.55 He considers this project as a metaphor for visualizing “the transitive passage of action from a painting out to a social network (or body), and from this network back onto painting.” He furthermore indicates how difficult it is to visualize networks, which, in their incomprehensible scale, range “from the impossibly small microchip to the impossibly vast global Internet.” He concludes the essay by saying that when entering into networks, “the body of painting is submitted to infinite dislocations, fragmentations, and degradations . . . these framing conditions cannot be quarantined. Painting is beside itself.”56 Joselit emphasizes that paintings have to behave as objects within social or political

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networks. In fact, this is what literally happened in Zmijewski’s Them and Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress. In the next section, I will explore this social space of their painting in more detail.

Delegated Performance: The Social Space of Painting “Participatory art” and “delegated performance” appear to be useful terms for characterizing the leading role of the participants in Zmijewski’s Them and Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress. These terms are at the center of Claire Bishop’s 2012 book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, in which she scrutinizes the increasing interest of artists in collaboration with their public since the early 1990s. If the previous sections of this chapter addressed the physical production and space of paintings, this last section will focus on how the medium of painting contributed to social interactions in Them and Draftmen’s Congress, and what insights into these processes might be provided by concepts such as participatory art, delegated performance, relational aesthetics, reassembling painting, and network painting. Bishop observes a tendency in contemporary art that has been named in varied ways: “socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, collaborative art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice.” Rather than interactivity, which focuses on a one-to-one relationship of exchange, the term “participation” seems to be more appropriate for these practices because they most often included activities by a group of people, who even became the medium of the work of art.57 In Them and Draftmen’s Congress many participants were involved, who could certainly be considered to be part of the artistic medium. Artists might have had various reasons for using the public as medium, according to Bishop. For instance, they increasingly wanted to challenge traditional artistic criteria by turning everyday actions into performances, or aiming at particular social constituencies to be visualized explicitly and rendered physically present. Furthermore, there was a desire to create active subjects, who would be empowered to determine their own social and political reality by means of experiences of physical or symbolic forms of participation. Also, artists grew more interested in dichotomies of live versus mediated, and authentic versus contrived, which were considered to play a role in constructions of collective identities, as well as in aesthetic effects of risk and chance.58 The preference of Zmijewski and Althamer for their public as part of

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their medium seemed to have been motivated, in whatever degree, by all of the aforementioned aspects. As discussed when addressing the first case study, these artists intended to democratize visual language in a mass conversation about current sociopolitical issues. Rather than creating objects as artworks, they composed human interactions, or so-called social studios, by means of painting workshops, aiming at exposing societal conflicts and the conditions that cultivated those clashes. In general, the artists involved in participatory art came to prefer the name “projects” for their works, to underscore that the object was replaced by an “open-ended, post-studio, research-based, social process, extending over time and mutable in form.”59 Christian Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999) even relate characteristics of artistic projects to the networks and projects that dominate today’s working life: a “connexionist world” in which fluidity and mobility are highly valued.60 The notion of “participatory art” or “projects” continues to be pretty broad, however. In the eighth chapter of her book, Bishop introduces a more specific category, the “delegated performance,” which fits more closely to my case studies. The category of participatory art still suggests that the artist is the protagonist in the performance. After the period of the 1960s and 1970s, when performances were executed by the artists themselves, collective bodies of social groups increasingly took over that role. Like a movie director, the artist withdrew to the background, but, in contrast to cinema, where actors were invited to play a role, (non-)professionals were asked to perform simply by being themselves. This choice occasionally evoked discussion about the ethics of representation, especially when vulnerable social groups were involved. In addition, the role of the artist came to be critically interrogated. Bishop addresses this aspect as “outsourcing authenticity.” Noting an important difference between outsourcing as usual practice in companies and how this system worked in artistic projects, the former intended to decrease risks, and the latter exploited risks. Moreover, the prominent artistry and authorship in traditional arts were questioned by delegating the form and contents of the work to the selected performers.61 Or did the artist only delegate the authenticity of the project in part? If this question cannot be answered in general, Bishop emphasizes that the involvement of the artist should not be underestimated. In her introduction to the anthology Participation (2006), published six years before Artificial Hells, Bishop discerned an authored tradition that aimed to provoke participants and a de-authored lineage that sought to enhance collective creativity. The former would be disruptive and interventionist, the

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latter constructive and ameliorative. In both traditions, participation became increasingly bound up inextricably from issues of political commitment.62 Draftmen’s Congress might be categorized as representing the latter tendency, although the conditions were still created by the artist as author. But what about Them? This work is one of Bishop’s many examples in Artificial Hells. She observes that the artist adopted an ambiguous role. It is not clear whether and how much he manipulated the course of events. Like other artists who recorded their project, the artist’s power alternated between relinquishing and reclaiming. He temporarily lost control over the situation before he regained it in selecting, editing, and displaying its representation.63 Bishop thus nuances the view of art critics who praised collective authorship projects, because they would activate the public while blaming singular authorship due to its passive spectatorship. Although she is critical about the aims of some projects, Them seemed to meet her definition of interesting delegated performances, described as producing “disruptive events that testify to a shared reality between viewers and performers, and which defy not only agreed ways of thinking about pleasure, labor and ethics, but also the intellectual frameworks we have inherited to understand these ideas today.”64 The aforementioned characteristics of participatory art and delegated performances call forth the concept of “relational aesthetics,” coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in Esthétique relationelle (1998). According to Bishop, however, the projects she selected for her 2012 book have little to do with relational aesthetics. Her artists would have been more interested in “creative rewards of participation as a politicized working process” than in aesthetics.65 Interestingly, the relational aspect also appeared to play a far more important role in Bourriaud’s own descriptions of his concept than the aesthetical element, about which he remains quite vague. He defines relational art as “an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space.” The aesthetic aspect is involved in his more detailed definitions, such as, “Their works bring into play modes of social exchange, interaction with the viewer inside the aesthetic experience he or she is offered, and processes of communication in their concrete dimensions as tools that can be used to bring together individuals and human groups.”66 Bourriaud focuses on artists who produced relational spaces, in which interhuman exchanges could take place and where constraints of the ideologies of mass communication could be shaken off. In these sites, alternative forms of sociability were created, and experiments executed with constructed conviviality.

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Some of Bourriaud’s descriptions suggest that he considers artworks in the field of relational aesthetics as “ideal social places.” For instance, Modernism would work with breaks, and was based on conflicts, whereas the imaginary of our period would be concerned with negotiations, links, and coexistence. Thus, progress was no longer aimed for by means of clashes, but through searching for possible relations between distinct units, and by building alliances between different partners. The aesthetic contracts would function like social contracts, establishing fairer social relations, and more dense, fruitful ways of life.67 Althamer’s Draftmen’s Congress was intended to be a social space, if not particularly an ideal place. Yet the recordings of the process that was presented in the hall of the church meet the aforementioned description. In contrast, Them presented a place of conflict but different from a modernist place of (formal) clashes on behalf of progress. Zmijewski’s project rather relates to Bishop’s conclusion of her 2012 book, where she observes that social and artistic judgments do not easily merge but appear to ask for different criteria. Artworks expose contradictory social truths; they continually throw established systems of value into question, including questions of morality; they search for new languages to represent and question social contradiction. As a result, “the social discourse accuses the artistic discourse of amorality and inefficacy, because it is insufficient merely to reveal, reduplicate or reflect upon the world; what matters is social change. The artistic discourse accuses the social discourse of remaining stubbornly attached to existing categories.”68 The arguments put forward by Bishop and Bourriaud thus concentrate on human interaction in art practices. The participants came to serve as the medium of the projects. Thereby, they ignored the role played by the materiality of the “things” involved, such as paint and paintings in Them and Draftmen’s Congress. To provide insights into this aspect, the concepts of “reassembling painting” and “network painting,” coined by David Joselit, seem to have this potential. I briefly discussed his 2015 essay “Reassembling Painting” in the first chapter, for its focus on physical painterly marks, which occupy the space between subject (artist or spectator) and object (painting) as a dynamic relationship. This essay was included in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age as part of the theme “Social Networks,” on artistic practices in which expressive gestures left the canvas and entered the world through performances and appropriated images. In Them and Draftmen’s Congress the paint and the expressive gestures were not only part of the paintings as medium but also of the participants as medium. In the view of Joselit, the applications of deposits of paint on

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supports simultaneously register an objective optical sensation and a subjective temperament, while referring to the general working process of the artist. Regarding my case studies, it is interesting to translate this statement to the delegated performances in which nonprofessionals were invited by artists to take over their role. More specifically, Joselit introduces the term “reassembling painting” to try to understand what happens in the encounter between the artist and the painting, when the paint connects both physically. This concept alludes to sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), which argues that the social is always assembled, and that the social is not a thing, but a type of connection between things that are not social themselves. Latour contends that heterogeneous elements might be assembled anew in some given state of affairs.69 In line with this view, Joselit even suggests an alternative view on the history of modern painting by arguing that from impressionism onward paintings investigated how marks or gestures “occupy the space between subjects and objects, or between persons and things.” Painterly gestures, he claims, were usually related to Modernism’s subjectivity in an artwork. But these painterly marks could also be considered as part of artistic labor, thus as a form of action rather than representation. This also implied that motion, instead of meaning, became more important, in the form of a dynamic transition between persons and things. In line with this observation, Joselit quotes Yve-Alain Bois who referred to the painterly field as a “relation of dynamic forces.”70 Joselit considers Jackson Pollock’s paintings as illustrative for his argument. I discussed this painter’s work in the section about painting as a verb, as artistic labor, but one would not expect his work to serve as an example in an essay on social networks in painting. However, Joselit uses his paintings to demonstrate that in this instance the fields of painterly marks turn into a perpetual state of becoming form, which results in the viewers’ incapacity to transform the work into a coherent painting. In his time, according to Joselit, Pollock pressed “the art of pure passage” as a way of reassembling painting further than anyone else. Joselit defines passage as “a form of materialized time; it is duration lacking both a starting and an ending point but nonetheless unfolding in space.”71 This definition is remarkably applicable to Them and Draftmen’s Congress in which the stages of passage never turned into final pictures and dynamic transitions between persons and things were center stage. Next to the subject-object painterly marks, Joselit identifies a second “transitive action.” If the former concerned marks on pictures, the latter referred

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to actions by human subjects onto pictures. The labor of the artist consisted in the latter case of the circulation of images. Inspired by Latour’s actor-network theory, Joselit coined the term “network painting.” He even characterizes contemporary painting as “circuits of human action interlocking with, biting into, or embracing circuits of images,” demonstrating that painting inextricably belongs to certain social networks.72 In recent years, the circulation of pictures in the art world has also become a source of artistic inspiration for quite a few artists. For instance, in the video Paris Adapted Homeland: Episode 6 (2013) by Ei Arakawa and Shimon Minamikawa, the former artist carried paintings by the latter in front of his head while running over a treadmill, suggesting an artist who hurried through the neurotic and competitive art world. Also, Paul McCarthy critically addressed the pressure exerted on painters by art institutions in his video The Painter (1995), in which he cynically interrogated the powerful roles of art dealers and collectors by taking on the role of a frustrated painter himself.73 That today’s art world is hectic and complex can also be concluded from Joselit’s observation of a development in painting from 1960 up to 2015, whereby passage and transitivity are combined to form networks, which are in fact the paradigmatic form of the information age. Such “network paintings” would render the plasticity of networks visual and palpable. Unlike the networks of images on the internet that visualize global connections as transient, network paintings would explore the affect of networks, and correspond more accurately to the networks we actually inhabit in daily life, since “one of the fundamental characteristics of actually existing networks is subjective and objective elements (humans and things) in motion.”74 Joselit also discusses the medium of collage as part of network paintings in his essay. What do we learn if we translate his observations to the delegated performances Them and Draftmen’s Congress? In the first stage of these projects, the participants started to apply familiar symbols and texts. Subsequently, these pictures were “appropriated” by other participants, who partly overpainted them, thus partly including the former stage of the picture. We may consider these paintings as a kind of collages, based on Joselit’s characterization of how collage reorganizes the artist’s labor: “collage privileges the act of arranging such appropriated materials.”75 Importantly, he reminds the reader that even though in the information age multiple times and places may have become familiar, painting has a long history of creating new networks, which made it possible, for instance, to perceive gods and humans in the same space or join various moments and places in a single picture. Painting, in other words, “can visualize

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the imperative of networks to make everything into a consumable picture easily transmissible in time and space. Painting embodies dislocation, the affect of networks.”76 If in the previous chapters the paintings or digital pictures were the final products, in Them and Draftmen’s Congress the painting actions did not aim at final products, but at visualizing and materializing social processes. If actionreaction processes are important drivers in social spaces, they usually do not leave any visual or material traces. Concepts such as reassembling painting (including subject-object transitions and passages) and network paintings (including collages) were all used by Joselit to describe physical painting actions by artists and the subsequent circulation of their paintings. In fact, the aforementioned projects by Zmijevski and Althamer even went one step further in the process described by Joselit, in which paintings approximated to—and materialized—the digital networks that are at the center of our daily life. In the interactive internet, where singular authorship is problematized, users become producers, as well as the other way around. In Them, the participants exchanged roles all the time from producer, to spectator of work by others, to producer again, and so on. Especially in Draftmen’s Congress, the network mainly consisted of anonymous producers who perceived work by unknown others and subsequently appropriated it into their own painting, while being aware of the temporality of the results of their actions that were already waiting for the next users and producers. Different from digital networks, however, the physicality of both projects made it necessary for participants to be present in the physical space. Interestingly, the video recordings of both the projects made them less similar to the dynamic interactive social networks of the internet. The recording of Draftmen’s Congress became traditional documentation material, and Them became a video artwork, or, actually, edited documentary video art. If in the first two chapters photography as lens-based medium served as the starting point and point of reference of the resulting paintings, while in the third chapter it replaced the materiality of paint, in this chapter the lens-based media played an increasingly important role toward the end of the projects and, finally, replaced the temporary painting events. However, the recordings turned out to be a more conservative medium than the slow, delegated painting performances as a new medium that actively interrogates and materializes how visual communication elucidates social relationships.

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Notes 1 Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 15–16. 2 Term used by Laura U. Marks in her research into the embodied spectator of moving images. 3 Bishop, Participation, 10. 4 http:​/​/blo​​g​.ber​​linbi​​ennal​​e​.de/​​en​/pr​​oject​​​s​/dra​​ftmen​´s-co​ngres​s-ini​tiate​d-by-​pawel​ -alth​amer-​20163​(accessed May 5, 2017). 5 Kurzmeyer, Szymczyk, and Cotter, Paweł Althamer, flap. 6 Hlavajova, Artur Zmijewski, 19. 7 https​:/​/em​​macla​​irela​​mont.​​wordp​​ress.​​com​/2​​012​/0​​3​/22/​​artur​​-zmij​​ews​ki​​-them​​-2007​/ (accessed May 28, 2017). 8 Majmurek in Sienkiewicz, Artur Zmijewski, 12. 9 Zmijewski in Hlavajova, Artur Zmijewski, 17. 10 Zmijewski in Hlavajova, Artur Zmijewski, 20. 11 Majmurek in Sienkiewicz, Artur Zmijewski, 18. 12 Excerpts from MA thesis in Zmijewski, If It Happened, 156–7. 13 Mytkowska in Zmijewski, If It Happened, 13. 14 Farver in Zmijewski, If It Happened, 102. 15 http:​/​/cul​​ture.​​pl​/en​​/arti​​st​/ar​​tur​-z​​​mijew​​ski (accessed May 2, 2017). 16 http:​/​/cul​​ture.​​pl​/en​​/arti​​st​/ar​​tur​-z​​​mijew​​ski (accessed May 2, 2017). 17 Zmijewski in Hlavajova, Artur Zmijewski, 3. 18 Godfrey, Painting Today, 393. 19 Stewart, Film and Screen, 5. 20 Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties, chapter 4. 21 Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 22. 22 Orton and Pollock, “Jackson Pollock,” 117. 23 Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy,” 290. 24 Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy,” 290. 25 Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy,” 286. 26 Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy,” 287. 27 Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties, chapter 6. 28 Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy,” 235. 29 Deepwell, “Paint Stripping,” 242. 30 Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 17; and www​.t​​ate​.o​​rg​.uk​​/art/​​artwo​​rks​ /s​​aint-​​phall​​e​-sho​​oting​​-pict​​ure​-t​​03824​ (accessed June 20, 2017). 31 Graw in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 260. 32 Exhibition catalog Kinetic Painting, MoMA PS1, October 22, 2017–March 11, 2018. 33 Schneemann quoted in Jones, Body Art, 2. 34 Schneemann quoted in Jones, Body Art, 1.

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35 Schneemann, “Development of Snows,” 88. 36 Sillman, “AbEx and Disco Balls,” 325. 37 Hoptman, Forever Now, 131. 38 Despotovic in Ivan Grubanov, 9. 39 For instance, http:​/​/www​​.balk​​anins​​ight.​​com​/e​​n​/art​​icle/​​serbi​​an​-ar​​tist-​​puts-​​dead-​​​ natio​​ns​-on​​-show​ (accessed April 19, 2017). 40 http:​/​/eng​​.msub​​.org.​​rs​/se​​rbian​​-pavi​​lion-​​at​-56​​th​-la​​-bien​​na​le-​​di​-ve​​nezia​ (accessed April 19, 2017). 41 http:​/​/www​​.acad​​emia.​​edu​/1​​19690​​48​/Iv​​an​_Gr​​ubano​​v​_Mem​​ory​_o​​n​_the​​_Othe​​​r​_Sid​​ e​_of_​​Histo​​ry (accessed April 19, 2017). 42 Bakhtin as discussed by Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy,” 230–1. 43 Ehninger and Krause-Wahl, Terms of Painting, 76. 44 Ehninger and Krause-Wahl, Terms of Painting, 75. 45 Lejeune in Ehninger and Krause-Wahl, Terms of Painting, 190. 46 Moonie in Ehninger and Krause-Wahl, Terms of Painting, 26. 47 For instance, Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field.” 48 Lawrence, Materiality of Paint, 45–6. 49 Ring Petersen in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 14. 50 Grosse about her work in unpaged artist contribution in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting. 51 Ring Petersen in Ring Petersen et al., Contemporary Painting, 135. 52 http:​/​/www​​.metm​​useum​​.org/​​exhib​​ition​​s​/lis​​tings​​/2013​​/imr​a​​n​-qur​​eshi (accessed May 4, 2017). 53 Godfrey, Painting Today, 210. 54 Rowley and Pollock in Harris, Critical Perspectives, 45. 55 Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” 126–7. 56 Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” 130, 128, 134. 57 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 1–2. 58 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 238–9; and Bishop, Participation, 12. 59 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 194. 60 Boltanski and Chiapello paraphrased in Bishop, Artificial Hells, 215. 61 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 231, 237. 62 Bishop, Participation, 11. 63 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 227, 237. 64 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 239. 65 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 1. 66 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14, 45. 67 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 48. 68 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 275–6. 69 Rather than just describing what is already assembled and defined as “social,” Latour focuses in this book on assumptions about the nature of what is assembled,

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70 71 72 73 74 75 76

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processes of assembling, and other types of material. The Actor-Network-Theory, of which Latour is one of the most influential proponents, has become known as “sociology of associations.” Latour, Reassembling the Social. Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 169–70. Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 172–3, 179. Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 178–9. http:​/​/www​​.tate​​.org.​​uk​/ar​​t​/art​​works​​/mcca​​rthy-​​pain​t​​er​-t1​​2606 (accessed December 15, 2017). Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 173–4. Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 170. Joselit in Ammer, Hochdörfer, and Joselit, Painting 2.0, 180.

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Socio-critical Expanded Paintings through Veiling and Unveiling

Quite a few well-known video artworks capitalize on the strategy of slow motion, and such works may well trigger associations with slow painting. An extreme case is Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which presents Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho slowed down to two frames a second, resulting in a presentation that lasts a whole day. The unnatural, slow movements, however, rather invite one to do a close reading of their development, instead of providing major new insights into specific relationships with painting. What is more, because Gordon relies on such a famous movie, his appropriation mainly gives rise to questions regarding the role of cinematic narrative. But perhaps Bill Viola’s slow-motion video The Greeting (1995), directly inspired by Jacopo da Pontormo’s painting Visitation (1528–9), has more to offer us here? Viola shot the forty-five-second recording of a staged meeting of three women—the subject of the painting—at 300 frames per second (using a high-speed 35 mm film camera), resulting in a ten-minute video. Quite similar to Gordon’s video, the slowly changing expressions on the faces and the body language automatically draw the attention of the spectators. After careful analysis of both videos, as well as some other examples, I decided not to focus specifically on slow-motion video in the context of my effort to gain more insight into socio-critical painting in the digital age by investigating video art. Given my aim, it proved far more rewarding to concentrate on videos that interrogate visual representations in mass media through various other strategies. These kinds of videos have a long tradition. From the very beginning, as argued by video artist and curator Chris Meigh-Andrews, artists working with video have been interested in challenging “the hegemony of broadcast television, with its one-way flow of propaganda, mass entertainment and advertising.”1 The video works I selected for this chapter express their critique through slowing strategies linked to, for instance, disturbance, boredom, and processes of veiling

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and unveiling. Which insights, then, can we derive from concepts explored in video art theory, media theory, and classic and modern painting with respect to these strategies as applied in socio-critical, painting-like video art? As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin rightly claim in Remediation (1999), “there is nothing wrong or even unusual in an older medium’s attempt to refashion a younger one.”2 They also refer to a double logic of remediation, which they define as, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion old media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.”3 Studying moving images to provide insights into painting is hardly a new endeavor indeed. In this respect, John Rajchman, in “Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art” (2008), has reminded us that the question of how investigations of issues of time and movement changed our view on paintings, photographs, or drawings, as well as our ways of seeing and talking about such things, has fascinated quite a few avant-garde filmmakers and philosophers. Rajchman specifically refers to Sergei Eisenstein’s discussion of Asian scroll-paintings and Gilles Deleuze about Francis Bacon as examples.4 In this context it does seem to be new, however, to address this issue from the angle of video art theory and artistic research of video. If I do not elaborate on slow motion, terms such as fixed frame, screen reliance, tediousness, and constructed disturbance will play an important role. All these terms are applicable to the key work discussed in this chapter: Tahrir Square: Metro Vent (2011) by Jasmina Metwaly. These kinds of painting-like videos have often been dismissed as “boring films” by the general public, but quite a few scholars have recently elaborated on the positive qualities of boredom, such as stimulating heightened awareness. As a visual strategy, tedium has been applied by several artists to encourage contemplation on their work’s socio-critical content—an issue I address in this chapter’s last section. The digitization of video in the early 1990s increased the range of options for manipulation, also causing video to look more like a painting’s constructed image. I will develop this interesting similarity by considering the question of how adapted characteristics from paintings—such as fixed framing, its centripetal effect, and distortions—and references to specific paintings enhance the meanings of these video works.5 In the third section, I zoom in on some of these characteristics, such as the centripetal screen. For a chapter about video as well as painting, the term “video painting” might seem obvious. In the second section, I discuss various definitions of this term. Some of them are certainly applicable to the artworks selected for this chapter,

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but because “video painting” tends to be associated with formal experiments rather than social critique, this concept will not be used as a key term here. Instead, throughout the chapter I will consider the interplay between veiling and unveiling as a strategy for stimulating contemplation about social memory, mediation in mass media, and the meaningful use of disturbance. That video appears to be much harder to define than painting renders comparative research of media as both problematic and thought-provoking. Media scholar Sean Cubitt touches on this challenge in Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (1993), stating that in the absence of essential properties the “singular mission of video media”—a term he prefers to use in the plural— would be to dissolve the borders between media, such as between painting and sculpture, or music and drawing. As a result, Cubitt understands video as a medium that mediates between: between other media, between senses, between technologies, and, most fundamentally, between people.6 Above all, he looks at video as a social medium, which underscores the relevance of investigating socio-critical contemporary painting from the perspective of video art.

Case Study of Jasmina Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent (2011) A flag is fluttering agitatedly before our eyes, filling the whole video screen. This also seems to be the only thing that happens in this video of about four minutes. Through the semitransparent flag, however, one can see glimpses of a city and people in action, including people holding flags (Figure 5.1). Only in a few, splitsecond moments it is possible to identify the flag in the foreground: it appears to be a part of the turned Egyptian flag. In a few other scattered instances, the wind is blowing the flag slightly aside, thus opening a limited view on what is going on behind this flag. These glimpses, however, hardly inform the viewer about the nature of the event. He or she waits in vain for a clear and open view, while watching this video artwork, entitled Tahrir Square: Metro Vent (2011), by Jasmina Metwaly. The title explains the cause of the movements of the flag, as well as mentioning a place and date. It is a video about Tahrir Square in Cairo, the site of the start of the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Metwaly, who was born to an Egyptian father and Polish mother, received her training in the art of painting in the Polish city of Poznan. In 2009, she moved to Cairo. There, she mainly turned to producing various kinds of video works, such as documentaries. Her video Tahrir Square: Metro Vent is part of the series

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Figure 5.1  Jasmina Metwaly, Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, 2011, single-channel video, color, sound, 5 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg/ Beirut.

Remarks on Medan (Tahrir version), all made in Cairo. These videos were called “Video Paintings” by Metwaly7—a term I will elaborate in the next section. This generic description invites us to a draw a connection between Tahrir Square: Metro Vent and the color-field paintings by modernist American artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly. These artists intended to stimulate the spectator’s visual contemplation, whereby Kelly mainly pursued formal aesthetic aims while the former two artists basically aimed to evoke a kind of sublime experience in the viewer. Quite similar to the color-field paintings, Metwaly’s video comes across as intriguing to spectators through its plainness in form and composition. However, rather than evoking contemplation on form or a sublime experience, the video explicitly presents a flag that veils the action and slightly unveils it, preventing the spectator from getting a clear view of what is happening there while also provoking thoughts on what might be going on. Aside from being an artist, Metwaly also became an activist. She was a cofounder of the social media collective Mosireen, established during the 2011 revolution in Egypt to create an archive of footage of the revolutionary events. They also organized workshops in film production for amateurs and a platform for citizen journalism.8 In 2012, in an interview with the art historian Angela Harutyunyan, she talked about her collaboration with the filmmaker Philip Rizk, and how they struggled to respond to people’s needs in Egypt: “Our dilemma was and is how to resolve issues without simply representing them through the tools of documentary filmmaking,” while also opposing the

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“rupture between reality and the way it was distorted and misrepresented on state television” that prompted them to find alternative means to portraying reality on the ground. She added that the revolutions made her wonder whether she could still work as an artist, and what that would mean in relation to activism. At first, she decided not to contribute to making artworks about the revolution, as she rather wanted to participate in the protest movement. She considered such new art objects as illustrations that simply represented things without actually expressing lived experiences. As she put it, “Art needs to be metaphoric, poetic and even magical.”9 In 2012, at the Cairo Documenta 2, Metwaly presented the installation About the Donkey That Wanted to Become a Painting (2011), consisting of two monochrome yellow canvases covered by stains and dust in combination with a single-channel video showing a fixed-frame recording of a dead donkey lying along the side of the road. One of the paintings displays a sketch of a still from the video, which, according to the artist, “attempts to illustrate reality, but fails to do so as a concept.”10 The voice-over recites a story about the German philosopher Nietzsche, who would have thrown himself around a horse’s neck to protect it from blows by its owner. Metwaly recalled how this work helped her thinking about her practice and her position in the political context of Egypt. One may interpret this artwork, then, as follows: the philosopher/artist is allowed to create intellectual/artistic products but has to act immediately in the real world whenever the conditions require him/her to do so. The issue of the obviously failing representation in About the Donkey That Wanted to Become a Painting is also center stage in Tahrir Square: Metro Vent. The disturbance caused by the flag obstructs and delays our perception of what is happening in the video. This interrelated strategy will be the main focus in this chapter’s last sections. First, I discuss the correspondences of digital video to painting in the historical context of analog video art’s ogling at painting.

Video Art’s Relationship with Painting When in the late 1960s portable video cameras became available and affordable for amateurs, artists started experimenting with the new medium. Some of them already experimented with other time-based arts such as music (e.g., Nam June Paik), film (e.g., Andy Warhol), performance art (e.g., Marina Abramovic), or Land Art (e.g., Robert Smithson). Many others, as noted by Gregory Battcock in New Artists’ Video (1978), got training in visual media such as painting,

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sculpture, or printmaking before turning to video.11 In “Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?” (1976), painter and video artist Hermine Freed explains that quite a few artists considered the new medium of video as a welcome alternative at a moment when pure formalism in art had run its course, when it became politically incorrect to produce objects, when performance artists and land artists felt the need to record their work, when it became clear that television was a better instrument for communication than the museum wall, and when video appeared to be suitable to address social issues.12 Because painting had been the “leading” medium in Modernism, in the 1960s it was still a standard toward which a new medium had to position itself. This may explain why quite a few early video artists explicitly addressed the history of painting in their video works, even up to the 1970s. For instance, in 1975 German artist Ulrike Rosenbach, during her performance Glauben Sie nicht dass ich eine Amazone bin (Do not believe I am an Amazon) shot arrows at a reproduction of the famous medieval painting Maria im Rosenhagen (Madonna of the rose bower) by Stefan Lochner. The performance was recorded by two cameras: one directed to Rosenbach, the other to the reproduction of the painting she perforated with arrows. A monitor showed the two recordings in superposition. The fusion of Rosenbach and the Madonna turned the performance into a martyrdom or “self-destruction.” Some other early video artists explained their choice for the medium of video in interviews in relation to painting. Such statements from the 1970s mainly emphasized that the video artist, like the painter who sees the result of his brushstrokes on the canvas right away, was able to see immediately the result of the recording, which was unlike the recording process in analog photography and film. They did not mention manipulation as a similarity, because in the 1970s the video camera’s real-time recordings were hard to edit, deliberate distortions being the main form of creative editing. Korean/American artist Nam June Paik’s video synthesizer was an exception. It was a tool that as early as in 1974 caused this artist to imagine shaping video “as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock, and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.”13 In the same period, the American artists Woody and Steina Vasulka also developed image-processing systems, allowing them to create videos in a similar way as formalist paintings through manipulating colors and forms. The way video was used by Paik and the Vasulkas was hardly representative of early video art. In Video Art: An Anthology (1976), the first volume on video art in the United States, the editors Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot elucidate in

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the introduction that as the medium developed, three basic applications of video emerged: one in which the artist was subject, another where the focus was on the environment, and a third one that concentrated on abstract synthesized images. Paik and the Vasulkas belonged to the latter category. The case studies presented in this chapter, starting with Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, are rather in line with the second category, although the works share some formal characteristics with constructed pictures.14 In New Media in Late 20th-Century Art (1999), Michael Rush categorizes early video practices differently in two types: activist-driven documentaries linked with alternative news reports and more proper, so-called art videos.15 This distinction appears to be irrelevant for my argument here. As pointed out in relation to the first case study, Metwaly did not explicitly distinguish between artistic video and activist video. In a study by Rush from 2003, Video Art, it is suggested that in general terms video art emerged in a complex international cultural environment characterized by anti-war protests and sexual liberation movements, which had become visible on television.16 My case studies demonstrate that even though this development continues to go on, contemporary artists have also related their work to the history of art, or, more specifically, to painting. Another approach to the origins of video art relevant for my argument was put forward by John G. Hanhardt in “Dé-collage/Collage: Notes toward a Re-examination of the Origins of Video Art” (1990). He proposes a history of video as a development of the history of collage, an original angle that is also relevant to my previous chapters dealing with collage-like characteristics in painting, graphic design, digital photography, and painting actions. One of Hanhardt’s starting points is Paik’s view that just as collage techniques replaced oil paint, the cathode-ray tube will replace the canvas.17 The other key term used by the author is “décollage,” commonly defined as tearing apart an existing image, basically as the opposite of piecing images together into a collage. One of first artists using this technique was the German artist Wolf Vostell, who in the 1950s began to deform and manipulate posters in public space. In postwar Germany, Vostell was one of the artists who criticized US-inspired consumerism. After deconstructing posters, he shifted to décollage of objects, and became one of the first artists to include (and deconstruct) television sets in artistic work. In his first TV Dé-collage (1958), he placed six television monitors behind a white canvas, which he cut open with a knife.18 Not only Hanhardt but also Wulf Herzogenrath has considered Vostell’s television décollages as the initial stage of video art.19 Yet Hanhardt in particular was to stress that décollage, together with the earlier strategies of collage (e.g.,

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by Kurt Schwitters), provided a basis for understanding the strategies of video art. Accordingly, he viewed the aesthetic discourse of video as one language of collage, in which strategies of electronic image processing, layering, and mixing of images and sounds created a new variety of this visual language.20 Strikingly, this take on the roots of video art in the medium of collage can be connected to William J. Mitchell’s view on the digitization of media such as photography and video. As he argued, digital images “give meaning and value to computational ready-mades by appropriation, transformation, reprocessing, and recombination; we have entered the age of electrobricollage.”21 In relating the medium of video to collage and television, Hanhardt sets video apart from the history of film, which is not only different in reception history but also in technological development. It is interesting to consider the technological differences between film and video, when still being analog media, and compare them with painting. In this context, Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon, in Art of Projection (2009) claim that “video cannot be adequately compared with film because, in its original configuration, there are no frames at all: it is all motion, the modulation of light corresponding to the array of lines traced by a beam of energy oscillating at an extremely high frequency.”22 In the same vein, Christine van Assche has characterized video as “the dynamics of fluids,” an expression that calls forth associations with “dripping paintings” rather than with film. More in detail, van Assche explains that physiologically video images were formed by luminous dots that move along horizontal lines within the frame of a screen, owing more to the dynamics of fluids and metamorphosis of molecules than to the physics of luminous photos.23 If video consisted of only lines that together suggested an image, the images presented in paintings consist of (lines created by) brushstrokes. This imageconstructing process in video is described by Maurizio Lazzarato in “Video, Flows and Real Time” (2008), in an analogy to painting as that the video image “is a constantly reshaping profile painted by an electronic paintbrush.”24 In “Looking through Video” (1996), John Belton observes a relationship between the metaphors applied to developments toward newer media and developments of our view on the essence of “looking.” In the far past a painting was compared with looking through a window. Later on, photography was hailed as a copy of looking through our eyes at the world, which in turn was overtaken by film as a way to see the world around us as moving. This development came to a provisional end in the comparison of the always incomplete image in video with the always partial image on the retinas of our eyes.25 Interestingly, contemporary

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painting—as discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 4—has grown more linked to the latter definition than to the metaphor of the view through the window. When juxtaposing the media of film, video, and painting, the most striking difference seems to be that the two former consist of moving images while the latter lacks any sense of movement. Yet temporal aspects are also included in painting in various ways. In a most general sense, looking at a painting takes time. In this respect, art critic Barry Schwabsky has observed that painting “is a creature of duration insofar as the perception of it is something that must be developed. Its emergent properties come out only in the chemical bath, as it were, of sustained attention.”26 Federico Windhausen addresses this aspect in “Paul Sharits and the Active Spectator” (2008), through quoting filmmaker Sharits, who first worked with media such as photography and painting before switching to film. As he put it in a 1976 essay, “These so-called ‘all-at-once’ modes were, for me, also temporal objects . . . the complexity of the photograph and painting unfold in perceptual time.”27 In “The Face in Close-Up” (1992), Jacques Aumont relates painting in a different way to time, when addressing the production process and the subject rather than the spectator: “painting, in general, is related to time, since the act of painting is recorded in it; more fundamentally, painting is the immortalizing of that which is painted, suspended in time, the transformation of material time into a transcendental time.”28 The artist Tony Conrad has even demonstrated that a painting can literally “behave” like a slow movie. His painting series Yellow Movies (1972–4) consisted of paper coated with house paint of a low colorfastness, allowing them to yellow fairly quickly.29 In Conrad’s “movies” the color “moves,” which made them different from Jean Tinguely’s 1950s’ kinetic paintings, behind which tiny engines set in motion the abstract forms in the composition on the surface of the paintings, for example, his Méta-Malévich (1954). As early as in the 1920s, albeit in a different way, artists tried to extend the scope of painting by introducing the dimension of time. In his seminal essay “The Two Avant-gardes” (1975), film theorist Peter Wollen mentions films by Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy, in which they used light and color directly to make abstract paintings as time-based art, as examples of this so-called Cubist Cinema.30 An example of what are probably the most hybrid film-painting artworks, consisting of paintings on which a film is projected, is Martial Raysse’s Made in Japan, Suzanna Suzanna (1964), an oil painting inspired by Tintoretto’s painting of the Bible story of Suzanne and the old men. On the partly white background, Raysse projected an eight-minute film of the artist Arman in the role of an old

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voyeur in the woods, turning the canvas partly into a film screen. More than forty years later, British film director Peter Greenaway created films that he projected on famous paintings such as Nightwatching (2007) on Rembrandt’s Night Watch and Last Supper (2010) on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. By the 1980s, a variety of creative editing procedures of video had become more easily available to most artists. Also the quality of the electronic images improved significantly, even though artists continued to struggle with details and colors, relying on an additive color process, contrary to the full-color spectrum of motion picture film that relies on a subtractive color process.31 Nevertheless, the technical developments made many video artists shift from black-and-white to color video productions in the 1980s, turning color into an increasingly important feature in video art. Color distortions, color noise, and bleeds emphasized the painting-like look of videos (e.g., Pipilotti Rist’s oeuvre). In particular artists who came from a background in painting transferred their painterly concerns to the new medium, whether film, video, or digital art.32 It should be added, of course, that this observation applies to Western painting. For instance, China and Japan have a long tradition of black-and-white ink painting. In those cultures, it was possible from the start to link up the black-and-white images of photography, film, and video with these monochrome ink paintings. The digitization of video and film in the early 1990s increased the range of options for manipulation, making video look more like the constructed image in painting. In “What is Digital Cinema?” (1999), media theorist Lev Manovich highlights the relation of digital cinema to painting, noting that as a result of the manual construction of images, digital cinema was no longer an indexical media technology, but rather a subgenre of painting, and of painting in time.33 The terms “analog” and “digital” seem to be only applicable in discourses related to technical images such as photographs, films, and videos. If one critically reconsiders the definitions of these terms, however, they become more complex and more broadly applicable. In “What is ‘Post-digital’?” (2015), media scholar Florian Cramer has claimed that something can be “digital” without being electronic, without involving binary zeroes and ones, and without any kind of computational device. When “digital” is defined as something divided into discrete, countable units, it is possible to consider, for instance, floor mosaics of monochrome tiles as digitally composed images. Cramer brings to mind that the word “digital” originates in the fingers (or: “digits”) of a hand. Moreover, digital information in general never exists in a perfect form, but would rather be an abstraction of physical matter, including chaotic properties and often ambiguous states. Conversely, “analog” means that information was not broken down into

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discrete, countable units, but consists of continuous scales, such as a light wave, a magnetic field, or a gradual transition between colors in a painting. Cramer refers to analog film as a digital-analog hybrid, because the film emulsion is analog, but the combined frames of the filmstrip are digital, in the sense of being discrete, chopped up, and countable elements.34 In line with these ideas from Cramer, the collage-like character of the paintings discussed in this book could be called a digital aspect of these artworks, which turns them into analog-digital hybrids as well. From this perspective, the digital videos at the center of this chapter that allude to analog media such as painting, as well as to their own roots as analog medium, are not so much different from paintings in the end. Finally, a remark about the formats and presentations of video art and paintings: The shift from presenting analog video on television screens to projecting digital videos by means of beamers increased the variety in size and ratio. Projection screens, however, used to have horizontal formats, related to film screens. Vertical formats, called portrait format in the discourse of painting, became more applicable after the introduction of LCD screens. And technological improvements also made it possible to display videos on white cube exhibition walls next to paintings. As a result, it became possible that in the exhibition Soulèvements, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman for the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in 2016, Tahrir Square: Metro Vent was presented opposite to a small oil painting, created in 1830 by Léon Cogniet and depicting three waving flags in an abstract environment. In the next section I will look more closely at the screen as canvas, and the centripetal images it comprises.

The Screen as Canvas: Centripetal Images Evoking Critical Contemplation The fixed frame in Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, which presents a hardly changing subject, calls forth one of the distinctions made between film and painting by film critic André Bazin in his seminal publication What is Cinema? (1967). According to Bazin, the outer edges of the screen are not the “frame” of the film image. They are merely the edges of a masking piece revealing a specific part of reality only. Conversely, the picture frame polarizes space inward. This is why the frame should be called centripetal and the screen centrifugal.35 Although technologically Metwaly’s video has edges, the spectator most probably perceives it as a centripetal picture that draws the attention inward. One is more curious about what is veiled by the flag than what surrounds it in the space off-frame.

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Decades before Bazin, perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim also drew a comparison between painting and film, in his essay on “Painting and Film” (1932), but he mainly focused on the compositional order within the frame. In his view, film was strongly influenced by painting in the creation of images. Principles employed for ages by painters, such as regarding the division of space, were adapted by photographers, and later by film directors. As an example, Arnheim mentioned that a good film shot groups the objects in the image according to simple mathematical figures and eye-catching lines. The spaces have to be balanced on the basis of size, form, light, and so on.36 In fact, Arnheim’s description of painterly film shots and Bazin’s centripetal frame also appear in definitions of “video paintings.” This term is frequently used for Metwaly’s short videos, by herself as well as others. In 2001, philosopher Hilary Lawson, in his study Closure, identified a tendency in video art that he called “video painting.” It would relate to a shift in interest from narrative to the potential of visual space. As specific criteria he singles out the use of a stationary camera, the absence of subsequent editing or manipulation of the image, the absence of dialog and sound, and the effort to escape narrative. He considers works such as Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Gillian Wearing’s Sixty Minutes Silence (1997) as predecessors of this kind of moving images.37 Sixteen years later, in Video Painting: The First 10 Years (2017), Lawson observes that it had taken some years before this interest became substantial among artists, but also that he had to redefine video paintings on the basis of recent developments. He notes that video paintings are now characterized by standing at “the cusp of openness and closure, a site from which the artist can gesture away from meaning and narrative and towards the limitless potential of that which has yet to be closed. . . . It is where narrative is offered but undermined, where meaning is identified but seen to be partial.” He also observes more construction and more evident intervention by the artist, even though this is always done in such a way that an overall narrative is avoided. Interestingly, he calls Metwaly’s video paintings series of Tahrir Square an exemplary work, characterizing it as observational rather than documentary, including layers of surprise to uncover events and cultural change without reintroducing a narrative.38 To elaborate on Lawson’s description of video paintings and to investigate the meaningful use of centripetal screens, a work by South African artist Mohau Modisakeng, called Passage, is most suitable (Figure 5.2). This three-channel video installation was presented as part of the national exhibition of South Africa at the 2017 Venice Biennial, as wall-filling projections on three adjacent walls of a small room. In almost similar compositions the projections display

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Figure 5.2 Mohau Modisakeng, Passage (video), 2017, triptych video screen, 17 minutes 34 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam.

an overall dark water surface including a white small boat in the center. On the bottom of each boat, which hardly moves, lies a dark-clothed African man or woman. The scenes were recorded from an aerial perspective. The fixed frame and static central positions of the boats emphasize the centripetal character of the images. At first sight, the figures even look like paintings of saints in niches. In the beginning of the approximately seventeen-minute video presentation, two of the figures are briefly standing in the boat, while one even sends off a bird resting on her arm. In the course of time the boats gradually fill with water. Eventually, the single figures cannot prevent the sinking of their boat. In the last moments they are struggling underwater. The images evoke associations with the history of slavery and the present route of migration from Africa to Europe, a subject addressed through different strategies in Great America by Marshall (as discussed in Chapter 2). Modisakeng appears to be mainly interested in South Africa’s violent history, of its postcolonial and postapartheid society.39 His contribution to the exhibition catalog This Is Our Time (2010) confirms this involvement. The artist selected an extract from “Of Pretence and Protest” (2009) by Njabulo S. Ndebele: You find yourself then being constantly pushed back to the alluring hatreds of the past and their call for activism. But then you pause: is it the whites who are responsible for my anguish or is it a black government that is not providing the requisite leadership and delivering the heaven it promised?40

The quite static position of the boat in the center of the frame, the bright white of the boats, the figures dressed in their Sunday best, and the harmonious background music including meditative bells together form a beautiful appearance that strongly contrasts with the tragedy taking place before our eyes. We are silently watching the disaster, and realize that we did and do the same in real life. Although this triptych includes sound, it could rather be called the silence of violence than the sound of violence.

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The vertical view on the scenes in Passage is also called a God’s eye view or drone view. These names stress the atypical view for human eyes. Before I elaborate on the consequences of the use of vertical view, I will first address the fact that we are used to look at the world from a horizontal perspective. As a result, “the view through the window” became the preferred perspective in the long history of Western painting after it was formalized in the Italian Renaissance.41 In fact, quite a few scholars still use the old concept, going back almost six centuries, as point of reference for our perspective on the world via our computer screen and through the internet. For instance, in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), media scholar Anne Friedberg uses the term “frame” for images in new media in the meaning of a centripetal frame. Interestingly, the title of her book refers to Leon Battista Alberti, who in the fifteenth century defined the painting as a screen figuring as a window that opens onto a space beyond the frame. As mentioned previously, this also happens when watching Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent. Because of the nervous fluttering, the presence of the flag itself draws attention as screen as well. To motivate her focus on frames, Friedberg states that we spend more and more time staring into the frames of computers, televisions, movies, and handheld displays. As a result, it has become as important to study how the world is framed as to study what is included within that frame.42 She observes how much the relationship between the linear perspective in traditional pictures and the viewer’s position has changed after the invention of moving images, and even more on the computer screen, where perspectival images are increasingly replaced by multiple-frame images, multiply layered, obliquely angled, abstract, and static next to moving images. Microsoft uses the name “Windows,” although its windows strongly differ from Alberti’s characterization. Nevertheless, all the frames discussed by Friedberg share the feature that they separate “the materiality of spectorial space from the virtual immateriality of spaces” seen within those boundaries.43 More specifically, regarding the new media screen, she uses the window as metaphor for the screen on the one hand, while claiming that the screen has become an actual substitute for the window on the other. This means that “virtual” in The Virtual Window, the title of her book, suggests both a metaphoric window and an actual window with a virtual view.44 Slightly differently, in Remediation, Bolter and Grusin address the windowed style of the desktop interface by emphasizing that representation would not be conceived anymore as a window onto the world but rather as being “windowed” itself: by means of windows opening toward other representations or other media. In doing so, this style tries to imitate the rich sensorium of human experience.45

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In this respect, then, Friedberg, like Bolter and Grusin, suggests a development from Alberti’s window onto the “real” world toward Microsoft’s multiple windows with constructed views on the world. In line with their view, German artist Hito Steyerl’s one-channel video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File (2013) is a fascinating artwork, which deals with a meaningful, complex, and merging use of various kinds of windows and frames. As in most of her video works (usually called films by her and art critics), Steyerl reflects in How Not to Be Seen on the current dilemma of being under surveillance anywhere and at anytime. In this video, she presents five lessons in how to become invisible: make something invisible for a camera, be invisible in plain sight, become invisible by becoming a picture, be invisible by disappearing, and become invisible by merging into a world made of pictures. One of the examples provided is to cover your whole body with a green Lycra suit, similar to the green screen used for making backgrounds of constructed film scenes invisible.46 The three singers of the Three Degrees, famous in the 1970s, reappear in various frames in the video with their song “When will we see you again,” a meaningful phrase in this artwork. Related to this focus, Steyerl, in an interview in 2013, raised the question “How do people disappear in an age of total overvisibility?”47 Steyerl’s digital video is an MOV File, an Apple QuickTime Movie file. The video is thoroughly and obviously manipulated, and this manipulation itself is the main subject of the artwork. Computer generated humanlike figures feature as an augmented reality in recorded images of, for instance, a desert, or they are integrated into digitally created environments such as gated communities as advertised by real estate agents. Also, texts and graphic design are part of the narrative. In this application of digital video, Steyerl’s moving images look more like digital television and internet than digital movies. Interestingly, the technological and visual characteristics of these media developed in opposite directions. Originally, as analog media, movie and television were technologically different media, being, respectively, chemical and electronic products. In this stage, however, both media presented a “view through a window” on either a fictive world or the real world. In the digital age, these media became based on numeral codes, but as digital media, television and cinema each went a separate way. In “Speed, Film, and Television: Media Moving Apart” (1996), media theorist John Ellis describes how both profited from digital image technology, but each in a different way. Cinema started to use the new potential to make ever more realistic, yet impossible images. Television aimed for creating constantly changing collages of images to underscore its particular

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social role. It took advantage of the two-dimensional feel of its screen, and increasingly treated the screen as a sheet of paper, by putting texts over images, adding drawn images, juxtaposing different video images, moving next to still images, or enclosing maps or diagrams.48 The internet even further developed this appearance. Steyerl’s video How Not to Be Seen explicitly addresses and exaggerates this character, and, in doing so, interrogates it. Particularly in this characteristic, digital video and contemporary collage-like painting seem to merge. Given the central focus of this section (the screen as canvas and the critical contemplation evoked by centripetal images), I would suggest that Steyerl’s highly manipulated collage-like images draw the viewer’s attention into the frame, to what goes on inside of it, rather than drawing them toward the outer frame. Interestingly, the artist has also inserted frames and screens frequently in her video as a kind of mise en abyme (Figure 5.3). On the one hand, she thus stresses the graphic appearance of the computer screens, but on the other hand, by manipulating the world she displays outside of the screens, she evokes the notion that the digital world of the internet has already entered the “real” world. This implies, when taking this to an extreme, that the only way to become invisible to surveillance cameras in real life would be, as mentioned, to behave like a green screen background used in manipulated film recording. In these passages, her work contains hilarious moments, for instance, the fact that the people who dressed in green in order to be invisible became even more

Figure 5.3  Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013, one-channel video, color, sound, 14 minutes. © Hito Steyerl c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2020.

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eye-catching, either as a result of the color contrast with the environment or as a blank form in full-color images. Next to her artistic visual work, Steyerl also published art theoretical essays and presented lecture performances. In her texts, she hardly addresses her artistic work explicitly, but some of them provide insights into her artworks, such as “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” (2013), where she states that “with digital proliferation of all sorts of images, suddenly too much world became available.”49 This comment clearly addresses the wealthy world of consumerism. Conversely, in the same year, in her lecture performance I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production, she addressed the disappearance of her friend Andrea Wolf, who as a fighter for the Kurdish PKK was presumably killed by Turkish troops (even though no visible evidence has been made available).50 Some of the other essays by Steyerl contribute to our understanding of quite different works by other artists. In “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” (2012), she discusses the unusual vertical perspective, which is the one chosen by Modisakeng in his triptych Passage. If in How Not to Be Seen, Steyerl incidentally chose vertical perspectives, this oblique view does not play a crucial role. Because her main perspective is horizontal, it is interesting briefly to address her comments on the linear perspective at work in the horizontal view, which she touched upon as basis for her thought experiment of a vertical view. Her argument starts from art historian Erwin Panofsky’s idea that linear perspective is based on an abstraction, and does not relate to subjective perception: [I]t computes a mathematical, flattened, infinite, continuous, and homogenous space, and declares it to be reality. Linear perspective creates the illusion of a quasi-natural view to the “outside.” . . . This space defined by linear perspective is calculable, navigable, and predictable . . . linear perspective not only transforms space, but it also introduces the notion of linear time, which allows mathematical prediction and, with it, linear progress. This is the second, temporal meaning of perspective: a view onto a calculable future.51

Regarding the spectators of those pictures, Steyerl concludes that the viewer, who is mirrored in the vanishing point, is thus construed by it. This may provide him/her with a body and a position, but it also subjects him/her to “supposedly objective laws of representation.”52 She notes specific changes in contemporary pictures, a transition toward other visual paradigms. In How Not to Be Seen her alternative is the collage-like way of dealing with fragmented spaces, an

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alternative introduced by the early twentieth-century cubist painters for the Renaissance perspective, as well as for the flattened decorative pictures by the post-impressionist painters. In “In Free Fall,” Steyerl already suggested that new perspectives were initiated in the early twentieth century by montage in cinema and painting that abandoned representation to a large extent, even demolishing linear perspective in cubist paintings and collages. She relates those visual and artistic experiments to developments in that period, involving new concepts of time and space based on quantum physics and the theory of relativity, as well as restructured perceptions resulting from warfare, the invention of aviation, and the conveyer belt. The more recent new views of the world from space have caused us, according to Steyerl, to reconsider our techniques of orientation, in particular the views from drones applied in military and entertainment images. These drones survey and track, but also kill.53 If at this point we return to the vertical perspective in Modisakeng’s Passage, the significance of this drone view proves to be even more important. Steyerl further refers to Eyal Weizman, who has described a spatial turn in terms of a vertical three-dimensional sovereignty, claiming that geopolitical power was once distributed on maplike surfaces on which boundaries were drawn and defended. Recently, though, power has increasingly occupied a vertical dimension, transforming space into stacked horizontal layers. This new “visual normality” might be considered a radicalization of the paradigm of linear perspective. The former distinction between object and subject in linear perspective has turned into the one-way gaze by superiors onto inferiors. The new disembodied and remote-controlled gaze is outsourced to machines and other objects.54 This observation renders the perspective applied in Passage even more disturbing. Strikingly, the vertical gaze, discussed by Steyerl as intimidating, evokes in Passage negative connotations only gradually, after a first harmonious attractive impression. Being a three-channel projection, it is noteworthy that Steyerl mentions in passing that multiscreen projections create dynamic viewing spaces and dispersed perspectives. The viewer represents no longer a specific gaze here, but is “dissociated and overwhelmed, drafted into the production of content.”55 This observation is also applicable to watching and experiencing Modisakeng’s triptych. Steyerl concludes her essay positively with the remark that cinema finally caught up with the representational freedoms of painting and experimental film. Her video How Not to Be Seen expresses this freedom associated with perspectives, and, in so doing, she adds a positive note to a worrisome subject. Modisakeng’s triptych does not offer a happy end, however.

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It suggests that the drowning protagonists become invisible for surveillance and, as a result, for potential rescue, causing them to end up in a tragedy “not to be seen.” The last issue to be addressed in this section is the physical screen, or, in other words, the screen as physical canvas. If Friedberg mainly focuses on the development from the concept of Alberti’s window onto the real world to Microsoft’s windows onto an explicitly constructed digital world, art historian Kate Mondloch aims at adding to this publication a focus on the physicality of screens in contemporary art in Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (2010). Her starting point is that video and computer screens, as objects as well as virtual windows, have invaded our daily life and the art world. In her emphasis on the physicality of screens, she develops a view on Alberti’s window theory that slightly differs from that of Friedberg. Mondloch argues that artistic screens have functioned as both a theoretical component and a physical presence ever since Alberti formulated the canvas as screen figuring as a window.56 Different also from the many views of the screen as transparent window, Mondloch introduces philosopher Stanley Cavell’s 1971 perspective on the screen as “a barrier, it screens me from the world it holds—that is, screens its existence from me.” Although Cavell’s comment pertained to the film screen, Mondloch suggests that it is also applicable to “screen-reliant spectatorship” in contemporary art. She prefers the term “screen-reliant” rather than “screen-based” to emphasize that screens are a performative category.57 In these “screen-reliant installations,” artists draw attention to the viewer-screen interface itself.58 The viewer-screen interface is defined by Mondloch as that which connects the viewer and the mechanisms for screening, including, at the most basic level, the film, camera, projector, and screen. Different from theories such as the apparatus theory that also includes these factors, Mondloch discusses the screen as a solid material entity as well, which she motivates by indicating that the screen’s physical form “shapes both its immediate space and its relationship to viewing subjects.”59 Mondloch’s case studies mainly consist of video installation artworks in which projection screens are positioned as partitioning walls in exhibition rooms. For my argument, it appears to be more interesting to relate Mondloch’s view to another intriguing artwork, Paper Landscape (1975) by the British artist Guy Sherwin, in which the same screen was used as both projection screen and canvas. The work actually consisted of a painting performance and a film projection. Sherwin applied white paint with a broad brush on the back of a transparent polythene screen. An 8 mm film was projected on the front of the screen, but became only visible where the paint was applied. The film presented

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a white paper screen, which was torn away little by little by the artist who was positioned behind the paper. Where the paper was removed, a landscape became visible (if only where paint was applied already). The protagonist finally stepped through the frame, turned around, looked at the “landscape painting,” stepped through the frame again and walked away toward the horizon. At the moment when the artist disappears in the distance, as viewers we experience the result as a still landscape painting again. Not for long, however, because soon we watch the performing artist cut the white-painted polythene screen open from the back, step through the frame to the front, and put out the light of the projector. As Sherwin explained in an interview with Duncan White, he was trained as a painter, and therefore he was used to stretching canvases, and became interested in different ways of using the screen as an active surface: “what happens to light when it falls onto a transparent surface—it’ll pass through. If you use white paper it will stop it. . . . The other elements to that piece are the cutting through of the screen: walking up to the camera, running into the distance—creating an illusion of depth.”60 Sherwin’s work was hardly exceptional in the 1970s. In 1973, Peter Campus made Three Transitions, three video works in which he presented painting actions on screens or his own face with projections on the paint, while also cutting a canvas/screen and stepping through it. The influence of the physical screen on our perception also becomes evident when we can watch the same video artworks on different kinds of screens. As mentioned, Modisakeng’s Passage was presented at the Venice Biennial of 2017 as three wall-high projections. In the LOOP Art Fair in Barcelona in May 2017, Passage was presented by gallery Ron Mandos on three flat screens next to each other. A visit to these two locations within a matter of weeks allowed me to compare both modes of presentation. While the one in Barcelona evoked associations with a series of three-framed paintings or even a triptych, the one in Venice evoked associations with wall paintings in a small, almost chapellike room, as a result of the centrally positioned, close to life-size figures in the boats that initially looked like representations of saints in niches. Both displays, however, triggered similar reflections on the current tragedies of sinking boats with migrants, but in the latter presentation this was caused by the smaller intimate size, while in the former case it was an effect of the overwhelming pictures. By comparing Passage, Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, and How Not to Be Seen on the basis of various views on screens and visual approaches of the world, this section revealed how these works exchanged the usual inner-outer-frame relationship in moving images for meaningful centripetal images that draw

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attention to being screen-reliant. In the latter video this shift becomes apparent in particular in the scenes that include mise-en-abyme screens. In Passage, the squared drone perspective and fixed frames turn the water surface into a parallel screen behind which the drowning boats disappear, while in Tahrir Square the fluttering flag functions as a screen that literally obstructs a clear view onto the world. In the light of this conclusion, it is remarkable that most of the consulted authors still look at the canvas as screen and the new media screen as separate entities. Most literally, Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media (2001), distinguishes the screen experiences of watching moving, illuminated images on a media screen, associated with “real-time” screen traditions, from viewing illusionist imagery painted on canvas, the “classical” screen tradition.61 I argue that watching the video screens of Metwaly, Modisakeng, and Steyerl is more related to the classical screen tradition of the painted imagery on canvas than the real-time screen tradition of live television. Yet it is also true that the visual disturbances in Steyerl’s and Metwaly’s works evoke associations with technical failures of media screens. In the next section I discuss various implications of this particular tension.

Functionally Disturbed Moving Images as Video Paintings Hito Steyerl tends to include many kinds of images in her artistic work, and she has also expressed a special interest in what she calls “poor images.” Such images may seem to be the opposite of video paintings when it comes to their aesthetic value, but in this section I will focus on the ability of both to stand in between veiling and unveiling glimpses of the world. At the same time, video paintings draw serious attention due to their affiliation with high-valued still pictures, whereas poor images are usually neglected, deemed unworthy of any attention. Steyerl hardly denies her own position on this, demonstrating in some of her essays and video artworks a love-hate relationship with poor images. Based in particular on her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” (2012)62 and her aforemetioned How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational, I will demonstrate that Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent synthesizes the video painting and the poor image in a process of veiling and unveiling, as well as in the tension between to be seen and not to be seen. In her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Steyerl develops her point as follows:

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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution. . . . The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its becoming. . . . It is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.63

Steyerl became intrigued by the poor images on the internet, but realized that we do not witness a new kind of images. In her view, the endlessly circulating cliché images of low quality are part of a long history of widely distributed ideological images masked as objective realities.64 In another 2012 essay, “Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy,” Steyerl identifies the poverty of the poor image as “not a lack, but an additional layer of information, which is not about content but form: this form shows how the image is treated, how it is seen, passed on, or ignored, censored, and obliterated.”65 This description is certainly applicable to her use of internet-like poor cliché images in How Not to Be Seen (Figure 5.3), to which she added a computer voice as voice-over, which in a pretty ironic tone instructs the viewers how to become invisible in our society of expanded surveillance by means of learning from the biographies of poor images. The interest in disturbed electronic images is barely a new phenomenon. In the early 1970s, Paik’s famous synthesizer developed by Abe intentionally produced poor images in the form of deteriorated electronic images whereby broadcast signals were deliriously degraded or distorted. In doing so, Paik, however, hardly criticized the cliché images provided by the television society. He mainly regretted the loss of creativity as a result of the passive spectatorship and tried to stimulate more creative uses of the medium, for instance, by means of moving a magnet over the television set to deform the electron beam. A more critical use of television can be found in the aforementioned Décollages by Wolf Vostell. Together with Udo Jansen, Vostell produced Sun in Your Head (1963), a dé-collage of screenshots from television, using flicker effects and distortion to create interference and noise. The resulting moving images were not completely opaque. One may interpret them as an indictment of militarism, as reflected by the change from talking heads to bombardments, as well as the nuclear blast at the end.66

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Disturbances in electronic images were not only a result of formal experimental aims by artists. Different from the high technical quality of (usually fictive) movies shown in theaters, broadcast was associated with low quality but “truthful” live reports of actual reality, of what was happening elsewhere. In 1976 art critic David Antin commented that the television audience was not only willing to accept but even “enjoyed” production errors as part of the anxiety of a live experience, suggesting that disturbances increased qualities of immediacy and spontaneity.67 Since the 1970s, the quality of television radically improved, up to so-called high-definition quality. Nevertheless, Antin’s observation continues to be relevant, even though today this phenomenon is rather applicable to images taken by means of mobile phones and images distributed through social media and the internet. The experience of “truthful” live reports of actual events has now shifted in part to amateur journalism or so-called citizen journalism. This has become obvious in particular during situations of crisis, revolutions, and war in the Arab world. In “Citizens Reporting and the Fabrication of Collective Memory” (2014), Jens Maier-Rothe, Dina Kafafi, and Azin Feizabadiy discuss the important role of social media and the web 2.0 during the events related to recent revolutions in the Arab world. They characterize civic and amateur reportage through inconsistent framing and raw pixilation, resulting from handheld cameras. Regarding Steyerl’s aforementioned reflections on the poor image, it is interesting to note that they mention that it has become increasingly difficult to trace the specific characteristics of origin, authorship, and authenticity in what we get to see and hear.68 Disturbed images are not only a result of low-quality devices or artistic intentions. The quality of images may also be reduced as part of censorship. For instance, top secret locations are conspicuously pixelated in Google’s earth views. Artists such as the Dutch Mishka Henner have searched for those areas and printed them as a form of appropriation art. Moreover, disturbance in the form of pixelated camouflage is often used by news shows and magazines to disguise digitally the details that are too atrocious and/or to protect the privacy of victims or relatives. In his series Pixel-Collage (2015), Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn interrogates this practice through combining uncensored horrifying news photos with “happy-life” photographs that he “censored” by means of camouflage pixels. As the artist has stated with respect to this series, “it seems that, in order to be authentic, a picture needs to be pixelated or partly pixelated. Pixilating or blurring has taken over the role of authenticity. A pixelated picture must surely be authentic if it has unacceptable areas which are concealed.”69

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In How Not to Be Seen, it is possible to regard the issue of digital camouflage as the main subject indeed. If this phenomenon of camouflage may appear in a less “high-tech” fashion in Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, at the same time it is more subtle. The flag in the foreground disguises what is happening in the real world behind it. The aforementioned relationship between camouflage and censorship turns the presence of the flag, as symbol of a nation, into a metaphor for the mass media controlled by the state, something about which Metwaly expressed serious worries. If, however, one does not recognize the flag and is not aware of the title of the video, the mere visual effect of the fluttering flag might draw irresistible attention. In that case, this experience, often misused in propaganda and advertisements, might result from the idea put forward by art critic Bruce Kurtz in “The Present Tense” (1976): that human beings have always been fascinated with flickering, colored light. Just think of men sitting around a communal campfire as an early example, or, later, the attention drawn by fireplaces in living rooms. Kurtz argues that films seen in theaters came to replace the communal campfire, and that color television in the living room served as a substitute for the fireplace.70 Although one may wonder whether this argument also explains the popular use of waving flags, the flickering flag in Tahrir Square: Metro Vent certainly has a signaling effect. With Daniel Richter’s Phoenix in the back of our mind, it is perhaps not far-fetched to think of paintings created through expressive brushstrokes of flaming colors as flickering, even though they do not literally move. The trembling, colored light of the color television was a result of its technology that was quite similar to that of analog video. Yvonne Spielmann explains it as a discontinuous process of construction and reconstruction of signals.71 Terms such as processuality and transformativity would not only apply to the analog but also to the digital state of video. Moreover, Spielmann characterizes the video image as “a surface image that is generated on—or, more technically precise, in—the surface of a screen and possesses no dimension of depth.”72 When on the basis of these characteristics we look to the video works by Metwaly, Steyerl, and Modisakeng, it is interesting that “surface images” appears to be an appropriate term. That which we see all appears to take place on and within the surface of the screen. This observation calls forth my discussion in Chapter 1 on the prominent surface of paintings as an oft-mentioned specificity of that medium. Returning to disturbance in relationship to video as surface image, we can acknowledge that errors and poor images are also experienced as part of the surface, because the effect of illusionistic depth has been obstructed. The kind of

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digital error that might be perceived as most surface-related is probably the glitch. Glitches may be defined as short-lived errors in systems, and transient faults that should correct themselves.73 Artists and scholars have increasingly become interested in this digital error. Media scholar Eivind Rossaak, for instance, in his essay “Who Generates the Image Error? From Hitchcock to Glitch” (2016) that is inspired by Mark Nunes’s Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (2011), suggests that perhaps errors or glitches are not our enemy but our friend: “error provides us with an important critical lens for understanding what it means to live within a network society. Error reveals not only a system’s failure, but also its operational logic.” In this sense, error calls attention to its etymological roots: the Latin errorem meaning a wandering, straying, a going astray; but also doubt and uncertainty. “In its failure to communicate, error signals a path of escape from the predictable confines of informatics control.”74 Glitches are even collected from the internet or created by so-called glitch artists. In Glitch Art and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics (2017), media scholar Michael Betancourt identifies “glitch art” as results from how artists have produced and exploited emerging errors in digital technology.75 His examples of glitch art mainly include abstract colorful images, but some of his statements are certainly relevant here. He clarifies that visual glitches are indicative of failure—not failure itself—in being evidence of real failure within the digital system. Moreover, they are a sign not of the machine breaking down, but of “a set of instructions that are aberrant.”76 Betancourt’s explanation is meant literally, but becomes particularly interesting in a metaphorical way for the glitch-like effects applied in videos such as How Not to Be Seen. The nervously shivering color-field in Metwaly’s video may at first seem to be a glitch, but as soon as the viewer recognizes a flag and people busy with flags on a city square, the meaning of the video changes. Yet the initial association with a glitch is perhaps meaningful as well, because the work relates to obstruction of visibility (“aberrant instructions”), albeit in mass media. As a stepping-stone from glitch to the next section about the dynamics of digital video technology as metaphor for social memory, I want to address briefly Laura U. Marks’s essay “Glitches in Arab Art” (2014). Marks discusses how many artists in the Arab world explore the aesthetics of low-resolution video as a metaphor for selective memory and forgetting, and as reference to practices of copying, pirating, and dealing with inferior copies. Their use of glitch, compression, and low-resolution video emphasizes the nature of their digital images as well. Marks in particular discusses artists who experiment with aesthetic as well as political implications of glitch.77 In a striking media-comparative case study, she found

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historical roots (a cultural memory) of low-resolution images as “compression aesthetics” in the textile matrix used by carpet designers and weavers. They selectively omitted information, resulting in expensive carpets that have “higher resolution,” and cheaper carpets with “lower resolution.” Particularly interesting for my argument is her observation that over centuries carpet designers and weavers have found ways to make compression a desirable aesthetic quality, for instance, through exaggerating features that were negligible in the original model.78 I want to add to her comparison that painting even has a longer tradition of compression of “resolution” because no painter was ever able to reproduce all details in representations of the visual world.

The Dynamics of Digital Video Technology as Metaphor for Social Memory If glitches in some Arab video artworks became a metaphor for selective memory and forgetting, the video artworks discussed in this chapter, in which disturbances also play a role, appear to relate to memory in one way or another as well. In Modisakeng’s Passage, Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen, and Metwaly’s Tahrir Square there is obviously a more important role for something like cultural or collective memory than for individual memory. Although a focus on memory aspects may seem to indicate a concern merely for the contents of the artworks rather than the medium of video, in this section I will specifically relate social memory to video technology. In Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (2007), media scholar José van Dijck introduces the concept of mediated memories to help theorizing, among other things, the mutual shaping of memory and media. By means of this analytical device, she investigates how media tools mold our processes of remembering and vice versa.79 To underscore her argument that mediated memories are not static objects, she advocates a model that demonstrates how the dynamic relationships move along the (horizontal) axis between personal and collective, as well as along the (vertical) axis between past and future. In these processes, films and photographs would function as mediated building blocks that we mold in processes of remembering.80 Although van Dijck focuses on vernacular films and photographs, her analytical device appears to be useful as well for studying processes involving the production and perception of artworks. For instance, Metwaly’s struggle with how to preserve a collective memory of the revolution through her personal

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recordings, and how these memories of the past could contribute to collective memory in the future, can be understood as reflections shifting and searching over the axes as defined by van Dijck. As argued by Sarah Rifky in her 2015 study of Mosireen, cofounded by Metwaly, this media collective aspired to become an archive for the revolution, thus widening the mission of citizen journalism. Some videos were intended to serve as testimonial material in courtrooms or in public space; others had to challenge common and state narratives. However, Rifky also quotes Metwaly’s doubts about continuing with these recordings. At first, in the years leading up to the January uprising, the videos functioned in making issues visible, circulating facts and evidence among a larger public. And after the revolution they considered their role as activist filmmakers as working against forgetting. Keeping memories alive, however, appeared to work differently than they expected. When they presented a street screening that displayed transgressions by the military against protesters in the previous weeks, much to their surprise spectators denied the images, thus seemingly refusing to accept the memory of what happened.81 These variances in memory could be explained on the basis of van Dijck’s model. The films as mediated building blocks were molded in different ways along the axes between personal and collective as well as between past and future by the filmmakers and the audience. The denial by the spectators in fact made Metwaly doubt the function of documentary images, arriving at the intriguing conclusion that “imagination bears more power to transform the future than memory.”82 Her Tahrir Square could be considered an early step in that direction. In the digital age, as noted by van Dijck, concepts of memory morphing and media morphing have been increasingly related to the capacity of digital multimedia to smoothly alter a coded representation into another, and we even more tend to think in terms of navigating mutant memory files than retrieving static memories.83 The consequences of radical technological changes, which compelled us to understand memory in new ways, led art historian and media scholar Ina Blom to wonder about the nature of society, if its memoryimages are perhaps not even representations. In Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social (2017), Blom and the coauthors aim at providing examples of radical changes in the material frameworks of memory that were intimately interwoven with changes in the conceptualization of memory. These material frameworks were technologies that not only store time (in the sense that magnetic tape and film contain distinct passages of time) but “produce and manipulate time in ways that may have certain rudimentary traits in common

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with the way in which the brain itself produces time.”84 Blom emphasizes that the social character of brains and information technologies cannot be considered as similar, but there would be a basic recognition of the fact that both may be approached in terms of a general capacity for production of time and difference that would be the technical basis for all forms of association.85 As early as in 1960, the designer couple Charles and Ray Eames made the film An Introduction to Feedback, in which they related the underlying principles of computers to how we improve our performances in daily life by means of recurring feedback actions. Blom, though, chose to focus on how in the early 1970s analog video was considered a quasi-biological entity, an instance of the memory at work in basic life processes. Although a connection between video and biological memory may sound like an artistic idea, Blom discusses a confirmation from the field of science, referring to a 1984 article in Physica by James P. Crutchfield—a physicist befriended with video art pioneers such as Steina and Woody Vasulka. Crutchfield presented in particular video feedback as a cheap and fast simulator of the type of complex behavior and a possible model for dynamic processes of life.86 To relate the medium of video more specifically to social memory, one first has to define the latter. Media scholar Yuk Hui explains in “On the Synthesis of Social Memories” (2017) that in the early twentieth century Maurice Halbwachs introduced the concept of collective or social memory as alternative for the psychological understanding of memory as personal and individual activity. Memories would not reside in the individual, but are recalled externally. The environment constantly provides us with the means to reconstruct them. For this reason, the social conditions of memories should be an object of study. Following this view, Hui investigates how digital technologies affect the technogeographic milieus of social memory. One of the effects is the tendency of digital technology to produce exteriorized memories through all sorts of computational operations and apparatuses. He concludes that social memory seems to enter now “a phase of technological exteriorization, where global processes of automatization and synchronization have accelerated to the point of preempting the imaginative dynamics of living memory.”87 Blom even compares digital video with “memoryless” perception. Thinking of Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen, it is interesting that she adds that the internet opened up a redefinition of memory as forgetting.88 If live broadcast as basis of video technology was a medium without memory from the start, videotapes were produced to record and save television programs. Also amateurs and artists commonly deployed the portable video camera from

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a desire to remember. In “The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions” (1996), Marita Sturken emphasizes that, quite similar to the older photo camera, the video camera had to recall the past and to make the absent present, resulting in constructed memories that did not only become personal, but also collective memories.89 The latter was particularly aimed at by early video artists who collaborated with activists in the 1970s. A famous example was the New York-based collective Raindance Corporation, founded in 1969. It grew out of a pragmatic need to share equipment, and included a combination of political theorists, artists, and activists who longed for radical social change. Both artists and activists considered low-cost video as a radical alternative to commercial television. Not only collective protest events were recorded; hippy artists such as Les Levine and Frank Gillette also produced “street tapes.”90 The media collective Mosireen can be considered a contemporary version of Raindance Corporation in various respects. In “Citizens Reporting and the Fabrication of Collective Memory,” Maier-Rothe, Kafafi, and Feizabadiy discuss Tahrir Cinema, the series of public screenings organized by Mosireen on Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution. Like Blom, they relate the construction of what we could call social memory to the dynamics of the applied techniques. They address the moving images projection in its literal meaning as to project, to throw forward, and even in ballistic terms, as a projectile propelled through the air, aiming at hitting a target.91 If we consider memory as a dynamic process, video as characterized by Spielmann in terms of processuality and transformativity would be the closest related medium. This claim does not necessarily exclude the still images of painting from serving as a productive metaphor for this dynamic process as well. For his Bourbaki Panorama (2014), the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez used a traditional nineteenth-century panorama painting as physical screen and visual backdrop for presenting a group of contemporary migrants (Figure 5.4). Téllez recorded the scene applying 35 mm film and displays the recordings by means of a traditional film projector, counteracting digital technology. If some scholars have argued that digital media, including the internet, developed into global media, others stated that these media depend on good network connections, from which many are still excluded. From that perspective, Téllez’s use of media, which is commonly considered as obsolete in the Western world, is quite meaningful indeed. Téllez produced Bourbaki Panorama for an exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland. The Bourbaki panorama painting in the Swiss city of Lucerne has a length of

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Figure 5.4  Javier Téllez, Bourbaki Panorama, 2014, 35 mm film, no sound, 13 minutes 47 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Koenig & Clinton Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.

100 meters and was created by Édouard Castres in 1881. It depicts the retreat of General Charles-Denis Bourbaki’s defeated army into Switzerland after the Franco-Prussian War. As was not uncommon in the late nineteenth century, real objects, such as a wagon, were positioned before the painting to increase the “reality-effect.” The Bourbaki panorama was even combined with life-size wax models, which presented people at rest on their flight. Interestingly, Jeff Wall, who in 1993 created Restoration, which presented the restoration of the Bourbaki panorama in a long-format photograph, motivated his interest in this painting by stating that the subject of a defeated army receiving asylum and help from the army and citizens of another country is very unusual, especially in large size.92 Téllez even more literally emphasizes this aspect of the subject through inviting a number of migrants, who recently came to Switzerland, to walk in a row in a circle along the panorama. The recorded film presents the migrants as a foreground of the painting, converging two events of migration, one from history and one from the present day. The process of veiling and unveiling—discussed earlier in relationship to the other videos in this chapter—relates in Téllez’s work to history and social memory. On the one hand, the anachronistic confrontation results in an obstructed view on the history of Bourbaki, while, conversely, the painting blocks the context of

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the migrants. On the other hand, following Halbwachs’s view that memories do not reside in the individual but are recalled externally by the environment that constantly provides the means to reconstruct them, one might claim that Téllez offered an environment to Swiss as well as foreign spectators of his appropriated Bourbaki panorama for reconstructing social memories from the far past in combination with those of the most recent past. Moreover, remediation took place through presenting the panorama painting as moving image, and turning the queue of migrants into a panoramic picture. In the aforementioned videos, the dynamics of social memory is expressed not only by the movements of the images but also, and probably even more, by the collage-like characteristics of the works. The distorted and fragmented elements could be considered as analogous to similar aspects in memories. And, different from conventional film montage, the collage-like fragmented videos lack clear narratives. In particular in Metwaly’s video hardly anything is happening. In the next section I will address the fact that many spectators experience this kind of videos as boring.

Slow and Boring Videos Challenging Perception and Interrogating Stillness Paintings are not usually called still images, because their stillness is too selfevident to notice. For the same reason, paintings are never characterized as being “too slow” because no one expects them to move. In this last section, I address videos through which “paintings” are created that evoke qualifications such as being too slow and still in response to the shortcomings of movement and sound, or too subtle movements and sounds. Moreover, what are the implications of being experienced as boring, rather than as slow or still? In Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (1993), Sean Cubitt notes that one of the crucial differences between video and painting is that video is not visible unless it is changing.93 Most of the video works I discussed in this chapter, in particular Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent and Modisakeng’s Passage, position themselves in between being still pictures and being moving images. On the basis of the aforementioned expectations regarding video, these artworks are consciously perceived as slow and still. Why should an artwork want to evoke an experience of slowness? The most often-mentioned reason is resistance. Sven Lütticken, for instance, has argued

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in “Liberating Time” (2009) that the “definitive enshrinement” of film and video in the art of the 1990s was related to a view on art as a space for a different temporality, one of slow and contemplative images, counteracting the mass media’s “action-packed frenzy.”94 In On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014), Lutz Koepnick has even called slowness a new aesthetic, characterized as “extended structures of temporality, with strategies of hesitation, delay, and deceleration, in an effort to make us pause and experience a passing present in all its heterogeneity and difference.”95 He observes that slowness, if once denigrated as the tool of conservatives or reactionaries, today serves “a crucial function to challenge deterministic fantasies of mindless progression and develop concepts of meaningful progress instead.”96 In his case studies, slowness is mainly applied as long exposure time in photography, as slow motion in moving images, or in production processes of digitally manipulated images. Many kinds of slowness have recently gained popularity in our society. In the 1980s a slow food movement started in Italy, followed by slow gardening and even slow medicines.97 In cinema, slow movies were made in response to the many high-paced action movies. Modisakeng’s Passage and Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent are very different from action movies, but can we qualify them as slow movies? In Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (2014), Ira Jaffe discusses slow movies from the last three decades, defining this kind of films through characterizations such as, To varying degrees, these movies are slow by virtue of their visual style, narrative structure and thematic content and the demeanour of their characters. With respect to the visual style, the camera often remains unusually still in these films. . . . Curtailed as well is physical motion in front of the camera. Furthermore, editing or cutting in slow movies tends to be infrequent. . . . Consistent with these stylistic elements, which may distance and irritate the viewer, is the austere mise-en-scène: slow movies shun elaborate and dynamic décor, lighting and colour. Moreover, the main characters usually lack emotional, or at least expressive, range and mobility.98

Interestingly, in general these characterizations are applicable to Modisakeng’s Passage and Metwaly’s Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, and actually in an even more literal sense than the movies Jaffe discusses in her book. On the basis of those case studies, then, it would be confusing to refer to my key works as slow movies. Basically, Jaffe agrees with Koepnick and Lütticken in considering the current interest in slowness as counteracting our high-paced, accelerated society.99 Their

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reasons for preferring forms of slowness appear to deviate little from interests in stillness. Geographers David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, editors of Stillness in a Mobile World (2011), argue that in our society where concepts such as flow, liquidity, routes, systems, and networks are center stage, stillness does not just represent a gesture of refusal. Stillness punctuates the flow of all things, and is a moment of focus. But like slowness, stillness used to be considered an aberration, a moment of missed productivity, and, consequently, a problem to be dealt with.100 What is interesting regarding my case studies is that Bissell and Fuller do not search for stillness in the meaning of emptiness or absence of movement. They want to open up other modalities of stillness, suggesting that a sharpened understanding of stillness can lead to new appreciations of mobile relations, which is interesting regarding my video artworks that can be said neither to lack movement all together nor to be empty.101 If, then, stillness and slowness tend to have negative connotations in our accelerating society, these features also have come to serve as positive counterstrategies. A third notion I want to relate to this tendency is boredom, because quite a few spectators will use this term in reaction to videos such as Tahrir Square, Passage, and Bourbaki Panorama, rather than using expressions such as slowness or stillness. It appears that in particular the notion of “boredom” has been applied more to video art—both early works and recent ones—than to any other medium.102 In 1974, the Irish/Canadian artist Les Levine blamed spectators of video art who complained about the boredom of some videos. He concluded that they apparently miss the dynamics of television in these video artworks: the work is “boring if you demand that it be something else. If you demand that it be itself then it is not boring.”103 Levine suggested that videos would not be judged to be boring in comparison with paintings or sculpture; they were unexciting in comparison with television, which at the time barely relied on distinct shots of over twenty seconds. For gaining insights into the meaningful application of boredom in my key works, it is interesting to note that quite a few philosophers and sociologists have reflected on boredom in contemporary society, intending to define it as a kind of attitude. For instance, philosopher Michèle Huguet has referred to the “social cultural permeability” of boredom (ennui) and its subjectivities in L’Ennui et ses discours (1984), suggesting that “the subject experiencing boredom is not suffering from an absence of desire, but from its indetermination, which in turn forces the subject to wander, in search of a point of fixation.”104 Huguet’s view formed a source of inspiration for film theorist Patrice Petro’s essay “After Shock / Between Boredom and History” (1995). As Petro’s interdisciplinary research

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establishes, boredom appears to represent a subjective experience of a lack of events, when nothing happens, a seemingly endless flux without beginning or end.105 This is what might be experienced by viewers of Metwaly’s video. It is surprising, at first sight, that Petro subsequently develops the point that boredom is about too little and about too much, about sensory deprivation and sensory overload, as well as about anxieties of loss and anxieties of excess. But when juxtaposing Metwaly’s Tahrir Square and Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen, it is interesting that it is quite possible to relate these two works to these opposite pairs. Whereas Metwaly’s video is obviously related to boredom, the avalanche of images and information provided by Steyerl is clearly about sensory overload, about too much and the anxiety of excess, simulating the boredom resulting from our current society, one overloaded with images and stimuli. Petro has argued that in twentieth-century psychoanalytical and clinical practice, boredom became associated with depression, anger, grief, or loss, but that finally, in contemporary postmodern theories, boredom became allied with frustration as well as relief.106 For example, Fredric Jameson, an important source for Petro, considers boredom as both a symptom and a cure in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).107 Moreover, in particular, the relationship between boredom and waiting has increasingly drawn attention, as a negative experience, such as in waiting in line, and as a popular experience, such as in various styles of meditation. In fact, meditation and contemplation are universal, age-old strategies for gaining inspiration of various kinds. And paintings functioned for ages as objects of contemplation and still operate as such. This is not to say that this kind of art will always please the eye of the beholder. As argued by Petro, one of the characteristics of the current aesthetic of boredom in moving images even continues the modernist feature of provocation and calculated assault: spectators wonder how long they have to watch and wait until something happens; how much tedium can one endure? Different from the modernist self-referential aesthetic object, however, is evoking the spectators’ awareness of the temporal and psychic structures of perception itself.108 In line with this statement, the aesthetics of boredom in Tahrir Square, Passage, and Bourbaki Panorama challenge our perception and the alarming stillness makes us actually aware of the absence of the sound of violence. This chapter focused on “boring” painting-like videos that interrogate visual representations in mass media. It is possible to refer to these videos as expanded paintings, whereby the expansion pertains in particular to processes of veiling

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and unveiling. Such processes rely on mediating and camouflaging screens, on disturbances, and on deferred insights resulting from slowness and boredom. Being turned invisible most literally applies to the continuously camouflaging flag referring, among other things, to Egyptian state television censorship, to the (surveillance drone) view on the African people in the smalls boats that records their becoming invisible, and to the luxury longing for invisibility in a frenzied world, which is simultaneously marked by conflict zones where people do in fact become invisible and disappear. The alternation between disturbance and more transparency draws attention in particular to the mediating function of information screens on television and the internet in Tahrir Square and How Not to Be Seen. Constructed disturbance and glitches-like effects in the form of “poor images” elucidate how images are treated in mass media, but also offer paths of escape from predictable information control. Moreover, faulty images appear to be considered as metaphor for deficiencies in social memory by some theorists and artists. Rossaak and Blom argue that social memory, based as it is on constant mobilization and new associations, may lead to loss of memory. Particularly the internet redefines memory as forgetting. In Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen, the image-overkill is suggested as possibility for becoming invisible. Metwaly, however, continues the work of activist video artists in archiving social memory, although she prefers a strategy of veiling and unveiling, rather than making witness reports in the form of documentaries. Disturbances in “surface images” function as a veil; as in daily life, one may try to ignore instabilities, but one should not ignore the mediator. In fact, the video artworks I discussed appear to call for a way of looking at the digital screen or projection screen that corresponds to how we are used to look at a painting: by observing it as a mediating screen as well as content at the same time. In addition, one may consider the compressed resolution of the (poor) images as a continuation of a long history of selective “resolutions” in representations in painting. The fragmented collage-like character of the aforementioned videos also allows us to compare them in productive ways to the collage-like paintings discussed in the first two chapters. Although the fragmented appearance is more obvious in How Not to Be Seen, the ways of telescoping background and foreground in Tahrir Square and Passage turns them into surface images that lack illusionist depth, calling forth the late nineteenth-century paintings by Paul Cézanne in which he experimented with pictorial depth, as groundwork for cubist paintings and collages. It is striking that the historical collage technique, fragmented as it is like the layout of newspapers, is considered to be one of the

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roots of video art, in particular because most of the discussed videos allude to the collage-like character of current mass media. Having arrived at the end of the last chapter of this study, it is possible to say more about how we can look differently at my first case studies of painted pictures in the light of my discussion of digital images, performances, and videos as forms of socio-critical paintings.

Notes 1 Meigh-Andrews in Rees et al., Expanded Cinema, 126. 2 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 87. 3 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 15. 4 Rajchman in Leighton, Moving Image, 318. Deleuze’s view on Bacon’s work was discussed in Chapter 1. 5 This chapter will not discuss “tableau vivant,” although the discussion on the influence of painting on time-based art usually addresses this phenomenon. See my reflections on this subject in Westgeest, Video Art Theory, chapters 3 and 4. 6 Cubitt, Videography, 191–2. 7 www​.o​​penga​​llery​​.co​.u​​k​/vid​​eo​-ar​​t​/jas​​mina-​​metwa​​ly​-b-​​1982-​​warsa​w (accessed July 14, 2017). 8 www​.i​​fa​.de​​/en​/v​​isual​​-arts​​/bien​​nials​​/ruec​​kblic​​k​/con​​cept-​​2015/​​jasmi​​na​-me​​twaly​​ -phil​​ip​-ri​​zk​.ht​​ml (accessed July 14, 2017). 9 www​.ibraaz​.org​/interviews​/17 (accessed July 14, 2017). 10 www​.ibraaz​.org​/interviews​/17 and http:​/​/www​​.sfei​​r​-sem​​ler​.c​​om​/ga​​llery​​-arti​​sts​/j​​ asmin​​a​-met​​waly-​​a​nd​-p​​hilip​​-rizk​/ (accessed July 14, 2017). 11 Battcock, New Artists’ Video, xiv. 12 Freed in Schneider and Korot, Video Art, 210–1. 13 Paik in Rosebush, Nam June Paik. 14 The artists discussed in Chapter 4, who recorded their painting action, can be put into the first category. 15 Rush, New Media, 80. 16 Rush, Video Art, 13. 17 Hanhardt in Hall and Fifer, Illuminating Video, 73. 18 Rush, Video Art, 53. 19 Herzogenrath, Videokunst. 20 Hanhardt in Hall and Fifer, Illuminating Video, 73, 79. 21 Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye, 7. 22 Douglas and Eamon, Art of Projection, 8. 23 Van Assche, “Videographics,” 96.

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24 Lazzarato in Leighton, Moving Image, 284. 25 Belton in Renov and Suderburg, Resolutions, 67. 26 Schwabsky quoted in Elwes, Installation, 21. 27 Windhausen quoted Sharits from one of his essays from 1976 in Leighton, Moving Image, 124. 28 Aumont in Dalle Vacche, Visual Turn, 146. 29 Leighton, Moving Image, 197. 30 Wollen in Leighton, Moving Image, 173. 31 Butler, Television, 172. 32 Rush, New Media, 27–8. 33 Manovich, “Digital Cinema,” 175, 192. 34 Cramer in Berry and Dieter, Postdigital Aesthetics, 17–18. 35 Bazin, What Is Cinema, 166. 36 Arnheim reprinted in Dalle Vacche, Visual Turn, 151. 37 Anthony Haden-Guest, Hilary Lawson, and Natasha Rees, authors of introduction to Video Painting: The First 10 Years, 2017, issuu​​.com/​​openg​​aller​​yuk​/d​​ocs​/1​​7​-03-​​ 03​.te​​nyear​​s​comb​​ined.​​ect (accessed July 14, 2017). 38 Hilary Lawson in Video Painting: The First 10 Years, 2017, 32–4. issuu​​.com/​​openg​​ aller​​yuk​/d​​ocs​/1​​7​-03-​​03​.te​​nyear​​s​comb​​ined.​​ect (accessed July 14, 2017). 39 Information in exhibition flyer of Galerie Ron Mandos, at the LOOP Art Fair 2017, where this triptych was simultaneously exhibited. 40 Ndebele quoted in Bosland and Perryer, This Is Our Time, 2010, 112. 41 If the preferred perspective before that period and in many other cultures was rather a “bird’s-eye view,” hardly ever this involved a strictly vertical angle. 42 Friedberg, Virtual Window, 1. 43 Friedberg, Virtual Window, 2, 5, 6. 44 Friedberg, Virtual Window, 12. 45 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 32, 34. 46 www​.m​​oma​.o​​rg​/le​​arn​/m​​oma​_l​​earni​​ng​/hi​​to​-st​​eyerl​​-how-​​not​-t​​o​-be-​​seen-​​a​-fuc​​ king-​​didac​​tic​-e​​ducat​​ional​​-mov-​​file-​​2013 (accessed November 12, 2017). 47 www​.b​​erlin​​artli​​nk​.co​​m​/201​​3​/11/​​19​/in​​tervi​​ew​-hi​​to​-st​​eyerl​​-zero​​-prob​​abili​​ty​-an​​d​ -the​​-age-​​of​-ma​​ss​-ar​​t​-pro​​ducti​​on (accessed November 12, 2017). 48 Ellis, “Speed, Film, and Television,” 107–8. 49 Steyerl in Aikens, Too Much World, 35. 50 Lütticken in Aikens, Too Much World, 58. 51 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 18. 52 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 19–20. 53 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 22. 54 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 23–4. 55 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 27.

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56 Mondloch, Screens, xiii. 57 Mondloch, Screens, 2. 58 In “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual,” Thomas Zummer inserted the definition of interface from the Oxford English Dictionary: “A surface lying between two portions of matter or space, and forming their common boundary.” In Iles, Into the Light, 77. 59 Mondloch, Screens, 3–4. 60 Sherwin in interview with Duncan White, published in Rees, Expanded Cinema, 253, 255. 61 Manovich, Language of New Media, 95, 99. 62 The 2012 version is a revised version of an essay by Steyerl from 2007 with the same title. 63 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 32, 44. 64 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 6. 65 Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 156. 66 Work discussed in Beckman and Ma, Still Moving, 70. 67 Antin in Schneider and Korot, Video Art, 177. 68 Maier-Rothe, Kafafi, and Feizabadiy in Downey, Uncommon Grounds, 70, 75. 69 Hirschhorn quoted in Jürgens, “Thomas Hirschhorn,” unpaged. 70 Kurtz in Schneider and Korot, Video Art, 235. 71 Spielmann, Video, 134. 72 Spielmann, Video, 5, 10. 73 Rossaak in Cohen and Streitberger, Photofilmic, 218. 74 Rossaak in Cohen and Streitberger, Photofilmic, 229. 75 Betancourt, Glitch Art, chapters 3 and 1. The author, however, emphasizes that glitch is not necessarily a new or digital form because technical failures have been employed for decades, particularly in analog failures in early video art (chapter 1, 1/49). 76 Betancourt, Glitch Art, chapter 2, 6/27; chapter 4, 4/20. 77 Marks in Downey, Uncommon Grounds, 260, 257. 78 Marks in Downey, Uncommon Grounds, 263–4. 79 Dijck, Mediated Memories, 2, 21. 80 Dijck, Mediated Memories, 21–2, 24. 81 Rifky in Ebner, Fabrik, 111. 82 Metwaly and Rizk quoted in Ebner, Fabrik, 112. 83 Dijck, Mediated Memories, 175, 179. 84 Blom in Blom, Lundemo, and Rossaak, Memory in Motion, 13–15. 85 Blom in Blom, Lundemo, and Rossaak, Memory in Motion, 24. 86 Blom in Blom, Lundemo, and Rossaak, Memory in Motion, 155–6. 87 Hui in in Blom, Lundemo, and Rossaak, Memory in Motion, 307, 315, 322–3.

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88 Blom in Blom, Lundemo, and Rossaak, Memory in Motion, 34. 89 Sturken in Renov and Suderburg, Resolutions, 1. 90 Meigh-Andrews, History of Video Art, 61, 64. 91 Maier-Rothe, Kafafi and Feizabadi in Downey, Uncommon Grounds, 81. 92 Wall in interview with Martin Schwander in 1994, in De Duve, Jeff Wall, 135. 93 Cubitt, Videography, 34. 94 Lütticken in Douglas and Eamon, Art of Projection, 57. 95 Koepnick, On Slowness, 10, 8. 96 Koepnick, On Slowness, 17. 97 Jaffe, Slow Movies, 7. 98 Jaffe, Slow Movies, 3. 99 Jaffe, Slow Movies, 1. 100 Bissell and Fuller, Stillness, 3. 101 Bissell and Fuller, Stillness, 4–6. 102 See my discussion about this term in relation to video art in Westgeest, Video Art Theory, chapter 3. 103 Quoted by David Antin in Schneider and Korot, Video Art, 178. 104 Huguet quoted in Petro, Fugitive Images, 271. 105 Petro, Fugitive Images, 268. 106 Petro, Fugitive Images, 270. 107 Jameson, Postmodernism, 72. 108 Petro, Fugitive Images, 276.

Concluding Remarks

In our culture today, most people will largely associate painting with the art world, whereas they will look at photography and video as media that are more integrated in daily life. The paintings discussed in this study were selected for their potential to function as mediator between art and our everyday experience. As “slow paintings” these works serve to counterbalance the fugitive images of the digital age. As this study demonstrated, however, it is equally important that carefully looking at these paintings may help us to generate insights into visual strategies applied in art as well as in everyday visual communication, while also exposing to us the role of conventions in the application and perception of visual media. Contemporary paintings that include photography or video may in particular convey insights into visual strategies and their different artistic and more general implications. Various forms of slowness are applied in these intermedia paintings that force us as viewers to contemplate their use of visual strategies, and this automatically implies attention for the relationship between slowness or stillness and contemplation versus the fastness and fleetingness of the countless images today that hardly seem to warrant closer scrutiny. If this prominent role for painting in the digital age may come as a surprise, it has in fact become quite common today for photography and video as digitally manipulated media to use strategies from the tradition of painting. Although it is no longer possible to define painting narrowly—because the rich variety of contemporary paintings discourages any generalization, having turned the limited traditional characterization as “paint on a flat support” obsolete—I still insist on calling the artworks discussed in this study “paintings” or “painting-like” artworks. As illustrated by my analyses of the selected works, this label is appropriate because they have at least some characteristics associated with the tradition of painting. For example, they apply or refer to basic conventions from its history, such as through alluding to themes, genres, or forms of composition. Or they embody what, essentially, a painting has always been: a still, two-dimensional picture, handmade and accentuating its

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own surface. Moreover, they are usually made of paint on a support or allude to it, and they draw the viewer’s attention into the frame, toward the constructed image that refers to the world outside. The use of photography and video does not undo these characteristics but rather strengthens them in the combination with features associated with lens-based media such as truthfulness, immediacy, and technology. I would like to end my discussion of various forms of slowness of painting by highlighting some of the issues that sum up my argument. From the perspective of the last chapter on a variety of forms of disturbance in painting-like video art as tools for slowing down and elucidating our approach of the images, it is interesting to look back to the case studies discussed in the first four chapters. In many cases the works also deploy forms of disturbance to slow down or intensify the attention of the spectator, either as formal distortions or paradoxical visual aspects, or as collage-like constructions. In fact, even salient brushstrokes may function as optical obstruction that delays our understanding of a painting’s subject, these brushstrokes serving as the “noise” of paintings. The disturbances actually generate awareness of the interfering role of media, as well as of the human intervention in the mediation, even in the case of mechanical media and technical disturbances. In line with this observation, there is the obvious connection between processes of veiling and unveiling, as discussed in the last chapter, and the term “masking,” used in the first chapter. This term, used with respect to affirming and criticizing photography as well painting, also comprises an alternation of unveiling and veiling. In fact, the digitally manipulated pictures discussed in Chapter 3 play with veiled and unveiled views of reality (or its masking) as well. The image-text combinations in the paintings of Chapter 2 rely on this strategy to convey paradoxical messages, whereas elsewhere in this study this was applicable to the tension between titles and pictures. The main effect of this strategy is that it slows down the work’s perception, forcing the spectator to think twice. The same is true of the artistic decision either to limit the number of details included in the image (veiling) or to provide an overload of details (unveiling). In a most literal sense, veiling or masking plays a role in Chapter 4 in the painting actions that involved overpainting previous expressions. As in the case of disturbance, then, the strategy of veiling and unveiling functions as method of delay in our perception and understanding of the artworks, while simultaneously drawing attention to this visual strategy applied in propaganda. A third feature in support of my argument on slow painting pertains to the role of skin as surface. This appeared to act as a delaying and meaningful factor

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in critically scrutinizing the role of the increasing immateriality and seemingly transparency of visual communication in society. Most literally, I discussed the skin of oil paint as an active agent, and, in a more figurative sense, I compared paint as a liquid material with bodily fluids or, after drying, with human skin. In addressing the role of acrylic paint as providing a more decorative surface to the paintings discussed in Chapter 2, I emphasized the corporality of the collage paintings as a way to focus on the present digital collage culture. Some of the digitally manipulated images I subsequently discussed had regained materiality through being printed on canvas or presented as a voluminous light box. In the last chapter, the role of skin related in particular to the heightened awareness of centripetal screens and surface images. If we associate skin specifically with human skin, however, the case studies discussed in Chapter 4 are most revealing, because the skin of the spectators literally touched the paintings, which contrasts of course with the convention that spectators merely look at paintings only. The participants either touched paint as producers, felt paint in “treatments,” or walked over floor paintings. These three factors—disturbance, veiling-unveiling, and skin—that slow down and intensify our perception may be understood as touching on the very point of images: we look at images because they carry the promise of “unveiling” something to us, but they actually transport us to a state in between unveiling and veiling/disturbance of the subject—in between the materiality of the image and the immateriality of its subject. All my case studies feature the human body as subject. People are depicted in action, often in a group. In an exceptional case, their presence is suggested or required rather than represented. Is it justified to call these pictures sociocritical paintings on the basis of what we perceive, regardless of the intentions of the artists? The artists’ statements did not give rise to alternative interpretations of the quite obvious socio-critical subjects; their words mainly provided specific contexts to or details of the subjects, yet without keeping spectators from developing their own interpretations. In the first chapter’s paintings, people are mainly represented to be interrogated as objects or even victims in news events. If in the next chapter they act in specific roles in order to communicate paradoxical messages, the people in the unsettling pictures of the third chapter are rather isolated individuals in groups representative of our mediatized society. In the last chapter the human beings in the videos are struggling in between being too visible and becoming invisible, which implies a hardly optimistic view on our present mediatized society. With respect to people’s visibility, my case studies in the fourth chapter strikingly differ from those in

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the other chapters. Rather than representing people, the paintings discussed in this chapter include people as living beings. They are encouraged to interact physically as “social bodies,” resulting in visualizations of various types of social interactions. The potential function of these paintings in raising viewers’ consciousness about strategies of visual mediation in daily life, as elaborated in this study, is hardly explicitly addressed by the artists or critics of their work. But raising awareness about a specific subject discussed by an artist in an artwork actually includes a heightened consciousness of its visual mediation. It is possible, for instance, to draw a connection between the various ways in which human beings in my key works are represented and debates about issues of representation in lens-based media. In my first case study, press photos are deployed in order to interrogate the immediacy of action photographs in contrast with the immediacy of action painting, their apparent truthfulness versus fiction in painting, as well as the pictorial conventions they have in common with painting. This position might be expected to be different in the case of manipulated photography, but some of my other case studies put this into perspective, demonstrating that in particular the inherent history of straight analog photography turns these manipulated pictures into thought-provoking paintings. In the last two chapters, lens-based media play a meaningful role in either recording the visualization of social relationships or problematizing their insistent or ambiguous role in visualizing and remembering. Photography and video do not just feature in the pictures under discussion; views on both media partly inform the theoretical foundation of my arguments as well. To understand some of the complexities of the paintings discussed it proved to be useful to consider historical as well as current debates on differences and similarities between painting and lens-based media. For instance, I relied on views on framing from the field of lens-based media for considering the role of the outer frame, as well as centrifugal versus centripetal frames with regard to paintings. Oft-used terms in theories of video and photography, such as disturbance, slowness, immediacy, blurredness, and indexicality, contributed to explaining particular features of the discussed paintings. And differences in applications of the term “fake” with regard to photography and painting underscore how much we still experience digitally manipulated pictures as photographs. The former meditations lead me to the question of the extent to which we can conceive of a medium as being socio-critical. After all, one of the challenges of the argument in this book was to develop a convincing, affirmative answer

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to this question. The case studies demonstrate that at least the applied media are quite capable of contributing to the socio-critical subject of the artworks, a role that mainly results from spectators’ expectations and experiences regarding specific applications and contexts of a particular medium. Through presenting news/war photography as painting, a Renaissance tondo painting as conflict photography, mass media-like videos as paintings, or networks in society as painting performances, the expectations of viewers are disturbed and questioned. This forces them to reconsider their expectations toward the role and nature of media in visual communication in society. Taking also into consideration the aforementioned metaphors for characteristics of the medium—such as skin, blood, mask, or veil—and painting actions as actions of social critique, I conclude that a medium can well function as a socio-critical mediator, even though this role is inextricably bound up with the subject of the artwork. This conclusion is underscored by the observation that social memories appear to be medium-related as well. Memories derived from contemporary news events are lens-based-related memories, whereas memories derived from, for instance, medieval Christian art are painting-related memories. Although I argue that in particular the simultaneous presentation of diverse characteristics of multiple media and paradoxical aspects in the subjects of the pictures engenders reflection on complexities in visual communication, the discussed view on simultaneous adaptation underscores that the multitude of options for spectators mainly encourages them to choose their own “route” in perception and interpretation. The artworks offer mines, but the beholders have to quarry. In daily life, images are most often presented in specific contexts that provide them with explicit meanings. As a result, we are not challenged by the veiling/unveiling aspects of the images themselves. The paintings I selected require the spectator to relate them to known images for meaning production. The more specific importance of the presence of simultaneous adaptations in a globalized society, as stressed by Dovey, becomes especially clear in the works by Samba, Mutu, Marshall, Smith, Dumas, and AES+F, which address multiple ethnicities. Moreover, some of the discussed artworks confront visual propaganda from communism and capitalism as somehow comparable if obsolete concepts, even though their utopian strategies are still successfully applied in mass media. With respect to the similarity between the discussed paintings and aspects of the digital age, Joselit’s views helped to identify the network character of the slow paintings addressed. If the internet appears as time and place compressions on our computer screens, paintings have been including such compressions for ages already, albeit as slow networks. And Cramer’s reconsideration of digital

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and analog as terms change common views on digital media versus painting. The artworks consisting of paint that I discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 4 include “digital” features, such as discrete elements of brushstrokes, reduction of resolution, and chaotic properties in their collage-like appearance. In other cases, however, it was possible to associate painterly gestures with human agency, and therefore as potential in humanizing tendencies toward digitization. At the end of the second chapter, I briefly reflected on the exposure and societal impact of the discussed artworks. Earlier in that chapter advertising agencies were identified by Hirota as the paradigmatic mass symbol-makers in our society, and Immendorff ’s painting presented a protagonist inciting the artist to leave the studio and join the political activists on the street. In fact, all paintings discussed in this chapter and the other chapters in this study were created to be presented in art institutions. As a result, their exposure remains limited to the visitors of those sites. In order to function as an experimental laboratory as well as a kind of training center to heighten consciousness of visual communication in society on a larger scale, I want to advocate more attention for these paintings in educational environments and mass media, where they can inject a new and effective form of slowness in order to provide insights into how visual media mediate and the role of human interference in it. For instance, if the collage-like nature of the fragmentized visual communication in mass media seems to reduce visual contemplation, the discussed collage paintings may function as study guide. This textbook aims to draw more attention to this too implicit role of paintings in providing profound insights into visual strategies, as well as to stimulate art historians and artists to open up these laboratories to a larger public. Moreover, this study evokes the question why research into the medium of painting is hardly included in the discipline of media studies. And art institutions might learn from this study, as well as from the successful campaigns of slow food, how to promote the potential of slow paintings in stimulating contemplation and critique in the digital age. Finally, a reflection on some of the most relevant outcomes regarding the application of various forms of slowness in the main case studies in relation to the functioning of these artworks as socio-critical medium. Whereas the reminiscence of press photos, as in Phienox, makes spectators assume that the event was important enough to be photographed and published, the absence of text and explanatory details as well as the masking materiality force viewers to invest time to fill in that gap with imagination and interpretations of their own. At the same time, the artwork heightens the awareness of the ambiguity of news photos deprived from their textual context. Moreover, the confrontation

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of straight photography and handmade painting draws attention to the different forms of immediacy included in these media, and problematizes the opposition of uniqueness versus reproducibility. By means of quite different strategies, several paintings discussed in Chapter 2 address the “feel good” depictions and slogans of commercial and political propaganda. They use, for instance, the look of amusement parks, while the inclusion of boat rides, as in Great America, interrogates the visual communication of the history of slavery and the practice of migration. In these examples, the tools of persuasion—exaggeration, inversion, humor, bright colors, emotions, decorative flatness, collage-like constructions, and ingenious image-text combinations—do not appear to differ dramatically in terms of their effectiveness. In collage paintings, however, the flashing simplified and utopian commercial and political messages are replaced by subtle paradoxical messages and psychological depth, thereby sustaining slow thought-provoking image-text combinations from conceptual art in particular. If propaganda aims to block critical contemplation, the paintings analyzed in this study rather stimulate such reflection. The slowly produced digitally manipulated pictures central to the third chapter stimulate the spectator to reflect not only on sanitized wars or violence in visual communication in the present digital age but also on the future development of visual evidence. If for ages we have been used to paintings as constructed vehicles of visual information, while also having become accustomed to informative straight photographs in photojournalism, ambivalent pictures, such as Last Riot 2 Tondo #22, demonstrate that their future status might be a sociocritical medium warning against the consequences of our present behavior and decisions—even preventing something from happening. By contrast, the slowness of the delegated painting performances covered in Chapter 4 worked to visualize, materialize, and interrogate current social relationships. In social spaces, people usually do not leave any visual or material traces. In Draftmen’s Congress, the network consisting of anonymous producers who used and adapted work by others—while being aware that next users and producers were already waiting to continue—is quite similar to the interactive internet, where users become producers and the other way around. The physicality of the project, however, made it necessary for participants to be present in the physical space, where they were enabled to discover the potentials of painting in critically discussing issues in social life. Conversely, in the case studies in the last chapter, spectators have to interact with people in the virtual space of digital video. The painting-like videos, in particular Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, express their critique of how mass media communicate social issues, through

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applying strategies linked to disturbance, boredom, and processes of veiling and unveiling—strategies that also feature in some of the other works explored in this study. It may be inspiring to readers to use these insights and look once again at Richter’s Phienox, the first case study, as a slow, analog-digital hybrid, veiling and unveiling video-like painting—one that well offers an alternative route for contemplation on critique in the digital age.

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Pollock, Griselda. 1992. Painting, Feminism, History. In Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, edited by Michèle Barrett, and Anne Phillips, 138–76. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ring Petersen, Anne, Mikkel Bogh, Hans Dam Christensen, and Peter Norgaard Larsen, eds. 2013 [2010]. Contemporary Painting in Context. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press and University of Copenhagen. Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. London: Thames & Hudson.

Chapter 1 Ammer, Manuela, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit. 2015. Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age. Munich: Prestel Verlag. Bann, Stephen. 1985. The Mythical Conception Is the Name: Titles and Names in Modern and Post-Modern Painting. Word & Image 1 (2): 176–90. Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne, ed. 1964. Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated from the French by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon. Bois, Yve-Alain. 1990. Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bryson, Norman. 1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan. Burgin, Victor. 1982. Thinking Photography. London: MacMillan Press. Chipp, Herschel B., ed. 1975 [1968]. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Danchev, Alex. 2010. The Artist and the Terrorist, or The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group. Alternatives 35: 93–112. Deleuze, Gilles. 2003 [1981]. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated from the French by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. Dorin, Lisa. 2008. Works by Luc Tuymans. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 34 (1): 48–9. Dovey, Lindiwe. 2012. Fidelity, Simultaneity and the “Remaking” of Adaptation Studies. In Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts, edited by Pascal Nicklas, and Oliver Lindner, 162–85. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Elkins, James. 2000. What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy. New York, NY: Routledge. Franklin, Margery B., Robert C. Becklen, and Charlotte L. Doyle. 1993. The Influence of Titles on How Paintings Are Seen. Leonardo 2 (2): 103–8. Gerger, Gernot, and Helmut Leder. 2015. Titles Change the Esthetic Appreciations of Paintings. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. http:​/​/jou​​rnal.​​front​​iersi​​n​.org​​/arti​​cle​/ 1​​0​.338​​9​/fnh​​um​.20​​1​5​.00​​464​/f​​ull. Godfrey, Tony. 2014 [2009]. Painting Today. London: Phaidon. Graw, Isabelle, Daniel Birnbaum, and Nikolaus Hirsch. 2012. Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

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Green, David, and Peter Seddon. eds. 2000. History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grynsztejn, Madeleine, and Helen Molesworth. 2011. Luc Tuymans. Anvers: Ludion. Harris, Jonathan, ed. 2003. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting: Hybridity, Hegemony, Historicism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Haxthausen, Charles W. 1997. The Work of Art in the Age of Its (Al)Chemical Transmutability: Rethinking Painting and Photography after Polke. In Sigmar Polke: Die drei Lügen der Malerei, edited by Martin Hentschel, 185–202. Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag. Heinrich, Christoph. 2007. Watch Out for the Bird. In Daniel Richter: Die Palette 1995–2007, edited by Ch. Heinrich, D. Dath, and K. Scott, 19. Cologne: DuMont. Hentschel, Martin, ed. 1997. Sigmar Polke: Die drei Lügen der Malerei. Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag. Heynen, Julian, and Frits W. Kramer. 2002. Daniel Richter: Grünspan. Düsseldorf: Kerber Verlag. Hoffer, Andreas, and Karlheinz Essl. 2009. Daniel Richter. Klosterneuburg: Sammlung Essl. Hoptman, Laura. 2014. The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art. Hudson, Suzanne. 2015. Painting Now. London: Thames & Hudson. Hughes, David. 2009. Daniel Richter and the Problem of Political Painting Today. New German Critique 108 (Fall): 133–60. Kaiser, Philipp, and Jacqueline Uhlmann. 2006. Daniel Richter: Huntergrund. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1993 [1927]. Photography. Critical Inquiry 19 (3): 421–36. Krauss, Rosalind E. 1979. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October 8 (Spring): 30–44. Lawrence, Sharon Orleans. 2013. How the Materiality of Paint Is Intrinsic to the Work of Art: An Explanation of the Meaningful Placement of the Medium of Painting in Contemporary Art Theory. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Leemans, Koen, ed. 2011. Joris Ghekiere – California. Mechelen: Cultuurcentrum Mechelen. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1999 [1982]. The Way of the Masks. Translated from the French by Sylvia Modelski. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Ring Petersen, Anne, Mikkel Bogh, Hans Dam Christensen, and Peter Norgaard Larsen, eds. 2013 [2010]. Contemporary Painting in Context. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press and University of Copenhagen. Rugoff, Ralph, ed. 2007. The Painting of Modern Life 1960s to Now. London: Hayward Publishing. Scott, Clive. 1999. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. London: Reaktion Books. Shiff, Richard. 2008. Less Dead. In Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, edited by Cornelia Butler, 145–75. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Spielmann, Yvonne. 2001. Intermedia in Electronic Images. Leonardo 34 (1): 55–61. Vermeiren, Gerrit. 2007. Luc Tuymans: I Don’t Get It. Anvers: Ludion. Wollen, Peter. 2003 [1984]. Fire and Ice. In The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells, 76–80. London: Routledge. Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. 2015. Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 2 Ammer, Manuela, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit. 2015. Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age. Munich: Prestel Verlag. Banash, David. 2013. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Betterton, Rosemary. 1996. An Intimate Distance: Women Artists and the Body. London: Routledge. Busch, Dennis, and Robert Klanten, eds. 2016. The Age of Collage. Vol. 2. Contemporary Collage in Modern Art. Berlin: Gestalten. Draxler, Helmut. 2011. Wo stehst du, Kollege? Texte zur Kunst (81). https​:/​/ww​​w​.tex​​ tezur​​kunst​​.de​/8​​1​/wo-​​stehs​​t​-​du-​​kolle​​ge/ (accessed on August 19, 2016). Evans, Sally. 2016. The Patchwork Girl’s Daughters: Cyberfemininity, Hybridity, and Excess in the Poetry of Stephanie Strickland and Mez Breeze. Contemporary Women’s Writing 10 (1): 105–22. Frank-Witt, Petra. 2016. Kerry James Marshall: Moving the Outside Inside. Third Text 30 (5–6): 388–402. Freeman, Damien, and Derek Matravers, eds. 2015. Figuring Out Figurative Art: Contemporary Philosophers on Contemporary Paintings. London: Routledge. Gaines, Charles, Greg Tate, and Laurence Rassel. 2017. Kerry James Marshall. New York, NY: Phaidon. Gibbons, Joan. 2005. Art & Advertising. London: I.B.Tauris. Godfrey, Tony. 2014 [2009]. Painting Today. London: Phaidon. Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gulas, Charles S., and Marc G. Weinberger. 2006. Humor in Advertising: A Comprehensive Analysis. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Hammond, Harmony, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. 1985. Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage. New York, NY: Gallery of the American Indian Community House. Haq, Nav. 2013. Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff. Antwerp: Ludion. Hudson, Suzanne. 2015. Painting Now. London: Thames & Hudson. Jackall, Robert, ed. 1995. Propaganda. New York, NY: New York University Press. Joselit, David. 2000. Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness. Art History 23 (1): 19–34.

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Index abstract painting  20, 29, 36, 123, 134, 170 action painting  17, 23, 25, 28, 140, 142, 204 action photograph  17, 23, 25–26, 29, 204 activism  20, 47, 141, 166, 174 adaptation  10–11, 18, 32, 38, 47, 59, 122 advertisement  65, 95–6 advertising  75, 90, 92–7, 206 AES+F  102–3, 105–8, 116–19, 121 agency  40–1, 206 Alberti, Leon Battista  40, 175–6, 180 Althamer, Pawel  133–5, 146, 152, 158 apparatus  9–10, 106, 140, 180 appropriation  10, 17–8, 34, 54, 117 Arakawa, Ei  157 archive  39, 42–3, 49, 165 Arnheim, Rudolf  173 Assche, Christine van  169 assemblage  39, 79, 122 atemporal  28 authenticity  4, 153, 184 autonomous  29, 39, 154 Bacharach, Sondra  95–6 Bacon, Francis  41–2, 163 Baily, Beezy  123 Bakhtin, Mikhail  52, 145 Balet, Catherine  120–1 Banash, David  76–9 Bann, Stephan  56–8, 102 Barragan, Paco  148 Baudelaire, Charles  23 Baudrillard, Jean  76, 112 Bazin, André  172–3 Beckmann, Max  51–2 Belton, John  169 Betancourt, Michael  186 Betterton, Rosemary  82 Bishop, Claire  134, 152–5 black-and-white  25, 34, 49, 78, 108, 171 blind fields  55

Blom, Ina  188–90, 196 blood  38, 69, 81–2, 104, 113, 116, 124, 142, 150, 205 blurred  17, 21, 43, 49, 135, 139 Bochner, Mel  148 Bois, Yve-Alain  4, 53, 147, 156 Boltanski, Christian  153 Bolter, Jay D.  8, 163, 175–6 boredom  7, 11, 162–3, 194–6, 208 boring  4, 163, 192, 194 Bourriaud, Nicolas  154–5 Broersen, Persijn  122 Brothers, Caroline  111 Bryson, Norman  32 Burgin, Victor  42, 115 Busch, Dennis  78, 83 Butt, Ambreen  84 Campus, Peter  181 caption  22, 54–6, 59, 71, 114 Celmins, Vija  33–4, 36, 38, 41 centrifugal  172, 204 centripetal  163, 172–5, 203–4 Cézanne, Paul  196 Chiapello, Eve  153 chiaroscuro  28, 120–1 Churchman, Leidy  142–3 cliché images  183 close-up  25–7, 32, 38, 147 collage culture  5, 67, 76, 79, 203 collage painting  64, 79–80, 83–4, 206–7 commercials  64, 88, 91–7 conceptual art  2, 64, 70–1, 93, 207 Conrad, Tony  170 corporality, 17–18, 35–6, 38, 43, 203 Cramer, Florian  171–2, 205 Crimp, Douglas  3 cropped  31–2, 139 Cubitt, Sean  164, 192 Damisch, Hubert  37 dance  43

220 Danchev, Alex  50 Danto, Arthur  57 da Vinci, Leonardo  113, 171 death of painting  3–4, 36 Debord, Guy  41 deceleration  2, 122, 193 décollage  168 Deepwell, Katy  141 de Kooning, Willem  28, 139 delay  2, 122, 193, 202 delegated painting  133, 158, 207 delegated performance  134, 138, 152–4, 156–7 Deleuze, Gilles  41–3, 163 De Maria, Walter  147 de Mul, Jos  8 Denis, Maurice  36, 191 de Piles, Roger  110, 116–18 de Saint Phalle, Niki  141 didactic  48, 118 Didi-Huberman, Georges  172 digital cinema  171 digital collage  5, 83, 103, 105, 203 digitization  5, 26, 108, 151, 163, 169, 171 Dijck, José van  187–8 directness  28–9 disturbance  163–4, 184, 196, 202–4 documentary photography, 107, 109 dot-screen  25–6, 29–30 Douglas, Stan  162, 169 Dovey, Lindiwe  10–11, 18, 32, 47, 74, 122, 205 Draxler, Helmut  9–10, 72 Druckrey, Timothy  110 dubitative  106–7 Duchamp, Marcel  57, 71 Dumas, Marlene  30–2, 36, 47, 53, 205 Eamon, Christopher  162, 169 Ehninger, Eva  134, 147, 208 Eisenstein, Sergei  163 Elkins, James  38, 43 Ellis, John  176 Eno, Brian  123 Ensor, James  51–3 ethical  48, 51, 69, 103 Evans, Walker  92–3 expanded painting  148, 195

Index Fang, Lijun  88 Faulkner, Simon  111–12 feminist  9, 64, 72, 80–5, 142 fixed frame  163, 172, 174, 182 fleeting images  1, 17 fleetingness  6, 18, 201 flicker  21, 183, 185 frame  34, 55, 115, 151, 169, 172–7, 181 framing  31, 163, 184, 204 Frampton, Hollis  106 Freed, Hermine  167 Friedberg, Anne  175–6, 180 Gaut, Berys  8 gaze  32, 42, 82, 111, 179 Géricault, Théodore  51 gesture  41, 156, 194 Ghekiere, Joris  25–6, 28–9, 36, 40–1, 58, 73 glance  32, 79 glitch  186, 196 globalization  18, 47, 78, 83, 146 Godfrey, Tony  2, 6, 33–4, 38, 43, 52, 75, 138, 151, 208 Gombrich, Ernst  37 Gordon, Douglas  162 Goya, Francisco José de  52, 114 graffiti  20, 22 Graw, Isabelle  4, 39–41, 141 Green, David  48–9, 52–3, 117 Greenaway, Peter  171 Greenberg, Clement  6–8, 36, 73 Grosse, Katharina  149 Groys, Boris  88, 90 Grubanov, Ivan  133, 144–8, 150 Grusin, Richard  8, 163, 175–6 Guerrilla Girls  72 Halbwachs, Maurice  189, 192 Hanhardt, John G.  168, 169 Harris, Jonathan  23 Haxthausen, Charles  25, 30 Henner, Mishka 184 hesitation  193 Hildenbrand, Karine  110–11 Hirota, Janice M.  92, 95, 97, 206 Hirschhorn, Thomas  184 history painting  44, 48–53, 67, 93, 110, 117

Index Holzer, Jenny  93 Hoptman, Laura  28 Hudson, Suzanne  3, 6, 208 Hughes, David  20–2, 28, 47 Huguet, Michèle  194 Hugues, Gérard  110–11 Hui, Yuk  189 humor  69, 95 image-text relationship  70–75, 96–7, 202, 207 immediacy  24–6, 28–9, 184, 202, 204 Immendorff, Jörg  72–5, 89, 97, 206 indexical  40, 57, 111, 171 indirectness  29, 35, 59 infrared  21, 34 ink jet print  102 installation (art)  145–6, 148, 166 interactive  133, 138, 158, 207 interface  8, 175, 180 intermedia  8, 33, 84, 122 internet  22, 28, 39, 158, 175–7, 183–4, 186 Jackson, Shelley  83 Jaffe, Ira  193 Jameson, Fredric  73, 195 Johns, Jasper  71–2, 167 Joselit, David  4, 38–9, 73, 79, 151, 155–7 journalism  112, 121, 165, 184 Jowett, Garth S.  85, 89 Kandl, Johanna  85–6, 88–92 Kawara, On  72 Kessler, Doris  104, 118 Klanten, Robert  78, 83 Klein, Yves  140, 146 Koepnick, Lutz  2, 122, 193, 208 Koether, Jutta  151 Korot, Beryl  167 Kotik, Charlotta  85, 88 Kozol, Wendy  111, 115 Kracauer, Siegfried  46 Krauss, Rosalind E.  7, 29, 147–9, 208 Kubota, Shigeko  142 Kurtz, Bruce  185 Land Art  147–8 Latour, Bruno  39, 156, 157

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Lavin, Maud  94–5 Lawrence, Sharon Orleans  38, 148 Lawson, Hilary  173 Lazzarato, Maurizio  169 Lehmann, Ann-Sophie  108 Lejeune, Anaël  7, 148, 208 Levine, Les  190, 194 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  34 Lister, Martin  106, 109, 110 liveliness  26, 38, 40 Lloyd, Fran  82 low quality image  22, 183–4 Lukács, Margit  122 Lunenfeld, Peter  106 Lütticken, Sven  192–3 McCarthy, Paul  157 McLuhan, Marshall  7–8, 77, 208 Magritte, René  71, 73, 75, 90, 92–3 Maier-Rothe, Jens  184, 190 Manovich, Lev  109, 171, 182 Marden, Brice  42–3 Marks, Laura U.  186 Marshall, Kerry James  65–71, 74–80, 91, 96, 174 mask  34, 52, 202, 205 Mathieu, George  139–40 mechanical  25, 49, 78, 105, 111 mediated memories  187 Meigh-Andrews, Chris  162 Metwaly, Jasmina  163–6, 168, 172–3, 182, 185–8, 192–3 mirror  107, 116 mise-en-abyme  177, 182 Mitchell, William J.  3,  105–6, 125, 169 Mitchell, W.J.T.  64, 79, 90–1 mixed media  8, 33 Modisakeng, Mohau  173–4, 179, 181, 187, 193 Mondloch, Kate  180 monitor  21, 47, 167–8 mosaic  107, 171 Mosireen  165, 188, 190 multimedia  8, 33, 188 Mumford, Steve  112 Murillo, Oscar  143 Mutu, Wangechi  80–5, 205 Myers, Terry R.  3, 208

222 Namuth, Hans  139–40 nesting  8, 59 network painting  39, 157 news photos  17, 21–2, 25, 29–30, 35, 43, 50–1, 54–5, 114, 184 newspaper  35, 39, 54–5, 59, 67, 77 Nochlin, Linda  81, 83 noisy  38 O’Donnell, Victoria  85, 89 Ophuis, Ronald  50–1, 53–4 Orton, Fred  139 outer-frame  31, 115–16, 204 Paik, Nam June  166–8, 183 painting-like digital photograph  101–2, 105, 126 painting-like video  163, 195, 202, 207 painting performance  133, 135, 139–45, 180 panorama painting  123, 190, 192 participatory art  135, 152–4 patchwork  78–9, 83 performance art  72, 81, 133–4, 145, 167 Petro, Patrice  194–5 photojournalism  103, 115, 126 photojournalist  44, 46, 51, 111, 116 photojournalization  55 photo-like paintings  101 photo-paintings  33, 49 pictorial turn  64 pixels  105–7, 184 Pliny  108 political propaganda  85–8, 91, 95–6 Polke, Sigmar  25–6, 29–30, 36, 55–8 Pollock, Griselda  3, 9, 37, 139, 151, 156 Pollock, Jackson  139–40, 142, 146–7, 156 poor image  182–5, 196 post-digital  79, 102 post-medium  7 proactive photography  107 propaganda  45, 64, 85–91 prosthesis  8, 120 prosumer  10, 12, 32 Qureshi, Imran  133, 149–50 Raindance Corporation  190

Index Rajchman, John  163 Rancière, Jacques  134, 138 Raysse, Martial  170 real time  28, 182 reassembling painting  39, 155–6, 158 reception  6, 8, 36, 55, 169 Reeb, David  111–12, 114, 121 Reed, David  4, 33 relational aesthetics  154–5 Rembrandt  26, 171 remediation  8, 163, 175, 192 reproducibility  29–31, 35 Richter, Daniel  18–22, 34, 42–4, 58–9, 185, 208 Richter, Gerhard  23, 33, 49–51, 53 Ring Petersen, Anne  4, 149 Ritchin, Fred  107, 119 Rosenbach, Ulrike  167 Rosenberg, Harold  139 Rossaak, Eivind  186, 196 Rötzer, Florian  119 Rowley, Alison  3, 37, 151 Rugoff, Ralph  23–4 Rush, Michael  168 Rutz, Paul X.  112 Saltzman, Lisa  10 Samba, Chéri  70, 74–5, 80, 205 Saville, Jenny  82 Schneemann, Carolee  141–2 Schneider, Ira  167 scopic regime  23 Scott, Clive  54–5, 124 sculpture  29, 148–9 Seddon, Peter  48–9, 52–3, 117 Shanchun, Yan  89 Sherwin, Guy  180–1 Shiff, Richard  30 silence  38, 46, 174 Sillman, Amy  142–3 simultaneous adaptation  10, 18, 38, 47, 52, 59, 122, 205 Singer, Avery  75, 77–80 skin  21, 31, 37–8, 66, 81–2, 94, 202–3 slogan  94–6 slow food  1, 193, 206 slow movie  170, 193 Smith, Jaune Quick-To-See  65, 67–71, 84, 95

Index Smith, Karen  89 snapshot  24, 33, 35, 54, 115 social media  121, 165, 184 social memory  186–7, 189–92, 196 social relationship  158, 204, 207 Sontag, Susan  107, 112–14, 117–19 Spielmann, Yvonne  33, 185, 190 spontaneity  26, 184 sprezzatura  26 Steyerl, Hito  176–9, 182–5, 195 Stiles, Kristine  82, 140–1, 145 straight photography  109, 119, 124, 126 surface image  185, 196 tactility  82, 133 television  33–6, 113, 166–9, 176, 183–5, 190, 194 Téllez, Javier  190–2 thermography  21 Titian  26, 37 titles of paintings  54–8, 69–70 transparency  29, 34, 49, 114, 164, 180–1, 196, 203 truthfulness  44, 101, 105, 119, 124–6 Tuymans, Luc  44–7, 53, 57 twofoldness  6, 37–8, 43 two-stages media  49 uniqueness  29–31, 35

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unveiling  182, 191, 196, 202–3 Vasulka, Steina  167, 189 Vasulka, Woody  167, 189 veiling  164, 182, 191, 195–6, 202–3 video game  78, 104–5, 122 video painting  163–5, 173, 182 Viola, Bill  162 Vostell, Wolf  168, 183 Walker, Kara  74 Wall, Jeff  114–18, 121, 124, 191 Wang, Guangyi  86, 88–92, 95 Warhol, Andy  23, 92, 166, 173 war photography  101, 111–14, 117, 126, 205 Weibel, Peter  5, 106, 208 window [as metaphor] 36–7, 52, 70, 73, 107, 169, 175–6, 180 Wollheim, Richard  6, 37–8, 43, 133 word-image relationship  70, 73–4 world wide web  34, 77–8 x-ray  19, 28, 34, 39 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard  56–8, 69–71 Yue, Minjun  95–6 Zmijewski, Artur  133–8, 146, 150–2, 155

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