The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art: Negative Work 9781350243712, 9781350243743, 9781350243729

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1 What Is Provisional Painting?
1 Provisional Painting (2009)
2 To Rest Lightly on the Earth (2011)
3 Painting the Stuckness: Samuel Beckett, Bram Van Velde, Georges Duthuit
4 Weak Thought, Strong Painting (Gianni Vattimo)
5 A Precarious Chain of Signifiers
Part 2 Varieties of the Provisional
6 Some Precursors: Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, Joan Snyder, Chris Reinecke, Sigmar Polke, Carmengloria Morales, Gerard Gasiorowski, Suh Se-Ok, Nahum Tevet, Pierre Buraglio
7 Varieties of the Provisional: Michael Krebber, Albert Oehlen, Rachel Hecker, Amy Feldman
8 Painting As Is (Luca Bertolo and Co.)
9 In Glimpses: David Hammons’s Tarp Paintings
Conclusion: After Provisional Painting
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplify cutting-edge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigor, and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Communication, Milano). Titles Published in the Series: Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed, edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasso Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, by David Carrier Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili, by Paul Gladston ­Gaga Aesthetics, by Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art, by David Carrier The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World, by Richard Kalina The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi, edited by Tiziana Andina and Erica Onnis

The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art Negative Work Raphael Rubinstein

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Raphael Rubinstein, 2023 Raphael Rubinstein has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: David Hammons, Untitled (Tarp Painting), 2010. Photo by Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Mnuchin Gallery, New York. 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. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-4371-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-4372-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-4373-6 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

­ or Heather F ­“I can hear the heart beating as one”

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­Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

viii ix 1

Part 1  What Is Provisional Painting? 1 2 3 4 5

Provisional Painting (2009) To Rest Lightly on the Earth (2011) Painting the Stuckness: Samuel Beckett, Bram Van Velde, Georges Duthuit Weak Thought, Strong Painting (Gianni Vattimo) A Precarious Chain of Signifiers

15 29 41 47 53

Part 2  Varieties of the Provisional 6

7 8 9

Some Precursors: Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, Joan Snyder, Chris Reinecke, Sigmar Polke, Carmengloria Morales, Gerard Gasiorowski, Suh Se-Ok, Nahum Tevet, Pierre Buraglio Varieties of the Provisional: Michael Krebber, Albert Oehlen, Rachel Hecker, Amy Feldman Painting As Is (Luca Bertolo and Co.) In Glimpses: David Hammons’s Tarp Paintings

73 95 105 111

Conclusion: After Provisional Painting

127

Notes Bibliography Index

136 149 153

List of Figures 1.1 Mary Heilmann, Blood on the Tracks, 2005. Oil on canvas 54 × 54 × 1 3/8" © Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth 19 1.2 Kimber Smith (1922–81), TILT, 1980. Acrylic on canvas. 68 × 64 in./172.7 × 162.6 cm. © 2022 Kimber Smith Estate. Private collection, Nashville, TN. Photo: Alex Yudzon/Cheim & Read, New York 22 6.1 Suh Se Ok, Point Variation, 1960s. Ink on rice paper. 76.97 × 50.67 ­inches/195.5 × 128.7 cm (paper); 83.74 × 56.97 × 1.97 inches/212.7 × 144.7 × 5 cm (framed). © The Estate of Suh Se Ok. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and London 78 9.1 David Hammons, Untitled, 2009, mixed media, 92 by 72 inches, Mnuchin Gallery. Photo by Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Mnuchin Gallery, New York 113

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Art in America for permission to reprint the following articles: “Provisional Painting,” May 2009 “To Rest Lightly on the Earth,” February 2012 “Albert Oehlen: The Accidental Abstractionist,” May 2015 “Nahum Tevet: Sculptural Questions in the Domain of Painting,” December 2016 Courtesy of Art Media, LLC Copyright © 2009, 2012, 2015 & 2016 by Art Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Many thanks also to the museums and galleries that commissioned the following texts, portions of which are incorporated into these pages: “Noël Dolla’s Tainted Metaphors of Painting” in Noël Dolla: léger vent de travers, Mac/Val, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2009 “Amy Feldman’s Condensed Poetics” in Amy Feldman: High Sign, Blackston Gallery, New York, 2014 “Pierre Buraglio: An Artist of the No Yes” in Pierre Buraglio: Low Voltage, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint Etienne, 2019 Five texts first appeared on my blog The Silo (thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com) “Chris Reinecke: Let Sundaes Be Sundaes” “Gérard Gasiorowski: Fiction/Nonfiction” “Rachel Hecker: The Throwaway Vanitas” “Suh-se-ok: Freeing the Mark” “Carmengloria Morales: Painted/Unpainted” Four texts are previously unpublished: “Painting the Stuckness” “Weak Thought, Strong Painting” “A Precarious Chain of Signifiers” “In Glimpses: David Hammons’s Tarp Paintings”

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Mary Jo Bang and Graywolf Press for permission to quote from her poem “Provisional Doubt as an Architectural Space.” I would also like to thank the editors I worked with at Art in America (Betsy Baker, Marcia Vetrocq, Lindsay Pollock, and Richard Vine) and to the many artists whose conversation and work inspired me. Last but not least, many, many thanks to the editor of this series, David Carrier, for initiating this project one evening in Brooklyn chez Phong Bui. Raphael Rubinstein, November 2021

Introduction

When we say something is “provisional” we imply that it will do for the time being, in lieu of some later more established form. We underline how the thing in question may be subject to change, that it is not definitive, that it has been created by making do with whatever resources are available. By this definition, there is no aspect of human civilization that isn’t provisional, including, of course, every work of art, and every interpretation of every work of art. My use of the term in my writings on “Provisional Painting” is more limited, even as it encompasses many different kinds of painting, many different approaches to the medium. Ultimately what interests me are those paintings that acknowledge their own inevitable provisionality and make it their subject, or at least one of them. Although my 2009 article “Provisional Painting”—the point of departure for this book—chronicles its own genesis, noting how over the course of a year or so I became, as I put it, “increasingly aware of a kind of provisionality within the practice of painting,” it might be helpful for readers to have a more detailed and nuanced sense of the article’s background. Useful for me, too, I’m sure, so that I might understand a little better what were the sources I drew on, consciously or not, and how events in the larger world might have influenced me and the artists I was writing about. At times provisional paintings (which I characterize in the article as “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling” by artists who “deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk failure or inconsequence”) can seem practically synonymous with the experience of modernity. One of its first, and most

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influential, expressions is found in Honoré de Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” (“Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu”), a two-part story first published in 1831 that is centered on a fictional painter named Frenhofer (we are only told his last name) and his relentless and doomed struggle to achieve his artistic ideal. Seized upon by numerous artists (among them Cézanne, Rodin, Picasso, and de Kooning) as a potent parable of the difficulties of the creative process, Balzac’s tale anticipates some central tenets of twentieth-century art. As many readers have remarked, the “unknown masterpiece” that Balzac describes (“confused masses of colors contained by a multitude of strange lines, forming a high wall of paint” in a portrait that has suffered “slow and progressive destruction”) sounds like it couldn’t have been painted any time before 1950, while Frenhofer’s expressions of self-doubt strongly recall Alberto Giacometti’s creative agonies. In the commentary to his own translation of “The Unknown Masterpiece,” British writer Anthony Rudolf finds in the story “various bits that Giacometti could have written for Balzac.”1 Three decades later, Charles Baudelaire published his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” in which he proclaimed: “Modernity is the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (“La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable”). While the author of Les Fleurs du Mal had in mind chiefly the physical artifacts he felt typified his time, from clothes to steamships to particular kinds of faces—aspects he urged contemporary painters to pay attention to rather than look to Old Masters for artistic lessons—his opposition of the contingent to the immutable speaks to qualities and conditions of modern art that go beyond paying attention to period fashions. Baudelaire’s tripartite formula could easily be appended to many of the works I describe as provisional. Folded into Provisional Painting are numerous modes, styles, and situations. The term encompasses works that have been painted with deliberate casualness, alongside those featuring shoddy craft, self-sabotage, apparent absence of skill, flagrant disregard for the viewer or for the artist’s career, and the appearance of being left unfinished. Of course, the notion of the unfinished, or, more accurately, the redefinition of what constitutes a finished work has been a constant throughout the history of modern art (see “To Rest Lightly on the Earth”), and a cause for debate going back at least as far as Michelangelo’s

Introduction

3

non finito sculptures. But it’s equally important to remember that worry over lack of finish is a particularly Western issue. In Chinese painting, the concept of the unfinished has been far less problematical. Indeed, it has long been a desired quality, as the Tang Dynasty art historian Chang Yen-Yuan makes clear in a passage I cite in “Provisional Painting”: “In painting, one should avoid worrying about accomplishing a work that is too diligent and too finished in the depiction of forms and the notation of colors or one that makes too great a display of one’s technique, thus depriving it of mystery and aura.”2 Similarly, Lao-Tzu’s praise in the Te-Tao Ching of “suppleness, softness, weakness” over “rigidity and power” (#76) implies criteria that could be applied to many of the works I discuss. As I note in “To Rest Lightly on the Earth,” the Tao is full of passages that could be applied to contemporary “provisional” works. Another nonwestern point of reference is the tendency in African art to let irregularities in materials guide shape of the work. At least two of the artists mentioned in these pages, Howardena Pindell and Stanley Whitney, have acknowledged their debt to this aspect of African aesthetics. During a studio visit in the 1990s, Whitney described to me how the gently sloping horizontal lines in his paintings took a cue from the way in which African carved-wood objects incorporated natural features of the wood rather than regularizing them, and in a 1984 review of an exhibition of African art, Pindell noted approvingly: “Once the basic geometric formula has been established, the design may expand or contract, inhale or exhale, according to the will of the artisan or the demands of the object’s irregular shapes.”3 The decision to leave a painting unfinished or to employ cheap materials can also be a response to cultural and economic conditions. In his study of the postwar California avant-garde, Richard Cándida Smith notes how the lack of a market for abstraction in the San Francisco Bay Area affected artists like Elmer Bischoff, who recalled that “you fully expected that your paintings would just pile up in your studio, your sculpture would just pile up in the backyard.”4 Smith points out how “since the work existed only for the exchange of ideas, the crafting of work was often careless. The immediate purposes did not require the very best paints, or even care in composition. The idea a painting expressed was always provisional, so an artist might decide to leave a piece half-finished once the drift of an effect became clear.”5 Rather than simply romanticizing this isolation, Smith also notes the risks

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

of having no public and no collectors: “Artists were tempted to be easy on themselves, moving on and trying something new without necessarily stopping to explore the full consequences of any one idea.”6 The situation was so frustrating to Bischoff that he abandoned abstraction in favor of a figurative style. Let me quickly add that I don’t believe any of the artists discussed in this book have embraced the provisional because they were without hope of ever selling their work. While contemporary artists might find themselves in studios filled with unsold paintings, we are very far from the kind of situation that prevailed for abstractionists in postwar San Francisco. Even if one can’t crack them, the markets for every kind of contemporary art are vast, and their existence affects how artists approach their work. For better or worse, it is generally believed that contemporary works of art are potentially valuable commodities, rather than the obscure, worthless relics of some private obsession. Thus, a contemporary artist might use cheap materials because of lack of money or to make an anti-commodification statement, but it is highly unlikely they would ever think: “Why bother finishing it or taking care with my craft since my painting has no chance of ever being preserved or given monetary value?” As in the rest of American society, a cruel optimism prevails. In my two initial articles, and in subsequent pieces, I propose a genealogy for provisional painting that includes, in addition to the artists I discuss in depth, Cézanne, Francis Picabia, Giacometti, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Guston, Sigmar Polke, Noël Dolla, Richard Tuttle. I also cite some early paintings by David Salle and the devil-may-care approach of Martin Kippenberger. I’m not happy at the exclusively male—and white—makeup of this list of historical precedents; in Part II the prehistory of Provisionality becomes more inclusive, though, I readily admit, still not enough so. I’m very aware now, as I was in 2009, that the great self-questioners among these precedents—Cézanne, Giacometti, and Guston—represent a once-central strain of modern art that has been largely marginalized if not driven totally extinct. Among its classic statements are Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Guston’s 1965 text “Faith, Hope and Impossibility,” and James Lord’s memoir A Giacometti Portrait, published the same year as Guston’s essay. In these texts we can find passages that are so far removed from the spirit of the contemporary art world as to seem like they were

Introduction

5

written in a different language. “Nine days out of ten all he [] saw around him,” remarks Merleau-Ponty, “was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration.”7 “You begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all—or is not even possible,”8 Guston agonizes. “If only I could accomplish something in painting or drawings or sculpture, it wouldn’t be so bad. If I could just do one head, just once, then maybe I’d have a chance of doing the rest, a landscape, a still life. But it’s impossible,” Giacometti confesses. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary painter submitting to such constant self-doubt or inhabiting a daily existential crisis, yet some residual traces of these attitudes, some debris of Cézanne’s “unknown celebration,” seemed to be surfacing in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Where, I sometimes wonder, did I find the word “provisional”? Could I have taken it from the cover of an exhibition catalogue on my shelves titled, in French, “Abstractions Provisoires”? Possibly, but if so, I have no memory of doing so. Curated by Eric de Chassey and Camille Morineau at the Musée d’Art Moderne Saint-Etienne in 1997, the show included twenty artists, only one of whom, Mary Heilmann, figures in my two articles. I didn’t see the exhibition and it’s only recently that I’ve read the essays in the catalogue, which, to my disappointment, nowhere address the theme of “provisional abstractions.” A much more likely source would have been Guy Debord and the Lettrist International. I had long before been struck by the declaration in that “The new beauty will be that of the situation, that is to say provisional and lived” (“La beauté nouvelle sera de situation, c’est-à-dire provisoire et vécue”) and by Debord’s evocation of a “provisional microsociety” in his film On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959). Although used sparingly, the concept of the provisional is central to the Situationists. After all, what is more provisional than a “situation”? And here, if I trace my notion of the provisional back to Debord et Cie., I have to acknowledge a contradiction between provisionality and art. As the Situationists declared, “Situations are conceived as the opposite of works of art, which are attempts at absolute valorization and preservation of the present moment.”9 No surprise, perhaps, since a provisional painting sets itself against those paintings that are no more than fossilized monuments to a complacent vision of art. I make this connection

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with the Situationists knowing that Debord, were he still alive, would instantly dismiss every painter considered here as an accomplice of the Spectacle. Another crucial influence on my thinking was Samuel Beckett (see “To Paint the Stuckness,” p. 41). Besides Beckett, two other writers were much on my mind: Francis Ponge, who in books such as La Fabrique du Pré (1971) and Comment une figue des paroles et pourquoi (1977), undermined the any notion of the finished work by publishing all his drafts and notes for a poem and giving them equal importance as the final text, and Enrique Vila-Matas whose Bartleby & Co (English trans., 2007) is a compendium of what its narrator calls “writers of the No.” (I discuss Ponge in the chapter “Pierre Buraglio: Artist of the No Yes,” which takes its title from Vila-Matas’s book.) Other literary points of reference were the fragmented poems and textual leavings of Emily Dickinson, the open-ended surrender to happenstance in Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisment d’un lieu parisien (1975) and Stephen Spender’s poem “One More New Botched Beginning,” which features a vivid cameo by Merleau-Ponty. In fact, “One More New Botched Beginning” was the working title for my second Provisional Painting article until I came across a comment Patti Smith made in a 2009 interview in The Art Newspaper. Asked whether she paid much attention to contemporary art, Smith replied: If I have time I’m more likely to go to the opera than schlepping round the galleries. Also a lot of things I see lack soul, they might be clever, or well done, but it’s like the difference between listening to Theola Kilgore or one of the great R&B singers then having to listen to Britney Spears. Somebody like Jeff Koons I think is just litter upon the earth, I look at his stuff and I’m appalled, I can’t access where these people are coming from.10

Her comment about Koons being “litter upon the earth” (a judgment I largely agree with) gave me the title “To Rest Lightly on the Earth.” Also contributing to the gradual coalescing of my ideas were several group exhibitions that went either unmentioned or undiscussed in my two articles. One of these was “Beneath the Underdog” at Gagosian Uptown from April to June, 2007. Curated by artists Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen, and taking its title from Charles Mingus’s 1971 autobiography, this show was, according to the press release, about “the individual’s relationship to the towering

Introduction

7

vertical landscape of late capitalism.” It claimed to favor “the horizontal” that is “questioning the traditional values implied by the upright.” Out of the fifty artists in the show, I would include two of them (Richard Aldrich and Joe Bradley) in “Provisional Painting.” Lowman and McEwen’s exhibition looked back to a kind of gritty urban assemblage, introducing into the Madison Avenue gallery a sense of dirtiness, fucked-upness, and decay, as well as some longoutmoded but now cool abstract painters such as Paul Feeley and Ray Parker. It came on the heels of “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–75” at the National Academy Museum. Even though there were no contemporary works in this show, which was on view in New York from February to April, 2007, it was a compelling, even revelatory, look at a previous moment in history when artists such as Dorothea Rockburne, Howardena Pindell, Richard Tuttle, and Alvin Loving were deconstructing painting both as an ideology and as a physical object. When I curated an exhibition titled “Provisional Painting” at the London gallery Modern Art in 2011, I sought to connect the contemporary work to the period covered by “High Times Hard Times” by including one of Tuttle’s octagonal paper pieces from 1970. I was also struck by “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” the New Museum’s large-scale exhibition of recent assemblage-based sculptures (December 1, 2007–March 30, 2008), singling out in my first article three of the artists in the show (Sarah Braman, Alexandra Bircken, and Gedi Sibony) as examples of “three-dimensional provisionality.” Looking now at the press release for “Unmonumental,” something I don’t recall doing at the time, the use of the term “provisional” in the following passage jumps out at me: “If the word monumental connotes massiveness, timelessness, and historic significance, the works in ‘Unmonumental’ are manifestly and consciously created in opposition to all such assumed authority. Rather than enduring and inarguable, they are delicate, provisional, deliberately of the moment.” (It’s also worth noting that Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” is reprinted in the catalogue of “Unmonumental”.) I find the term used again in a September 2008 review in Map Magazine, which I didn’t see at the time, of Jörg Heiser’s book All of a Sudden: Things That Matter in Contemporary Art where the writer, British curator Graham Domke, suggests that the book “aligns itself with the more speculative and provisional aesthetic witnessed in recent exhibitions like Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York and the most recent Berlin

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biennial.”11 A  few months later the word turns up again in a Brooklyn Rail review of Mary Heilmann’s survey show, also at the New Museum. “Looking at Heilmann’s canvases means, in part, thinking hard about these awkward moments, working through their against-all-odds quality. The paintings seem unusually honest, then, about the provisional, uncertain process of perception’s occurrence,”12 writes Anne Byrd. While Byrd isn’t using the word “provisional” to refer to a particular type of work, the fact that it occurs in a piece about one of the artists central to my thesis makes me wonder if I had noticed it and unconsciously appropriated it, as I wonder about the press release for “Unmonumental.” To tell the truth, I don’t believe that any of these contemporaneous texts was my source, yet they do suggest how in 2007–8 more and more people found that the term “provisional” suited more and more contemporary artworks. (This was the same period when Hito Steyerl was developing her concept of the “poor image,” by which she meant the endlessly copied and disseminated video clips and photographs circulating in “digital no man’s land,” and when scholars Anne Wilson and Glenn Adamson were developing the notion of “sloppy craft,” first proposed at a November 23, 2007, symposium at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.13) It’s here that I want to step back for a moment and look at events in the larger world, specifically the global recession that began in the United States when subprime lenders began filing for bankruptcy in the spring and summer of 2007. On October 9, 2007, the Dow Jones hit a peak of 14,164, and over the next year and a half began to drop until it reached its lowest level on March 6, 2009, which represented a drop of 54  percent. That period saw the failure of giant investment banks like Bear Sterns (March 2008) and Lehman Brothers (September 15, 2008). Between 2005 and 2011 median household wealth in the United States fell 35 percent. Between 2007 and 2009 unemployment doubled from 5 percent to 10 percent. Suddenly the hollowness and inequality of the post-Fordist economy became impossible to ignore. (We all know how this ended—not in a revolutionary moment, not in the expansion of economic, social, and racial justice that so many hoped would follow Obama’s victory in 2008, but only in some mild reforms of financial markets and a more or less permanent precarity for most workers, followed by the election of a corrupt, psychopathic demagogue.) Only at one point in “Provisional Painting” do I allude to the concurrent economic crisis. Noting

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the title of Cheryl Donegan’s September 2007 exhibition at Olivier Kahm/5BE Gallery, “Luxury Dust,” I observe: “These are just about the most unluxurious paintings imaginable (an effect heightened by the fluorescent lights the artist requested for her show): as such they can be interpreted as detritus of the boom or as strangely prophesying a post-crash economy.” Obviously, many of the works I deem “provisional” pre-date the Great Recession and no art worthy of the name can be accounted for by the gyrations of the stock market. But if we can’t draw any direct line of causation between the collapse of the housing-market bubble of 2007–8 and the paintings I discuss, the emergence of the concept of Provisional Painting in my mind was connected, at least in part, to developments in the art market. During the years leading up to the 2007 economic crisis, galleries and art fairs (especially the latter) seemed to be increasingly populated by shiny objects (I mean this in a figurative sense, though all too often the objects in question were also literally shiny) produced with the help of small armies of assistants and fabricators. Alongside such works by wildly successful artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami, I noticed many celebrated paintings that relied on impressive displays of technical skill (John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage) or enormous scale (Barnaby Furnas). Personally, I found most of this work not only uninspiring, but oppressive and dispiriting, as I did Chelsea’s ever-larger and more forbidding gallery spaces where much of this work was shown. Contemporary art seemed to have become nothing more than a playground for the wealthy. Some would say it had been so for a very long time and it was only an unprecedented level of ostentatious display that had finally forced even a politically blindered critic like me to recognize the fact that art and money, especially big art and big money, had always worked hand in glove. In any case, I felt marginalized—as art critic and as simple viewer. Too often I felt like a servant peeking through a slightly open doorway at the festivities of my grand employers, festivities to which I would never be invited, or only to provide some minor service. How could I not feel this way when reading reportage like this: After a few more slatherings of paint, [Barnaby] Furnas was ready to knock off. His wife and Boesky’s husband, Liam Culman, were expected any minute. “My husband is a total philistine,” said [Marianne] Boesky, whose father is Ivan Boesky. “Liam is a Wall Street trader, but he loves Barnaby, and Barnaby

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

loves the bourgeois life my husband loves. They play squash together at the Racquet Club.” When the spouses arrived, everyone went off to Peter Luger for a celebratory dinner of rare steak and red wine.14

­ r learning how hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb was snapping up O Kippenbergers to the tune of some sixty paintings, which after a few years he began selling off at huge profits. Martin Kippenberger, who loved nothing more than fucking with the exchange value of art, his own and others’, now an object of high-end speculation—nothing could be more dispiriting. Looking back after more than a decade, I can see that “Provisional Painting” was to some degree my revenge on the bloated, exclusionary, greed-driven art market of the early 2000s. At times, I wanted to see it all go down in flames— in fact, much of it already had (at least temporarily) so maybe all I was doing was dancing on a temporary grave—and be replaced with works of art that reconnected with the modern art’s foundational self-questioning. I wanted an artworld where the key text was “Cèzanne’s Doubt” rather than the latest auction catalogues from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. With more than a decade’s distance I can also see that my ability to reject so much of the art world was made possible by a dramatic shift in my employment status in 2007: I left my position as an editor at an art magazine to become a professor at a university. It wasn’t that I was making much more money, but for the first time I had real job security and my employer did not rely on advertising money from galleries, auction houses, and museums. As I was writing my article, I began to notice a new tone in how painters were talking about their work. Richard Aldrich, for instance, referenced “Cézanne Doubt” in interviews and in the title of a painting, If I Paint Crowned I’ve Had It, Got Me? (2008) and in Craig Olson’s interview with Chris Martin (published by The Brooklyn Rail in early 2008) there’s an exchange that is deep in Beckett-Giacometti territory: Rail: So is there a constant questioning of yourself and of boundaries in your work? Martin: Constant questioning, yes. I’m giving myself permission to try stuff. I’ve gotten more accepting of the things that I can’t do—and hopefully more accepting of the things I’m compelled to do over and over.

Introduction

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Rail: It seems that within that process there’s a relinquishing of control. You allow so much to just happen, which also allows for failure to happen. Are there any works of yours that you consider as failures? ­Martin: [Laughs.] Constant failures! I think if I accept that it’s a kind of hopeless situation then I can let the paintings go in the direction they want. There is a wonderful Julian Schnabel quote where he describes one of his paintings as a “a bouquet of mistakes.” I think that Julian’s best paintings have that kind of feeling of fearlessly blundering ahead.15

I wasn’t the only observer to notice a change in the weather of painting. Swedish curator-critic Daniel Birnbaum wrote in the December 2008 issue of Artforum, “There is now an entire movement of impossible painters out there—including Sergej Jensen, Andrei Koschmieder, and Michaela Meise; perhaps even Wade Guyton—whose work operates surprisingly in this mode. Would it be fair to call it a school of Krebberism? Whatever the case, it was everywhere this year, suggesting that skill, criticality, and aesthetics might yet coexist.”16 Another exhibition that should be mentioned is “Painting, Now and Forever, Part II,” a two-venue New York show of over forty artists at Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali that included three artists discussed in “Provisional Painting” (Mary Heilmann, Michael Krebber, and Christopher Wool) and one who featured in “To Rest Lightly on the Earth” (Sergej Jensen). I didn’t reference the show, which billed itself as “a highly subjective, celebratory survey of contemporary painting,” but I did take note of a painting in it by Michael Krebber, which would figure in “Provisional Painting.” Krebber’s painting also struck other critics. In The Village Voice R.C. Baker wrote: “Bearing the conceptual baton to some ever-receding finish line, the flaccid smears of blue and green in Michael Krebber’s 2001 Contempt for One’s Own Work as Planning for Career are a Sunday painter’s dream: Five minutes of work, and you’re hung in a major gallery.”17 While in The Brooklyn Rail, Craig Olson lamented the presence of nagging doubters like Michael Krebber, whose Contempt for One’s Own Work as Planning for Career (2001) seems amateurish and weak. If the sentiment is such, why make it at all? Perhaps the motivations behind the pouty painting are more in line with “professional development” and “marketability

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

strategies” than in the intensity and range of the medium or the long, hard hours of looking that artists have always known and lived. It’s in that space that knowledge of your medium, and ultimately of yourself—not contempt for your lack of success—can and does occur.18

Some of the language deployed in these reviews (“flaccid smears of blue and green,” “amateurish and weak”) was not so different from how I described paintings by Krebber and others in “Provisional Painting,” but where Baker and Olson deplored the hasty, cynical qualities of Krebber’s work, I was more interested in understanding how he arrived at such an approach and what it meant to create an interesting painting with “five minutes of work.” Happily, for me, I was successful in convincing Art in America to give me the space to ponder the work of Krebber and the dozen or so other painters, past and present, whose work embodied what I ended up calling Provisional Painting.

­Part One

­What Is Provisional Painting?

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1

Provisional Painting (2009)

For the past year or so I’ve become increasingly aware of a kind of provisionality within the practice of painting. I first noticed it pervading the canvases of Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann, and Michael Krebber, artists who have long made works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished, or self-cancelling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from “strong” painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse. Why would an artist demur at the prospect of a finished work, court selfsabotaging strategies, sign his or her name to a painting that looks, from some perspectives, like an utter failure? It might have something to do with a foundational skepticism that runs through the history of modern art: we see it in Cézanne’s infinite, agonized adjustments of Mont St. Victoire, in Dada’s noisy denunciations (typified by Picabia’s blasphemous Portrait of Cézanne), in Giacometti’s endless obliterations and restartings of his painted portraits, in Sigmar Polke’s gloriously dumb compositions of the 1960s. Something similar can be found in other art forms, in Paul Valéry’s insistence that a poem is “never finished, only abandoned,” in Artaud’s call for “no more masterpieces,” and in punk’s knowing embrace of the amateurish and fucked-up. The history of modernism is full of strategies of refusal and acts of negation. The genealogy of what I refer to as provisional painting includes Richard Tuttle’s decades-long pursuit of humble beauty, Noël Dolla’s still-radical stained-handkerchief paintings of the late 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg’s “cardboards” of the 1970s, David Salle’s intentionally feeble early canvases and the first-thought/best-thought whirlwind that was Martin Kippenberger.

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

I take such work to be, in part, a struggle with a medium that can seem too invested in permanence and virtuosity, in carefully planned-out compositions and layered meanings, in artistic authority and creative strength, in all the qualities that make the fine arts “fine.” As employed by younger artists, provisionality may also be an attempt to spurn the blandishments of the art market—what seemed, until only yesterday, an insatiable appetite for smart, stylish, immaculately executed canvases, paintings that left no doubt as to the artist’s technical competence, refined sensibility, and solid work ethic.

Five Provisional Painters Raoul De Keyser’s paintings tend to be modest in size, so that they have already forfeited “heroic” ambitions even before the first mark is made. Unlike many painters who wield impressive techniques in small-scale work (Tomma Abts, James Siena, Merlin James), De Keyser doesn’t compensate for modesty of size with complex compositions or dazzling brushwork. On the contrary, he works in a manner so low-key that even sympathetic critics can be unsure how to evaluate his paintings. In 2006, New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith noted his “weird combination of deliberation and indecision”1; in 2004, Barry Schwabsky, writing in Artforum, described the oscillating responses De Keyser’s work can inspire: “Slapdash handling gradually begins to seem surpassingly sensitive—or is it? The grubby color, fresh and beautifully calibrated—but is it, really? The sense of doubt never quite goes away.”2 In truth, when you encounter a De Keyser it doesn’t take too much imagination to attribute it to an amateur painter having a try at abstraction after seeing reproductions somewhere of paintings by Clyfford Still and Jean Arp. He manages to lay down a few jagged shapes, usually all the same color, against a monochrome ground. The limited palette suggests not any reductivist strategy but a novice who has invested in only a couple of tubes of paint. No effort is made to hide the laborious adjustments to the contours of the shapes or preliminary pencil markings. No line is quite straight; placement of shapes and dots of color appear either senselessly random or stiffly coordinated. As French curator Jean-Charles Vergne puts it, De Keyser’s work “constantly asserts the impossibility of painting free of touch-ups, mistakes, accidents, set

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on laying bare the seams, the second tries and the failures …. [There is] a constant stuttering in the painting.”3 Unlike De Keyser, Albert Oehlen paints big and avails himself of far more than two or three colors, but his canvases also seem rife with “mistakes” and “second tries.” Oehlen does not bother to hide his reliance on standard graphic design software for many of his compositions. Even after more than a decade of experiment, he wields these basic digital tools with apparent clumsiness; his computer-assisted paintings can sometimes bring to mind Paper Rad, the US art collective that fetishizes the clunky graphics of early video games. Oehlen’s paintings usually begin with collage-based inkjet images, over which he layers dirty-looking swaths of thin paint and whacked-out meandering lines. Canvases in a recent show of less digital work at Nathalie Obadia in Paris feature smudges of oil paint atop fragments of Spanish advertising posters; many of them look as if someone had inadvertently spilled paint onto a poster and, in the attempt to clean it off, had only made matters worse. This onetime purveyor of “bad” Neo-Expressionism has been committed to large-scale abstraction since the late 1980s (when, in his own words, he “started making an effort to be seen as a serious painter”4), but his work, which manages to be at once antiseptic and messy, continues to draw great pictorial force from its abject awkwardness. The grisaille abstractions Christopher Wool has been making since about 2006 share a lot with Oehlen’s work. (The resemblance is more than coincidental: these two artists enjoy a long-standing dialogue, most recently evidenced by the Oehlen painting Wool selected for his section of the artist-curated show “Sardines and Oranges” at the Hammer Museum.) The smudged passages of paint defacing parts of Oehlen’s canvases become, in Wool’s work, something like the ground of the composition. Both artists also make Photoshop, or similar software, part of their painting process. For some works, Wool takes photographs of brushstrokes in his own previous paintings, which he manipulates digitally. These altered images are silkscreened onto aluminum or linen. Other more straightforward paintings employ enamel paint (sprayed and brushed on) to similar effect. The compositions feature large clumps of broad back-and-forth gray and white brushstrokes—think of whitewashed windows or rubbed-out chalk on blackboards—through which wander black spray-painted lines of varying thickness that suggest bent rebar

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

or mangled wire coat hangers. There are echoes of de Kooning’s light-filled landscape-inspired paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, though Wool’s engrained chromophobia (over several decades of painting he has hardly ever strayed from a palette of black and white) keeps nature at bay. What we get instead are paradoxical pictures in which the artist seems to have obliterated a paintingin-progress and then presented this sum of erasures as the finished work. But has anything actually been covered up? Is there something under Wool’s erasures? From one angle, Mary Heilmann is the unlikeliest of candidates for painting stardom: over nearly four decades she has relied on a few off-the-rack modernist structures—generally grids or blocks of color over solid grounds— which she deploys with a nonchalance that seems to border on carelessness. Like De Keyser, she favors the slightly wobbly over the straight and true, and an unflashy way of handling paint (Figure 1.1). Her palette—acidic primaries and an occasional black-and-white composition—is more attention-getting than his, and she has always been adept at slipping little visual conundrums into her paintings. (There’s an almost Escher-like oscillation of figure and ground in many of her works.) But for an abstract painter of her generation, she displays remarkably little sense of program or agenda. Because each painting is selfcontained and unassuming, it doesn’t seem to invite any transcendent reading. Where so many other painters seek to convey their artistic ambitions through signs of intensive labor, grand scale, daunting complexity, or serious themes, Heilmann, who began as a ceramist, seems to position painting as ceramics by other means. In her recent retrospective at the New Museum, the presence of some of her ceramic vessels and dishes and funky painted chairs invited viewers to look at the painterly qualities of these objects. Far more interestingly, their inclusion suggested that treating painting as if it were ceramics, that is, as a medium free of weighty cultural expectations, is key to Heilmann’s art. If one could measure provisionality in painting, then Michael Krebber would probably score off the charts. Much of his work, although ostensibly about painting, uses none of its accepted components—his most recent show in New York, at Greene Naftali Gallery, centered on sliced-up windsurfing boards—and when he does engage brush and canvas, the results can seem laughably thin. Many of his paintings consist of a few bits of sketchy brushwork that might or might not represent an object or body part slapped over a white

Provisional Painting (2009)

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Figure 1.1  Mary Heilmann, Blood on the Tracks, 2005. Oil on canvas 54 × 54 × 1 3/8" © Mary Heilmann. Photo credit: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

or pastel ground. At other times, he has painted white blocky shapes over kitschy bed linens, or glued single newspaper spreads onto cursorily painted grounds. Confronted with a baker’s dozen of Krebber’s paintings, London critic (and Krebber fan) Adrian Searle once observed: “How long did each painting take—five minutes, 10 minutes max, a lifetime of experience?”5 There’s nothing inherently noteworthy about a quickly executed painting, but Krebber’s hastiness seems closer to a prostitute’s hurried coupling than to the rapid elegance of a Chinese ink painting. It appears to say, Painting is what I do but let’s not get sentimental about it or waste unnecessary time or materials;

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

this is all you’re getting for your money. And yet, Krebber’s disdain for painting could equally be interpreted as a sign of overvaluation of the medium—he holds it in such high esteem that he’s afraid of besmirching it through excessive contact. The dandyish, self-lacerating wit that runs through Krebber’s work (this may be the real basis of his critical association with Kippenberger) extends to some of his titles. A 2004 show at Dépendance Gallery in Brussels of newspaperspread paintings was named “Unfinished too soon,” a phrase that suggests an artist failing to achieve non finito vitality out of sheer impatience. In 2001 he titled an especially sketchy painting Contempt for one’s own work as planning for career. It would be a mistake, however, to equate Krebber’s contempt with cynicism. His attitude to painting ultimately resembles the stance Marianne Moore took toward poetry in her 1919 poem “Poetry”: a potent brew of contempt and devotion.

Three Reappearances The historical context of the quintet of artists above may become clearer with the new accessibility of bodies of work by Joan Miró, Martin Barré, and Kimber Smith. Until “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last fall, I’d relegated Miró to the status of Boring Modern Master, an artist whose once radical innovations had long ago been tamed and diluted by overexposure. The twelve series of works gathered by MoMA curator Anne Umland made me dump this ridiculous misperception once and for all. Miró’s aim in this period was, as he told a Spanish journalist in 1931, to “destroy everything that exists in painting.”6 Two works in particular exemplify this agenda. Painting (Cloud and Birds), 1927, is a big unprimed canvas with a giant clump of white paint into which Miró has scribbled a cursory series of looping black lines; some incomplete featherlike shapes are scattered below. Painting (Head), 1930, a 7½-by-5½-foot white ground canvas, has been  … “defaced” is the first word that comes to mind, by a schematically outlined, giant pink head, large blotches of black and pink paint and a huge tangle of looping blue lines similar to the black ones in Cloud and Birds. The images

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in Painting (Head) are lined up on a diagonal (lower left to upper right), and the entire composition is crisscrossed with rapidly drawn pencil lines and a smattering of dots and dashes. The lack of finish, aggressively crude figuration, and extensive doodling and cancellation marks suggest a painter at war with his medium. That Miró dared such provocations at this scale more than seventy-five years ago is astounding; he looks like a contemporary of Polke or Kippenberger. I think the source of Miró’s daring, and the reason why his work is so close to what I’m calling “provisional painting,” resides in his rejection of the idea of a finished, durable work. In 1928, he confessed to Francesc Trabal that after completing a painting he had his dealer take it away as quickly as possible: “I can’t bear to have it there in front of me …. [When] I’ve finished something I discover it’s just a basis for what I’ve got to do next. It’s never anything more than a point of departure …. Do I have to remind you that what I detest most is lasting?”7 The paintings of Martin Barré (1924–1996) remained little known in this country until last year, when they were the subject of a show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and a monograph by Yve-Alain Bois. Emerging in mid-1950s Paris as a gestural abstractionist, Barré went against the grain by working with thin paint. “But,” as he explained to Catherine Millet in 1974, “what bumped up against the taste or style of the period was not so much this lack of thickness as the impression of emptiness, of nonwork.”8 In the early 1960s, he embarked on a series of paintings with stripes and grids (he also used arrow motifs), sometimes made with spray-paint applied through stencils. Even now, the pictures look strikingly preliminary and offhand, like the underpainting of some never-finished work. It’s common to locate the zero-degree of painting in the realm of white or black monochromes, but Barré’s skewed grids and free-floating signs can make Ryman or Reinhardt look positively old masterish. And yet he insisted that his paintings should not be understood as neo-Dada critique. “What I was doing,” he clarified to Millet, “could well appear as antipainting, whereas what I wanted to show, through the traces or points of impact in a clear surface, was what a painting could be if disencumbered of object, color, and form.”9 Unlike Miró and Barré, the American painter Kimber Smith (1922–81) was not out to destroy or to disencumber his chosen medium, and yet he made paintings, especially toward the end of his life, that hover at the edge of

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

dissolution, that seem radically unfinished. Smith’s career can be divided into two parts: the decade he spent in Paris (1954–64), where he was particularly close to fellow expatriates Shirley Jaffe and Sam Francis, and the years after his return to the United States, when he divided his time between New York City and the Hamptons. The best recent presentation of Smith’s work was a 2004 retrospective at the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland, which included paintings such as Kirchner’s Garden (1976), Prague (1977), and Nissa (1980). In these works, Smith treated the canvas as a giant sketch pad. He generally combined sets of wavy lines, floating bars of loosely applied

Figure 1.2  Kimber Smith (1922–81), TILT, 1980. Acrylic on canvas. 68 × 64 in./172.7 × 162.6 cm. © 2022 Kimber Smith Estate. Private collection, Nashville, TN. Photo: Alex Yudzon/Cheim & Read, New York.

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paint, some approximately filled-in shapes and lots of empty primed canvas. The marks seem notational, as if this were a preparatory gouache that somehow ended up as the final painting. Smith’s signature—a penciled-in KS that seems as iffy as the composition it claims—identifies these as finished works (Figure 1.2). In a stylistic fusion that anticipates Heilmann’s informal formalism, Smith splashed Matissean insouciance over the serious-minded legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Reviewing a show of Smith’s paintings for Artforum in 1979, Hal Foster noted the artist’s “apparent nonchalance” and freedom from “anxiety” in relation to his immediate predecessors. Smith, he wrote, “does not fight at the fore, but neither does he fight at the rear; indeed, he fights not at all.”10 Although chiefly concerned with how Smith faced the dilemma of being a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter at the end of the 1970s, years that were so inhospitable to the style, Foster broaches a much larger issue. It is precisely in declining to “fight” that painters such as Smith, Heilmann, and De Keyser make their attacks on received ideas about painting.

­Painting and Its Impossibility What makes painting “impossible”? What makes “great” painting impossible? Perhaps it is a sense of belatedness, a conviction that an earlier generation or artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up. Or maybe, at a particular moment, in a particular life and history, nothing could seem more presumptuous or inappropriate—maybe even obscene—than to set out to create a masterpiece. Impossibility can also be the result of the artist making excessive demands on the work, demands to which current practice has no reply. At a certain moment, in a certain studio, it appears that great painting may be impossible, that painting of any kind may be impossible. Nonetheless, for whatever reasons pertaining to a particular painter at a particular time, painting must be done, must go on. A growing number of younger artists (and a few who have been showing for longer) are entertaining the idea of impossibility in painting. This has led them to reject a sense of finish in their work, or to rely on acts of negation. An Austrian artist based in Vienna, Stefan Sandner works mostly with found texts

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

and documents—scrawled notes, agenda pages, and enigmatic sketches— which he paints in a greatly enlarged format onto his large monochrome canvases. Some of the texts are obviously self-referential (“see me before you go!” pleaded one painting in his 2008 show in New York at Museum 52); others recycle inscriptions by famous people (the text of a 2004 diptych is cribbed from Kurt Cobain’s journals), handmade public notices and artworld ephemera (e.g., a playlist for a Stephen Prina performance). The initial sense of disconnect between the triviality of the texts and the way they have been reproduced (often at imposing scale, on faultlessly executed canvases) gives way to a new synthesis. It’s as if conceptualist Joseph Grigely were supplying material to Ellsworth Kelly. (Lest viewers be tempted to pigeonhole him as a textual appropriator, Sandner usually includes at least one textless monochrome painting, often on a shaped canvas, in each of his solo shows.) Rather than turning abstraction into a joke—like Richard Prince, with whom he has been unfavorably compared—Sandner gives it a serious task: to bridge the gap between the everyday and the ideal. The twenty paintings in Richard Aldrich’s show this winter at Bortolami in New York rehearse nearly that many modernist modes: there were gestural paintings that look like details from late 1950s Gustons, deconstructed canvases, essays in oblique figuration, compositions that verge on pattern painting. Aldrich uses collage elements (pieces of cloth and art reproduction postcards), cuts away sections of canvas to reveal stretcher bars, slathers on oil paint and wax, reduces a composition to a scattering of seemingly random marks, paints copies of his own work. Rather than an exercise in stylistic pastiche, however, or suggesting that the artist was assuming different personae, the show looked very much of a piece, held together by a curious awkwardness, even incompetence, that persisted across the different modes. Accommodating slightly irregular stretchers and a lack of perfect right angles, several canvases are badly wrinkled and folded at the edges. In one work, four thin lengths of snapped-off wood employed as improvised pins hold together two pieces of black cloth. The bottom third of a large portrait is abruptly cut away to reveal the flimsy-looking stretcher underneath. Attached to a large painting featuring postcards of Whistlers from the Frick are four large sheets of paper, one of which is crumpled in a corner and already peeling away from its canvas backing. Another painting looks like a half-finished canvas that some

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second-string abstractionist had stuck in the racks circa 1960. One way or another, every painting has something “wrong” with it: sloppy craft, outmoded style, impenetrable obscurity. Taken together, these flawed works seem less about offering yet another critique of painting than securing permission for the artist to pursue every potentially interesting idea that crosses his mind. While Cheryl Donegan has long explored painting issues in video to much acclaim, her actual paintings garner much less notice. Given her mode of working, her choices of materials and forms, this isn’t so surprising. Donegan’s last show of paintings in New York, “Luxury Dust” in September 2007 at the now-defunct Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, included about a dozen works on 24-by-18-inch pieces of corrugated cardboard. Some of them feature crowded, triangle-laden compositions executed in water-based oils; in others she covered the cardboard with gold or silver tape and then sliced away at the tape to create spiky, reflective arrays. The cheap materials, generic imagery (Donegan’s claustrophobic CuboFuturist compositions sometimes include clips grabbed from eBay), modest size and hasty-looking facture seem to beg for the works to be dismissed. The title of the show should give us pause. These are just about the most unluxurious paintings imaginable (an effect heightened by the fluorescent lights the artist requested for her show): as such they can be interpreted as detritus of the boom or as strangely prophesying a post-crash economy. Restless painters tend to work in several different manners at once or embark on new approaches in serial order. Jacqueline Humphries does the latter. Each of her phases displays her gift for linear mark-making and a curiosity about paint’s material possibilities, though one feels she never lingers as long as she could. Yet, her show in winter 2006 at Greene Naftali in New York was one of her best. In silvery oil paintings, gestures seem to erase one another in a flurry of marks, always obliterating some underlying composition of greater order and grace. Though long based in New York, Humphries is a New Orleans native, and it doesn’t seem far-fetched to read these turbulent paintings as visions of a location overwhelmed by chaotic natural forces. There are clear echoes of Wool’s self-erasing gestures in Humphries’s paintings (as well as borrowings from Rosenquist’s shard paintings of the 1980s), but her cancellations are more immediate and less self-conscious than Wool’s. Wendy White also employs the obliterative qualities of paint, though she is more likely to use a spray-gun than a brush. The paintings she showed at Leo

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Koenig in New York last summer are multipanel, with three to five variously sized canvases abutted in irregular formations. Dense, sooty accumulations of black spray paint are randomly dispersed across the panels, sometimes partially covering more open tangles of Day-Glo lines. Echoing the irregularity of the outer edges, the units of paint avoid neat enclosure; their edges fray, disperse and fade out, as if the artist simply runs out of paint. The sense of random defacement evokes graffiti art, but one could equally think of Tàpies and Motherwell—as in Humphries’s work, there is an affinity between some kinds of provisionality and gestural abstraction. Provisionality is visible in a number of current artists nominally identified as sculptors, including Sarah Braman, Alexandra Bircken, and Gedi Sibony; much of the work in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibition of 2007–8, which included Bircken and Sibony along with many others, embodied the provisional sensibility in three dimensions. Although not present in “Unmonumental,” sculptor Peter Soriano has recently been making extremely provisional three-dimensional works. Each consists of a length of aluminum tubing projecting from the wall. Steel cables stretch from the tube to anchors on the wall. These points are linked by spray-painted lines and arrows (mostly in bright colors), and sometimes marked with circles and Xs or crossed out with brief squiggles. Usually executed by the artist, these wall works can also be made by others following a set of instructions. Owing as much to Con Ed street markings as to conceptual wall works (LeWitt, Bochner), Soriano’s structures diagram their own making, but with their cancellations and misdirections (arrows sometimes seem to be suggesting a particular element, or even the entire work, should be moved over several feet), and work-in-progress status conveyed by the spray-painted signs, they also entertain the possibility that they could be remade in another way. This comes about not only because the metal structures and spray-painted marks must be constructed afresh for each showing, but also because the viewer is always being invited to second-guess the artist’s decisions, to imagine other configurations. At times provisional painting overlaps with “bad painting,” a mode with roots in the 1970s that continues to offer artists means of engaging the medium without having to take on all of its unwanted trappings. When Kippenberger employed techniques that give the impression of haste and clumsiness, it allowed him to mock the market along with the medium (though he also snuck

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in some virtuosic painting that doesn’t seem pretentious). But provisionality can also be taken to a point where there is not even a remote possibility of “bad” concealing “good.” That seems to be where Joe Bradley’s intent in the “Schmagoo Paintings” that he showed at Canada Gallery in New York last fall. A distinction needs to be made between Bradley and the other artists I have been discussing here. Their work may at times come off as uncertain, incomplete, casual, self-cancelling, or unfinished, but each of them is fully committed to the project of painting. If they seek to break existing, perhaps unspoken, contracts with painting, it is only in order to draw up other protocols that will renew the medium. Bradley’s work, which sometimes shares the guttersnipe esthetics of artists such as Dan Colen and Dash Snow, seems more like a willful artistic gesture than part of a painter’s necessary process. Provisional painting is not about making last paintings, nor is it about the deconstruction of painting. It’s the finished product disguised as a preliminary stage, or a body double standing in for a star/masterpiece whose value would put a stop to artistic risk. To put it another way: provisional painting is major painting masquerading as minor painting. In their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described how Kafka’s linguistic and cultural condition (as a Jewish author writing in German in Prague where the type of German he spoke was “minor” in relation both to the locally dominant Czech language and to standard German) involved the “impossibility” of writing in German and the “impossibility of not writing.” Kafka’s solution was to fashion a mode of writing that seemed to erase all literary precedents, and to create an oeuvre that barely survived into the future. Faced with painting’s imposing history and the diminishment of the medium by newer art forms, recent painters may have found themselves in similarly “minor” situations; the provisionality of their work is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.

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To Rest Lightly on the Earth (2011)

Painting Is impossible At the opening of his compact memoir A Giacometti Portrait (1980), James Lord is on a visit to Paris. He agrees to pose for Giacometti, who has proposed a “sketch” on canvas of his young American friend that is expected to require only a single sitting. They set to work in Giacometti’s dilapidated studio, situated in an alleyway in the fourteenth arrondissement. Things start well but at the end of the sitting, Giacometti announces his deep dissatisfaction with the results and obliterates most of the image. He asks Lord to pose again the next day, when the process repeats itself. As more days, then weeks, go by, the artist becomes increasingly despairing of his task, cancelling out each day’s efforts as Lord remains a virtual prisoner in Paris, waiting for his portrait to be finished, changing his travel reservations again and again. Finally, late one afternoon, on the eighteenth sitting, as the last light is going, he is able to dissuade Giacometti from painting out that day’s work, and the portrait is … “finished” isn’t the right word. Let’s say abandoned. Throughout Lord’s little book, which lays out the ground for his subsequent full-scale biography of the artist, published in 1997, we get to hear repeated expressions of Giacometti’s profound self-doubt. “If only I could accomplish something in drawing or painting or sculpture,” he tells Lord on the first day, “it wouldn’t be so bad. If I could just do a head, one head, just once, then maybe I’d have a chance of doing the rest, a landscape, a still life. But it’s impossible.”1 On the seventh day Giacometti laments: “‘The painting’s going worse and worse …. It’s impossible to do it. Maybe I’d better give up painting forever. But

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the trouble is if I can’t do a painting, I can’t do a sculpture either.”2 On day 13: “What I’m doing is negative work …. You have to do something by undoing it. Everything is disappearing once more. You have to dare to give the final brush stroke that makes everything disappear.”3 Some of Giacometti’s artistic pessimism might be put down to a superstitious artist not wanting to jinx his work-in-progress, but his relentless undoings and restartings suggest that he really did mean it, that he really did feel that art—achieving what he desired in a painting or sculpture—was, as he says, “impossible.”

I Have Been “Wanting to Paint This Painting” In the postwar Parisian milieu Giacometti inhabited, “negative work” was considered inescapable. Its classic expression is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Sartre and Giacometti were close friends and the philosopher penned numerous essays about the artist). At one point in Being and Nothingness, Sartre conjures up a struggling writer to illustrate what he calls “the origin of negation.” Here’s the passage, which I have altered, substituting the act of painting for that of writing: In order for my freedom to be anguished in connection with the painting that I am painting, this painting must appear in its relation with me. On the one hand, I must discover my essence as what I have been—I have been “wanting to paint this painting,” I have conceived it, I have believed that it would be interesting to paint it, and I have constituted myself in such a way that it is not possible to understand me without taking into account the fact that this painting has been my essential possibility. On the other hand, I must discover the nothingness which separates my freedom from this essence: I have been “wanting to paint,” but nothing, not even what I have been, can compel me to paint it. Finally, I must discover the nothingness which separates me from what I shall be: I discover that the permanent possibility of abandoning the painting is the very condition of the possibility of painting it and the very meaning of my freedom.4

There’s little surprise in the idea that wanting to write a book or to paint a painting can define an individual, can be their “project.” What’s important here is Sartre’s insistence that one is only free if one can abandon that project at any moment. But what sort of book is written under such conditions, what sort

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of painting gets painted? What does it mean to believe that in order to create a work of art one must entertain the “permanent possibility” of abandoning it, and to believe that something called “freedom” inheres in this situation? What does it mean to say, with Giacometti, that art is “impossible”? What are the consequences if a work of art is produced under the sign of abandonment, negation, impossibility? Until very recently, these questions sounded very old-fashioned. The existential self-questioning, the doubt, the anguish, all those hallmarks of mid-twentieth-century art, have been long put aside, superseded, forgotten, laughed out of the room. With the eclipse of Abstract Expressionism ca. 1960, new modes of art-making were discovered in which the kinds of doubts that troubled artists from Cézanne to Giacometti became largely irrelevant. They were replaced by a solid work ethic, by an emphasis on production, by attention to surfaces (material and psychological), by coolness, by social rather than individual identity; in short, Giacometti’s gloomy, doubt-filled studio was replaced by Warhol’s Factory. Even as James Lord was faithfully recording it, Giacometti’s artistic anguish was already obsolete.

Driven into a Corner Although he came late to abstraction and turned away from it after fewer than two decades, Philip Guston was able to articulate better than anyone the central experience of Abstract Expressionism. He summed up his attitude in the 1966 statement “Faith, Hope, and Impossibility” where he describes his studio situation in terms that sound like they were taken right out of Being and Nothingness: “You begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all—or is not even possible.”5 As we well know, within two years of saying this Guston concluded that no abstract painting he might attempt had “a reason to exist.” The same year that he wrote “Faith, Hope and Impossibility,” Guston spoke about his work in a public forum at Boston University. The transcript is full of his characteristic brilliance and self-analysis. One of the most interesting passages is one in which he discusses what he feels is still important about Abstract Expressionism. Guston insists that the issues Abstract Expressionism raised regarding painting were “the most revolutionary problems posed and

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still are,” despite the fact that so many people (artists, critics, curators) had tried to kill it off.6 The error of these would-be murderers is to mistake Abstract Expressionism as a mere “style, as a certain way of painting.” It’s a cinch to get rid of a style; as Guston says, “After 10 years or 15 years, you’re bored sick of it. Younger painters come along and want to react against it.” The revolution of Abstract Expressionism, however, was not a matter of any stylistic innovation; instead, Guston says, it “revolves around the issue of whether it’s possible to create in our society at all.” He immediately draws a distinction between “creating” and simply producing art: Everybody can make pictures, thousands of people go to school, thousands go to galleries, museums, it becomes not only a way of life now, it becomes a way to make a living. In our kind of democracy this is going to proliferate like mad. In the next ten years there will be even much more than there is now. There’ll be tons of art centers and galleries and pictures. Everybody will be making pictures.

Guston is being impressively prophetic here, even if the present level of picture-making (and every other kind of art making) is beyond anything he could have imagined. Guston’s main point at Boston University was that the state of things in 1966 was very different from the original experience of the Abstract Expressionists around 1950 when, in his words: you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall with no place to stand, just the place you occupied, as if the act of painting itself was not making a picture, there are plenty of pictures in the world—why clutter up the world with pictures?—it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible. Whether it was just possible.

Interlude I The artist has chosen not to let us see the entirety of any of the paintings in the show. One has an old armoire jammed up against it, leaving only the margins of the painted canvas visible (broad gestures, drips, areas of scumbling, and glimpses of spilling de Kooningesque light). Another is barely visible through a much creased and torn piece of plastic sheeting. Multiple layers of plastic

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sheeting, black and transparent, are draped over another painting, though one of the bottom corners has been left uncovered and a tear in the black plastic reveals an area of painted canvas, but visible only dimly through the underlayer of transparent plastic; onto the surface of a third painting the artist has glued a frayed blanket, colored drab brown like a piece of army surplus. Rather than being smoothed out flat, the brown fabric has been irregularly gathered and folded to resemble both classical drapery and an unmade bed. Having previously avoided the medium of painting throughout his lengthy career as a maker of sculptures, performances, and conceptual provocations, the artist has now ensured that there will always be something between the viewer and the painting; the painting will never give all of itself, nor will the artist ever give all of himself; something will always escape us, and maybe even something that is at the center of the work. But though it remains partially shrouded by failures—the artist’s, the viewer’s, the society’s—the painting is nonetheless there, in all its occluded and shabby beauty.

Finished/Unfinished Once upon a time, New York painters tore themselves apart trying to determine what constituted a “finished” painting. During the famous Studio 35 conference of Abstract Expressionists, William Baziotes tied himself into verbal knots trying to clarify what he and his fellow painters thought about the subject: “In talking about the necessity to ‘finish’ a thing, we then said American painters ‘finish’ a thing that looks ‘unfinished,’ and the French, they ‘finish’ it. I have seen Matisses that were more ‘unfinished’ and yet more ‘finished’ than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in a terrific emotion at the time and he was more ‘unfinished’ than ‘finished.’”7 Time plays a curious role in the perception of finish or its lack. Most Abstract Expressionist paintings now seem quite finished to us. But in some canvases—I’m thinking of mid-1950s Joan Mitchell and mid-1960s Guston—the flurries of marks have yet to settle down. Interestingly, it’s rare to find a completed work that can retain an unfinished aura for several decades; Miró’s white-ground anti-paintings of the 1930s are another striking exception. Long before Studio 35, Chinese artists had pondered the

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question of finished/unfinished. In his invaluable book on Chinese painting, Empty and Full, French scholar François Cheng quotes Chang Yen-Yuan, a Tang dynasty historian, in praise of the incomplete: In painting, one should avoid worrying about accomplishing a work that is too diligent and too finished in the depiction of forms and the notation of colors or one that makes too great a display of one’s technique, thus depriving it of mystery and aura. That is why one should not fear the incomplete, but quite to the contrary, one should deplore that which is too complete. From the moment one knows that a thing is complete, what need is there to complete it? For the incomplete does not necessarily mean the unfulfilled.8

This text from the year 847—written, one can’t help noticing, when the best artists of Carolingian Europe were spending their lives applying gold leaf details to illuminated manuscripts and crafting decorative metalwork—could easily be a commentary on twentieth-century modernism. “One should not fear the incomplete, but quite to the contrary, one should deplore that which is too complete. From the moment one knows that a thing is complete, what need is there to complete it?” This sounds like something Duchamp might have said. How curious that the prospect of leaving a work intentionally unfinished remained controversial in Western esthetics some ten centuries after its virtues had been recognized in Chinese painting, and some four centuries after Michelangelo’s ambiguous embrace of the non finito.

Provisional Paintings, Last Paintings It’s important to make a distinction between provisional paintings and last paintings. Last paintings appear within a narrative about the end of painting, an art history that believes (or believed) in a certain progressive logic; they occur within an esthetic dialogue in which artists feel compelled to finesse or outmaneuver art of the recent past. Provisional painters know that such conditions no longer prevail, and yet they don’t want to give up the sense of difficulty that energized the painters of last paintings such as Ad Reinhardt. I am tempted to say that the provisional painting is what follows after the last painting, except that doing so would entail a teleological scheme that the

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last painting was supposed to have brought to a close, and that is, anyway, no longer tenable. In the 1980s it was thought that last paintings would be followed by simulacra of paintings. Emptied of all transcendence, all utopian pretensions, all expressive qualities, proffered as signs of painting rather than the thing itself, simulated paintings like Peter Halley’s were first and foremost a measure of diminishment, which seemed like a natural direction to go after the last painting, after the failure of the last painting to be the last painting. Does provisional painting appear when last paintings are no longer possible to paint? Maybe it’s wrong to talk, as I have done, about painting being “impossible.” It’s impossibility itself that has become impossible. Visiting the Brooklyn studio of one of the artists I wrote about in “Provisional Painting,” I get into a discussion about “impossibility.” The artist thinks I’ve misunderstood something fundamental about his work. For him, painting is never impossible—just the opposite. I realize that I have committed one of the worst, if most common, critical (and curatorial) sins: recruiting an artist into a compelling critical narrative while missing something fundamental about his or her work.

Interlude II Among this Berlin-based artist’s favorite materials are ammonia, hydrochloric acid and chlorine bleach. He applies these corrosive substances to pieces of canvas, linen or jute fabric, sometimes to create pale patterns, but more often to make the painting support look like something that’s been left out in the rain or pulled from a mildewed basement. Using gouache or other thin paints, he will then add a few shaky geometric designs or stray gestures to his damaged fabrics. In other works, he sews strips and patches of colored or beaded fabric that seem to float atop the gently distressed, subtly atmospheric grounds. Sometimes he will stitch up a tear in the fabric. Delicacy and a sense of loving attention coexist with a mood of neglect and abandonment. When the artist exhibits his work, he generally leaves the gallery or museum lighting exactly as it had been arranged for whatever show was previously in the space. But for all the desultoriness that seems to go into their making and presentation, his paintings have a remarkably consistent focus. His compositions resemble fragments salvaged from the shipwreck of

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modernist abstraction: melancholy, vulnerable, absolutely convinced of their own necessity, lying in quiet wait for viewers willing to give a piece of their lives to a rectangle of barely thereness.

­It Just Happened … Provisional paintings can show signs of struggle and can also look “too easy.” In the case of easy-looking provisionality, we encounter a paradox: the struggle with the problematics of painting results in a painting that shows no signs of struggle in the sense that the finished piece displays a minimum amount of work (Michael Krebber, for instance). But in other cases we can see the record of the artist’s struggles, though not necessarily accompanied by Giacometti-style anguish (Raoul De Keyser). But whether it looks easy or arduous, the provisional work is always opposed to the monumental, the official, the permanent. It closes the door on the era of the high-productionvalue art market (Hirst-Koons-Murakami-Currin). It wants to hover at the edge of non-existence. It wants to rest lightly on the earth. Robert Ryman is often cited as a maker of “last paintings,” but read this quote from him and ask yourself if he doesn’t sound more like Matisse than Ad Reinhardt: The one quality I look for and I think is in all good painting, is that it has to look as if no struggle was involved. It has to look as if it was the most natural thing—it just happened and you don’t have to think about how it happened. It has to look very easy even though it wasn’t.9

In a 1974 interview, Martin Barré, a French painter whose work was often fiercely provisional, approvingly quotes Jean Cocteau: “The work must erase the work; people must be able to say, I could have done that.”

Auto-iconoclasm Provisionality inoculates the painting, conveys to us the dissidence of the painter from a prevailing style. Once, not all that long ago, artists could establish their

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dissidence through the innovative originality of their work, but the avant-garde strategy of rupture, the creation of an iconoclastic artwork, has become so thoroughly assimilated as to no longer serve as proof of anything more than that the artist is a good student. Perhaps the only time that iconoclasm retains its power is when the icon that is broken is the artist’s very own work. This is what a provisional work can do: demolish its own iconic status before it ever attains any such thing. The provisional is born in the moment when the painter hesitates between painting and not-painting—and then begins to paint nonetheless.

Interlude III The scene is Paris in the early 1960s. An art critic remarks to a young expatriate American painter enjoying his gallery debut of thinly painted abstractions, “I see you’re not very interested in matière.” He replies, with a deceptive nonchalance, “Well, I’m interested enough that I try to eliminate it.” Within a few years the materiality of oil paint takes on a more central role in his work when he begins to make paintings by depositing small amounts of liquid paint onto his canvases and tilting them this way and that to direct the paint toward the edges of some feint pencil markings. He never knows exactly what will happen, how a painting will look when it is finished; it often seems to be “doing” itself. Thin color has flooded the canvas or, as he increasingly turns to smaller formats, sheet of paper and receded, leaving visible a residue of barely emerged imagery: hutlike structures, wobbly Roman numerals, luminous grids that suggest an archeological dig seen through patchy fog. Rather than minimalist, they are subliminalist. For a 1987 show of small grey paintings he has a passage from the French writer Maurice Blanchot typed up and affixed to a wall of the gallery. “Speech,” the quotation ends, “is the replacement of a presence by an absence and the pursuit, through presences ever more fragile, of an absence ever more all-sufficing.”

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And What If? And what if provisional painting is an implicit critique of human ambition, a kind of vanitas? And what if provisional painting is a response to the renewed dematerialization of art that has accompanied the rise of digital mobility, a way for painting to say “I, too, am just a momentary image on a screen?” But what if provisionality is nothing more than a stylistic trope, rather than a matter of profound artistic conviction and philosophical reflection? I keep rereading a sentence I came across in one of Frank O’Hara’s art reviews: “It is simply a property of Bonnard’s mature work, and one of its most fragile charms, to look slightly washed-out, to look what every sophisticated person let alone artist wants to look: a little ‘down,’ a little effortless and helpless.” Could provisional painting, or at least some of it, be merely the medium on a casual Friday?

Failing Better How does one respond, as a critic, to a provisional work of art? Can one practice provisional criticism? What would this look like? Given the way that every judgment, evaluation, and interpretation, is subject to revision—if not total rejection—by the passage of time, isn’t every piece of criticism provisional? Maybe. But at the same time, doesn’t every critic also try to offer something that will be completely non-provisional, that is, durable and confident? After a long period when painting was frequently dismissed as a complacent, indulgent, narcissistic medium in contrast to other modes (conceptual art, relational esthetics, etc.) that were supposed to be more faithful to the skeptical, oppositional character of historic avant-gardes, some painters have been rediscovering doubt as an aspect of their medium, reclaiming Cézanne as an ancestor, and nominating as their tutelary spirit Samuel Beckett, a writer who favored paintings where he found “no trace of one-upmanship, either in excess or deficiency. But the acceptance, as little satisfied as bitter, of all that is immaterial and paltry, as among shadows, in the shock from which a work emerges.”10

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Interlude IV Words painted quickly over other words, some of which have been obscured by equally speedy painterly gestures. The letters, always uppercase, are neither crude nor graceful. They can be thick or thin, but always look like the artist was in a hurry to get from one edge of the canvas to the other. Along the way, spaces are opened and closed, flipped and flopped, color is summoned but with no more ceremony than when you turn on a light switch. The paintings contain ordinary words or phrases that, because they seem to point to no obvious external referent, sometimes ask to be read as descriptions of the painting in which they appear: “CUTE AND USELESS” or “DISASTER” Others might be admonitions to the viewer “THINK” and some could be both self-referential and the artist talking to herself “PAINT!” If the painterly side of this work looks back to de Kooning’s practice of hanging abstract compositions on letter shapes and the linguistic aspect engages conceptual art, it’s the apparent nonchalance of the paintings, their complete lack of pretence or fussiness that marks them as belonging to NOW.

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Painting the Stuckness: Samuel Beckett, Bram Van Velde, Georges Duthuit

In April 1945, Samuel Beckett traveled from Paris to Dublin, chiefly to see his mother, whom he had not been able to visit since the Nazi invasion of France five years earlier. After fleeing Paris in 1942 when the resistance network he belonged to was broken up by the Germans, Beckett and his companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil spent the remainder of the war lying low in Southwestern France, under often difficult conditions. It was during this time that he wrote Watt, the last novel he would compose in English. Despite his activities during the Occupation, for which he had already been awarded a Croix de Guerre, Beckett, still an Irish citizen, found it difficult to secure permission to return to France. In the end the only way he could reenter the country was to volunteer for an Irish Red Cross mission to set up a hospital in the French port city of Saint-Lô, which had been bombed to near oblivion by both the Allies and the Germans. While in Saint-Lô, Beckett wrote a talk for Irish radio titled “The Capital of the Ruins.” In this text Beckett observes how, nearly two years after the city’s liberation, prisoners of war and casual laborers were still clearing the rubble by hand and implies that the supposedly temporary hospital he was helping to set up was likely to be around for a while. He wasn’t wrong—it continued in operation until 1956. The likelihood that this hastily assembled Red Cross hospital will be around for much longer than originally planned, suggests to him that, as he put it in the talk, “‘provisional’ is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional.”1 In an essay on Beckett and the Second World War, Marjorie Perloff notes that this sentence “explodes the script’s air of reasonable reportage” and introduces a question (what the word “provisional” might mean when the universe itself

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has become provisional) that “gives impetus” to the stories in Texts for Nothing and to Waiting for Godot. Indeed, Beckett’s perception of the postwar universe as profoundly provisional is of a piece with his quest for a mode of writing that could acknowledge its own utter futility, its rendezvous with failure. As is well known, he only arrived at this mode when he began writing in French rather than in his native English. Trying to explain (in French) in a 1954 letter to a German translator why he had switched in the late 1940s from English to French, Beckett teasingly alludes to there being several reasons that he prefers to keep secret, but then immediately adds: “I will all the same give you one clue: the need to be ill equipped” (Je vous donnerai quand même une piste: le besoin d’être mal armé).2 Although many writers choose to impose constraints on their working process—for instance, the poets and novelists of the Oulipo—it’s hard to think of other authors in literary history who deliberately pursued a strategy to weaken rather than strengthen their writerly powers. While Beckett was by no means the first writer to switch languages, his motivation to compose in French is distinctly different from authors like Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, who changed languages in response to exile. They were adapting to new cultures, seeking new readers, enriching their powers of expression, whereas Beckett seems to have been drawn to French largely for what it denied him: “At the liberation [of Paris], I … began to write again—in French—from a desire to impoverish myself still further (m’appauvrire encore advantage). That was the real motive.”3 Visual artists, with the exception of those who rely on text, don’t have the option to transform their work by changing the language they use, yet there are plenty of other means for them, should they wish, to impoverish themselves and answer the need to be ill-equipped. Forgoing skill, a frequent strategy at least since the advent of Conceptual Art, is obviously one approach, as is placing obstacles in your own way by adopting constraints and procedures that force detours from mainstream practice. For example, when Martin Barré forces himself to apply spray paint through a cardboard barrier that prevents him from seeing the mark he is making or when Howardena Pindell trades paintbrushes for a hole punch as her main tool for making paintings. These deliberate self-denying strategies are acts of refusal, but they are also something else. Just as Beckett’s relentless negations constitute a powerful affirmation, perhaps all the more powerful for being woven from a sense of

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inescapable failure (his “Texts for Nothing” are texts nonetheless) so, too, do the paintings that issue from the studios of Barré and Pindell reanimate the medium of painting through the artists’ choice to divest themselves from the usual trappings of the medium. Beckett’s first publication in French was “La peinture des Van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon,” an essay on the work of the brothers Geer and Bram Van Velde. (The odd title refers to the joke Beckett uses as an epigraph, which he later recycles for his 1957 play Endgame.4) Over the next several years Beckett wrote frequently about contemporary painters, chiefly among them Bram Van Velde. Several of these texts involved Georges Duthuit, a French art historian who was married to Henri Matisse’s daughter Marguerite and who edited the magazine Transition. The importance of this chapter in Beckett’s life can’t be overstated. His involvement with Van Velde and Duthuit coincides with what is without doubt the most significant phase of his work: the writing of the three stories that would appear in Nouvelles et textes pour rien (Stories and Texts for Nothing), the composition, also done in French, of his three major novels, Molloy, Malone Meurt (Malone Dies), and L’Innomable (The Unnameable) and, last but not least, the writing of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot). In addition, Beckett’s engagement with painting provoked from him what is arguably the fullest articulation of what he sought in his own writing. While our chief interest here is what Beckett has to say about the art of painting—in particular about painting that could be defined as provisional—anyone who is curious about Beckett’s work in general will find much worth thinking about in his writing on art. In fact, the impact of painting was so profound that without this experience Beckett may never have arrived at the mode of writing that made him famous. In addition to his three major texts on painting—“La peinture des Van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon” (1945), “Peintres de l’empêchement” (1948) and “Three Dialogues” (1949)—Beckett addressed the subject at length in his letters to Duthuit. As editor of Transition, Duthuit commissioned essays and translations from Beckett, which provided him with desperately needed funds as well as giving him the opportunity to work out his ideas. A maverick historian who believed that European art had gone off-track with the Italian Renaissance, Duthuit shared Beckett’s passion for Bram Van Velde’s work. The best-known of Beckett’s texts on Van Velde can be found in “Three Dialogues,”

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which is presented as conversations between himself and Duthuit, but it is in  his correspondence with Duthuit where Beckett delves most deeply into the subject. On March 2, 1949, he writes: ­ ram and I are a long way apart from each other, if I have sensed us right, B although at one moment, that is at any moment, close together in one and the same stuckness …. certainly Bram makes no more headway than I do. But he does try his hand at it …. I thought at one point that he would end up giving that up, and painting the stuckness, if only from exhaustion.

Although this didn’t happen, Van Velde’s work remained for him “a painting without precedent, in which as in no other I find what I am seeking, precisely because of this fidelity to the prison-house, this refusal of any probationary freedom.” The letter implies that artists and writers alike, even as they pursue the most radical paths, are always in danger of lapsing into conventional solutions. Unable to stand being “stuck” any longer, they find ways of getting unstuck. What Beckett seems to want, for Van Velde and for himself, is to make this stuckness the very subject and content of the work, and though he doesn’t believe that Van Velde has achieved this, the Dutch painter’s work is nonetheless exemplary. One week later (March 9, 1949), Beckett writes again to Duthuit on the subject of painting. After acknowledging that abstract painters have broken with the age-old reliance on the visible world, Beckett worries that they may have simply substituted that relation (rapport) with another. Rather than trying to paint the world, in whatever mode they use, painters are simply painting in relation to their own interior states. “The artist can wallow untroubled,” he observes, “in what is called non-figurative painting, assured of never being short of themes, of always being in front of himself and with as much variety as if he had never left off wandering idly along the banks of the Seine. And here again we see triumphing the definition of the artist as he-who-is-always-in-front-of.” Beckett then comes back to Van Velde’s work, praising it without reservation: For me Bram’s painting owes nothing to these feeble consolations. It is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all these forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses, but the state of

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being in relation as such, the state of being in front of. We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes of intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world …. I am not saying that he makes no attempt to reconnect. What matters is that he does not succeed. His painting is, if you will, the impossibility of reconnecting. There is, if you like, refusal and refusal to accept refusal. That is what makes this painting possible.5

Many people, Beckett included, have wondered if Van Velde’s work really corresponds to this extreme standard of breaking with the exterior and interior worlds, of dispensing with “being-in-front-of,” of juggling refusal and the refusal of refusal.6 Beckett even expressed concern that his writing about Van Velde was doing the artist a disservice by identifying him too closely with Beckett’s own extreme vision. What makes the situation still more complex is that Beckett’s rejection of “relation” (“I am no longer capable of writing about,” he confesses to Duthuit) extends to the very project of art criticism, resulting in what Lois Oppenheim has described as a “stunning paradox.” As she observes: Beckett’s commentaries on painting do not aim at an elucidation of art (the van Veldes’s or any other) so much as a clarification of the difficulty endemic to writing about it. At the very antipodes of the conceptual order of thought, art defies conceptual explication, yet it is in expounding on what opposes the critical task that Beckett succeeds in articulating those qualities intrinsic to art itself. Such contradiction, at the heart of all Beckett’s writing, critical and creative, has hardly gone unrecognized. As we have seen, more than any other feature, it was semantic self-resistance—in the form of the cancellation of one word or group of words by others on the page or by a discrepant act on the stage—that first caused Beckett to be so closely scrutinized by scholars of literature in the early 1960s. Need it be said, yet again, that each of Beckett’s texts belies, by its mere existence, the futility of the communicative effort professed within it?7

Or, as Beckett puts it in “Peintres de l’empêchement”: “For what remains to be represented if the essence of object is to elude representation? There remain to be represented the conditions of that elusion.”8 While Beckett might not have recognized painters like Raoul De Keyser or Mary Heilmann as meeting his stern criteria, there is in provisional painting an attempt to disrupt the practice of painting at its very base. I can’t help wondering what Beckett would

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have thought if he had wandered into a show of Martin Barré’s paintings in the 1960s. (It’s not such a far-fetched possibility, given Beckett’s continuing interest in visual art.) Would he have recognized in Barré’s stripped-down, self-referential, defiantly withholding abstractions something like what he described to Duthuit? The Beckett commentator who has perhaps best understood the relationship between Beckett and Bram Van Velde is Pascale Casanova, the French literary scholar who died in 2018. In her invaluable book Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Casanova writes of The Unnameable, that “there is no longer any ‘subject’—either in the sense of painting or of philosophy—any content, and there is almost no signification either. There is only the telling of the failure to tell, just as Bram Van Velde paints the failure to paint.”9 Is there anything of use to us in Beckett’s and Van Velde’s ethos of failure or in Beckett’s quest, as recorded in his letters to Duthuit, to envision a form of painting that escaped all “relation”? Already thirty-plus years ago Daniel Soutif observed that Van Velde’s “art and the choice it engages, of course, belong to their time, which has passed. The drama of ‘I paint my misery’ has evaporated from the art world today, as if the fascination with success had blown away the fascination with failure.”10 Nor has Beckett’s embrace of failure fared much better. As cultural historian Joe Moran has pointed out recently in If You Should Fail: A Book of Solace, Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better” is a cliché now seen “on tea towels, hoodies, mugs and iPhone covers,” spouted by entrepreneurs and recycled in the title of a book (Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner) published by no less than the Harvard Business School.11 What do we do with a once-radical stance that has become a marketing tool?12 The same might be said—in fact, has been said, and rather often—about Provisional Painting. I can’t deny that the modes of painting practiced by the artists I wrote about in 2009 and 2012 subsequently became available as stylistic options to a generation of MFA students, nor can I dispute the fact that those four words from Worstword Ho! have long-since lost their sting. The only antidote is to return to the original sources, to Beckett’s books and plays, to the paintings of Heilmann and Barré and divest yourself of the easy slogans and formulas that have accrued to them. In other words: Forget “Fail again. Fail better” and forget “provisional painting.”

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Weak Thought, Strong Painting (Gianni Vattimo)

In a 2014 post titled “The nihilist condition and provisional painting à la Rubinstein,” artist-blogger Martin Mugar confessed to being “astonished” that I didn’t mention nihilism in my two articles on Provisional Painting, adding that Gianni Vattimo’s “‘weak thought’ would be a perfect concept to encapsulate where painting is in Rubinstein’s provisional world.”1 Although I had been aware of Vattimo’s ideas since I encountered Arte Debole, an early 1990s movement inspired by his work, I confess that as of 2009 I had yet to read any of his writings (a failing since corrected). Vattimo’s absence from my articles meant that I missed the opportunity to weave my ideas about provisionality into current philosophical debate, and vice versa. In a belated effort to make up for that lacuna, let me attempt, as briefly as possible, to outline Vattimo’s concept of “weak thought” as it might apply to painting and to art in general. When Vattimo was a professor of aesthetics at the University of Turin in the late 1970s, a number of his students who had been arrested for their alleged involvement with Italian “extra-parliamentary” leftist movements such as the Red Brigades wrote letters from prison that Vattimo found distressingly doctrinaire and filled with what he called “metaphysical and violent rhetorical subjectivity.”2 His students had, he feared, misunderstood his teachings and misinterpreted Nietzsche and Heidegger. As an antidote to their embrace of violence, he developed his notion of “weak thought.” Believing that it was an insistence on the existence of definitive truths and belief in a unitary history that had led astray not just his students but Western philosophy as a whole, Vattimo argued that it was not a question of finding a new ground for philosophy, replacing, say, as Derrida urged, the metaphysics

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of presence with a science of grammatology, but of loosening the ties between thought and its aims. To overcome metaphysics, to reject foundational thinking, would only lead to positing or imposing a new foundation, a new metaphysics, a new first principle on which truth would be based. Instead, Vattimo argued for “nihilism” and “hermeneutics.” If by “hermeneutics” he meant a plurality of interpretations, his use of the term “nihilism” has nothing to do with destruction, pessimism, and futility. Rather, it indicates a way of thinking that relies on negating any stance that claims a privileged relation to truth and reality; nihilism is, in his words, “the dissolution of all ultimate foundations.”3 Vattimo was trying to fundamentally reconfigure the task of philosophy. As he has explained: “‘Weak thought’ is by no means a weakness of thinking as such. It is just that, because thinking is no longer demonstrative but rather edifying, it has become in that restricted sense weaker.”4 Referring to Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, Vattimo elsewhere observes that the idea of a progressive unfolding of time, and even that such a thing as history is at all possible, belongs to a culture of masters. As a linear unity history is actually only the history of those who rose to the top as victors. It is constituted at the cost of excluding, first in practice and then in recollection, an array of possibilities, values, and images.5

Vattimo also believes that foundations and the notion of a single reality, a single standard of rationality, are undermined today by the multifariousness of communications media and the effects of global migration. It’s easy to see how the absence of a foundation and the existence of multiple rationalities and the breaking up of unilinear history has obvious parallels with the withering away of modern art’s master narrative of progress and of any lingering notion that a particular style or approach to art making enjoys a stronger claim of suitability to the present moment. Thus, the current—and by now well established—pluralism in art would seem to be the equivalent of “weak thought,” which is not surprising given Vattimo’s status as a postmodern thinker. But where does this leave “provisional painting”? Does it have any deeper relationship to Vattimo’s “weak thought” than other kinds of contemporary art, all of which embrace non-linear histories and reject foundational structures?

Weak Thought, Strong Painting (Gianni Vattimo)

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Or do they? Is it possible that foundational structures—the art-historical equivalent of metaphysical concepts in philosophy—underlie the freewheeling realm of contemporary art? What if the relationship of artist to work, and work to aesthetics, has remained essentially unchanged despite the move away from the unitary tendencies of modernism? And despite wave after wave of innovative artforms, from Conceptual and Performance art to Relational Art and NFTs. It would be disappointing, to say the least, if decades of radical departures left the basis of art unchanged. After all, what is the point of overthrowing a previously dominant style only to replace it with a different one? “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” as The Who once sang. I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t know if contemporary art has escaped its own foundationalism, nor even whether this would be a positive development were it true. What I do know, however, is that every human activity is littered with unexamined assumptions. What Vattimo, and many “provisional” paintings, ask us to consider is how our habits of thought depend on fixed systems of belief, on our investment in a single reality. At the same time, they invite us to let go of the belief that we can make a total break with such foundational structures. In his introduction to his own translation of Il pensiero debole, the collective volume that introduced the concept of “weak thought,” Peter Carravetta summarizes Vattimo’s reasoning: If we “no longer believe in the (by now presumptuous) value of making tabula rasa of all that we inherited in order to seek some ‘new’ foundation or beginning,” he writes, then we are left with a mass of “existing interpretations” to help us make sense of the world. Yet, Carravetta continues, these interpretations will always, as in every human communication, be somehow distorted: we must recognize “the fact that some of these versions have become authoritative (archives, canons, traditions) and others have been marginalized (minority discourse, the wretched of the earth, the ‘slaves’) or forgotten (erasures, ‘dead metaphors,’ suppressed voices).” In the context of visual art, this suggests a more nuanced scenario than simply replacing a dominant style with a plurality of stylistic options. For one thing, it implies that not every available approach is equal: to engage with an “authoritative” interpretation is different than doing so with a marginalized one. In the first case, one needs to guard against simply reiterating (and thus reaffirming) the canon (for example, creating minimalist sculpture that unquestioningly accepts the premises of Donald Judd), while the

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risk of engaging with a minority discourse is appropriation (which can easily happen when a contemporary artist borrows iconography from visionary or outsider artists). A further step would be to decouple one’s work from historical precedent altogether, or at least not rely on art-historical references for content and context. Another approach that has the potential to undermine fixed systems of belief would be a hybrid practice in which the work belongs to multiple fields (for example, the work of Paul Chan or Tacita Dean). One way to think about provisional painting is as the record of an artist’s failed attempt to achieve some absolute break with the inherited legacy of painting. The parameters of this failure, and the source of the tension within provisional art, are that the artist pursues this break within the domain of painting, all the while retaining some of its founding conditions. This is what distinguishes provisional painting from more radical strategies, say Katharina Grosse’s spray-painted architectural spaces or Jessica Stockholder’s assemblage installations. Of course, the choice of the provisional painter to retain certain conventions (at the very least, the use of a rectilinear support hanging on a wall) dooms any hope of achieving a dramatic break with the legacy of the medium. But this doesn’t mean accepting all of the medium’s conditions, just as weak thought doesn’t mean surrendering the emancipatory potential of philosophy. Later in Il pensiero debole, Pier Aldo Rovatti explains the place of weak thought on what we might call the spectrum of power. There is in the expression “weak thought,” he writes, “something which is transitory and in-between. It is provisionally lodged between the strong reason of those who speak the truth and the impotence of those who contemplate their own nothingness. From this midpoint it can work for us as a signpost.”6 Provisional painting occupies a similarly interim space between those who champion painting’s continuing vitality and those for whom it is dead and finished (I am including in the latter territory not only those artists who reject the medium altogether but also those who pursue endgame anti-painting). Can a painting achieve a powerful effect without modeling the “strong reason of those who speak the truth”? In other words, can deconstructed, provisionalized painting do more than annotate its own conscious weakness? Conversely, can any painting navigate the dangerous waters of authority without accepting its own vulnerability? One artist who embodies a positive

Weak Thought, Strong Painting (Gianni Vattimo)

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response to both these questions is Mark Bradford. His paintings intentionally avoid the materials and techniques that would steer them toward conventional solutions, while also displaying a degree of contingency. Both these aspects affiliate them with provisionality, as does the way Bradford speaks about his work. “I never was interested in being perfect. I was interested in sharing my imperfect perfection,” he told an interviewer in 2020. “What constitutes a painting, and who are the gatekeepers of that?” he recalls asking himself as he was developing as a Black painter in Los Angeles in the 1990s. “I pillage my own work,” he says of his violent ripping and sanding away of his surfaces. Ultimately it is not despite these qualities of imperfection, cultural resistance and auto-disruption but because of them that Bradford’s paintings derive their indisputable power. I wish I could say that the artists participating in the Arte Debole group in Italy in the late 1980s and early 1990s produced noteworthy explorations of these ideas, but in my experience their work tended to come across as derivative and illustrative (always the danger when leaning too much on theory). In her review of a 1992 Arte Debole exhibition in New York, Jenifer P. Borum accused the group of “exploring a decadent, mannerist phase of post-Modern esthetics.”7 Despite the “free play of surface color and texture,” the artists are limited by their “indentured servitude to ‘pensiero debole,’ which is in turn contradicted by the avant-garde bravado of their manifestostyle polemics.”8 The notion that artistic bravado is incompatible with an embrace of weak thought may have implications for provisional painting. For instance, it could be that the sheer scale of Julian Schnabel’s paintings may exclude them from the realm of the provisional, which requires a certain modesty, a retraction of the artist’s ego, a kind of artistic tzimtzum. At the very end of her review, Borum raises one last—and particularly devastating— criticism of the debolisti: their subject “turns out to be the white male artist in search of a new style, thrashing like a fish out of water in an art context currently preoccupied with the nuances of gendered and culturally specific subjectivity.”9 It would be a sad day, indeed, if Provisional Painting turned out to be nothing more than a new style for white male artists, or, indeed, for any artist of whatever race or gender. It may be the fate of every influential turn in art to be subjected to recuperation and end up as just another stylistic option but

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this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to resist, to mount salvage operations. From a Vattimonean perspective, painting is neither perennially healthy in the “now and forever” (to quote the boosterish title of a series of painting exhibitions) nor is it fatally compromised by failing to make a radical break with its modernist past—instead it may be in a state of prolonged convalescence, healing in the plurality of its own possibilities.10

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A Precarious Chain of Signifiers

Provisionality—one term within a chain of signifiers that includes “refusal,” “doubt,” “nonchalance,” “the unfinished,” and “precarity,” among others—has been our lot for a long time, and so has our will to deny its reign: for every provisional moment, in painting as elsewhere, there have been a greater number of monuments dedicated to its opposite. If provisionality, then, is more a condition than a consequence, its story can be picked up nearly anytime and anywhere. For me, the moment was circa 2008, when a series of exhibitions and the paintings they included seemed to be orbiting around the same question, but one could just as easily begin at Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit’s dialogues about painting in the late 1940s or with certain passages in Chang Yen-yuan ninth century C.E. history of Chinese painting Record of the Painting of Successive Periods, or with any number of Cézanne’s late works. Not surprisingly, perhaps, provisionality is one of those concepts like Roland Barthes’s “the Neutral” that by its very nature tends to resist stable definitions, and all the more so when it is operating not in critical discourse but within a work of art. If the neutral, in Barthes’s phrase, seeks to “outplay the paradigm,” provisionality attempts to outplay itself. Just as a text in praise of silence must grapple with its own inner contradictions, so must a painting that engages provisionality find some way of dealing with its aspiration to be unprovisional, to survive into the future like the great works of the past. (This is excepting those few paintings deliberately designed to decay and self-destruct.) If provisionality reminds us that there is no such thing as a finished painting, it also proves again and again, that, de facto, there is no such thing as an unfinished one.

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

If I seem to be proposing two contradictory lines of thought—that provisionality is an eternal aspect of art-making and that it has arisen in response to specific historical conditions—this may simply be a means of moving my argument ahead, something that I also hope to do by trying to distinguish among different types of provisionality, categories that frequently overlap.

The Labyrinth of the No Refusal, which has played a crucial role in modern art since the Salons des Refusés in nineteenth-century Paris, may be the most visible form of provisionality. Art history is full of artists who have made, in Dante’s phrase, il gran rifuto (the great refusal), from those like Duchamp, Hélio Oiticica, and Lee Lozano who abandoned painting for other pursuits, to those who refuse the success that is offered them or walk away from the fame they have earned.1 In this category we also find artists who through their work or via public (mis)behavior choose to inflict irony and insult on viewers and prospective buyers, artists whose “No” is uttered in galleries and museums. These acts of negation are often more performative than they are definitive, as when Edward Ruscha’s 1979 text painting that declares “I don’t want no retro spective” was selected as the cover for the catalogue of his 1982 SFMOMA retrospective.2 Near the end of “Provisional Painting” I briefly discuss Joe Bradley’s “Schmagoo Paintings,” a 2008 group of smudged and scuffed raw canvases bearing crude images drawn with black grease pencil. “A distinction needs to be made,” I write, between Bradley and the other artists I have been discussing here. Their work may at times come off as uncertain, incomplete, casual, self-cancelling or unfinished, but each of them is fully committed to the project of painting. If they seek to break existing, perhaps unspoken, contracts with painting, it is only in order to draw up other protocols that will renew the medium. Bradley’s work, which sometimes shares the guttersnipe esthetics of artists such as Dan Colen and Dash Snow, seems more like a willful artistic gesture than part of a painter’s necessary process.

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In 2009, Bradley himself explained his motives for creating such a debased body of paintings: “I really wanted to be able to be careless … work on them for a while, crumple them up in a ball, throw them in the corner. It was a relief. I like the idea that someone could spill a glass of wine on one of these things and it would be no big deal.”3 Whatever their status in 2007, less than a decade later a spilled glass of wine would have been a very big thing as Bradley’s grease-pencil paintings were edging close to the $1 million mark at auction. By that time, however, his work had changed significantly, now drawing on the abstract styles of Hans Hofmann, Philip Guston, and Robert Motherwell and the roughly-hewn drop-cloth paintings of Julian Schnabel. It was more obviously “fully committed to the project of painting” and no longer very “provisional” or liable to be mistaken for a nihilistic gesture. The fate of the “Schmagoo Paintings” is emblematic of what frequently happens to art intended to resist commodification. (It’s difficult to say whether the “Schmagoo Paintings” represented a purging of Bradley’s negational impulses, opening the way for an exuberant formalism or if their quick embrace by the market convinced him of the futility of any resistance— perhaps both.) It has been clear for a long time that absolutely anything can be turned into a commodity, especially when it involves stretched canvas, but this hasn’t prevented artists from trying their best to disrupt the odious machine. In 2007, for his third solo exhibition at Reena Spaulings in New York, British artist Merlin Carpenter hung thirteen blank canvases. Halfway through the opening, the artist arrived with a can of black paint and a brush and began writing phrases onto the stretched canvases. What he wrote were intentionally dumb and lamely offensive phrases such as: “I like Christopher Wool,” “I hate you artworld,” “you cunts” and “die collector scum.” This show was the first in a series of similarly conceived exhibitions, each titled “The Opening,” that took place during 2007–9. Carpenter’s calculated insolence owes a lot to Martin Kippenberger, whose entire highly self-conscious career was meant as a constant challenge to the art system, even as it remained as complicit with it as possible. One of the things that makes Kippenberger’s work so engaging is the subtlety of his critique, the twistiness of his irony. He may use incredibly dumb phrases in his paintings—like all those “I heart” stickers—but their meaning is always slippery. Kippenberger played the role of the rebel painter as a slapstick routine,

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knowing that there was something inherently comical about it. Carpenter (who was for a time Kippenberger’s assistant) treats it more as a self-conscious farce. The blatant insincerity of his work seems to be an indictment of the entire art world. It’s clear that the targets of Die Collector Scum are not collectors per se but an art world where such a painting is necessary, and, even worse, successful. There is a certain economy and bravura to Carpenter’s work but it also leaves both artist and viewer looking decidedly pathetic. If one wanted to be more generous, one could say that Carpenter is after some zero-degree of painting—reducing it to its bare essence, larding his squibs with a hint of the tautology and self-referentiality so dear to conceptualism. Or, to put it another way, demoting the neutral space of the blank canvas, the void of the “last painting,” to nothing more than a support for the crudest, dumbest graffiti imaginable. Another artist who has made similar gestures with text paintings is Houstonbased Mark Flood, whose 2012 exhibition at the New York gallery Zach Feuer greeted visitors with a 194-inch high painting that read “Whore Museums, Gutless Collectors, Blind Dealers, Alleged Artists.” A provocateur since his days in a Houston punk band called Culturecide, Flood is also the creator of “Lace Paintings,” which offer an opulent beauty that seems at odds with his intentionally rebarbative text paintings. Are his insolent text paintings meant as some kind of penance for the decorative lace paintings, or are they more like a day job that make the text paintings possible? Like so many artists who have emerged since Gerhard Richter dismantled the abstraction/figuration wall, Flood, and his audience, doesn’t see such bifurcated practice as in any way problematic. An earlier Artist of the No, largely ignored during his life, was Boris Lurie (1924–2008), a painter and Holocaust survivor who spearheaded the NO!art movement from 1960 until his death. Rather than inserting ironic statements into the mainstream art world like Flood and Carpenter, Lurie and his associates embraced their marginality, making work that mixed protest and provocation. They didn’t refuse so much as do their best to be refused. Still earlier, Georg Grosz expressed the disdain felt by many artists for the society around them when he titled his 1946 autobiography A Little Yes and a Big No. Far more nuanced than either Flood or Carpenter, and more innovative as a painter than Bradley, is Rochelle Feinstein, whose abstractions combine self-reflexivity, gleeful bricolage, and barbed humor. Although I didn’t discuss

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her work in either of my Art in America articles (an oversight I regret), Feinstein’s paintings are nothing if not provisional. Take, for instance, her series “The Estate of Rochelle F.” made in 2009–10, during and in response to the economic crisis. In the process of consolidating two storage spaces into one, Feinstein began thinking about the economic value of her work and what might happen to it after her death. The 2008 stock market crash was on her mind, as was her shaky art-market status as a woman painter. Out of this came “The Estate of Rochelle F,” 13 “pre-posthumous” paintings created using only what was at hand without spending an additional penny on materials. As she explained to Artforum in 2018, “the paintings were made from a massive, varied amount of surplus stuff, such as cardboard, packing materials, tarps, ground glass, paint, and unfinished work accumulated over time. ‘The Estate’ ended when this material was depleted.” More explicitly than most contemporary painters, Feinstein acknowledges how thoroughly the materials in a painting are subject to changing meanings, as when the use of non-art materials becomes “practically a default mode.” Most elements in her work are ringed with multiple sets of quotation marks. Impressively, she nonetheless achieves a highly personal style of expression. As she rightly says, “negation has been a productive force in my studio.” There are so many options available to a painter today: every style, every combination of materials, every kind of content has the chance to be given serious consideration. This puts the scrupulously skeptical painter in a predicament. “Is it true,” she or he might ask, “that no type of painting is forbidden? Will whatever I paint be always already approved by the artworld’s apparatus? Is there any way of not making a puzzle piece that perfectly matches the space waiting for it?” Of course, not every painter is skeptical about the acceptance of his or her own work. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that most painters worry more about their work not fitting in. And yet, there are those who seem to care about making problematic work, distinguished not by a turn of style or novel content (or both simultaneously), but by an apparent refusal to offer what is expected, by a painting that seems to position itself in opposition to painting as commonly defined. A memorable literary depiction of such an artist occurs in Albert Camus’s 1957 story “Jonas, or the Artist at Work,” in which a successful painter

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progressively withdraws from his career, his family, and his friends in order, he says, to concentrate on his painting. After the artist collapses, his closest friend discovers what he has been working on: a single canvas, “completely blank, in the center of which Jonas had merely written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary (solitaire ou solidare).” Here Camus suggests how affirmation may emerge from extreme refusal. As he observes in The Rebel: “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.” Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby and Co. is a veritable encyclopedia of what the author terms “writers of the No,” inspired by the uncooperative protagonist of Herman Melville’s famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Framed as a chronicle kept by a Madrid office worker, Vila-Matas’s book is a collection of brief meditations on writers, real or invented, who, like Melville’s character, “prefer not to” produce anything. As the protagonist explains early in the book, For some time now I have been investigating the frequent examples of Bartleby’s syndrome in literature, for some time I have studied the illness, the disease, endemic to contemporary letters, the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness that means that certain creators, while possessing a very demanding literary conscience (or perhaps precisely because of this), never manage to write: either they write one or two books and then stop altogether or, working on a project, seemingly without problems, one day they become literally paralysed for good.4

A page later we learn why refusal is a good thing for literature, even if it might bring misery onto the lives of writers who embrace it: “Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear.”5 In a provocative 2015 text titled “Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness,” painter Amy Sillman argues that the familiar forms of what could be called “negative aesthetics”  … fail to adequately describe what a lot of artists are doing in their studios. Dada, the readymade, “bad painting”, the Dandy, “provisional” painting, deskilling, etc.—none of these ring quite right in accounting for something

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I would call negativity-at-work, the arduous search for form, the feelings of dissatisfaction, the endless decisions and changes that constitute the work of various artists.

­ or her, “awkwardness” is a far more accurate word to describe the struggle F of an artist than “negation” or “provisionality,” and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is a better literary reference than Melville’s Bartleby. “Gregor Samsa’s miserable discovery that he is a bug,” Sillman writes, is “a good example of making do with what you’re stuck with when you’ve got a body, is a contrast to the much-cited Bartleby position of ‘I’d prefer not to’, an aesthetic style of negation.” Although the “Bartleby position” may only tempt a minority of painters, and certainly fewer than it did circa 2008, refusal remains a powerful tool for artists, and obviously not only in the medium of painting. Discussing Deana Lawson’s photographs of black women, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa has recently written that “the assertions of black feminine sensual and sexual life figured in Lawson’s portraits can be understood as acts or practices of refusal—refusal of the strictures that seek to contain and order their bodies and their inner worlds.”6 Painting was more to the fore in “On Refusal: Representation and Resistance in Contemporary American Art,” a six-person exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland from October 25, 2019 to January 19, 2020.7 The show’s curator, Clare Gormley, framed the exhibition “in relation to an emergent philosophy and politics of refusal in contemporary America,” particularly in the fields of black studies and black feminist theory. Her chief influence, she explains in the exhibition’s catalogue was the work of the Practicing Refusal Collective, a group of academics, artists, and researchers. As the members of the Practicing Refusal Collective define it, the “practice of refusal” is a “refusal to accept black precarity as inevitable, and a refusal to embrace the terms of diminished subjecthood through which black subjects are presented.” Projects like the Practicing Refusal Collective demonstrate that despite nearly two centuries since some artists and writers in Paris began to turn their backs on officially endorsed styles and subjects, and despite the enormous acclaim, and endless blandishments that eventually followed, artist have not forgotten the power of their No, their right of refusal.

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The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art

The Nonchalant The word “nonchalant” (earliest recorded English usage 1734) derives from the French nonchalant “careless, indifferent,” which can be traced back to the Latin calere “to be hot.” In French a person who is chaleureuse is someone who is welcoming or warmhearted, the opposite of a nonchalant individual, who is cool and indifferent. Somewhere in talking about Matisse, Clement Greenberg attributes Matisse’s influence on 1960s Color Field painting to “the paint, the indifferent paint.” The impact of Matisse hardly ends with Color Field painting. Since the 1980s, several generations of painters have learned from Matisse to harness the power of indifference, to take a casual approach to the application of paint in which its expressive potential and any suggestion of opulence are jettisoned. The key artists here are Mary Heilmann and Stanley Whitney. At the start, I suspect, loose paint handling was a way for Whitney and Heilman to separate themselves from Minimalism and its fetish for flawless surfaces; their paintings were and are clearly handmade. At the same time, their canvases forgo the temptation of virtuosic paint handling—they don’t function as a display of ego, they are never show-offish. Another influence, especially in Whitney’s case, was the speedy no-nonsense brushwork Philip Guston favored in the 1970s. Significantly, both Heilmann and Whitney also drew on sources from outside the standard history of painting. In Heilmann’s case, it was ceramics (which she had learned while studying with Peter Voulkos at U.C. Berkeley), a medium in which the application of marks and colors doesn’t come with the cultural baggage of painting. For Whitney, it was his discovery of how in African art the irregularities of the materials used were effortlessly assimilated into the finished work, rather than being smoothed away as is so often the case in Western aesthetics. In her June 2011 article “The New Casualists,” Sharon Butler identified some dozen or so contemporaries concerned with “multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right.” In the work of Lauren Luloff, Cordy Ryman, Amy Feldman, Joe Bradley, Patricia Treib, Rebecca Morris, and Joe Fyfe among others, she found artists who were exploring “uncharted territory” often under the guise of faux amateurism and a “purposeful lack of formal cohesion.” At play in some of Butler’s Casualists, and also in the work of

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Whitney and Heilmann, is a fear of looking like you are trying too hard. Maybe “fear” is too strong a word. Let’s say “preference.” This is hardly a new idea in art. In 1878, Nietzsche declared that “to give an impression of health, a work of art should seem to involve at most three-quarters of its author’s strength …. All good things have something idle about them.”8 The concepts of artistic nonchalance and the deliberately unfinished work are closely intertwined, at least in Western art. In “Provisional Painting” I include an observation by the Tang dynasty art historian Chang Yen-Yuan in praise of the incomplete that French scholar François Cheng quotes in Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting. Here is the full passage from Cheng’s book: In painting, one should avoid worrying about accomplishing a work that is too diligent and too finished in the depiction of forms and the notation of colors or one that makes too great a display of one’s technique, thus depriving it of mystery and aura. That is why one should not fear the incomplete, but quite to the contrary, one should deplore that which is too complete. From the moment one knows that a thing is complete, what need is there to complete it? For the incomplete does not necessarily mean the unfulfilled. Indeed, the defect of the unfulfilled is precisely the failure to recognize a thing as complete enough. When one paints a waterfall [or a spring], the brushstrokes should be interrupted without the breath’s being interrupted; the forms should be discontinuous without the spirit being so. Such is the case with a divine dragon in the midst of clouds: Its head and tail do not seem to be connected, but its being is animated by a single breath.9

Chang Yen-Yuan’s distinction between the incomplete and the unfulfilled, his advice to interrupt brushstrokes rather than complete them, might describe half the paintings in any Western museum of modern art, which is not surprising given how deeply beholden the modern art of the West is to Asian art and philosophy. The impact of Zen Buddhism, in large part via Daisetsu Suzuki’s lectures on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University in the late 1940s, on postwar American artists such as Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, and Agnes Martin is well-known. What these artists and others confronted as they absorbed Buddhism and the teachings of the Tao was the inherent contradiction between the role of individual will in art-making and the

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selflessness they knew was required of great art, between the base facticity of paint and canvas and the transcendent content they sought in their work. # 29 “­ For those who would like to take control of the world or act upon it— I see that with this they simply will not succeed. The world is a sacred vessel; It is not something that can be acted upon. Those who act on it destroy it. Those who hold on to it lose it.”

Or, as John Cage, another attendee of Suzuki’s lectures put it in the title of his published diaries: How to Improve the World: You Will Only Make Matters Worse. The lesson of Zen Buddhism may be as relevant to artists of the early twenty-first century, especially those grappling with the environmental consequences of their activities. If negation represents one branch of provisionality, acceptance of the contingency of any material object, and hence of failure, acceptance which is the cornerstone of Zen Buddhism, is surely another. Its echo can be heard, for instance, in the words of Adam Pendleton when he says, “I realized I want my language to fail. That my approach must be asyntactic and combinatorial. That I don’t want to become but to always be becoming.”10

The Unfinished In his recent biography of Jacques Derrida, Peter Salmon notes that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein or “being there” is “a type of ‘continuous incompleteness.’”11 Among the most forceful explorations of this condition is Robert Morris’s installation Continuous Project Altered Daily, which occupied the Castelli Warehouse on West 108th Street for twenty-two days in March 1969. Every day, Morris would visit the space to add, remove, or alter the assembled materials which, at one point, included earth, clay, asbestos, cotton, water, grease, plastic, felt, wood, threadwaste, electric lights, photographs, and a tape recorder.

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Nineteen years earlier and 100 blocks to the south, the dozen or so invitees to “The Artists’ Sessions” at Studio 35 (named for the address where this symposium was held, 35 West Eighth Street, which had been the site of a lecture series organized by Baziotes, David Hare, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell) spent a good part of three afternoons arguing about the “unfinished.”12 (This Studio 35 conference is also referenced in “To Rest Lightly on the Earth” see p. 33.) Barnett Newman suggested that the idea of a finished picture was “a fiction.” Willem de Kooning said that he purposely refrained from finishing his paintings. Ad Reinhardt confessed that finishing paintings had always been a problem for him: “Disturbances arise when you have to treat the work as a finished and complete object, so that the only time I think I ‘finish’ a painting is when I have a dead-line.” Motherwell said he disliked any picture that “is too suave or too skillfully done” but added: “I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering.” Many of the painters present made distinctions between American and French artists. De Kooning insisted that the French “have a particular something that makes them look like a ‘finished’ painting. They have a touch which I am glad not to have.” Baziotes tried to clarify what he and his fellow participants meant by “finished”: “In talking about the necessity to ‘finish’ a thing, we then said American painters ‘finish’ a thing that looks ‘unfinished,’ and the French, they ‘finish’ it. I have seen Matisses that were more ‘unfinished’ and yet more ‘finished’ than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in a terrific emotion at the time and he was more ‘unfinished’ than ‘finished’.” It must be admitted that Baziotes’s distinctions aren’t entirely easy to follow. How do you spot the difference between a “finished” painting that looks “unfinished” and an “unfinished” painting that looks “unfinished”? How can a painting be more unfinished and also more finished at the same time? And what does “terrific emotion” have to do with the level of finish in a painting? Then as now, artistic debates venture deep into the realm of the undecidable. As Baziotes rightfully suggests, Matisse is a complex case. If many of his Fauvist canvases are deliberately and radically unfinished, he is also capable of deploying preparatory-looking brushwork as style. Sometimes, as John Elderfield put it in the catalogue of MOMA’s 1992 Matisse survey, Matisse “would cultivate an ‘apparent facility’ to hide his efforts and thus maintain the privacy of his work.”13 Elderfield points out that the acceptance of “unfinish”

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was hardly an invention of Matisse’s. “Since the eighteenth century, at least, it had been understood to contribute to the beauty of paintings.” He cites Baudelaire’s observation, in his report on the Paris Salon of 1845, that “what is complete is not finished and … a thing that is highly finished need not be complete at all.”14 (Whether a painting was sufficiently finished or not was often a flashpoint in the nineteenth century; one of Ensor’s great early paintings, The Oyster Eater (1882), was refused by the Antwerp Salon because the judges believed the artist hadn’t actually finished it, something that Ensor’s signature seemed to dispute.) For Matisse, according to Elderfield, freedom from finish is not only a liberating way of making paintings, it projects forward into time “a possible image, a future image.”15 If, in Collioure in the summer of 1905, Matisse ceased differentiating between preparatory and finished canvases and submitted highly notational landscapes to that year’s salon, he was not only saying that an “unfinished” painting can be “finished” but also that it is in the nature of the work of art to remain unfinished, to point toward some ever-receding culmination, some impossible whole. The unfinished may have come to the fore with Abstract Expressionism, but its triumph was short-lived. A bare decade after the Studio 35 conference, as Abstract Expressionism was giving way to Neo-Dada, Minimalism and Pop art, as people stopped reading Sartre and began reading Claude Levi-Strauss, painters all over stopped worrying about whether their pictures looked too finished. But what if there was a hidden continuity between pre- and post-1960 esthetics? Even though artists who emerged in the 1960s tended to shy away, at least in their public statements, from the kind of existential dramas that engaged the previous generation, the specter of impossibility may not have wholly retreated. Perhaps, instead of vanishing into some landfill of obsolete ideas, it migrated into new art forms, reappearing as insubstantiality in conceptual art, the ephemeral in performance art, as negation in all those artists whose practice in destroying things (Gustav Metzger, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, etc.) or, like Robert Morris in Continuous Project Altered Daily, refusing any definitive form. Could it be that the dematerialization of art represents the general victory of Giacometti’s doubt? After a century of seeking the impossible in paintings and sculptures, artists discard objects; the banks of anxiety burst and the world are flooded with the sheer possibility

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of everything. One hundred years of relentless questioning have resulted in total artistic freedom. Doubt vanishes because it has accomplished its task so thoroughly; what is conceptual art if not a commentary on the impossibility of art itself? There are, of course, other ways of looking at this history. Perhaps after a century of pursuing greater freedom and having to entertain greater doubt, artists couldn’t stand it anymore, and sought out less uncertain approaches to art making. Hence, the fabricated boxes of Minimalism, the purity of perceptual art, the quasi-totalitarian task-oriented branch of performance art, social and political activism as art/art as activism. Yet, it’s equally true that an array of factors (including the rise of mass media, the growth of higher education, the capitalization of art, the shift from existentialism to structuralism, the adaption of Greenbergian formalism as a model for instrumentalizing art historians, even those who claimed to reject Greenberg) conspired to push further into the past the kind of agonies of self-doubt that were the hallmark of artists from Cézanne to Giacometti to Guston, which is why I was so surprised when I began to notice circa 2008 among a broad range of artists, a resistance to finishing artworks according to accepted standards of craft, an approach to the object that highlighted its “impossible” status.

The Breaking of Contracts Provisionality can manifest itself as work that looks “unfinished,” but provisionality and the unfinished are not identical. Thus, some of the painters discussed in “Provisional Painting” signed and exhibited works that looked unfinished (Martin Barré) while others produced paintings that were clearly finished but appeared provisional because of the casualness or clumsiness of their style (De Keyser) or the flimsiness of their materials (Richard Aldrich) or the disconnect between their trivial content and painstaking execution (Stephan Sandner) or the relentless revisions that they seem to have undergone (Christopher Wool). All these types of provisionality, however, depend on the existence of a normative idea of painting. How might this negotiation between the normative and the provisional function? At any given moment, an artist inherits a particular system of

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exchange, a medium defined by certain types of transactions between work and viewer, a bundle of esthetic contracts. These contracts tend to remain implicit, instances of what Barthes called the “what-goes-without-saying.” They are also surprisingly fast-acting: they relentlessly surge up out of the paintings (the medium in question here) hanging on gallery and museum walls, crowded into art fair booths or reproduced in art magazines and exhibition catalogues. Often new paintings seem to function like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fitting perfectly into spaces that have been waiting for them. Most painters are content to honor existing contracts, to produce works that deliver something the viewer will accept as painting. In our era, just as in every other, the vast majority of paintings meet our expectations of what a painting should be. Whether we are looking at a luminous Peter Doig landscape, a Brice Marden abstraction of tangled bands, a fractured allegory by Neo Rauch or one of Elizabeth Peyton’s artful portraits, we remain within the domain of painting-worthy-of-its-name. This means paintings that are well-made and visually appealing; works that demonstrate the artist’s technical competence, refined sensibility and solid work ethic. Of course, there are individuals less respectful of decorum—for instance, Richard Prince’s “Canal Zone” riffs on late Picasso—but even in such cases there is still an assumption that the artist has made every effort to produce the best painting of which he or she is capable. Whether the work is decorous or aggressive, the esthetic contract between painter and viewer is unbroken. But what happens when an artist asks: how can I break this contract yet still find a way to paint? Sometimes the answer must be: “I cannot,” and the artist turns to another medium, a different set of contractual rules. Marcel Duchamp ceased to paint after Tu’m and devoted himself to readymades, Donald Judd transitioned in the early 1960s from relief paintings to sculpture, Lygia Clark moved from Neo-Concrete paintings and sculptures to a performative practice that resembled art therapy, John Baldessari burned all his canvases and started using text and photography. After producing several important bodies of painting in the 1960s, Lee Lozano went on a “general strike” against the art world and her own work, resulting in total silence and isolation. Duchamp, Judd, Clark, Baldessari, and Lozano are among those who, at a given moment, ceased painting but did not stop making art. Other painters, however, have persisted in this medium, all the while acknowledging, in their work itself, the

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reasons not to paint, the pressures pushing them away from the canvas. This is where the provisional emerges. Provisionality is one consequence, and maybe an ultimate expression of, the de-skilling of art that got underway, according to some, in the art schools of the 1960s. De-skilling, the shift away from training to be proficient in specific mediums, the move from the manual to the conceptual, the de-emphasis of technical skill was, in some ways, perhaps the last article in a divorce case that had started with the Renaissance as artists sought to distinguish themselves from artisans. Because of de-skilling we can accept a painting that seems devoid of all the traditional qualities of good painting. And yet, the force of the provisional or de-skilled painting depends on the existence of a normative painting. If Michael Krebber’s painting is engagingly pathetic this is because we have a notion of what a fully realized painting should be. Or do we? Contracts keep changing or, in a gig economy, stop being used altogether. The look of being unfinished, some shoddy workmanship, a display of self-loathing or ostensible career sabotage—these and other once subversive features now risk being mere signifiers, items picked off the rack of stylistic options, easy effects, like the foot pedal that makes an electric guitar sound distorted, like new jeans that are pre-torn and pre-faded, like the “American typewriter” font in Microsoft Word. So how do we distinguish between the genuinely provisional and the superficially so, between actual anxiety about the creative act and moves that do no more than imitate past instances of self-doubt, moves that have long since been assimilated into the painter’s repertoire: the skittering brush, the smudged line, the untouched patch of canvas, the violently overpainted picture? I’m willing to entertain the idea that none of these painterly tropes are anything more than flourishes. The history of all the arts, from enjambment in poetry to jump cuts in film, is full of similar hollowing-out processes. But this leads us to a deeper question: have anxiety and doubt gone extinct in painting or have they migrated into other areas of art-making, taken on other forms? The anxious artist—nothing could be further from us. There is much we want and expect from and value in artists. We want them to be inventive and politically engaged and willing to explain their work and entrepreneurial and well-dressed and well-educated—but in the present environment there is no place for the anxious artist, for the artist who is plagued with doubt. Why?

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Why do we not have time for artists who doubt their own abilities, who doubt the value of what they are doing? Maybe this is no great loss. Maybe we are better off now without all that self-questioning, all that existential dread. And maybe this stance, this way of being an artist has disappeared from the world because it no longer speaks to us. But, again, why? Is it simply because so many of us, artists and nonartists alike, rely on a daily diet of anti-depressants? Some observers have suggested that Provisional Painting is stuck in a tired scenario about the Death of Painting, devoted to futile pursuit of the Last Painting. I think there’s a distinction to be made between Provisional Paintings and Last Paintings. Last Paintings appear within a narrative about the end of painting, an art history that believes (or believed) in a certain logic; they occur within an esthetic dialogue where artists feel compelled to address, incorporate, and further the works of the recent past. Provisional paintings know that such conditions no longer prevail, and yet they don’t want to give up the sense of difficulty that artists once were energized by. A provisional painting of a certain type reenacts a last painting without really meaning it, knowing that last paintings are no longer possible to paint. So, maybe it’s wrong to talk, as I have done, about painting being impossible. It’s impossibility itself that has become impossible. Perhaps the provisional painting is what follows after the last painting, but this would entail a teleological scheme that the last painting was supposed to have brought to a close, and that is, anyway, no longer tenable or relevant. At one point it was thought that last paintings were followed by simulacra of paintings. Emptied of all transcendence, of all utopian pretensions, of all expressive qualities, proffered as signs of painting rather than the thing itself, simulated paintings were first and foremost a measure of diminishment, which seemed like a natural direction to go after the last painting, or after the failure of the last painting to be the last painting. What happened instead was a massive expansion of possibility in painting, an ongoing expansion fueled by growing numbers of MFA graduates, by more people spending more money on art, and by a far more inclusive consensus about what kinds of paintings and what kinds of painters might be considered valuable (valuable in various senses, including the monetary one). This vitality might suggest that the moment of Provisional Painting as anything more than a set of stylistic tropes has passed, that it was only in the lead-up to

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and aftermath of the 2008–10 economic crisis that this approach to painting had anything significant to offer. And yet, despite the robust health seemingly enjoyed “now and forever” by the medium of painting, the condition of our world seems to be in every way—economically, environmentally, politically—more and more provisional. So much so that the very word risks losing its meaning, something Samuel Beckett perceived long ago when he remarked, “‘Provisional’ is not the term it was, in this universe becoming provisional.”16

Precarity Although I didn’t clearly see it at the time, in the midst, like everyone else, of a global financial crisis, the emergence of “provisional painting” now seems inseparable from the Great Recession of 2007–9. This isn’t to imply that the economic crisis caused a turn in artistic practice: for one thing, positing direct causal relationships between economic conditions and artistic styles is notoriously difficult and speculative; for another, many of the artists I discussed in my two articles were making “provisional” work years before the subprime loan crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Yet, it must be added, the neo-liberal economy was itself in trouble long before the onset of the Great Recession, and had often been the focus of protests and theoreticians, especially following the July 2001 G8 protests in Genoa. Intentionally or not, artists had plenty of reasons to make work that interfered with its own success. It could be argued that they have been harbingers of the Post-Fordist economy, the shift from stable long-term employment to, in the words of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, “flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations  … precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment.”17 Like so many other workers in the gig economy, every artist (and every critic and art dealer) is an individual contractor with no guarantees of employment. (Precarity is, of course, subject to the inequalities of race, gender and class—whenever I say “artists” or “painters” I am keenly aware of how many different experiences and situations such terms contain or, all too often, gloss over.) It might be argued that in the United States, at least, artists have never had any guarantees of employment, apart from the brief period when the WPA and related government programs

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paid artists to make art, but it would be a mistake to conclude that American artists were thrown to wolves of capitalism with the end of the New Deal. Significant public support was available in the postwar period when the G.I. Bill allowed a generation of artists to devote years to studying (or pretending to, while they pursued their careers at home and abroad), and the subsequent explosion of higher education providing thousands of new teaching jobs for young artists. This safety net began to fray in the 1980s as the hollowing out of the public sector, the weakening of labor unions and the gradual erosion of the middle class were set in motion. By the time of the Great Recession, there was nothing to insulate artists from the effects of living and working in a society of increasing precarity. Fewer and fewer of them seemed to be willing to reconcile themselves to the game of cruel optimism, despite having been fed on the myths of the garret and the lightning strike of success.

­Part Two

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6

Some Precursors: Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, Joan Snyder, Chris Reinecke, Sigmar Polke, Carmengloria Morales, Gerard Gasiorowski, Suh Se-Ok, Nahum Tevet, Pierre Buraglio

Many decades before I arrived at the concept of “provisonality” as a means to better understand paintings being made circa 2008, there were artists—not all of them self-identifying as “painters”—whose work embraced (among other signs of the provisional) contingency, lack of finish, an apparent nonchalant approach to execution, or a willingness to wander around the no-man’s land between painting and sculpture. I think, for instance, Dorothea Rockburne’s Intersection (1971), a large floor piece involving a thin layer of oil (not oil paint, just crude oil) sandwiched between two layers of transparent plastic sheeting, or Pat Steir’s The Night Chant Series, No. 1: Beauty Way for J.B. (1973), a diagrammatic painting as oblique and freighted as its title: several grisaille irises are painted onto a large black square, with a few more flowers, this time in vivid reds, yellows, and purples, appearing in a surrounding white border. Steir adds tally marks, x’s, color swatches, a gray scale, and various scratchings here and there to give the 84-inch-square painting the look of a sketchbook page. Another example might be Joan Snyder’s The Storm (1974), a muddy 72-by144-inch painting comprising eighteen identically sized panels, each filled with its own composition of vigorous brushstrokes in mostly browns and blacks. In some of the panels, jagged patches of yellow or white appear, and there are a few bursts of deep red. The ensemble is essentially three rows of small-scale Ab-Ex studies. In the several years preceding The Storm Snyder had gained

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recognition for her lyrical “stroke” paintings, brightly colored compositions that feature irregularly placed stacks of juicy horizontal brushstrokes. Often drips of paint leak out from these strokes, and sometimes Snyder festoons them with spray paint. The Storm began as one of these exuberant works but the artist soon had a change of heart. “Every time I painted a passage that was beautiful, I covered it with dark colors,” she has recalled.1 After completing The Storm Snyder says she “fell apart completely” and stopped working for six months. When she recommenced, her work more directly addressed feminist themes. Curator Katy Siegel believes that The Storm represents “a denial of the early optimism and bright beauty of the late 1960s.” (All three of these paintings were included in “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975,” the revelatory 2006 exhibition curated by Segal and painter David Reed.) Across the Atlantic, other young artists were also dismantling the medium of painting—conceptually and literally—and often doing so, like Rockburne, Steir and Snyder, with an awareness of the relationship between painting traditions and patriarchy. In West Germany in the late 1960s, Chris Reinecke was drawing on various types of fabric or on multiple sheets of thin paper hand stitched together with thread. She also experimented with sandpaper as a support: in Packung (Packaging) from 1968, she sketches a woman’s naked torso tied up with a blue ribbon on a creased and abraded piece of sandpaper. In 1969 and 1970 she turned to the most ubiquitous clothing material: jean fabric. Hemming small rectangles of pale blue fabric with thread or yarn, she used felt-tip pens to make all-caps word lists and signed these miniature text paintings by rubber stamping them “REINECKE.” The texts are like concrete poems. One translates as “protection against touch.” Another is a list of verbs: “to leaf through, to scratch, to sting, to fold, to crease, to tear, to touch, to grease.” Avoiding anything remotely connected to artistic virtuosity, stripped down to near anonymity, these diminutive rectangles of fabric are unexpectedly compelling. They encapsulate, perhaps better than any works of the period, the ethical dilemma of an individual torn between art and activism. Yet make no mistake, they are also fully realized artworks: every detail, every stitch, every letter, every decision in Reinecke’s 1967–70 text-on-textile works repays the viewer’s attention. In 1968, Sigmar Polke seemed ready to try anything, including a kind of alltext painting that he had never done before and never returned to. The work

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in question, The Large Cloth of Abuse, known in earlier English translations of the German title Das grosse Schimpftuch as The Great Bitching Sheet, consists of several flannel sheets stitched together to form a roughly 13-by-14-foot piece of unstretched fabric. Onto this, using dripping black tarlike paint, Polke wrote out dozens of German swear words, running them together to create a litany of insults. When he included this work in his 1976 survey, which debuted at the Tübingen Kunsthalle before traveling to other German cities, he brought it into the museum at the last moment. Before the painting was hung (or, rather, simply nailed to the wall), he had himself photographed wearing it like an enormous cape. Then, shortly after the work was installed, he had the cloth turned to the wall so that visitors had to lift up a corner of the huge sheet in order to read the words, fragments of which seeped through from the other side. One’s first thought—that he hid the words to avoid offending the public— is contradicted by the fact that he selected this painting for the endpapers in the exhibition catalogue, the most substantial publication on his work to date. As a language-based attack on aesthetic proprieties, The Large Cloth of Abuse perfectly complements Austrian writer Peter Handke’s notorious 1966 play Offending the Audience, in which the actors subject the audience to a relentless deconstruction of theatrical conventions and a mounting litany of insults; given its size and suppleness, the painting might even plausibly have served as a theater curtain for a production of Handke’s anti-play. The curator of the Tübingen show, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who shares his views on Polke in a recent interview in the MoMA catalogue, says he “always thought that this [The Large Cloth of Abuse] was a travesty of the artist as seer and the artist as leader, of Beuys wrapping himself in all kinds of things. Polke takes a painting, which isn’t a painting, and then debases the object, turning it into a sheet that you wrap around yourself to keep warm.” In Rome in 1971, the Chilean-born Carmengloria Morales, who came of age as a painter in Italy, produced her first painting in the format that she has stayed with ever since: a diptych in which the left panel was monochrome and the right panel was an unprimed stretched canvas. The panels were of identical dimensions, hung an inch or two apart. As the 1970s progressed, the painted left panels began to acquire more activity, first with striated graphite, then with more and more visible brushstrokes. Morales also began mixing metallic pigments into her acrylic paint, giving the painted panels a Byzantine

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intensity. (In the mid-1980s, she also began to make tondos, while continuing to concentrate on diptychs.) Morales arrived at her painted/unpainted format in the wake of 1968, a tumultuous year in many places around the world but one that in Western Europe saw a radicalization of culture. Many artists felt they had to rethink their mediums and their relationship to their audience. Painting was already in crisis, of course, under attack by new mediums, new attitudes, and in Italy by the emergent Arte Povera artists who (it just now occurs to me) may have constituted the first major twentieth-century art movement in which painting played almost no role. One has to learn to look at Morales’s work; it took me years of encountering her paintings, in Italy and in New York, where she has spent a lot of time, to accept what she calls her “asymmetrical symmetry.” The opulence of the layers upon layers of glittering, pulsating brushstrokes next to these untouched, untouchable zones of pure immanence offers an irreconcilable, almost unthinkable opposition. This is painting and its impossibility; painting at its most corporeal, vulgarly physical, and painting at its most ascetic and conceptual. In the end, it was only by ceasing to paint (in the right half of every work) that Morales could continue to make paintings. Each of her diptychs reenacts Samuel Beckett’s famous “I can’t go on. I’ll go on” dilemma, and rediscovers the post-1968 death of a medium and its unexpected survival. As far as I know there has never been a solo exhibition in the United States devoted to Gérard Gasiorowski (1930–86). Still worse, his work may not even have been included in a single American group exhibition. Given the fact that Gasiorowski was a French artist, his absence from the US scene is hardly surprising—with few exceptions, contemporary art from France has been subjected to an embargo that has gone on about as long as the ban on trade with Cuba. This absence is particularly lamentable because Gasiorowski strikes me as someone who brought a unique intensity and inventiveness to the medium of painting. He could be as irreverent as Kippenberger and as theorydriven as Art & Language, as transgressive as Andres Serrano and jumped from photorealism to painterly figuration to barely there abstractions. Keenly aware that many people at the time believed painting to be an exhausted and irrelevant medium, Gasiorowski set out on a spirited survey of its possibilities and its impossibilities. Despite the brevity of his career, which lasted a mere

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twenty years, he is an important missing chapter in the history of painting post-Warhol. More so than many other artists, Gasiorowski’s oeuvre separates naturally into distinct bodies of work, each one of which is like a guerilla raid on the fortress of Painting. Relevant here are a group of paintings titled Les Symptômes (1983), large canvases with simple geometric shapes reportedly derived from tantric art that Gasiorowski casually sketched with acrylic paint. “I began to paint in a very indecisive manner,” Gasiorowski recalled a few years later. If the contemporaneous reference points for these shaky compositions might include Martin Barré and Kimber Smith, there are actually more affinities with the recent work of Michael Krebber—I’m sorry that I didn’t know about Les Symptômes when I was writing “Provisonal Painting” in 2009. While always ready to mock himself, his medium and the apparatus of contemporary art, Gasiorowski was also an artist driven by a passionate love of art, and, clearly, a belief in its power to communicate. In the late 1950s, South Korean artist Suh Se-Ok (1929–2020) embarked on a painterly practice that borrowed from traditional Korean ink painting and modernist Western abstraction. What’s striking about his early work is not only its melding of “East” and “West,” but how Suh dismantles the assumptions on which these two modes were then operating. Using the traditional tools of the ink painter—brush, ink, and paper—he developed a language of marks and ink application that rejected the conventions of Korean ink painting in favor of stripped down, seemingly haphazard sets of links and blots. At the same time, Suh declined the muscular gesturalism and labored scaffolding that pervaded so much informel and Abstract Expressionist painting at the end of the 1950s. His late 1950s–early 1960s paintings, often done on mulberry paper, but also sometimes on cotton fabric, are speculative, “weak,” and provisional; they anticipate the radical deconstruction of painting that would only get underway some years later in the United States and Europe. Suh banded together with other South Korean artists to form the Mungnimhoe or Ink Forest Group, whose aim was to forge a new kind of Korean painting. Most viewers are familiar with the notion that Informel and Abstract Expressionism were indebted to Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, but too little attention has been paid in the West to the emergence of a vibrant abstract practice in postwar East Asia.

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Figure  6.1 Suh Se Ok, Point Variation, 1960s. Ink on rice paper. 76.97 × 50.67 ­inches/195.5 × 128.7 cm (paper); 83.74 × 56.97 × 1.97 inches/212.7 × 144.7 × 5 cm (framed). © The Estate of Suh Se Ok. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and London.

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Among the earliest works in a 2008 survey of his work at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston show were Line Variation (1959), a fencelike composition of eighteen variously thick and thin vertical lines on a sheet of speckled tan mulberry paper, and Epitaph (1962), in which ethereal smudges of ink are distributed seemingly at random on a brownish, 68-by-24-inch cotton support. Although more tentative in spirit than the subsequent work, these paintings already display Suh’s marvelous ability to embrace control and freedom, to conjure improvisational, speculative-looking compositions out of what is evidently a rigorous artistic discipline (Figure 6.1). Nothing, of course, is as unforgiving a medium as brush and ink where every stroke is irretrievable and unalterable. Jumping ahead to 1977, the painting Where Clouds Disperse is a 50-by40-inch composition on rice paper (which offers a surface closer in color to primed canvas than does mulberry paper) in which all the ink is limited to a narrow margin around the edges of the rectangle: a dozen or so plumes of ink appear to have leaked into the white ground from some zone beyond the painting. Irregular in shape, hue, and spacing, these spongelike forms make the painting seem like a magical collaboration between the artist and nature. Suh’s later large ink paintings on mulberry paper feature gridded and stacked compositions of linear forms that initially appear abstract, but their titles (usually People or Person) point to their figurative content. Possibly taking clues from Korean ideographs, Suh’s intertwined formations oscillate between representation and sheer mark-making. Even after having grasped the figurative function of his strokes, it remains easy to reengage with their abstract qualities. What helps here is the amazing variety of things he can make ink do—sometimes it hovers like a cloud of iron filings held in place by an unseen magnet, other times it seeps deeply into the paper, but it can also pulse with dark, quasi-sculptural presence. I especially like the way he often seems in no hurry to dip his brush back into the ink again, allowing successive marks to grow lighter—an “imperfection” that adds immeasurably to the power of his work. In a provocative article titled “The Curious Case of Contemporary Ink Painting” art historian Joan Kee has suggested that despite being chosen to represent South Korea in international biennials in the 1960s, Suh and other Mungnimhoe painters were marginalized in their own country by being classed as “ink painters” rather than as contemporary artists.2 (Kee also links

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the birth of the Mungnimhoe style to a traumatic period of Korean history, noting that the Ink Forest painters grew up under Japanese occupation and that for them “ink painting was an opportunity through which to free the mark from what its members saw as the obligations imposed on it via the dominance of nihonga, the body of paintings made according to traditional Japanese artistic conventions.”) In her description of Suh at the end of the 1950s, Kee characterizes his work, especially the transformational Line Variation, in terms that suggest how much it anticipated twenty-first-century Provisional Painting. Suh, she writes, “attempted to recast painting as an act of unlearning, so as to remind the viewer of what painting was like before it turned into representation. Faithfully repeated in freehand, the lines in Line Variation frame painting as an ongoing act of practice. In another work, the diffusion of ink deliberately evokes an image of transience and changeability.”3 Happily, any attempts at marginalization haven’t prevented Suh from creating an outstanding oeuvre of primary importance to the (still unwritten) global history of postwar abstraction.

Nahum Tevet For an artist working in Israel in the early 1970s foreign magazines were practically the only way to access contemporary international art. Rather than lamenting his isolation or contenting himself with derivative production, Nahum Tevet, who didn’t travel abroad until 1975, embraced the differences between “center” and “periphery.” As he recalls in an interview in the exhibition catalogue of Hunter College’s 2016 exhibition, “Nahum Tevet: Works on Glass 1972–1975,” “You could not live in a relatively poor socialist kibbutz and pretend to be Donald Judd or Richard Serra.” Relying on cheap, readily available materials, Tevet began to assemble works in which conceptual selfreferencing and inspired tinkering cohabit to an unusual degree. Like classic conceptual art, each Glass Work is a record of its own making—one of the pleasures of the show was to watch a highly self-conscious artistic intelligence at work—but, somehow, they also seem to be achieved through improvisation and accident. This combination of the conceptual and the casual owes a debt to Tevet’s mentor, Israeli painter Raffi Lavie (1937–2007); it also makes Tevet’s

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work seem very contemporary, a precursor to much “Provisional” art in its embrace of a self-questioning attitude and rejection of monumentality. Typically, one of the Glass Works involves a rectangle of roughly cut glass onto which the artist has attached some metal binder clips. Lengths of twine usually run from one clip to another: sometimes the twine is used to suspend the work from a nail (Untitled #19, 1975), sometimes its role is purely formal (Untitled #7, 1972). Frequently, small pieces of folded paper are wedged under the binders, while larger pieces of paper or card stock are held in place either by binders or tape. The compositions are predominantly symmetrical, especially in regards to the placement of binder clips and twine, but there are significant departures from bilateral symmetry in how Tevet situates the larger pieces of paper. The palette is muted: Manila paper, off-white masking tape, brown twine, black clips. Drawing implements include only pencil, wax pencil, and marker (the latter nearly always black). The wall on which the pieces hang (white at Hunter) is left visible in most of the work. The dialogue between the mediums of painting and sculpture has been a recurrent feature from the very beginning of Tevet’s career. Although he has rarely presented a work that was identified as a painting (an exception would be Big Lying Painting, a 1978 work in which Tevet used oil paint, paper, and wood stools he built himself to create a long, narrow, bench-like painting)4 the conditions of painting, its materials and techniques and history, have been central to his art. This is most explicit in Works on Glass, if only because they are single-plane, rectangular works hanging flat on a wall, but painting has been constantly on his mind, as can be seen from the title he gave to an important series 1984–90 of floor sculptures: “Painting Lesson.” A pivotal work in Tevet’s development, and perhaps his most explicit engagement with painting, is Page from a Catalogue (Cézanne) Eight Times 92x73. Created in 1976 (along with several similar works) it consists of a 184-by-292-centimeter plywood support that has been covered with creamy, off-white industrial paint. Hanging on the wall it is, for all intents and purposes, a monochrome painting. Using a pencil, Tevet drew grid lines onto the white surface, dividing it into eight 92-by-73 rectangles. He derived the dimensions and divisions from a book titled The Complete Paintings of Cézanne published by Harry N. Abrams in 1972 as part of its Classics of the World’s Great Art Series. In this book, numerous Cézanne paintings are

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reproduced in grids on each page. For Page from a Catalogue, (Cézanne) Eight Times 92×73, Tevet turned to page  113 and selected from it only the paintings with identical dimensions (92 by 73 centimeters), and drew those grid lines on the white-surface plywood. Hung next to the painted plywood is a photographic enlargement of the source page from the 1972 catalogue raisonné. In the French standard sizes for paintings, which were established in the nineteenth century, 92 by 73 is designated as “F30” (“F” stands for Figure, distinguished from P for “Paysage,” and M for “Marine”). All the paintings selected by Tevet are portraits though apparently Cézanne would sometimes turn a canvas intended for a figure sideways and use it for a landscape scene. If we consider the direction of Tevet’s work following Page from a Catalogue (Cézanne), it is as if having reduced painting—embodied by the most exemplary of modern painters—to a blank surface determined only by its physical dimensions, the artist was able to begin working more extensively in three dimensions. This isn’t to suggest that Tevet immediately began concentrating exclusively on more sculptural work. Through the rest of the decade, he produced numerous wall drawings. By 1979, however, with Installation for Two Rooms he had, in effect, broken with the single plane in favor of structures that extended into space in multiple directions. And yet, to complicate matters, his sculptures of the 1980s often included gestural brushwork on their wood surfaces. As the artist has explained: “In the 80’s I used acrylic in very painterly, ‘indexical’ gestures, something like showing a catalog of as many as possible ‘Painting’s Clichés’.” In the 1990s these painterly touches disappear from his installations. He continued to apply paint—industrial, turpentine-based paint rather than acrylic—to all his wood constructions, but in a more anonymous manner, in the artist’s own words as “a professional house and furniture painter rather than an Artist (painter).”5 What then, we might ask, is the exact role of painting in Tevet’s work? If he is not engaged in “enlarging” painting into “an entire room”, what exactly is he doing to it, or with it? Is his work an example of painting “in an extended field”? In 1997, Tevet was included, along with Jessica Stockholder, Imi Knoebel, Polly Apfelbaum, Rudolph Stingel, and nine other artists in an exhibition titled “Painting—the Extended Field” at the Magasin III in Stockholm. Obviously taking its cue from Rosalind Krauss’s influential essay “Sculpture in an Expanded Field,” this exhibition was, in the words

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of Artforum reviewer Daniel Birnbaum, “a demonstration of how painterly practices emerge in other genres, such as photography, video, sculpture, printmaking, and installation. Painting no longer appears as a strictly circumscribed mode of expression but as a zone of contagion, constantly branching out and widening its scope.”6 (Birnbaum described Tevet’s contribution, Untitled 1995–96, as resembling “the architectural model of an imaginary city,” likening it to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.) In “Sculpture in an Expanded Field,” published in 1979, the same year as Installation for Two Rooms, Krauss argued that following the nomadic condition of modernist sculpture, postmodernist sculpture operated in an “expanded field” defined by its relationship with landscape and architecture, rather than the materialoriented medium specificity. I’m not sure that Tevet’s work, either then or now, is an instance of painting emerging within another “genre” (i.e., sculpture). Rather, it seems to me that he has established a practice drawing on multiple mediums (painting among them) in order to initiate precise (and multifarious) experiences for his viewers. There is a perceptual and participatory dimension to Tevet’s work that displaces emphasis from the object to the experience. This is true not only of the installations, but also of the small wall sculptures, which are every bit as dependent on the viewer’s choice of position and movement. This might seem to situate his work in a Friedian objecthood/theatricality debate, but ultimately Tevet’s work easily escapes such binary thinking. If nothing else, it is simply too complex to be subsumed into the language of any single medium. He also has found a way to decouple painting from the circuit of commodification to which it is so often consigned. There’s very little chance that any of the painted rectangles in his installations will become pieces of trophy art or vehicles of financial speculation. To return to the Glass Works, it’s tempting, and not unreasonable, to relate their fragility and Spartan qualities to their historical context, especially the traumatic 1973 Yom Kippur War in which Tevet served while working on the series. With its intricate play of hiding and revealing, the work is also conducive to epistemological interpretations. Equally compelling is the dialogue throughout the series between the mediums of painting and sculpture (in essence, Tevet proceeds by asking sculptural questions within the domain of painting). The show’s curator, art theorist Thierry de Duve, devotes a portion

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of his subtly argued catalogue essay to how Tevet responded to “Duchamp’s message,” by which de Duve means the widespread embrace in the late 1960s of the notion that anything can be art. In Tevet’s subsequent work, which to my eye represents one of the major sculptural oeuvres of the last thirty years, Duchamp is eclipsed by Constructivism as refined handicraft and physical abundance supplant what the artist calls his “minimalist, puritan attitude” of the 1970s. One of the many stimulating challenges of this show was hunting for prophetic signs of what lay ahead for this young artist.

Pierre Buraglio Let’s recall the situation for a young painter emerging in Western Europe or North America in the early 1960s. Leaving aside for the moment the question of national and regional specificity (a painter in New York didn’t face exactly the same conditions as one in Paris, whose experience wasn’t identical to a contemporary in Nice, and so on), most young painters felt that gestural abstraction, the mode that had been dominant for the previous decade, was looking exhausted. This apparent decline of abstract-expressionist/informel painting coincided with (and was partly provoked by) the emergence of Nouveau Réalisme and Neo-Dada, which rejected not just gestural painting but painting tout court. It’s true that in the early years of the decade Pop art reanimated painting, but only by relying on a new kind of content and an acknowledgment that mechanical reproduction had to be addressed. At the same time Minimalism was advocating a rejection of the handmade, a rejection of touch and, perhaps most importantly, a rejection of composition, while chance-loving Fluxus believed it was time to bid farewell to art objects altogether. For a painter who wanted, on the one hand, to insist on abstraction, and, on the other, to not dismiss the innovative art of the last few years, it wasn’t an easy moment. The challenges to abstract painting raised by the avantgardes of the early 1960s—the bankruptcy of gesture, the collapse of relational composition, the power of objects, the burden of objects—led, in many cases, to a similar response from young painters like Giulio Paolini in Torino, Blinky Palermo in Düsseldorf, and Jo Baer in New York. They approached the medium of painting as one would deal with a car engine that had stopped running: strip

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it down, examine each part, rebuild it. But the goal of these young painters was not that of a mechanic; they didn’t want to put the machine back together exactly as it had been before. As they considered the disassembled components of painting they found themselves fascinated by isolated parts, which they began reassembling in new ways, leaving out anything they couldn’t use. To many observers, the rebuilt vehicle that emerged was barely recognizable as painting. Lacking lyrical reverie or pictorial drama, it didn’t seem capable of transporting the viewer as painting was supposed to do. Thus began a decade-long collective attempt to redefine painting, a deconstructive process in which the internal contradictions, and unexplored potentials, of the medium were coaxed out into view. Among the many artists who contributed to this project, perhaps none have been more faithful to that original confrontation than French artist Pierre Buraglio, who, for over fifty years, has continued to find new and fruitful ways to reassemble the components of painting, It was in 1964 that Buraglio, then twenty-five, began making works that disrupted the structures of the medium. This disruption was absolutely necessary because, as Pierre Wat has put it so well, Buraglio “entered painting at a moment when it was a closed space.”7 His first attempts he called Recouvrements, abstract works in which sheets of offset printing paper with roughly filled in areas of color were glued onto canvases he had already painted. With their expanses of single colors, absence of painterly gestures and general flatness, the Recouvrements seem, at first glance, like responses to the work of Rothko, Newman, and the Color Field painters. Certainly, Buraglio had these artists in mind at the time, and the year before he had made his first trip to New York which enhanced his knowledge of American postwar painting, but there are several aspects of the Recouvrements that set them apart from any American precedents, and announce what will be Buraglio’s future preoccupations. First, there is the fact that the paintings involve the covering up of something. There were other artists who were experimenting with painting on paper glued to canvas—most notably Italian painter Mario Schifano, whose early 1960s monochromes sometimes resemble the Recouvrements—but Buraglio’s emphasis on effacement, made explicit in the title, introduces a conceptual dimension and metaphorical content to his work. Here paper is not simply a surface designed to receive

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paint, it’s a tool of revision, a device of cancellation, a philosophical statement of negation. Papering over a surface is also a technique that derives not from the realm of fine art, but from the quotidian world of posters and billboards, from the street. In effect, Buraglio is using the same materials as the Nouveau Réaliste affichistes, but without any sociological associations, and without any Duchampian strategies. By covering the support with paper in the Recouvrements, Buraglio wants us to pay attention to how the work has been made and to his avoidance (for the moment not yet total) of conventional painting tools such as brushes. During a 1982 interview with poet Jean Daive, Buraglio explained how, beginning with the Recouvrements, his work always involved “this effort to let the operations be seen.”8 Another significant aspect of the Recouvrements is that they depend on the reuse of an already existing object (the stretched canvas that is to be covered up). This, too, will become a central tenet of Buraglio’s work, and it is not fully realized until his next body of work, the Agrafages, which occupied him from 1966 to 1968. In order to make the Agrafages (Staplings), the artist used a pair of scissors to cut up painted canvases (mostly his own but occasionally those of other artists) into small triangles which he dropped more or less at random onto a stretched canvas, stapling them where they fell. Usually he left the triangular fragments untouched but in some instances he painted them after they had been attached. What this tells us is that Buraglio, in contrast to an artist such as Daniel Buren who early on defined his work by certain unchanging constraints, does not impose any strict limits on his work; he is less concerned with any kind of conceptual purity than he is with the final pictorial effect. Always willing to experiment with new materials, Buraglio sometimes connected the painted triangles with black or brown adhesive tape. Snaking through the composition like leading in a stained-glass window, the tape is at once functional and formal. In later Agrafages, the artist dispensed with the canvas support and simply stapled the cut-up triangles to each other to create a composite painting with irregular edges. While they have an evident relation to both School of Paris painters like Poliakoff and to Nouveau Réaliste décollage, and, further back, to Kurt Schwitters, the Agrafages also look forward in time, anticipating later artists from Julian Schnabel (how the picture plane and surface are fragmented in the Plate Paintings) to Mark Bradford (the creation

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of a painting from countless pieces of detritus). Collage, of course, is a central technique of twentieth-century art, but if we too quickly fold Buraglio’s recycling of materials into the history of collage, we miss some important distinctions. In a 1988 public conversation with Yves Michaud, Buraglio explains his affinity with Schwitters, and his disconnection from Cubist collage. He feels close to Schwitters “certainly for his relation to recuperated materials” but distant from the Cubists, who used collage elements as a “replacement” for a painted image or pattern. Chez Schwitters, the tram tickets and newspaper fragments are “there for themselves, for their color, for their texture. In this way, carried toward what is most humble.”9 At the same time he was making the Agrafages, Buraglio developed another body of work, less extensive, and less labor-intensive but nonetheless significant, the Camouflages. These are large multi-part grid paintings in which each panel is either a white monochrome or a section of French Army camouflage fabric. If the gridded composition and the prevalence of white is intended to evoke Mondrian (a connection made explicit in titles such as Mondrian camouflé), the camouflage is a conscious evocation of lyrical abstraction. It’s also, obviously, a reference to military power. The paintings stage an eruption of war, specifically the 1960s colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam, into the serene realm of geometric abstraction. (Buraglio has identified the camouflage pattern he used as the one worn by French paratroopers, who were infamous for their brutality in Algeria and recognized as symbols and agents of repressive state power.) For Buraglio, the Camouflages were thoroughly political. In an impassioned text written at the time, but only published in 1975, he called for a subversive art and offered the Camouflage paintings as an instance of such subversion. “The dominant class controls all the means of communication [diffusion], of cultural penetration,” but it is in the “interior” of this system that the artist must pursue subversion. Buraglio’s aim, he said, was to “understand painting as a field where our unfreedom [non-liberté] can manifest and exhibit itself.” The only path for artists was to “be within bourgeois culture” and dialectically oppose it, and the only kind of painting that can do this is “A painting foreign to all representation, to all spectacle.”10 “Painting must destroy itself in order to reconstruct itself,” Buraglio declared in a 1966 statement.11 The idea of “destroying” painting was not in itself a new one. Destruction, after all, had been the muse of Dada. But the notion of

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reconstructing the demolished medium, rather than moving on to some new and more radical form of expression, struck a new note. Another aspect, one of utmost importance, distinguished Buraglio’s campaign of destroying and rebuilding painting from most other efforts, past or present: he was performing the process on his work: the Agrafages were cut up pieces of his own finished painting, not a picture of the Mona Lisa (Duchamp) or a flea market find (Asger Jorn). Later, in the 1980s, Buraglio would create a series of works from studio leftovers given to him by Simon Hantaï, but even when he is using materials made by another artist, Buraglio has never been interested in appropriation or iconoclasm: his motivation is, rather, to let nothing go to waste, to base his work on an economy of deprivation, on his skill at scrounging. When he declares that “painting is nourished from itself ” he isn’t merely referring to a reliance on art history or the use of tautological strategies—he means it quite literally: so much of his art is made from studio detritus.12 The attitude of refusal, the rejection of “representation” and “spectacle,” is of a piece with much art of the late 1960s and 1970s, a period in which painting was often concerned with exclusion and reduction. The danger with such approaches is that of any doctrinaire esthetic, whether it’s Socialist Realism, hardcore punk, or 12-tone music: after the initial burst of vitality that comes from rejecting the old way of doing things, the obligation to adjust one’s creativity to a set of rules, to always having a commissar, real or imagined, looking over your shoulder, saps energy from the work, takes the risk out of it. Buraglio has always been keenly aware of these dangers, which may help explain his independence (he has never been part of any artistic group) and his constant innovation (always seeking new techniques, new materials, new content). It’s why he seeks to avoid any artistic practice that, as he puts it, “doesn’t engage the body, that doesn’t put the career in peril.” As a young man, Buraglio was struck by Michel Leiris’s text “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie” (translated into English as “The Autobiographer as Torero”), which extols courting various kinds of peril through one’s art.13 Published as an afterword to Leiris’s 1946 autobiography L’Age d’Homme (Manhood), “The Autobiographer as Torero” describes the author’s wish to write with such candor that it will forever change his relationship with the world. It is this risk, which Leiris likens to the bull’s horn for the bullfighter, that would make him something more than a mere

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littérateur. Leiris acknowledges that a writer does not risk dying for what he or she writes in the way a bullfighter courts “a real danger of death,” but he at least hopes “to write a book that is an act,” an act in relation to himself to others (“the way in which I would be regarded by others would no longer be what it had been before the publication of this confession”) and on a literary level (“a backstage revelation that would expose, in all their unenthralling nakedness, the realities” that lurked beneath the surface of his previous writings).14 For Buraglio, the “shadow of the bull’s horn,” the “act” that will change his relation to the world, takes the form of a restless, relentless transformation of his work (so that he will never be identified with any artistic brand) and a refusal to rely on any kind of virtuosity, even any specialized skills: he appears to always want his art to carry with it a certain awkwardness, as if he is still learning how to make his work. He also wanted his work to consist of “things anyone could do.”15 These are ideals that many artists claim to pursue, but few of them have done so as thoroughly as Buraglio. Refusal is a stance that seems to have long fascinated Buraglio. He has often cited Harold Rosenberg’s discussion of refusal, and in 1994 he wrote an appreciation of Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” that classic instance of (to borrow a phrase from Enrique Vila-Matas) “an artist of the No.” In a 2008 interview, he places the notion of refusal at the heart of his work. The great reference that has marked my life, even more than that of [Gilles] Aillaud and Hantaï, and who is an incomparable figure for people of my generation, is Bram Van Velde. I compare him a bit to Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, when he says “I would prefer not to.” He did all he could to not paint, it’s marvelous, it’s the opposite of how things are today when you are asked to fill some space, to fill, always. Him, he sides with reticence. I try to comport myself like that.16

It was in 1968–9, following the upheavals of May, that Buraglio’s political convictions and artistic ambitions brought him to a crisis point. (During the events of May, Buraglio joined the Atelier Populaire at Paris’s École de Beaux Arts to help produce street posters and fliers.) Finding it impossible to reconcile his artistic practice with the Maoist injunction that art must reflect the experience of the working class and contribute to the cause of socialism, he embarked on what he later called the “progressive abandonment of the metier,

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of the profession.”17 It was during this period that he declined to participate in a group exhibition at the École spéciale d’architecture in Paris that marked the emergence of the Supports/Surfaces group.18 In 1969, he took a job operating a rotary press in a print factory, a full-time job he held for four years, during which he stopped making art. The impact of Buraglio’s experience as a rotary press operator—a demanding job that required him to work eight-hour shifts often stretched late into the night (3 to 11 pm or 11 pm to 7 am)—can be seen in the Caviardages of 1982, works in which newspaper pages from Le Monde have been partially effaced with colored pencil and adhesive tape. In other Caviardages, Buraglio introduces a more personal kind of erasure by crossing out items from his agendas and notebooks. (The general title for all these works is “Les très riches heures de PB.”) Buraglio brings to the Caviardages his personal experience of rotary press printing, a technology that revolutionized the newspaper industry in the mid-nineteenth century, but rather than celebrate the iconic power of mass-communication as Warhol did, or treat it as a reservoir of imagery as one sees with Rauschenberg, Buraglio entirely negates the newspaper’s content. By eliminating all the information contained in Le Monde, the Caviardages offer a concise visual restatement of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” As one continues to look at these works, and consider the implications of the title, additional layers of meaning emerge. “Caviardage,” the French word for “redaction,” alludes to the heavy censorship practiced in Russian under Czar Nicholas I (the term caviardage neatly conflates the black ink favored by the Russian censors with the famous Russian delicacy). Thus, the Caviardages remind us of how all media are subject to censorship, but they also belong to the line of “erasure” art that includes Marcel Broodthaers’s blacking out of Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard,” Emilio Isgrò’s Cancellature and Joseph Kosuth’s scored-through text works, among many others. In a further deepening of meaning, the strips of tape that the artist uses to impose rectilinear designs on the crossed-out newspaper pages introduce a formal and pictorial structure, which Buraglio has described in phenomenological terms: The peripheral margins make a frame, while the internal margins form a cross, and designate a window. The material superimposition of a frame, alone or with an internal colored cross (of adhesive or masking tape) will

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limit the visual field, trace a window on the window. This frame produces an optical and tactile space that suggests and contradicts the interior/exterior illusion.19

I­t’s typical of Buraglio’s work to derive such complexity, such multiple layers of meaning, from a set of self-evident operations performed with everyday materials. As we note the consistencies throughout Buraglio’s oeuvre, it’s just as important to recognize the constant changes he makes in his practice. If recycling and foregrounding process are part of every body of work, it’s equally true that each series introduces different materials, different techniques, and different forms/images. This, too, Buraglio made clear from the beginning. In his 1966 text he cites a remark of Matisse’s: “We must not create autographs … we must get away from the individualism of the artist.” By “autographs,” Matisse and Buraglio, too, refer to works of art that become expressions of the artist’s personality. Buraglio has refused to assume an easily recognizable style, a repeatable iconography. He generally works for two years, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, in one mode, before turning to something altogether different. When he returned to art making after his four-year hiatus in the early 1970s, he was no longer using painted canvas, nor even painted paper. Instead, his main materials were wood and glass, yet he remained as deeply as ever within the discourse of painting. The Châssis-Cadres (Stretchers-Frames) of 1975–6, wooden stretchers and frames, enclosed nothing more than a void, to which Buraglio sometimes added thin surfaces of paper, nylon, or glass. It’s unclear if the features of these wood supports (screws, brackets, nails, patches of paint) are incidental or intentional, but either way they signal the artist’s deliberations. The Fenêtres of 1975–82 pursue similar directions with fragments of recycled window frames and colored glass. Paradoxically, it is the absence of “painting” in these works that makes them so vital to the medium, that makes Buraglio a key artist in the evolution of painting from the zerodegree of the early 1960s.20 Papering over, cutting up, stapling, taping, crossing out, tracing—one could distill Buraglio’s oeuvre into a series of verbs. This emphasis on action, this definition of art as an activity based on the fact of labor, can be understood in relation to the artist’s engagement with working-class realities and leftist activism in the early 1970s. It can also be compared to Richard Serra’s “Verb

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List,” a compendium of infinitives published in the journal Avalanche in 1971. If one of Buraglio’s driving forces is refusal, the expansive list of procedures he uses suggests he draws just as much energy from inclusivity, from a continual expansion of his art. The emphasis on process that is so central to Buraglio’s work draws on multiple inspirations, from the realms of poetry and philosophy as well as from art. The artist has credited an early reading of Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New with making him aware of treating each painting as a “work in progress,” but Buraglio’s exposure as a young man to the writings of poet Francis Ponge and philosopher Louis Althusser were at least equally important in convincing him of the value of foregrounding process. As a Marxist, as a reader of Althusser, Buraglio sides with an art that involves making, production, labor. Because painting exists within an ideological field in a way that readymades do not (for Buraglio, Matisse has always been more important than Duchamp) it provides more opportunities to explore the workings of the ideologies in question. One of Althusser’s insights (articulated in his 1966 “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”) is that artists, because their art is “born from” and immersed within an ideology, have the ability to make us perceive the workings of the determining social systems that surround it, and us. But to achieve this level of perception, the work must possess specificity, and the best source of specificity is technique. Yve-Alain Bois makes a similar point in his essay “Painting as Model,” which argues persuasively for the value of “the epistemological moment of techniques where thought and invention take place,” versus “all the rest, all the procedures that borrow from tradition or contest it without reaching that threshold that it is a question of designating.”21 This is exactly what Buraglio achieves time and time again: emphasizing a specific technique not for the sake of a visual effect but as a vehicle of “thought and invention.” Further, it is by insisting in his work on the primacy of technique that Buraglio contributes to the demystification of art, a project he pursues through deskilling (his work is something that “anyone can do”) and directness (“let the operations be seen”), anything to avoid perpetuating the myth of the artist as genius, as demiurge, as the possessor of some secret knowledge. If Buraglio borrows from Althusser the idea that political art must grapple with its own place in the ideological field, what he takes from Ponge, whose

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texts have inspired a number of the artist’s works such as La Fabrique du Près de M (1987), is the example of a writer who continually foregrounds his own working process. In books such as La Fabrique du Pré and Comment une figue des paroles et pourquoi, Ponge provides his readers with the countless drafts and notes that he accumulates in the process of writing a poem. Ultimately, there is no distinction between the finished poem and its earlier states. As one reads Ponge’s playful self-questioning, his reiterations with only minor variations of a theme or stanza, his excurses on the material history of words, his endless reworkings of his subject, sooner or later the barriers between writer and reader begin to dissolve: the formulation of the text, its prolonged provisionality, becomes a mutual project. This is very much what happens in the encounter with Buraglio’s art. In the exchange with Jean Daive cited at the beginning of this essay Buraglio explains that ever since the Recouvrements, he has sought to “let the operations be seen.” The reason he does so, he explains to Daive, is to attain “a contemporaneity between the one who looks and the painter, the one who operates.”22 It is one of the everyday miracles of art, especially art like Buraglio’s, that this “contemporaneity,” this solidarity between artist and beholder, can happen again and again, whether with a work made in 1964 or in 2019. On the ground of refusal rises a house of accord.

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Michael Krebber: Painting Ridiculized Michael Krebber creates his shows at the last possible minute, and sometimes fails to produce anything at all (he has more than once had to postpone exhibitions because he couldn’t bring himself to produce the expected paintings). His emblematic work is Contempt for One’s Work as Planning for Career (2001). At first glance, the title of this seemingly inept, inconsequential painting appears to confess the cynical strategy behind Krebber’s art. But does openly confessing the calculated deployment of a cynical attitude render it more cynical or less so? As usual, Krebber dares us to invest time into work that seems incapable of repaying us with any kind of esthetic satisfaction. Some of his works Krebber deems as “unfinished too soon.” Chez Krebber what is unfinished is not a great painting that remains in progress because the painter has been defeated by the challenge of art. A painting that is “unfinished too soon” is like a loaf of bread that hasn’t been baked long enough. The artist breaks off the struggle because he is distracted, because time has run out, because, like the dandy who disdains the crude business of living, he doesn’t want it to look like he is trying too hard to make a painting. A precedent for Krebber’s “unfinished too soon” stance is Sigmar Polke’s Plastic Tubs from 1964, an enlarged version of what looks to be a page from a department store catalogue that the artist has left unfinished as if he couldn’t be bothered to spend any more time on the canvas In 2011, Krebber had two simultaneous shows in New York: one at Greene Naftali titled “C-A-N-V-A-S, Uhutrust, Jerry Magoo, and guardian.co.uk Paintings” that consisted of canvases which roughly reproduced postings from

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blogs run by some his former students at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Here are some excerpts from the texts that Krebber transcribed: “I read a crit about a blake named Bloke Rayne, saying he’d be more harmless than Bjarne Melgaard and that guy’s a social tourist representing a ‘wild uncontrollable expressionist’ for rich people’s art collections. I also read about Cheyney Thompson, but I forgot all of it.” Another seems directed at Krebber, complaining “How dandyism is an excuse for every lazy idiot not taking care.” “Dandyism” is one of Krebber’s conceptual and historic touchstones. Elsewhere we read “Which art is the worst out of all the trash Michael Krebber has knowingly / unknowingly breeded? pt. I,” followed by a series of jpegs of Krebber-influenced work by young artists. Nothing seems more pointless than making an enlargement on canvas of a blog. Reportedly, Krebber painted the entire show in a week or two before the opening in a studio space Green Naftali provided him. But his second New York show, at Real Fine Arts, a small gallery in Brooklyn, presented paintings that seemed even more pathetic. They were small canvases each with an insipid snail copied from a painting done in 2011 by Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, during a visit to an inner-city children’s program in Los Angeles. These “ridiculized snails,” as Krebber calls them, were designed to be impervious to criticism. As the artist explained in relation to his 2012–13 survey show at CAPC in Bordeaux, France, “In my interpretation of the title, the snails, i.e. all my works on view in the exhibition and illustrated in the catalogue, are in fact already ridiculized. Nobody makes a fool of them.”1 Krebber has said that he works under a double bind: “to choose/not to choose.” For him, it would be too predictably conventional to paint an image that was full of meaning, but also too obvious to choose an image that merely offers an ironic commentary on painting. This is one reason he puts himself in tight corners. One can’t imagine him arriving at Kate Middleton’s snail as a subject after a lengthy intellectual investigation. The image partakes of Koonsian banality, but unlike Koons it doesn’t lay claim to any larger symbolism, nor does it employ technical perfection as a means to transcend banality. Krebber tempts his viewers into a dizzying dialectic of meta-irony and insincerity. In 2008, he contributed a “portfolio on Courbet” to Artforum in which he commented on the discourse on painting in New York between

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Columbia University art students and artists showing at the Lower East Side galleries Miguel Abreu and Reena Spaulings: For there is a different coolness factor at work now, steeped in ideas of the “readymade artist,” “expropriation” instead of “appropriation,” “painters without paintings and paintings without painters,” “shandyism” and formalism in its new forms—which basically means practicing Kandinskian formalism in the full knowledge that it cannot possibly work out, but sticking with it all the same. (Which, in fact, sounds like fun.) Yet at the moment, the classiest works are those in which irony takes effect only on the third level: irony takes on irony. And so now there can be “painting” again.

(quoted by Catherine Chevalier in CAPC catalogue) Arguably, it is this kind of exhaustive self-consciousness about painting that has contributed to the recent shift to socially engaged figurative painting.

Albert Oehlen: Escape from Meaning When I included Albert Oehlen in “Provisional Painting” it was because of his overpainted poster paintings as well as his earlier black-and-white computer-paintings. At the start of the article I described him, Raoul De Keyser, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann, and Michael Krebber as “artists who have long made works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.” One aspect of Oehlen’s work that made it look “provisional” to me was his use of basic graphic design software, with crude pixilation and obviously off-the-shelf effects. The situation of a gifted and experienced painter deliberately turning to a drawing tool that seemed to exclude all his skills was paradoxical, even perverse. That it resulted in unexpectedly compelling paintings forced me to rethink some fundamental painting issues, as did the exhilarating balance between virtuosity and defacement in the overpainted-poster works. (Rereading my brief description of the latter in “Provisional Painting” I think that I didn’t do justice to their painterly lyricism.)

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Early on in “Provisional Painting” I cite Punk as a precedent for a particular approach to painting. Oehlen has some interesting things to say on the subject. He explicitly links his initial choice to become a painter to the ethos of Punk. As he recalled in a 2003 interview, what sparked my interest was a desire to be involved with the medium that quintessentially represented High Art but which at the time, in the late 1970s, was coming under fierce attack. Added to which, there was a general feeling of massive potential in painting, since so little was happening in that field. It was more or less a black hole. And it coincided with Punk, the feeling that one could use rudimentary means to revitalize the whole thing. There was no question of being intimidated by jibes like: “Go and learn to play an instrument”.2

The interviewer then asks Oehlen how he feels about the punk attitude now. Noting that it can be helpful in giving young people the confidence “they might otherwise have lacked,” Oehlen adds that “it soon becomes ridiculous.” Like any other originally iconoclastic, avant-garde, disruptive stance, punk inevitably turned into a codified style. Something similar seems to have been happening among younger painters attracted to the painting mode I identified in my 2009 article. If a new generation of artists (and maybe some of his contemporaries) wishes to learn valuable lessons from Albert Oehlen, they will not find what they are looking for in any of his specific moves (compositional overload, playing high against low, mixing the digital and the handmade, inserting text into abstraction, etc.), although his brilliance as a colorist should be taken as a challenge by all chromophobic painters. They should focus, rather, on his refusal, for now more than three decades, to ever be satisfied with his own art, and on his equally sustained, equally demanding pursuit of a deep dialogue with art history. Oehlen once admitted: “I’m not really interested in what the paintings mean. People can interpret them how they want, but, for me, painting is about trying to get as far away from meaning as possible, which is perhaps the most difficult thing of all.”3 And he once told an interviewer, apropos of painted portraits, “I don’t think you can communicate something about an experience or a situation.”4 Why would an artist, or anyone for that matter, deny the possibility of communication? Out of some kind of nihilism? Out of a distaste for the crassness of signification or for those binary oppositions, those complementary

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colors, or that absence of nuance? Maybe he doesn’t care about meaning, ignoring it as an unavoidable nuisance. Or maybe it’s because he cares too much, and bracketing out the question of meaning allows him to live with the failure of every painting he makes (failure because his standards are high, failure because that’s the way things always go, failure because failure seems to hold more promise than success). I connect Oehlen’s rejection of meaning with Samuel Beckett’s rejection of “relation.” In his great September 3, 1949, letter to Georges Duthuit, Beckett explains that he values Bram van Velde’s painting, “because it is the first to repudiate relation in all these forms” (meaning in relation to the visible world as well as to some inner state). “We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes of intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world.”5 Whether Bram van Velde or Albert Oehlen, or any other painter before or since has been able to totally “repudiate relation” is doubtful, but I suspect that most of the paintings we have come to value have come close to failure, and are very probably seen as such by their creators.

Rachel Hecker: The Throwaway Vanitas There’s a collision in Rachel Hecker’s recent paintings of two great, and usually segregated, modes of art-making. One of them is the ultra-precise hardedge painting tradition that leads from Mondrian through Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley, and Peter Halley. The other is the practice of salvaging scraps of everyday ephemera and recategorizing them (with lesser or greater degrees of alteration) as art: Kurt Schwitters, On Kawara, Joseph Grigely, Danica Phelps. Hecker’s canvases are exquisitely finished, with barely a trace of the immense craft that goes into them, while the subject of her paintings are mostly scaledup pieces of throwaway printed and written matter: shopping lists, to-do memos, store receipts, ticket stubs—items that seem the ontological opposite of a painstakingly executed abstract painting. What happens in these collisions is not what one would expect: there’s no attack on painting’s elevated status and no pop-inspired celebration of quotidian artifacts. Instead, Hecker steers her work toward the dynamics of social transactions, toward autobiography, and toward philosophical meditations about art.

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Walking into her 2009 show at Texas Gallery in Houston (Hecker has been living in Houston since the mid-1980s, but her work has consistently rejected the weathered surface and expressionistic touch that marks so much Texas art), it was easy to think that you’d come on the wrong day: dozens of canvases were leaning against the long walls of the gallery’s large space, sometimes stacked two or three thick. It looked as if the show was either not yet installed or already concluded. In fact, the exhibition was neither over nor not yet begun but fully up and running, installed exactly as the artist intended. Hecker’s decision to emphasize the objecthood of the paintings was meant to push them toward another medium. As she puts it, “I refer to this work as painting for convenience, but I approach and think of it as sculpture.” (Hecker also makes things that are emphatically sculptures, including supersized charcoal briquettes and burnt matches.) One painting in the Texas Gallery show depicts a sheet of pale-blue notepaper adorned with a cute Sanrio-style monkey and two hastily written columns of numbers, one noting times of day, the other quantities of ounces. Numbers appear in many of the works: a hardware store receipt with the product number of a purchased item and a dimension (“36 × 51”) someone has scribbled onto the receipt and that Hecker has faithfully reproduced; one of Hecker’s business cards with additional phone numbers written onto it, alongside notations in Spanish and misspelled English. The Sanrio stationery has to do with the care of the artist’s aging mother (a frequent topic of her paintings); the business card records an exchange between Hecker and a couple looking for housingcleaning work; in a neat bit of conceptualist tautology, the dimensions on the hardware store receipt refer to the very painting they appear on. As resourceful as she is patient, Hecker seems to relish the challenge of fashioning convincing simulacra of everyday items. Not strictly engaged in trompe l’oeil, Hecker doesn’t try to fool us into thinking we are looking at the real thing: she always scales up her subjects to ten or twelve times their actual size. Through trial and error, she has figured out how to make paint look like pencil or felt-tip pen marks, like the printed text on a fortune cookie message, like a sheet of stickers. She has a love of difficult making and a passion for making her labor invisible that is reminiscent of Vija Celmins. What first drew Hecker to this kind of material was her desire to escape self-consciousness in her choice of subject matter. For many years, she made

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photorealist paintings of pop imagery, often taken from film stills. Executed with an airbrush, these paintings offered a sly, feminist-influenced commentary on the society of the spectacle. By contrast, her ephemera paintings leave the question of their intended meaning open. They also engage abstraction: her scaled-up notes on hotel stationery exist as gestural marks on monochrome grounds (most obviously with her paintings of color sample cards), often resulting in paintings of a startling beauty made all the more affecting by its humble origins. On one level, the work is a record of the artist’s life, but you don’t have to know the backstory to Hecker’s paintings in order to respond to their chronicling of the daily grind we all face. One painting remakes a fancily printed card from a gala dinner informs its holder that he or she is seated at “Table 17”—as with Martin Kippenberger’s Preis Paintings, it effectively mocks the absurdity of social pecking orders. (Hecker, by the way, shares Kippenberger’s love of hotel stationery.) A different kind of absurdity emerges in a painting where a shopping list that runs from pizza to soymilk shares the page with handwritten words of wisdom from Rumi and the Ashtavakra Gita. Hecker’s work is not entirely without precedent. In the 1960s, Alex Hay began crafting meticulous enlargements of items such as a sheet of legal-pad paper or a cash register receipt. More recently, Jonathan Seliger has been showing scaled-up sculptures of brand-new shopping bags, take-out food containers and pizza boxes, and Austrian artist Stefan Sandner has been making large-scale paintings of handwritten notes. In contrast to these other artists, Hecker emphasizes the transactional nature of her source material. Much of her work also charts (sometimes literally) the relationship of our bodies to the regimented systems they exist within, whether it’s a medication schedule, seating at a gala dinner or the colors of paint available at a hardware store. Her work can also laugh at its own place within the art system. Hecker’s loving re-creations of the scraps we thoughtlessly acquire, and just as thoughtlessly discard a dozen times in the course of any given day can also be understood as contemporary vanitas paintings, reminding us of the brevity and fragility of human life. In one painting of a page torn out of a spiral notebook, notes for a weekly schedule happen to share space with the penciled-in observation that “everything in my house will eventually be garbage and I will eventually be food.” A grim truth, but by presenting it as

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a ripped-out page (the torn holes of spiral bound notepaper are to this artist what lace was to seventeenth-century European painters), Hecker quietly suggests that art, even when depicting the most quotidian subjects, is still a vehicle of transcendence.

­Amy Feldman’s Condensed Poetics One of Amy Feldman’s significant reconfigurations is to create forms that constantly evoke the decorative and the cartoony through a working process that, paradoxically, seems to belong to the realm of gestural painting in its purest state. Let’s make it clear at once that Feldman has no intention of reviving of gestural abstraction; she is a maker of images not of marks; a painter who courts allusion, whose motifs come tantalizingly close to things the mind already knows, even if they aren’t easily nameable. Feldman also joyfully declines all high-production-value, labor-intensive options, instead relishing the virtues of the nonfinito, the provisional, the open. No matter how large, Feldman’s acrylic paintings are always completed in a single session. If she doesn’t get it right the first time, she compels herself to redo the entire composition again from the beginning. She almost never revises, touches up, or adjusts her initial image; it’s pretty much all or nothing. This doesn’t mean, however, that she begins her paintings ex nihilo: they are usually based on small drawings and Feldman will often make a few preliminary marks on the white ground to help guide her rapid execution of the image. In much of her work the ideology of the autonomous gesture is further complicated by the effects of mirroring and doubling created by two groups of small paintings in the gallery’s second room, each of which is similar to the large painting Killer Instinct. The slight but continual variations in these paintings display Feldman’s fecundity of invention and her interest in the play of repetition and difference. Feldman’s alla prima approach introduces a strong performative component into her work, and also a sense of risk, of potential failure, something that was avoided by many painters over a long period of time. After the post-Second World War embrace of spontaneity and improvisation (a cultural turn that affected literature as well as in visual art, and was in large part a direct response to the fact of jazz), around 1960 painting began to shun improvisation and became

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more and more risk-averse. While the rhetoric of the artist-as-existential-hero no doubt needed to be challenged, especially when it was no longer credible in the growing institutionalization, capitalization, and academicizing of contemporary art, something went missing from the studio when painters ceased to see the canvas as, in Harold Rosenberg’s famous formulation, “an arena in which to act.” In paintings like Feldman’s, the artist’s handling of the brush is in naked evidence; we see every graceful stroke and every awkward turn. In one sense, the painting is a chronicle of how she reacts under pressure. The question of pressure isn’t much discussed in relation to visual art, though it is much more central when we think about, evaluate, and enjoy more explicitly physical performances: the pressure felt by a tennis player serving for game point in a grand slam final, the nervousness of a ballet dancer essaying an epic leap, the anxiety of the goalie at the penalty kick. The reason we pay attention to these situations is because it is at such moments that the human body and mind are flung into different orders of being, sometimes attaining moments of beauty, expressivenesss, stamina, or grace, sometimes failing at the moment of supreme effort. Feldman’s paintings involve a level of difficulty that is all the more compelling for being achieved with apparent effortlessness. Like every serious painter (and, remember, serious painters can be great comedians) Feldman is operating under the pressure of history. The impact of her work is inextricably bound up with the dialogue her paintings initiate with the past, a dialogue that is always surprising and deeply felt. When I look at Feldman’s paintings I think about Matisse (bold, sensual, unfussy limning of shape), Guston (quest for the uncanny, speed of execution), Elizabeth Murray (cartoony humor of unwieldy forms), Mary Heilmann (seeming nonchalance), Jonathan Lasker (eloquence of the unadorned graphic stroke), early Ellsworth Kelly (focus on contour and flatness), late Norman Bluhm (ornamental erotics, gesture at the service of baroque designs), Ray Parker (small numbers of large forms, a decline of obvious virtuosity); her work also builds on twentiethcentury virtuosi of curvilinear choreography from Arp and Calder to George Sugarman. By proposing multiple genealogies, Feldman maps out new paths from the present to the past and back again. Equally important, she achieves things you won’t find in any of the oeuvres just cited, in particular the insidious twisting of figure/ground relationships that can make Feldman’s seemingly reductive paintings so complex and even delirious.

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Feldman seems to give herself the challenge of restating visual ideas in distinctly different ways. Repeatedly, for instance, framing devices surround voids, and curving bands and concatenated shapes loop back into each other. Make no mistake, however, there is rich psychological content lurking within the decorative punch of these pictures. In the 2014 painting Killer Instinct, for example, the stacked forms (reminiscent of a sculpture by Henry Moore or, maybe better, Charles Long) unleash a narrative of cavities and solids, of separation and attachment, of singularity and doubling that models any number of biological, emotional, and social situations. Often, the titles, which employ a kind of condensed poetics and restrained punning that perfectly suits the paintings themselves, point toward this content. One of Feldman’s basic compositional units is the scalloped edge: again and again, arcs swell and decline, bulge and deflate, stretch and compress, at times evoking drapery or rotund human figures (there are intentional echoes of the Venus of Willendorf) or simply—simply?—turn the picture plane into an irresistible spectacle. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve said nothing yet about Feldman’s binary palette of gray and white, perhaps the aspect of her paintings that most immediately strikes first-time viewers. Nota bene: both the grays and the whites change from painting to painting—in any single canvas the palette may be binary, but across a group of paintings the effects are multifarious and require the viewer to pay close attention to small changes. Gray has frequently been understood a mean of distancing the painter and painting from the emotiveness of color, a cerebral procedure. Feldman’s grays are about something quite different. It is not in quest of neutrality and blandness (which are not, let me hasten to add, necessarily bad things, as anyone familiar Roland Barthes’s The Neutral or François Julien’s In Praise of Blandness will know) that Feldman privileges gray. Rather, she endows it with a palpable sensuality, not unlike what designer Charles James did in the 1950s with his sleek gray mohair dress (more recently sported by Angelina Jolie in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2010 film The Tourist). Feldman uses gray to intensify the effect of her paintings, to make sure that the viewer misses nothing, not a single drip, not a single slathered brushstroke, not a single positive/negative reversal. This keenly focused palette is one more thing that makes these paintings burn themselves straight into your memory.

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Painting As Is (Luca Bertolo and Co.)

Thinking Ahead Let’s start, in the manner of Francis Ponge, with a little etymology: The word “provisional” derives from the Latin term proviso, the act of providing, and ultimately from providere, to see ahead (it combines the prefix pro, forward, with videre, to see). To be provisional, thus, is to foresee, to provide for or against. Therefore, we can say that provisional painting provides for the uncertainties in its own future. How does it do this? Chiefly, perhaps, by conveying to us, via certain stances, certain types of painterly rhetoric, that the painter is keenly aware of the uncertainties (of interpretation, of reputation, of conservation, et cetera) that lie in wait for his or her work. This kind of foresight (which is at once tragic and comic) is opposed to the monumental and the permanent. Etymologically, the word “monumental” derives from the Latin monere, to remind; the purpose of the monumental is to remind us of something or someone absent, to summon the past to the present. Thus, the monumental painting can only imagine an undisturbed future for itself, where it will continue to reenact its faith in its own survival. If the provisional painting is a visitor from the future, the monumental painting is a ghost from the past.

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Why Appearances Are Deceiving It wasn’t just gestural painters like Philip Guston who approached painting without preconditions. Here’s Barnett Newman from a 1962 interview with Dorothy Seckler: “The fact is, I am an intuitive painter, a direct painter. I have never worked from sketches, never planned a painting, never ‘thought out’ a painting. I start each painting as if I had never painted before … I have no interest in the ‘finished’ painting.”

C.C. (1903–74) The brilliant English literary critic Cyril Connolly observed that “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” His 1938 critical study/memoir Enemies of Promise is, among other things, his attempt to explain why, despite all his gifts and ambition, he had failed to produce a literary masterpiece. Many readers since have found Enemies of Promise itself to be Connolly’s masterpiece. This ironic episode from modern English literature reminds us that only works that redefine the meaning of “masterpiece,” often by seeming to discard it altogether, can hope to approach such a degree of artistic power.

Not Needed on Voyage Although drugs and suicide still take their toll (I think of Jeremy Blake, Dash Snow, Mike Kelley), one has the feeling that generally artists no longer suffer like Cézanne and Giacometti, like Pollock and Kahlo, that is to say that they no longer suffer for their art. What is lost if artists are no longer plagued by doubt and anxiety about their vocation, about how or even whether to make a work of art? Perhaps nothing of any importance. Perhaps whatever we’ve lost is something we no longer need on our voyage. I am willing to entertain the possibility that their frame of mind is as obsolete and useless as the rotary telephone.

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But what, then, is this provisionality about? Where does it come from? Why do so many current artists feel it to be necessary? What does it mean? Maybe it is a way for the artist to ask the work: Why do you not require from me heroic suffering?

­Just Say No/Yes Since Manet, let’s say, painters committed to innovation, to making a break with precedent, have frequently resorted to strategies of refusal. If painting of the past, especially the recent past, favored elaborate compositions illustrating heroic episodes from history or literature, painters of different ambitions might dispense with such trappings in favor of straightforward depictions of the everyday life around them. If neatly executed geometric abstractions were the established avant-garde option, a renegade movement of younger painters might likely turn to an expressionistic mode of abstraction. At first these works might not even be recognizable as painting to the public. They would only see what wasn’t there—the Egyptian princesses, the rearing horses, the licked surface, the rectilinear perfection. But it’s precisely in those absences, and in the acts of negation that create them, that the innovative painter discovers his or her freedom. The risk, or one of them, when artists don’t take an oppositional stance to the immediate past is that their work will lapse into mannerism. It’s important to recognize that refusal actually involves both rejection and embrace; as you turn away from the old, you turn toward the new; as the Egyptian princesses exit, the stonebreakers enter. After the asperities of postminimalism, for instance, many postmodern painters of the late 1970s and early 1980s couched their refusal in effusions of brushwork, figure-thronged allegories, and opulent formats. Although we have supposedly dumped the Hegelian-Greenbergianteleological notion of art history as progressing toward some desired, better culmination, the dynamic of rejecting the status quo for a new and presumably more appropriate form of expression is still very much with us.

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Painting As Is Do you ever have the feeling that the painting you are looking at is not the painting you think you are looking at? Have you ever suspected that the painting you are looking at is a substitute for a second invisible painting? Welcome to the realm of the stunt or body-double painting! In a stunt painting there’s no need to risk the real painting, the authentic artistic creation, not so much because it is too valuable but because in this way it (the painting that embodies painting in all its plenitude) can always be held in reserve, as a source of meaning that doesn’t have to risk the contingencies of physical existence, the challenges of materials, the uncertainty of completion, the dangers of esthetic failure. This situation is constructed in such a way that failure is impossible because the painting that issues from the artist’s studio never claims to be a definitive work. It arrives “as is,” a painting painted so that the artist can move on to the next painting, which will be neither closer nor farther from the actual work. (This may be related to Rosalind Krauss’s notion of the expanded field in which art in the 1960s began relying on seriality in such a way that single works could no longer offer themselves as complete.) Some artists spend their lives in pursuit of the ideal, the perfect, most fully realized, most powerful, sublime, subtle work they are capable of producing, but a painter of the “as is” is perfectly content to always remain at the same distance from such an impossibility. His work neither improves nor gets worse. It is free to risk its own destruction.

Talking Back to Artforum In the early 1990s, the English artist Gillian Wearing created a series of portraits where she asked people she met in the street to write messages on large signs and hold them up for a photograph. The series is titled “Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say.” To my eye, this seems similar to what Luca Bertolo is doing when in his “The Domain of Painting” series he overpaints ads from the pages of Artforum. Bertolo’s irreverent additions of images and texts painted with a style at once casual and assured, transform slick publicity designs into

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highly personal statements. It is always thrilling when an accepted ideology is challenged, when the passive subject starts to talk back. Bertolo’s overpainted ads share certain tactics with Situationist detournement, but happily avoid the programmatic politics that weighs down so much Situ-inspired art. I think this is because rather than coming to them with a particular agenda, Bertolo responds in a spirit of improvisation to whatever potentialities he happens to discover in each page.

­Torn and Frayed Proof that the concept of vanitas is intimately bound up with a sense of painting’s frailty can be found in an oil on panel still life by the seventeenthcentury Flemish painter Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It depicts a niche filled with typical symbols of the genre (a skull, an extinguished candle, an hourglass, a straw, and dish of soapy water for blowing bubbles), but what sets it apart from other death-obsessed still lifes is a detail in the upper-right-hand corner where, with exquisite trompe l’oeil technique, Gijsbrechts creates the illusion that the canvas on which the image is painted is peeling away from its wooden support. As art historian Victor I. Stoichita points out in his fascinating study The Self-Aware Image, the edge of the detached canvas is noticeably frayed. Pondering this, Stoichita concludes: “What is being challenged, therefore, is the work of the painter—of ‘painting’ in general. The presence of—or allusion to—this work is thematized by the maulstick, ‘abandoned’ in the right-hand corner of the painting…. The maulstick is an instrument of the making; the fraying of the canvas is a sign of the unmaking. The work of the artist is being equated with the destructive action of time.”

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In Glimpses: David Hammons’s Tarp Paintings

Why would someone make a painting and then, before releasing it into public view, cover up the painted canvas nearly completely with some tattered plastic sheeting or a frayed cloth tarp, leaving the painting visible only where the covering is torn or otherwise insufficient? What does this say about the painting? What does this say regarding the artist’s feelings about the painting? Or about the viewing public? Or about painting in general? One thing it could be saying: No one knows how to look at painting (anymore) so covering up a painting with a torn tarp is simply acknowledging the futility of the exercise. But that’s probably not what this painting is saying. More likely the message is something like: You don’t have the right to look at this painting. The artist behind this semi-concealed painting has, by his own admission, long sought to “get even” with being forced to look at a culture that doesn’t belong to him. His response has been two-fold: (1) create works in which White viewers can’t see themselves reflected and (2) create works in which Black viewers can see themselves. For a show in Europe he fashions a fountain with water flowing from the mouth of an African mask, a device he knows will be jarring to European viewers who wouldn’t think twice about water streaming from the mouth of a “White” figure in an Italian fountain. * The artist has often made work that speaks directly to Black viewers in its materials, its content, its location, even though this strategy was not helpful initially, nor long thereafter, to his career. “In this country,” he says, in one of

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few interviews he has ever given, “if your art doesn’t reflect the status quo, well then you can forget it, financially and otherwise.” * You enter the gallery. It’s in a very fancy neighborhood, thronging with five-star hotels, elegant boutiques, expensive restaurants, foreign consulates, dog walkers, doorman buildings. You’ve probably come there by subway. Or perhaps you drove or took a taxi. Maybe you even live nearby. We won’t pretend that these factors don’t matter (of course they do, insofar as they say something about your economic status and all the cultural formations that accompany it) but let’s try to bracket out those facts and pursue a phenomenology of the paintings. * In the David Hammons exhibition at L & M Arts in the winter of 2011 all the works were displayed on or against the walls except for a sheet of creased white plastic (or maybe it was paper or thin cloth) hanging from the ceiling in one of the first-floor rooms. One work was partially propped up on a length of weathered 4-by-4 wood beam, another on some smaller, less conspicuous object. Two works on the second floor were nothing more than sheets of plastic attached to the wall. In one case, a black plastic tarp was sandwiched between the painting and the wall while a length of striated green textile—the only remotely luxurious covering in the show—that might have been silk was draped artfully across the canvas, allowing viewers to see a fair amount of its intensely broken-up black-and-white marks. The coverings employed were of various materials (black contractor bags, sliver-gray plastic, shiny blue plastic, what seemed to be an unused drop cloth); they were adhered to the canvases in various ways (draped, loosely wrapped, affixed by having been applied when the paint was still wet) and subjected to all kinds of treatments and mistreatments (torn, cut up, stitched together) either prior to getting attached to the canvas or at some earlier point in their abject existence (Figure 9.1). The paintings—to the extent they were visible—were equally various in palette and composition, but all seemed to be gestural abstractions. Although this body of work—begun in 2007 and still, apparently, continuing—is now known as the “Tarp Paintings” or, in the parlance of one of his galleries, simply “Tarps,” in 2011 they were presented without any designation; the only information provided was the artist’s name written with graphite in cursive letters on one wall. *

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Figure 9.1  David Hammons, Untitled, 2009, mixed media, 92 by 72 inches, Mnuchin Gallery. Photo by Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Mnuchin Gallery, New York.

There is a potential for linguistic (and ontological?) confusion with the Tarp Paintings if we call the underlying stretched canvas “a painting” and also refer to the entire canvas/tarp ensemble as “a painting.” If both the ensemble and the partially hidden stretched canvas are “paintings,” then we

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could say that these are paintings that include paintings, kind of like how Matisse’s Red Studio includes paintings of paintings, but really not like that at all. * Or maybe bracketing out the gallery goer’s mode of transportation and all that it entails would be a fatal mistake because it would require conjuring up a generic viewer (of whatever socio-economic status). There is no such entity, nor, it follows, is there any objective description that could be attributed to such a viewer. (We may return to the description problem later.) Works of art (pace Duchamp) are not mental constructs. Just as consciousness is always consciousness of something, the encounter with a work of art always happens in a specific time and space, and it is always perceived by a consciousness that has been shaped by specific experiences. In that case I might as well write about David Hammons’s Tarp Paintings in the first person, explicitly acknowledging that objectivity is a fantasy. In that case I might as well acknowledge that my perspective is that of a White viewer, will inevitably be that of a White viewer, inevitably an “I” instead of “eye.” But—you must have known that a “but” was coming—isn’t the exact premise of art, and of writing about it, the notion that you can inhabit, however partially, another’s consciousness and that they can inhabit yours? * So many metaphors in these works. For instance, knowledge is always partial (in the sense of being incomplete). We never see “the whole picture.” Aspects of the work of art will always escape us, Hammons reminds us, which is why a measure of humility is called for (that means you/me, art critic). * What about the space where the work is situated? One writer (Alexander Alberro) believes “it surely was not lost on the artist” that L&M Arts at 45 East 78th Street where the Tarp paintings were first exhibited had “been the site of no less than seven solo exhibitions of the work of the New York School painter Willem de Kooning.”1 The history of the space thus becomes part of the content of the Tarp paintings. Alberro then suggests that the semi-concealed paintings themselves are deeply indebted to de Kooning:

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The ludicrously vulgar colors and emotional high heat of the paintings are derived whole cloth from de Kooning. And as if that was not enough, the broad sweeps that dominate Hammons’s canvases were evidently produced with the help of the type of large brush de Kooning often employed to endow his expressionistic compositions with a virile swagger. But if the reference is de Kooning, it is not as much an homage to the intuitive and technicallygifted painter as an oblique revamp of Robert Rauschenberg’s outrageous 1953 gambit “Erased de Kooning Drawing”. Hammons’s riff, it seems, is more one of cancellation than of eulogy, an attack on the medium and style of de Kooning rather than an embrace.2

­ icely written, I have to admit, but in addition to the fact that the paintings N (from what one can tell) aren’t nearly as de Kooningesque as the writer suggests, there is surely a significant difference between erasing the work of a famous older artist and covering up, and otherwise subjecting to disrespectful treatment (one has an old armoire pushed up against it), a group of paintings you have made yourself. I think that rather than being an update of Erased de Kooning Drawing these are more along the lines of, to paraphrase Martin Kippenberger, “The Paintings de Kooning Couldn’t Paint Anymore.” * What if, instead of “erasing” the underlying paintings, the tarps are meant to protect them, to shield them, to keep them safe and secret as one might want to withhold some mystical knowledge or the idol of a powerful spirit? * The artist had spelled out, several decades before, when much of his work was being made and displayed on the streets of Harlem, what he saw as the negative impact of museums and galleries on the art experience: The worst thing in the world is to say, “well I’m going to see this exhibition.” The work should be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it, it shouldn’t be at the gallery. Because when you get there you’re already prepared, your eyes are ready, your glands, your whole body is ready to receive this art. By that time, you’ve probably seen more art getting to the spot than you do when you get there. That’s why I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else.3 

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Yet, for the debut of the Tarp paintings he chose an art gallery. What’s more, an art gallery located in an elegant townhouse in the ritziest part of Manhattan. In this same gallery, four years earlier, he and his wife, Chie Hammons, showed a different body of work: fur coats that had been subjected to paint and scorching and were displayed on tailors’ dress forms. Generally, David Hammons provides little or no explanation of his work, but in this case the gallery issued (with or without the artists’ participation) a substantial press release that included comments on the relationship of the work to the gallery’s history and its location: The fur coats, a favorite choice of cold weather garb for the doyennes of the gallery’s Upper East Side neighborhood, become the canvases for the exhibition. These “canvases,” made of mink, wolf, chinchilla, etc., offer a glimpse of the timeline of post war-art, echoing artists that came before, artists who are frequently shown at L&M: Pollock, de Kooning and Klein among others. Holding the show in the winter months ensured the opportunity for fur clad visitors to mingle with these paintings—art and the viewer become one in the same. The fur, “found material” on the Upper East Side, is both a statement about the insular wealth of the neighborhood and the blue-chip art world, as well as the oppositional insular world of the animal rights movement.4

Why is it that after reading this press release the work seems just a little less interesting? Or maybe even much less interesting? First, the mere fact of being given the meaning instead of trying to work it out for yourself diminishes the intensity of the experience. Second, by anchoring the exhibition to a particular—and seemingly authorized—interpretation, these sentences of explanation threaten to rob the work of all ambiguity, of the possibility that it can mean many things. This is exactly why, I think, Hammons generally prefers to have his work presented with little or no explanation. * I said that I am seeking to explore consciousness, but whose? The artist’s? Is this just a matter of trying to figure out what was on the mind of David Hammons when he made these works? The artist’s famous silence and elusiveness, his preference to not explain his work or to provide the kind of contextual information that has long since become de rigueur for artists,

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renders this approach difficult. But the more he refuses to tell us, the more we want to know. * The mistake so many viewers (including me) make about the Tarp paintings is to assume that “the work” is hidden. Yes, there is something being (partially) hidden here (the abstract paintings on stretched canvases), but the work itself is not hidden. There it is, directly in front of you, in all its haggard beauty. * Even if I don’t write in the first person, it’s still going to be a matter of me trying to impose my ideas onto the work insofar as I pretend to speak for viewers in general. If I do write in the first person (as I am doing now) at least my partiality will be upfront. * How is it possible that such a simple act—putting a tarp on a painting—could invite so much complexity? Oh, there are actually two actions involved here: (1) Putting a tarp on a painting (2) Displaying the tarped painting in an art gallery. Maybe number 2 isn’t as simple as number 1. But number 1 is not as simple as it looks, either. * “Tarp” is an anagram of “trap.” And of “rapt.” David Hammons’s tarp painting trap us. We would like to feel rapt by them, but they are wrapped in tarps, so our quest for the rapture of painting is trapped between the tarp and the canvas. (Where is Duncan Smith when we need him?) * The first group of Tarp paintings were mostly untitled, but a few years later they began to acquire titles, such as Dirty Money and The New Black. * What is so interesting about the folds and creases in the brown canvas tarp (which I originally thought was an army-surplus blanket) covering one of the Tarp Paintings (the one that was on the cover of the issue of Art in America where my article “To Rest Lightly on the Earth” first appeared)? They are

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signs of contingency, evocations of disorder, of someone making the best of a bad job, with just a hint of classical drapery in the lower right. * As the Tarp paintings have evolved (yes, I know the word “evolved” imposes a teleological structure, implying that the newer work is better than the older work, which I don’t at all believe, so let’s add it to the list of forbidden artcrit words), Hammons has sometimes dispensed with the play of conceal/ reveal. An untitled 2017 painting that was shown at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles in 2019 displays the “painting” in full: on a drop cloth splattered with thousands of gold and green dots the artist has painted a large violet triangle that is fused into a bright yellow semi-circle (imagine a giant ice cream cone falling through space). Unstretched, the painting is loosely attached to a unit of rolling metal scaffolding of the kind used by house painters, one wheel of which is left exposed. Attached to the bottom and extending a few feet onto the floor is an unpainted piece of black fabric with patches of orange plastic netting set into it. * Not being allowed a full view of the paintings, we can’t judge them as paintings. Could that be part of Hammons’s intention, to prohibit judgment? Since we can only see small portions of the paintings, we can’t make any conclusions about their quality, nor even about how the artist approached them. Did he sincerely try to make the best gestural abstractions he could, or did he paint them tongue-in-cheek? Did he know from the beginning that he would show them under these strange circumstances, or was that an idea that came along later? Only the artist can really answer these questions, and he probably never will. Viewers are left on their own in a state of prolonged, maybe endless, undecidability. For what it’s worth, this dilemma doesn’t prevent art collectors and galleries from spending millions of dollars to buy a single Tarp painting. Dirty Money, for instance, sold at Sotheby’s on May 15, 2014 for $2,045,000. Perhaps this ambiguity of intention makes the work more valuable. It would be nice to think so. More likely, it’s just the upward trajectory of the artist’s career that counts. *

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As many observers have pointed out, the Tarp Paintings share certain qualities with the work of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri. With Fontana, the idea of the cut that destroys and reveals in a single motion; with Burri, the use of rough everyday materials and the gashes in those materials. The relationship to the work of Fontana and Burri is a matter of technique and materials, not of image. Burri and Fontana were both Italian; in the 1990s, Hammons spent a lot of time in Italy. Should we make anything of this? Is this another chapter in the “Roma-New York” dialogue that has involved American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Philip Guston, and Stanley Whitney? * Other wrapped paintings: Christo’s Wrap In Wrap Out, a double-sided lithograph depicting a stretched canvas loosely covered by a shiny tarp and his sculpture Wrapped Painting that features some stretched canvases have been neatly wrapped with a tan tarp and rope. Both made in 1968. But far more relevant is Jack Whitten’s Birmingham (1964), a small work in which the ostensible subject of the painting—a newspaper photograph of police attacking Black civil rights demonstrators in Alabama—is mostly hidden underneath a layer of black paint and aluminum foil. The image, which has additionally been covered with stocking mesh, is only glimpsed through a rough rectangle where the foil has been torn away and folded back. Whitten admitted that the stocking was “straight out of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, his notion of the Negro having been born with a veil that created a double-consciousness (‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’).” * In case you had any doubts. An art critic writing a profile on David Hammons doesn’t ask him what it’s like being Black in a mostly White art world, but the artist volunteers: “It’s like being a white man in the jazz world, like Chet Baker or Gerry Mulligan. They had confidence. I feed off the confidence of jazz greats like them.”5 What’s beautiful about this response is that in a single statement Hammons lets us know exactly how overwhelmingly white the art world is and that although he has suffered as a Black man in a white world, he has only

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admiration for white musicians like Baker and Mulligan, when he could so easily, as others have done, marginalize them because of their race. * Alberro observes that the Tarp paintings “recall the iconoclastic form of selfexpression with trash materials that characterized the work of the mid-twentieth century informel painters such as Alberto Burri or Antoni Tàpies, though they conspicuously lack the existential, humanist-driven impulse of these European abstract artists.”6 One first thinks: yes, of course, there is a world of difference between Hammons’s Tarps and the work of Burri or Tàpies. But a moment later, you wonder: what differences are there, really? Doesn’t Hammons exert as much control over his plastic and textile coverings as Burri did with his burlap sacks or Tàpies with sand? Is it just the conceptual aspect of the Tarps (covering a conventional abstraction with crappy materials) that sets them apart from the Europeans? Why can’t we read “existential” and “humanist-driven” content in Hammons? And how “humanist” was Burri anyway?7 * In my second article on Provisional Painting (“To Rest Lightly on the Earth”) I inserted four “interludes” in each of which I described the work of an artist, one of whom was David Hammons, without giving their names. My primary motivation for suppressing proper names, a technique that also occurs in my book The Miraculous, in which Hammons also figures, was to give readers a chance to encounter my description of an artist’s work without preconceptions. I didn’t want them to see the name “David Hammons” or “James Bishop” or “Sergej Jensen” or “Dana Frankfort” (the subjects of the other “interludes”) and immediately summon up whatever they might know about that artist. Like any writer, I suppose, I wanted to exert as much control as possible over the reader’s experience (however futile such a desire might be) and the automatic, unpredictable gush of associations that can accompany a proper name threatened to derail my texts. Although he is concerned with common nouns rather than with proper names, Francis Ponge does something similar when he tells himself, “Replace the name.” In approaching one of the humble objects that populate his texts, Ponge seeks to “consider it unnamed, unnameable, and describe it so well ex nihilo that it be recognized.” He withholds the names of things in order to

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overcome or at least temporarily suspend his readers’ preconceptions about the subject. Because names contain so many assumptions, all our biases and beliefs about the thing or the person being named, they can make it hard for us to see what’s really there. In my article I didn’t want whatever my readers knew about David Hammons to influence their response to the Tarp Paintings (or at least to my description of them). I didn’t give names in my “Interludes” for the same reason that Hammons has often preferred to work in the streets rather than in galleries and museums. As he puts it: “The work should be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it, it shouldn’t be at the gallery. Because when you get there you’re already prepared.”8 * Like Hammons, Burri generally declined to talk about his work. In 1954 he told Milton Gendel, “The words don’t mean anything to me; they talk around the picture. What I have to express appears in the picture.”9 * For a long time, Hammons stayed far away from the realm of galleries and museums. “The art audience is the worst audience in the world,” he told Kellie Jones. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? That’s like going into a lion’s den. So I refuse to deal with that audience and I’ll play with the street audience. That audience is more human and their opinion is from the heart. They don’t have any reason to play games, there’s nothing gained or lost.10

In the decade preceding the debut of the Tarp Paintings, Hammons had two solo shows at commercial New York galleries. In Concerto in Black and Blue (Ace Gallery 2002–3) he had the gallery turn off all the lights in its windowless, cavernlike spaces and provided visitors with tiny blue flashlights in which they could make their way through the otherwise empty gallery. In 2007, he exhibited trashed fur coats at L & M Arts. He seems to have decided that if he was going to engage this “worst audience in the world” he would either present a seemingly crude and artless provocation (the fur coats at L & M) or deny any easy satisfaction (empty galleries in Concerto in Black and Blue and hidden paintings with the Tarps).

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One can only admire how perfectly Hammons makes the passage from the street to the gallery without sacrificing his own integrity (to use an old-fashioned word). But it’s not only a matter of artistic integrity: as Coco Fusco puts it, Hammons is “a masterful investigator of how an oppositional black cultural identity can be generated through a dialogue with ‘high’ culture.”11 * To be displayed above the door of an artist’s studio: “If you know who you are then it’s easy to make art. Most people are really concerned about their image. Artists have allowed themselves to be boxed in by saying yes all the time because they want to be seen, and they should be saying no.”12 * While re-reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co., that endlessly absorbing compendium of “writers of the No,” and thinking how I could easily imagine David Hammons enjoying the book, I suddenly remember that Vila-Matas has also published a book (The Illogic of Kassel) in which he recounts his strange experience as a writer-in-residence at Documenta 13. Did Hammons participate in that Documenta? Could the paths of this Spanish writer and American artist, both afficionados of the No, have crossed somewhere in Kassel in the summer of 2012? I look up the list of artists in Documenta 13. No Hammons, alas, though his work was included in Documenta 9 in 1992, curated by his friend Jan Hoet. There’s nothing, however, stopping me from writing a fictional account of such a meeting. * This artist of the No once said: “The Whitney Biennial and Documenta need me but I don’t need them.”13 There’s a crucial difference between saying no and committing an act of radical withholding versus incorporating some artfully debased materials into your art. To put it another way, there’s a crucial difference between Hammons’s Tarp Paintings and works using dirty or paint-splattered drop cloths by artists such as Joe Bradley and Oscar Murillo. What is that crucial difference? * At one point in “To Rest Lightly on the Earth” I admit to the possibility that provisionality may be “nothing more than a stylistic trope, rather than a matter

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of profound artistic conviction and philosophical reflection” and then quote the following sentence from one of Frank O’Hara’s art reviews: “It is simply a property of Bonnard’s mature work, and one of its most fragile charms, to look slightly washed-out, to look what every sophisticated person let  alone artist wants to look: a little ‘down,’ a little effortless and helpless.” Why is that so, I wonder. What is the attraction among sophisticates for presenting oneself as “slightly washed-out”? Is this nothing more than a prolongation of modern painting’s nineteenth-century revolt against the strictures of the academy, against the perfection of the licked surface? Staying within the domain of French painting, we could oppose to Bonnard’s washed-out look Cèzanne’s forever unfinished quest for the fixing of true appearance. But that’s not fair to Bonnard, who had far more on his mind than a fear of seeming to have tried too hard. What I’m really talking about here is the difference between inadvertently creating a style out of sheer necessity and merely adopting one as a matter of taste; “fuck off ” versus “je m’en fous.” * David Hammons in 1986: It [art] used to wake you up but now it puts you to sleep. There’s so much of it around in this town [New York] that it doesn’t mean anything. That’s why the artist has to be very careful what he shows and when he shows now. Because the people aren’t really looking at art, they’re looking at each other’s clothes and each other’s haircuts. In other sections of the country I think they’re into seriously looking at art. This is the garbage can of it all. Maybe people shouldn’t look at art too seriously here because there’s so much.14

* Let’s return to “the description question.” Does it make sense to describe one of the Tarp Paintings as one would describe a Bonnard or a Joan Mitchell or an Alma Thomas? Should I (or anyone) make a close examination of a particular tear in one of the plastic tarps and then try to render precisely what I see in words? At first, this seems, I admit, absurd. But why? Surely just the fact of using paint instead of plastic, a brush instead of a knife (or whatever tool Hammons employed—or maybe he just used the tarps as he found them) doesn’t exclude a work from close inspection. If art historians can devote such

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attention to Alberto Burri’s paintings made with burlap or melted plastic, surely Hammons’s Tarps qualify for such treatment. Maybe it’s just too soon. The shock of the Tarp Paintings, the challenge they present to how we are used to looking at paintings, is too new. When ArtNews ran one of their “So-and-so Paints a Picture” articles on Burri in 1954, they had to adjust the series title to read “Alberto Burri Makes a Picture.” “Makes” instead of “Paints.” As Jack Whitten used to say, “Don’t paint it, make it!” Milton Gendel’s ArtNews article on Burri is over 3,500 words long, most of them devoted to a detailed eye-witness account of how Burri created a single work. I can’t help wondering what a similar account of Hammons making a Tarp Painting would reveal. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Walker,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2002: “‘I decided a long time ago that the less I do the more of an artist I am,’ Hammons had said to me on the phone. ‘Most of the time, I hang out on the street. I walk.’ He agreed to let me walk with him.”15 * “What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.” “Reification” he answered. “It’s a serious job,” I added. “Yes, it is” he said. “I see,” Carole observed with admiration. “Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and paper.” “No,” said Gilles. “I walk. Mainly, I walk.”16

One doesn’t have to accept the Situationists’ rejection of art in order to understand why someone might prefer drifting around a city to becoming a reliable supplier of cultural commodities. * Hammons explaining to Kellie Jones what he liked about California, how the artists he knew there shaped his approach to being an artist in New York: These cats would be in their ‘60s, hadn’t had a show in twenty years, didn’t want a show, painted every day, outrageous stamina. They were like poets, you know, hated everything walking, mad, evil; wouldn’t talk to people because they didn’t like the way they looked. Outrageously rude to

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anybody, they didn’t care how much money that person had. Those are the kind of people I was influenced by as a young artist. Cats like Noah Purifoy and Roland Welton. When I came to New York, I didn’t see any of that. Everybody was just groveling and tomming, anything, to be in the room with somebody with some money. There were no bad guys here, so I said “let me be a bad guy,” or play with the bad areas and see what happens.17

­ e Tarp Paintings guarantee that the medium of painting has not been Th thoroughly hollowed out; their existence allows me to look at other contemporary paintings (though by no means all of them) in a mood of hope, hope that some grain of dignity and truth can be salvaged from the shipwreck of the avant-garde on the shoals of vulture capitalism. * Although they have much to tell us about the subject, and although I seem to have been writing about not much else, the Tarp Paintings are not, ultimately, about painting. Instead, their central purpose is to stage an encounter between the artist and the viewer, more specifically between the artist’s opacity and the viewer’s curiosity. * The tarps and other coverings do not accomplish total concealment: they are too small or too ripped up or too sloppily placed; if their task is to completely hide the paintings, they have failed. This, of course, is a staged failure, a failure that adds to the pathos of the ensemble: a painting that has been denied full exposure by a covering that does a crappy job at concealing. No one wins in this game. Who decides what is valuable and what is not? The abstract paintings under the tarps are emissaries (or escapees) from the realm of wealth; the tarps are ambassadors of the street. The biggest lie, Hammons tells us, is to pretend these two worlds have nothing to do with each other. This isn’t a utopian scenario of coexistence, only an ethical one. It has been left to David Hammons, who for most of his career confronted an art world in which there were almost no opportunities for artists of color, to remind us that artists can seize power rather than let those who profit from their work call the shots—as long as they are willing to risk everything. *

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At a conference in Mexico City in 1969, Édouard Glissant demanded “the right to opacity.” What Glissant meant was that to recognize someone’s difference, their otherness, doesn’t require transparency, nor even understanding. For Glissant, opacity was a means to push back against the West’s attempts to impose its values, in the name of their supposed universality, on colonized peoples. As he wrote in his text “For Opacity”: If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh.—But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction. Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.18

The right to opacity, the right not to be understood, is at the center of David Hammons’s art, perhaps most explicitly with the Tarp Paintings. Unlike the coverings usually placed over paintings in galleries and museums, the motley assortment of scavenged textiles adorning the Tarp Paintings, all those sheets of plastic, contractor bags, and canvas tarps, are not transparent. While they may not pretend to reveal all, neither do they keep everything under wraps. I’m reminded that Hammons once curated an exhibition of three painters (Ed Clark, Denyse Thomasos and Stanley Whitney) titled “Quiet as it’s Kept.” The condition of quiet is not the same as the condition of silence or, as Glissant wrote, “the opaque is not the obscure.” These torn and creased and crumpled veils are a sign of vulnerability, the work’s, the artist’s, the entire tottering edifice in which they, you, and I all coexist, and it is through their gaps and vents, their raw openings, that the possibility of dialogue flows, even as these flawed barriers remind us of what we may never understand.

Conclusion: After Provisional Painting

For whatever reasons, my writings on provisional painting sparked numerous responses, far more than anything I had previously published. As Andreas Fischer noted in 2017, “proclamations like Rubinstein’s are fairly frequent and typically evaporate soon after they emerge. ‘Provisional Painting’ did not go away quickly, though. Instead, it provoked continued discussion and elaboration.”1 These ranged from online comments that the kind of work I was discussing was nothing more than an excuse for laziness and lack of talent (especially, these readers complained, on the part of MFA students) to the accusation from a prominent poet-art critic that I was “a professional mourner enumerating what painting can no longer do or hasn’t done” to an artist blogger who took me to task (rightly) for failing to mention Gianni Vattimo.2 Not all the responses were negative. Artist-writer Sharon Butler was inspired in part by my first article to develop her own thesis about “Casualism” in contemporary painting.3 Her article “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists” identified a dozen-plus contemporary painters as employing modernist “tropes and methods with a certain insouciant abandon.” Perhaps because she is a painter herself, Butler kept the boundaries of “New Casualism” noticeably porous. She also argued, persuasively, that “the new approach to abstraction is indebted to female artists of the 1970s like Elizabeth Murray, Mary Kelly, and Ree Morton, who, railing against the macho posturing of the Minimalists, worked from an intimate point of view that embraced messy everyday detail.”4 American poet Mary Jo Bang, whose work has engaged recent visual art more than any of her contemporaries, published a poem inspired by “To Rest Lightly on the Earth.” In Italy, painter Luca Bertolo (whose work I discuss in

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“Painting As Is”) took it on himself to translate “Provisional Painting” into Italian and get it published in Flash Art.5 Poet Rachael Wilson wrote a long post on the blog mostperfectworld where she found numerous connections between my Provisional Painting articles and my other explorations (as writer and as curator) of abstract painting. To my surprise, she even tracked down a poem in which I had snuck in a reference to Michael Krebber.6 If many of the negative responses were hampered by a reactionary investment in “tradition” and “good painting,” others raised more interesting issues. Art historian Lane Relyea, for instance, argued that I portrayed the “neoliberal world in an overly enchanting light” and, as a result, overlooked the ways in which provisionality, rather than offering a challenge to the status quo, was perfectly in tune with the dominant economic-political system: Being a D.I.Y. artist in the Rubinstein mode, too unique and uncategorizable and ever-changing to be pinned down by a single, definitive visual statement, can often result in a romantic art, its template is the romantic hero’s transcendent quest of leaving behind common social definitions and roles in search of unique paths and triumphs, fuller truths and a more authentic and rich existence. And yet today the association between authenticity and the uniquely handmade has become a primary sales pitch used by business to add exchange value to everyday retail objects. Indeed, with official policy advancing risk, flexibility, and short-term speculation over the social contract’s promises of long-term security, it’s hard to see how the values promoted in our D.I.Y. age can be taken as challenges to the system when these are the very attributes today’s dominant system so loudly promotes.7

While I am very hesitant to stuff all the very diverse artists I discuss into something called “the Rubinstein mode” (it’s already bad enough that I corralled them under the rubric of Provisionality), I want to point out that “authenticity” and “the uniquely handmade” are among the concepts that many of these painters place in question marks, as I have just done. Part of the problem here is that at the start of his essay Relyea makes a distinction between provisional and D.I.Y. painting that later gets fudged (additional confusion arises when he enlists an artist from “Provisional Painting”— Cheryl Donegan—in the D.I.Y. camp). Initially, Relyea states that whereas Provisional Painting “might suffer from such things as hesitancy, belaboredness

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and lack of mastery” these qualities are “more than compensated for by the foregrounded presence of the painter her or himself— the painter’s worrying and indecision, the compelling drama of the artist’s perpetual questioning and doubt.” With D.I.Y. abstraction, however, there is a “a quasi-classicist aesthetic of mostly unmixed color, unbroken line and closed form” and “a relatively anonymous execution.”8 By later conflating the two types Relyea forgets how many of the artists I discuss (including Oehlen, Krebber, Wool, Barré, and Sandner) are anything but partisans of handmade and authentic. Their work may not stake out explicitly anti-capitalist territory, but neither does it fail to problematize the notions of artistic labor (central for Krebber), skill (Barré, who said he wanted his paintings to look as if anyone could have made them), and touch (Oehlen’s use of billboard ads, Wool’s reliance on silkscreen and spray paint, Sandner’s machine-like surfaces). The criticality in their work sets them apart from the approach of D.I.Y. painters as Relyea imagines it: The only option they [D.I.Y. painters] have is to act out in their daily material practice the society’s reigning, terrifying belief in the shortterm, the temporary, the moment to moment, the always on call, the getit-while-you-can and enjoy-it-while-it-lasts. Here artistic labor becomes nearly indistinguishable from flex-time wage labor—anonymous, abstract, interchangeable and disposable. Painting as just doing stuff, like a hamster on its treadmill, as if in a perpetual feedback loop, over and over, with no other further objective in sight.9

This scenario—churning out small, undistinguished paintings without much hope of them ever gaining significant symbolic value—sounds worse than the complicit romanticism Relyea finds in “my” painters. All the same, I think it’s important to address the issues he raises. Looking back in 2014, Relyea wrote that his “contribution to this debate [sparked, he says, by my and Sharon Butler’s articles, as well as David Geers’ 2012 essay ‘Neo Modern’] was meant to nudge it toward labor concerns and away from questions about painting’s relation to subjectivity or history or criticality or the market, all of which I feel are increasingly beside the point.”10 It might be useful for the sake of giving a fuller context to the debate around abstract painting at the time, to say a few words about David Geers’s “Neo

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Modern,” drafted, he says, in August 2011 and published in the journal October in January 2012. His essay doesn’t mention “Provisional Painting,” but it does address some of the same conditions that troubled me. Geers’s identification of “a legitimate and thrifty attempt to ‘keep it real’ in the face of an ever-expansive image culture and the slick ‘commodity art’ of Koons, Murakami, and others” sounds much like my comments of February 2012: “whether it looks easy or arduous, the provisional work is always opposed to the monumental, the official, the permanent. It closes the door on the era of the high-productionvalue art market (Hirst-Koons-Murakami-Currin).” The difference between Geers and me is that he sees efforts to “keep it real” as overly beholding to “the formal moves of some modernist art” and, thus, representing “a nostalgic retrenchment on the part of an art world threatened by technological transformation and economic uncertainty that now undermine its hierarchies and claims of cultural precedence,” whereas I tend to accept the recent work as thoroughly contemporary rather than nostalgic. (There’s also not much overlap between the artists I cite and those that Geers mentions, who include Josh Smith, Daniel Hesidence, Alex Hubbard, Thomas Houseago, Richard Aldrich, Gedi Sibony, Jacob Kassay, Mark Grotjahn.) For Geers, the backwardlooking orientation of neo-formalism blinds it to current social, technological, and political revolutions. Rather than engaging with events like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, “the art world is still trying to connect an emancipatory rhetoric to an economy of luxury goods.” Neo-Modern artists, Geers concludes, resemble nothing so much as eighteenth-century ancien régime painters like Fragonard and Boucher, court artists for the aristocrats of the neo-liberal economy. I can’t deny that paintings, even “provisional” ones, are liable to be embedded in the economy of luxury goods, but I think that the binary option implied by Geers’s argument—formalist decadence or engaged activism—is incredibly reductive, and too close to some of the twentieth century’s more destructive aesthetic debates. Painting, even “formalist” or even “neo-formalist,” still has the potential to contribute something valuable to our sense of the world we live in, to our sense of ourselves, and it needn’t do so bedecked in theory. Although much painting may turn out to be no more than overpriced decoration, a work’s seeming indifference to the internet or social media (both mentioned by Geers) is no guarantee of its irrelevance.

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In a subsequent article, however, Geers made a more compelling argument. Writing in Frieze (March 2015), he warned that while “devaluing” and “ruining” painting may seem like a counter to the look of pristine commercialism, it can also exoticize formlessness and abject materials, fetishizing the real. It bears mentioning that what is often implicit in such gestures of restaging reality as distressed ruin, is the very privilege and distance belied by this act. As viewers, we get a rarified glimpse of the abjected and the forsaken—the frisson of the demolished object silhouetted by its palatial setting. If materialist critique or anti-aesthetic levelling is the objective, this gesture—seen in galleries from Bushwick to Berlin—substitutes one emphatic materialism for another. That is, it asks us to focus on the materials of the deconstructed thing rather than critically deconstruct the material conditions framing it.

Although the artists Geers discusses are totally different from those mentioned in my pair of articles on provisionality, the points he makes (the risk of contradiction, of the inherent privilege involved in displaying a “demolished object silhouetted by its palatial setting,” and the confusing of materials and material conditions) need to be addressed. (I take “setting” to mean both the architectural frame—gallery or museum—and the ideological one—the time-honored medium of painting itself.) The question that Geers seems to be asking is whether any attack on painting from within painting can be more than an empty gesture (no pun intended). Or, to put it another way: Is abjection in painting doomed to be never more than an illustration of abjection, an act made at a safe remove? Although the answer to both these questions is probably yes, this doesn’t mean that the content of every painting is identical, or identically futile. Not every “demolished object” in a “palatial setting” means the same thing or offers viewers the same experience. Some may simply stage stylish distress, while others lure us into beautifully tangled webs, what Barry Schwabsky in 2009 called “the stealth with which the best abstract painting often proceeds today.”11 So, what about Relyea’s “labor concerns”? I’m open to the notion that labor might be a worthwhile subject for painters to think about, perhaps even more worthwhile than the concerns Relyea feels are played out (subjectivity, criticality, history, the market). But I also believe that questions of labor and precarity need to be addressed more concretely by changing how artworks

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are produced and distributed. I also don’t believe that the hopeless conditions Relyea lays out for D.I.Y. painters apply to most of the artists I discuss. I don’t think that any of the painters featured in this book suffer from “increasing ordinariness, aimlessness and disenchantment of their situation, without any promise of their output eventually resulting in some enduring social and historical meaning, or of its landing a place for itself within a redemptive, time-honored tradition, or of its being received by a robust, discerning and coherent discourse.” Mediocre painters may not have much hope of their work achieving “enduring” meaning, but that’s always been the case, and as for the proving the existence of “robust, discerning and coherent discourse” around painting, need I do more than point to the various critical voices cited in these very pages? In a 2015 article in Frieze, painter Amy Sillman, whose work I admire, makes a useful distinction between “negative aesthetics,” in which she includes Provisional Painting, and “negativity-at-work”: I know that we are no longer making things for the Beaux Arts, for truth, beauty, elevation or virtuosity. Yet the familiar forms of what could be called “negative aesthetics” also fail to adequately describe what a lot of artists are doing in their studios. Dada, the readymade, “bad painting”, the Dandy, “provisional” painting, deskilling, etc.—none of these ring quite right in accounting for something I would call negativity-at-work, the arduous search for form, the feelings of dissatisfaction, the endless decisions and changes that constitute the work of various artists. How to discuss this, without resorting to a cliché of artistic work? What is everyone doing, and how do they decide to make it “better”?12

Because she is a painter herself, Sillman’s perspective is especially valuable. As my wife Heather Bause Rubinstein, who is also a painter, often reminds me, artists are capable of understanding works of art in ways that are at once more intimate and more informed than any non-artist can hope to achieve. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that some of the best art criticism has come from artists themselves. Through my many discussions about painting with Heather, I have become more alert to the risks of burying the actual conditions of art-making, in all their everydayness, uncertainty, and concreteness, beneath a blanket of tightly woven arguments—just because the writer’s

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discourse is internally coherent doesn’t mean that it faithfully describes the work in question. For instance, when Samuel Beckett was writing about Bram Van Velde for Transition, some people at the magazine believed his theorizing distorted the work and had damaging consequences for the artist.13 Less dramatically, one of the artists included in “Provisional Painting” (Richard Aldrich) subsequently told me that the idea of painting being “impossible” was completely foreign to him. In his book Bad New Days, Hal Foster makes a somewhat surprising connection between Relational Art and Provisional Painting. Citing artist Rikrit Tiravanija’s skepticism about “the need to fix a moment when everything is complete,” Foster adds: “This provisionality, which extends to traditional mediums like painting, was once thought to shield the artwork from commodity status, on the one hand, and from the artist as brand, on the other.”14 Denying that “provisionality” was very successful in either of these tasks, Foster accuses work such as Tiravanija’s and the kinds of paintings I discuss in “Provisional Painting” of obscuring “one service that art can still render, which is to take a stand, and to do so in a manner that brings together the aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical in a precise constellation.” While I appreciate the effort Foster is making in trying to pin down what he most values in art, to say that a work “brings together the aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical in a precise constellation” is far too general to be of any practical use. Rather than recognize the vagueness of his formulation, Foster labels it “almost quaint or overly ambitious,” and contrasts it with art that “confirm[s] to the image flows and information networks that run around and through us.” Faced with Foster’s and Relyea’s criticisms, I can’t pretend that a provisional painting has anything to contribute to a more equitable and just society, but that doesn’t prevent me from speculating that to some degree, however minimal or hard to prove, the attitude embodied by such a painting might contribute to ways of thinking that acknowledge economic precarity and the dangers of foundationalism. (I’m trying here to avoid both vagueness and overblown claims, but probably failing all around.) By 2015, when Foster’s book was published, the most common term for current abstraction was “zombie formalism” and my coinage “provisional

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painting” had made it onto a list by critic Ben Davis of “30 art writing clichés to ditch in the New Year.” “Provisional Painting,” he explained, has had its moment, and there is, no doubt, a lot of stuff that looks halffinished or fragile or tentative or underproduced or so-wrong-it’s-right or just kind of funked-up. Nothing wrong with that. But “provisional” can mean some of that or all of that, and a lot of color is lost as provisionality becomes a rigid grid to view things through.15

As far as art writing was concerned, I had to agree with Davis, a critic I respect, that it was probably time to give “Provisional Painting” a rest, but that same year I was thrilled to see the concept turn up in another field: poetry. In her 2015 collection The Last Two Seconds, Mary Jo Bang includes a poem titled “Provisional Doubt as an Architectural Space,” which, as she explains in a note, “takes language” from my article “To Rest Lightly on the Earth.” While some words I use turn up in the poem, Bang conjures an atmosphere and a line of thought that is wholly her own. Within its fifteen lines, the poem moves between abstract statements and concrete images, tracking the figure of provisionality through a room and across time. I am especially taken with several lines toward the end: “The scene is the early 1960s:/ a room, a foggray wall, an absence of ambition/ as a response to self-doubt. Along the way, the ceremony/ of switching on a light.” As far as I can tell, Bang’s jumping off place here is a passage from my article about the American expatriate painter James Bishop (unnamed in my piece), but the first dozen times I read her poem, I wasn’t sure whether the scene Bang evoked was inspired by my article or by the poet’s own memories, an ambiguity that makes the poem all the more valuable for me. Ultimately, of course, because this is a fully realized poem, the source doesn’t matter—the clarity and mystery, the experience of provisionality, are the poem’s and the poet’s own.16 While writing this conclusion in the summer of 2021, I belatedly discovered Elisabeth Ellis’s book Provisional Politics. Published in 2008, precisely as I was developing my ideas regarding provisional painting, Provisional Politics argues that the language of timeless principles is inadequate when it comes to “the immense complexity, uncertainty, and dynamism of the world of politics.”17 Instead, building on Kant’s notion of “provisional right,” Ellis holds that “provisional theory allows us to speak accurately about the relationship

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between political morality and political practice.”18 I am keenly aware of the folly of comparing political realities with activities in an art medium, but the coincidence of Ellis’s ideas and my own give me hope that the concept of provisionality can contribute in some small measure to the accuracy of how we speak about painting, even if it is only to remind us that, until the moment the painter steps away from the painting, nothing is definitively decided, and that it is during those non-definitive moments when total possibility and lurking impossibility perform their dance, when every action is “for the time being,” that the painting is made.

Notes Introduction 1

Honoré de Balzac (1988), Gillette or the Unknown Masterpiece, translated with an

­2

Chang Yen-Yuan, quoted in François Cheng (1994), Empty and Full: The

essay by Anthony Rudolf, London: The Menard Press, p. 52. Language of Chinese Painting, trans. Michael H. Kohn, Boston and London: Shambhala, p. 76. 3

Howardena Pindell (1997), “The Aesthetics of Texture in African Adornment,” in The Heart of the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell, New York: Midmarch Arts Press, p. 86.

4

Richard Cándida Smith (1995), Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 115.

5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1993), “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Painting and Philosophy, eds. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 75.

8

Philip Guston (1965–66), “Faith, Hope and Impossibility,” first published in Art News Annual 31, reprinted in Philip Guston (2011), Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations, ed. Clark Coolidge, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 53.

9

“The Meaning of Decay in Art,” originally published in Internationale Situationniste #3 (December, 1959), reprinted Situationist International Online, trans. John Shepley, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decay.html (accessed July 26, 2021).

10 Adrian Dannatt (2009), “Interview with Patti Smith,” The Art Newspaper, March, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/patti-smith-i-look-at-jeff-koons-sstuff-and-i-m-appalled (accessed August 13, 2021). 11 Graham Domke (2008), “Books: All of a Sudden: Things That Matter in Contemporary Art,” Map, #15, Autumn, https://mapmagazine.co.uk/books-allof-a-sudden-things (accessed August 14, 2021).

Notes

137

12 Anne Byrd (2008–2009), “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” The Brooklyn Rail, December–January, https://brooklynrail.org/2008/12/artseen/mary-heilmannto-be-someone (accessed August 11, 2021). 13 See Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (2015), eds. Elaine Cheasley Paterson and Susan Surette, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 14 Corey Hajim (2007), “Wall Street Meets the Art World,” Fortune.com, March 30, https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_ archive/2007/04/02/8403478/index.htm?postversion=2007033005 (accessed August 14, 2021). ­15 “Chris Martin with Craig Olson,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2008, https:// brooklynrail.org/2008/02/art/chris-martin-08 (accessed August 13, 2021). Julian Schnabel goes unmentioned in both Provisional Painting articles, but after seeing a 2010 survey of his work at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and making several visits to his New York studio, I understood how his work could sometimes engage provisionality. As a result, I included one of his paintings in “Provisional Painting,” an exhibition I curated in 2011 at Modern Art in London, and in an Art in America article that same year, I wrote, apropos of a pair of 2006 works, Painting for Malik Joyeux and Bernardo Bertolucci V and VI: “One of the things I appreciate in Schnabel’s work is his readiness to gamble that something might succeed as a painting despite the flimsiness of its premises.” 16 Daniel Birnbaum (2008), “Top 10,” Artforum, December, https://www.artforum. com/print/200810/daniel-birnbaum-41931 (accessed August 12, 2021). 17 R. C. Baker (2008), “Painting: Now and Forever, Part II,” Village Voice, July 16, https://www.villagevoice.com/2008/07/16/painting-now-and-forever-part-ii/ (accessed August 12, 2021). 18 Craig Olson (2008), “Painting: Now and Forever, Part II,” The Brooklyn Rail, September, https://brooklynrail.org/2008/09/artseen/painting-now-and-foreverpart-ii (accessed August 3, 2021).

Chapter 1 1

Roberta Smith (2006), “Art in Review,” New York Times, November 17, p. E37.

2

Barry Schwabsky (2004), “Raoul De Keyser,” Artforum, Summer, p. 240.

3

Jean-Charles Vergne (2008), “Small Things Aspirate the World and They Become the World,” in Raoul De Keyser, Clermont-Ferrand, FRAC Auvergne, p. 15.

4

Albert Oehlen (2003), “Albert Oehlen Talks to Eric Banks,” Artforum, April, pp. 182–3.

Notes

138 5

Adrian Searle (2001), “Never Trust a Painter,” The Guardian, September 25.

6

Quoted in Anne Umland (2008), Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, New York: Museum of Modern Art, p. 2.

7

Ibid., p. 91.

8

Catherine Millet (2001), “Interview with Martin Barré,” in As Painting: Division and Displacement, eds. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville, Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, p. 190.

9

Ibid., p. 193.

­10 Hal Foster (1979), “Kimber Smith,” Artforum, April, p. 71.

Chapter 2 1

James Lord (1980), A Giacometti Portrait, rev. ed., New York: Farrar, Straus and

2

Ibid., p. 44.

3

Ibid., p. 79.

4

Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre (1948), Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes,

Giroux, pp. 9–10.

New York: Philosophical Library, p. 37. 5

Philip Guston (1966), “Faith, Hope, and Impossibility,” ARTnews Annual, October, reprinted in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics: An Anthology, New York: Abrams, 1990, pp. 62–3.

6

All quotes in the rest of this section from Philip Guston (1990), “Public Forum with Joseph Ablow, 1966”; the transcript appears in Ross, Abstract Expressionism, pp. 63–75.

7

William Baziotes (1950), transcript of Artists Session at Studio 35, 1950, in Ross, Abstract Expressionism, p. 216.

8

Chang Yen-Yuan (1994), quoted in Cheng, Empty and Full, p. 76.

9

Robert Ryman (1988), “Interview with Robert Storr, October 17, 1986,” in Abstrakte Malerei aus Amerika und Europa/Abstract Painting of America and Europe, Vienna: Galerie Nacht St. Stephan, p. 211.

10 Samuel Beckett (1984), “Henri Hayden, homme-peintre,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, New York: Grove Press, p. 146. Translation by Lois Oppenheim, in Lois Oppenheim (2000), The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 103.

Notes

139

Chapter 3 1

Samuel Beckett (1946), radio talk “The Capital of Ruins,” quoted in Anthony Cronin (1997), Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, New York: HarperCollins, p. 35.

2

Samuel Beckett to Hans Naumann, February 17, 1954, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941–1956 (2011), eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, p. 464.

3

Samuel Beckett, quoted in Janvier, Ludovic (1969), Samuel Beckett par lui-même, Paris: Seuil, p. 18, see Michael Edwards (1992), “Beckett’s French,” Translation and Literature, vol. 1, p. 77.

4

The joke goes like this: “THE CLIENT: God made the world in six days and you, you’re not fit to make me a pair of pants in six months. THE TAILOR: But Sir, look at the world, and look at your pants.”

5

Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuit, March 9, 1949, in The Letters of Samuel

6

For a recent assessment of Bram Van Velde in relation to Beckett, as well as to

Beckett Volume II, p. 139. postwar French art and Provisional Painting, see Gwenaël Kerlidou’s excellent two-part article “Failure as Success in Painting: Bram Van Velde, the Invisible,” Hyperallergic, February 14–February 15, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/182275/ failure-as-success-in-painting-bram-van-velde-the-invisible-part-1/ and https:// hyperallergic.com/182278/failure-as-success-in-painting-bram-van-velde-theinvisible-part-2/ (accessed October 1, 2021). 7 Oppenheim, The Painted Word, p. 78. 8

Largely forgotten is that the essay first appeared in English under the title “The New Object” in a brochure published by the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York in conjunction with a two-person exhibition of Bram and Geer Van Velde on view March 8–27, 1948. Only the French version is easily available (in Disjecta, the 1984 collection of Beckett’s miscellaneous writings). A transcription of the English version (which the sentences quoted here come from) was published in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 18, Iss. 4, November, 2011, with an illuminating introduction by Peter Fifield who argues that the uncredited translation was most likely the work of Beckett himself. As well as omitting the striking opening paragraphs, which resemble Beckett’s self-cancelling narratives such as The Unnameable, the English version oddly translates “empêchement” as “mist.” While empêchement is one of those French words difficult to translate

Notes

140

into English (it can mean “impediment” but also an ambiguous term referring to something that prevents you from meeting a prior engagement), “mist” is in no way one of its meanings. Presumably, recognizing the essential untranslatability of the word, Beckett (or whoever did the translation) struck off in a different direction altogether. It’s interesting to compare “The New Object” with Barnett Newman’s essay “The Sublime Is Now,” published in The Tiger’s Eye in December 1948, eight months after Beckett’s text. Toward the end of this influential text, Newman declares: “We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.” In 1948, both Beckett and Newman were arguing for starting afresh, but while Newman dreamed of ditching “impediments” and grounding painting in subjectivity, Beckett defined painting itself as an impediment and as an opportunity to get rid of the artist’s self. 9

Pascale Casanova (2020), Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, p. 88.

10 Daniel Soutif (1990), “Flight into Whiteness: Bram Van Velde,” Artforum, Summer, p. 150. 11 Joe Moran (2020), If You Should Fail: A Book of Solace, London: Penguin/Viking, p. 11. 12 Beckett’s 1969 text “Lessness” (Sans) was a key reference point for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which included work by two artists who figure in “Provisional Painting,” Joe Bradley and Mary Heilmann.

Chapter 4 1

https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-nihilist-condition-andprovisional.html. Although I disagree with parts of Mugar’s interpretation (for instance, I don’t think you can neatly equate the role that metaphysics plays in Vattimo’s work with the place of art history in contemporary painting) I thank him for introducing Vattimo into the conversation.

Notes 2

141

Quoted in Santiago Zabala (2016), “Gianni Vattimo’s Life, Philosophy, and Archives,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 10, https://www. lareviewofbooks.org/article/gianni-vattimos-life-philosophy-archives/ (accessed August 12, 2021).

3

Gianni Vattimo (2009), “Nihilism and Emancipation,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 20.

­4

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala (2019), “‘Weak Thought’ and the Reduction of Violence: A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo,” trans. Yaakov Mascetti, Common Knowledge, vol. 25, nos. 1–3, April 1, pp. 92–3.

5

Gianni Vattimo et al. (2012), Weak Thought eds. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, trans. Peter Carravetta, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 41–2. Originally published in 1983 as Il pensiero debole.

6

Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Transformations in the Course of Experience,” in ibid., p. 72.

7

Jenifer P. Borum (1992), “Arte Debole,” Artforum, March, p. 110.

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 The notion of convalescence here comes from Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of Verwindung.

Chapter 5 1

Recent studies of such artists include Martin Herbert’s (2016), Tell Them I Said No, London: Sternberg Press, and the chapter on Stephen Kaltenbach in Roger White’s (2015), The Contemporaries, London: Bloomsbury.

2

Although originally made for his actor friend Bud Cort, who uttered the phrase after Ruscha told him about having seen a sign for a “Bud Cort Retrospective” outside a cinema in Switzerland, the selection of the painting (actually a pastel on paper) as the cover image for the catalogue of Ruscha’s own 1982 retrospective turned the work into a gesture of refusal, albeit highly ironized.

3

“Dike Blair and Joe Bradley,” Bomb, Summer 2009, https://bombmagazine.org/ articles/dike-blair-and-joe-bradley/ (accessed July 4, 2022).

4

Enrique Vila-Matas (2000), Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne, New York:

5

Ibid., p. 3.

New Directions, p. 2.

Notes

142 6

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (2021), “Spectacular Opacities,” E-flux Journal #120, September, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416942/spectacular-opacities/ (accessed March 28, 2022).

7

The six artists in the show were Paul Stephen Benjamin, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Aria Dean, Troy Michie, Arcmanoro Niles, and Sable Elyse Smith.

8

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, section 107, quoted in Ronald

9

Chang Yen-Yuan (1994), quoted in François Cheng, Empty and Full, p. 76.

Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (1982), London: Penguin Books, p. 209. 10 Adam Pendleton, “I Am Not Safe and This Country Is Not Kind,” ArtNews, June 4, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/adam-pendletonprotests-1202689725/, accessed July 21, 2022. ­11 Peter Salmon (2020), An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida, London: Verso, p. 65. 12 The transcript of this closed, three-day conference of Studio 35 was first published in the sole issue of the magazine Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, 1951. The following quotations are from Ross, Abstract Expressionism, pp. 212–25. 13 John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 67. 14 Ibid., p. 52. 15 Ibid. 16 Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of Ruins,” radio talk, (1946), quoted in Anthony Cronin (1996), Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, London: HarperCollins, p. 35. 17 Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press, p. 112.

Chapter 6 1

Quoted in Hayden Herrera (2005), Joan Snyder, New York: Harry N. Abrams, p. 37.

2

See Joan Kee (2010), “The Curious Case of Contemporary Ink Painting,” Art Journal, vol. 69, no. 3, Fall, pp. 88–113.

3

Ibid., p. 98.

4

Big Lying Painting was subsequently cut into separate parts and reconfigured as a new work, Studio Studies: 22 Arrangements of Ten Elements in the Studio, 1978.

5

Nahum Tevet (2017), “Some Notes on the Making of Seven Walks 1997–2004,”

6

Daniel Birnbaum (1997), “Painting—the Extended Field,” Artforum, February.

unpublished text.

Notes 7

143

Pierre Wat (2000), Pierre Buraglio, Paris: Flammarion, 2001, p. 19. All translations from French by the author unless otherwise noted.

8 In Pierre Buraglio (1982), Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, p. 91. 9

“Qu’est-ce qui manque dans le chariot?,” a dialogue with Yves Michaud (1988) in Pierre Buraglio (2007), Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, Paris: Beaux Arts de Paris, p. 149.

­10 “Préalablement … il faut admettre,” 1968, first published in T.P.: Travaux Pratiques, UER des Sciences, Limoges, 1975, reprinted in Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, pp. 34–9. 11 “Il ressort de cet entretien,” an unpublished text written for the catalogue of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture (1966) in Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 29. 12 The phrase “la peinture est nourricière d’elle même” occurs in the text “Ces transparances,” first published in Écriture-peinture, no. 2, November 1976, reprinted in Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 68. 13 Buraglio has cited the influence of Leiris’s text more than once. For instance, “Par la force des faits, dix ans de la peinture, 1968–1978,” Documents Sur, 1979, no. 415, Juin 1979, reprinted in Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 85. 14 Michel Leiris (1963), “The Autobiographer as Torero,” in Manhood, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grossman, pp. 151–5. 15 Buraglio made this remark at a May 16, 2018, colloquium on May 68 at the Institut de l’histoire de l’art in Paris while speaking with Monique Frydman and Eric de Chassey. A video of the conversation is available on YouTube, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlRcmyzskr4 (accessed January 1, 2019). 16 Entretien avec Pierre Buraglio, from the conference “Le postmoderne: un paradigme pertinent dans le champs artistique?” at the Institute national de l’histoire de l’art, Paris, May 31, 2008. 17 “Par la force des faits, dix ans de la peinture, 1968–1978,” in Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 88. 18 Organized by Jean-Pierre Pincemin and Claude Viallat, the exhibition included Marcel Aloco, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, Bernard Pages, Patrick Saytour, as well as Pincemin and Viallat, which represented half of the twelve artists who would form Supports/Surfaces. (Aloco never became a part of the group.) The consequences of Buraglio’s refusal to join Supports/Surfaces, motivated by his political convictions, included his exclusion from many subsequent exhibitions and critical accounts. In “Par la force des faits, dix ans de la peinture, 1968–1978,” Buraglio describes his refusal (p. 87). He also recounts turning down an invitation from Dezeuze and Louis Cane to contribute to

Notes

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Peinture: Cahiers Théoriques, the journal that served as the house organ of Supports/Surfaces (p. 88). 19 In Pierre Buraglio, p. 77. For more on the use of erasure in art and literature, see Heather and Raphael Rubinstein (2018), Under Erasure, Milanville: Nonprofessional Experiments. ­20 Buraglio was hardly the first artist to exhibit wooden stretchers and frames as works in themselves. He acknowledges the precedent and influence of Daniel Dezeuze’s “Chassis” and “Echelles” of 1967–70, and one could cite other stretcher-works by Imi Knoebel and Antoni Tápiès, but Buraglio’s “Chassis” and “Fenêtres” offer more variety, nuance, and invention than other experiments in this mode. Given the achievement of these works, and their influence on subsequent artists, it is unfortunate they are absent from Peter Weibel’s selection of such work in Iconoclash (2002), eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Cambridge: ZKM, Karlsruhe, MIT Press, pp. 593–602. 21 Yve-Alain Bois (1990), “Painting as Model,” in Painting as Model, Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 250. Bois’s text is chiefly concerned with the ideas of French art historian Hubert Damisch. 22 In Pierre Buraglio, p. 91.

Chapter 7 1

Michael Krebber quoted in November 15, 2012, press release from CAPC Contemporary Art Museum Bordeaux, https://www.e-flux.com/ announcements/33447/michael-krebber/

2

Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert (2003), “Ordinary Madness: An Interview with Albert Oehlen.”

3

Sean O’Hagan, “Albert Oehlen: There’s Something Hysterical about Magenta,” The Guardian, February 5, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2016/feb/05/albert-oehlen-interview-gagosian-gallery-london (accessed November 7, 2017).

4

Frieze, issue 78, October 2003, https://www.frieze.com/article/ordinary-madness (accessed July 4, 2022).

5

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941–1956 (2011), eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 140.

Notes

145

Chapter 9 1

Alexander Alberro (2011), “The Joke of Painting,” Texte Zur Kunst, no. 82, June, https://www.textezurkunst.de/82/alexander-alberro-joke-painting/ (accessed September 22, 2021).

2 Ibid. 3

Kellie Jones (2011), “Interview with David Hammons,” originally published in Real Life Magazine, Autumn, 1986, reprinted in Kellie Jones, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 251.

4

Press release for “Hammons” held at L & M Arts (now Mnuchin Gallery), New York, January 18–March 31, 2007, https://www.mnuchingallery.com/exhibitions/ hammons#tab:slideshow (accessed September 22, 2021).

5

David Hammons, quoted in Peter Schjeldahl (2002), “The Walker,” The New Yorker, December 23, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/23/thewalker (accessed September 21, 2021).

6

Alberro, “The Joke of Painting.”

7

In a 2015 article on Burri spurred by the Guggenheim’s exhibition “Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting,” (John Yau, “Alberto Burri’s Challenge,” Hyperallergic, October 25, 2015) another writer brings Hammons, Provisional Painting (and me) into the discussion, writing: “It is likely that Burri’s work influenced a wide range of American and European artists, including Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Piero Manzoni, Salvatore Scarpitta, Yves Klein, Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou, along with movements and groups such as Arte Povera, Support/ Surface, and what Raphael Rubinstein called ‘Provisional Painting.’ It is worth noting that Rubinstein, who lived in Italy when he was an editor for Flash Art, never mentioned Burri in his article. Needless to say, Rubinstein never mentions Hammons either, suggesting that his view of ‘provisional painting’ is rather tame.” Setting aside the oddly personal nature of this commentary (that I once lived in Italy apparently makes my failure to mention Burri even more egregious), this passage ends with a gross factual misstatement: not only does Hammons figure in the article the critic is referencing (“To Rest Lightly on the Earth”), the issue of Art in America where it appeared featured one of the Tarp Paintings on its cover (the one from L&M with a creased brown tarp glued onto a painting). The writer, John Yau, missed the reference to Hammons because it occurred in the first of four “interludes” that punctuated the article. In each

Notes

146

of these I avoid using the artist’s name but it is obvious who they are once you notice the captioned image of their work on the same spread. 8

Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” p. 251.

9

Alberto Burri, quoted in Milton Gendel (1954), “Alberto Burri Makes a Picture,” ArtNews, December, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/i-willnot-be-a-sunday-painter-alberto-burri-makes-a-picture-in-1954-5102/ (accessed September 22, 2021).

10 Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” p. 255. 11 Coco Fusco (1995), “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified,” Frieze, May, https:// www.frieze.com/article/wreaking-havoc-signified (accessed September 22, 2021). 12 Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” pp. 253–4. 13 David Hammons, quoted in Peter Schjeldahl (2002), op. cit. 14 Jones, “Interview with David Hammons.” 15 Schjeldahl, “The Walker.” 16 Michèle Bernstein (2008), All the King’s Horses, trans. John Kelsey, New York: Semiotext(e), p. 33. 17 Jones, “Interview with David Hammons.” 18 Édouard Glissant (1997), “On Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 189–90.

Conclusion 1

Andreas Fischer (2017), “Post-Critical Painting,” in Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction, eds. Pamela Fraser and Roger Rothman, London: Bloomsbury, p. 117.

2

The poet-critic was John Yau, who rarely misses an opportunity to denounce Provisional Painting in his writings for Hyperallergic; the artist-blogger was Martin Muggar (see note 38). Other noteworthy responses can be found in Cherry Smyth’s review “Provisional Painting at Modern Art and Corvi-Mora,” in Art Monthly, June 2011; Jed Perl’s article “The Perils of Painting” in the New York Review of Books, September 24, 2015, and in Perl’s and my subsequent exchange of letters in the October 22, 2015 issue. The most bizarre response was a February 4, 2016 post on the website AFCity headlined “Trump Supporter also a Fan of Provisional Painting.” The accompanying screenshot shows a woman urging Republicans to caucus for Donald Trump with, as the caption explains, “what appears to

Notes

147

be a David Ostrowski painting hanging in the background.” http://artfcity. com/2016/02/04/thursday-links-trump-supporter-also-a-fan-of-provisionalpainting/ (accessed October 1, 2021). Although I have never written about Ostrowski, his work has been associated by others with a provisional approach. 3

Sharon Butler (2011), “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists,” The Brooklyn Rail, June, https://brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/abstract-painting-the-newcasualists (accessed August 8, 2021).

4

Ibid. (accessed October 1, 2021).

5

See Raphael Rubinstein (2015), “Pittura Provvisoria,” in Flash Art Italia, trans.

6

Rachel M. Wilson (2013), “Reinventing (Provisional Painting) [as]

Luca Bertolo, Milano: Ottobre. ‘Impure {Abstraction’” Out of Bounds} July 30, https://mostperfectworld. com/2013/07/30/reinventing-provisional-painting-as-impure-abstraction-outof-bounds/ (accessed August 8, 2021). 7

Lane Relyea (2012), “D.I.Y. Abstraction,” originally published on the nowdefunct website wowhuh.com, reprinted in Golden Age: Perspectives on Abstract Painting Today (2014), eds. Marco Antonini and Christopher K. Ho, New York: Nurtureart, p. 64.

8

Ibid., pp. 59–60.

9

Ibid., p. 65.

10 Lane Relyea (2014), “Postscript to D.I.Y. Abstraction,” in Golden Age: Perspectives on Abstract Painting Today, p. 70. 11 Barry Schwabsky (2010), “The Resistance of Painting” The Nation, January 4, p. 36. First posted online December 16, 2009, https://www.thenation.com/article/ archive/resistance-painting-abstraction/ 12 Amy Sillman (2015), “Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness,” Frieze, November 10, https://www.frieze.com/article/shit-happens (accessed October 2, 2021). 13 See Deirdre Bair (1978), Samuel Beckett: A Biography, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 394. 14 Hal Foster (2015), Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, London: Verso, p. 137. In an endnote, Foster cites “Provisional Painting” and praises a 2006 article by Lane Relyea that considers how Relational Art “conforms to a casual economy.” He also cites the privileging of the provisional in Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel How Should a Person Be. ­15 Ben Davis (2015), “30 Art Writing Clichés to Ditch in the New Year,” ArtNet News, January 5, https://news.artnet.com/market/30-art-writing-cliches-toditch-in-the-new-year-210836 (accessed August 7, 2021).

Notes

148

16 Mary Jo Bang (2014), “Provisional doubt as an Architectural Space,” Salmagundi, vol. 184, Fall, p. 42. Reprinted in Mary Jo Bang (2015), The Last Two Seconds, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, p. 10. Among Bang’s books are two collections of ekphrastic poems, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004) and A Doll for Throwing (2017). 17 Elisabeth Ellis (2008), Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments on Policy Context, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 1. 18 Ibid., p. 4.

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Index “Abstractions Provisoires” (exhibition) 5 African art 3, 60, 111 Aillaud, Gilles 89 Alberro, Alexander 113 Aldrich, Richard 10, 24–5, 65, 133 Althusser, Louis 92 Art in America 12, 116 Art Debole (art movement) 47, 51 art market, the 9–10, 123 Artaud, Antonin 15 Artforum 11, 16 ArtNews 122 Baer, Jo 84 Baker, Chet 119–20 Baker, R.C. 11 Baldessari, John 66 de Balzac, Honoré 2 Bang, Mary Jo 127, 134 Barré, Martin 21, 36, 42, 65 Barthes, Roland 53 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Herman Melville) 58–9, 89 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 64 Baziotes, William 33, 63 beauty, 5, 15, 33, 56, 64, 74, 101, 103, 115, 132 Beckett, Samuel 6, 133; and Bram van Velde 43–6; and failure 42–3, 46; impoverishment of artistic means 42; amid postwar ruins 41; in relation to work of Carmengloria Morales 76; rejection of “relation” 99; as tutelary spirit 38 “Beneath the Underdog” (exhibition) 6–7 Bernstein, Michèlle All the King’s Horses 124 Bertolo, Luca 105–9, 127–8; “The Domain of Painting” 109 Birnbaum, Daniel 11, 83 Bischoff, Elmer 3

Bishop, James 37, 134 Bluhm, Norman 103 body double, painting as 108 Bonnard, Pierre 38 Borum, Jenifer P. 51 Bradford, Mark 51, 86 Bradley, Joe 27, 54–5, 122 The Brooklyn Rail 8, 10, 11 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 75 Buraglio, Pierre 84–93; Agrafages 86–7; Camouflages 87; Caviardages 90–1; Châssis-Cadres 91; Fenêtres 91; and Francis Ponge 92–3; and Marxism 92; and Michel Leiris’s “The Autobiographer as Torero” 88–9; Recouvrements 85–6; and refusal 89–90 Buren, Daniel 86 Burri, Alberto 119, 120, 121, 124 Butler, Sharon 60, 127, 129 Byrd, Anne 8 Camus, Albert 57–8 capitalism 7, 70, 125 Carpenter, Merlin 55–6 Carravetta, Peter 49 Casanova, Pascale 46 Casualist painting 60–1, 127 Cézanne, Paul 2, 3, 15, 81–2 Cocteau, Jean 36 Chang, Yen-Yuan 3, 34, 53, 61 cheap materials 3, 4, 25 Cheng, François, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting 34, 61 Chinese painting 3, 19, 33–4, 61–2 Christo 118 Clark, Ed 126 Clark, Lygia 66 Connolly, Cyril 106 Continuous Project Altered Daily (Robert Morris) 62, 64

154 craft 4, 8 Currin, John 9 Daive, Jean 86, 93 Davis, Ben 134 de Duve, Thierry 83–4 De Keyser, Raoul 16–17, 65 de Kooning, Willem 18, 39, 63, 114–15 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature 27 Derrida, Jacques 47, 62 Deschevaux-Dumesnil, Suzanne 41 D.I.Y. Abstraction 128–9, 132 Doig, Peter 66 Dolla, Noël 15 Donegan, Cheryl 9, 25 Duchamp, Marcel 66, 84 Duthuit, Georges 43–6, 99 Elderfield John 63–4 Ensor, James 64 ephemera, paintings based on 23–4, 102 failure 1, 11, 15, 35, 50, 62, 99, 102, 108, 125 Feinstein, Rochelle 56–7 Feldman, Amy 102–4; apparent effortlessness 103; binary palette 104; single-session paintings 102 Fischer, Andreas 127 Flood, Mark 56 ­Fontana, Lucio 119 Foster, Hal 23, 133 Frankfort, Dana 39 Frieze 131 Furnas, Barnaby 9 Fusco, Coco 122 Gasiorowski, Gérard 76–7 Geers, David 129–31 Gendel, Milton 121, 124 Giacometti, Alberto 2, 3, 15 A Giacometti Portrait (James Lord) 4, 29–30 Gijsbrechts, Cornelis Norbertus 109 Glissant, Edouard 126 Gormley, Clare 59 the Great Recession 8–9, 69–70 Grosse, Katherina 50

Index Grosz, George 56 Guston, Philip 3, 5, 33, 55, 60, 61, 65, 103, 106, 118; “Faith, Hope and Impossibility” 4, 31; justifying the act of creation 32; legacy of Abstract Expressionism 31–2 Halley, Peter 35, 99 Hammons, Chie 116 Hammons, David 32–3; Concerto in Black and Blue 120; declining to explain his art 114–16; Fur Coats 114–15; identity as a Black artist 118; and opacity 124–5; radical withholding 121; reminiscences of California artists 123; street art 114, 120–1; Tarp Paintings 111–26 Handke, Peter 75 Hantaï, Simon 88, 89 Hardt, Michael and Toni Negri 69 Hay, Alex 101 Hecker, Rachel 99–102; autobiography 99, 101; contemporary vanitas paintings 101; installation at Texas Gallery 100; simulacra of everyday items 100 Heilmann, Mary 5, 8, 18, 60 Heiser, Jörg, All of a Sudden: Things That Matter in Contemporary Art 7 “High Times, Hard Times” (exhibition) 7 Hirst, Damien 9 Humphries, Jacqueline 25 iconoclasm 36–7 “impossible painting” 5, 11, 23, 29–30, 31, 35, 64–5, 68, 133 James, Charles (designer) 104 Jensen, Sergej 11, 35–6 Jones, Kellie 121, 124 Judd, Donald 76 Julien, François 104 Kafka, Franz 27, 59 Kee, Joan 79–80 Kippenberger, Martin 10, 14, 15, 55–6; Preis Paintings 101 Koons, Jeff 6, 9 Korean Ink Painting (Mungnimhoe) 77–80

Index Krauss, Rosalind 82–3, 108 ­Krebber, Michael 11, 18–20, 67, 95–7; Contempt for One’s Work as Planning for Career 11, 20, 95, 128; dandyism 95–6; double bind of choice 96; on irony in painting 97; “Ridiculized Snails” 96 Lao-Tzu 3 Last Paintings 68 Lawson, Deana 59 Leiris, Michel 88–9 Levi, Raffi 80 Lozano, Lee 54, 66 Lurie, Boris 56 Marden, Brice 66 Martin, Chris 10–11 masterpieces 2, 23, 27, 106 Matisse, Henri 33, 63–4, 91, 103 May 68, 89 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 5; “Cézanne’s Doubt” 4, 7, 10 MFA programs 68 Michaud, Yves 87 Michelangelo, and the non finito 2–3, 34 Miraculous, The (Raphael Rubinstein) 120 Miró, Joan 20–1 Mitchell, Joan 33, 123 Morales, Carmengloria 75–6 Moran, Joe 46 Motherwell, Robert 26, 55, 63 Mugar, Martin 47 Mulligan, Gerry 119–20 Murakami, Takashi 9, 130 Murillo, Oscar 122 negation 15, 23, 30–1, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 86, 107 Neutral, the (Roland Barthes) 53, 104 Newman, Barnett 63, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47–8, 61 nihilism 47–8 Oehlen, Albert 17, 97–9; large-scale abstraction 17; painterly lyricism 97; on punk 98; rejection of meaning 98–9; use of graphic design software 17, 97 O’Hara, Frank 38, 123

155

Olson, Craig 10, 11 Oppenheim, Lois 45 “Painting, Now and Forever, Part II” (exhibition) 11 Palermo, Blinky 84 Paolini, Giulio 84 On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (film) 5 Pendleton, Adam 62 Perec, Georges 6 Perloff, Marjorie 41–2 Peyton, Elizabeth 66 Picabia, Francis 4, 15 Pindell, Howardena 3, 42 ­poetry 6, 20, 134 Polke, Sigmar 15, 74–5, 95 Ponge, Francis 6, 92–3, 105, 120–21; Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi, 6; La Fabrique; du Pré 6 Practicing Refusal Collective, the, 59 precarity 8, 53, 59, 69–70, 131, 133 Prince, Richard 24, 66 “Provisional Painting” (2009 article), background 2, 5–8; reception of, 127–9, 132, 133–4; Provisional painting, versus Last Paintings 27, 34–5, 36; and Relational Art, 133 Provisional Politics (Elisabeth Ellis) 134 Provisionality, and “bad” painting 26–7; and criticism 38; difficulty of defining, 53; emergence of 1–12, 15; genealogy of 15–16; and gestural abstraction 26; punk as a precedent 15, 98; and sculpture 7, 26 “Quiet as it’s Kept” (exhibition) 126 Rauch, Neo 66 Rauschenberg, Robert 15 Reed, David 74 refusal as an artistic stance, 54, 57–9, 88; history of 107 Reinecke, Chris 74 Reinhardt, Ad 34, 63 Relational art 49, 133 Relyea, Lane 128–9, 131 Rockburne, Dorothea 7, 73, 74

156 Rosenberg, Harold 89, 92, 103 Rovatti, Pier Aldo 50 Rubinstein, Heather Bause 132 Rudolf, Anthony 2 Ryman, Robert 36 Salle, David 15 Salmon, Peter 62 San Francisco abstract artists 3–4 Sandner, Stefan 23–4, 65, 101 Sartre, Jean-Paul 64; Being and Nothingness 30 Schifano, Mario 85 Schjeldahl, Peter 124 Schnabel, Julian 11, 51, 55, 86 Schwabsky, Barry 16, 131 Schwitters, Kurt 86–7, 99 Searle, Adrian 19 self-doubt 5, 29, 31; loss of 67–8; 106, 129; painters rediscovering 38, 64–5; in poem by Mary Jo Bang 134 Seliger, Jonathan 101 Siegel, Katy 74 Sillman, Amy 58–9, 132 Situationists 5–6, 109, 124 Smith, Duncan 117 Smith, Kimber 21–3 Smith, Patti 6 Smith, Richard Cándida 3–4 ­Smith, Roberta 16 Snyder, Joan 73–4 Soriano, Peter 26 Spender, Stephen, “One More New Botched Beginning” 6 Steir, Pat 73 Steyerl, Hito, the poor image 8 Stockholder, Jessica 50, 82 Stoichita, Victor I. 109 Studio 35 Artists’ Sessions 33, 63 Sugarman, George 103 Suh, Se-Ok 77–80

Index Tàpies, Antoni 120 Te-Tao Ching 3, 61 Tevet, Nahum 80–4 Thomas, Alma 123 Thomasos, Denyse 126 Tiravanija, Rikrit 133 Tuttle, Richard 7 Umland, Anne 20 unfinished art 2 unfinished, art that appears to be 1, 2, 3, 15, 20, 22, 27, 33–4, 53, 54, 57, 60–5, 67, 95, 97 “The Unknown Masterpiece” (Honoré de Balzac) 2 “Unmonumental” (exhibition) 7, 26 Valéry, Paul 15 Van Velde, Bram 43–6, 89, 99, 133 Vattimo, Gianni 47–52, 127 Vergne, Jean-Charles 16 Vila-Matas, Enrique 6, 58, 89, 122; Bartleby & Co, 6, 122, The Illogic of Kassel 122 Village Voice 11 Wat, Pierre 85 weak thought (il pensiero debole), and foundational structures, 48–9; origins of 47–8; and provisional painting 50–2 Wearing, Gillian 108 White, Wendy 25–6 Whitney, Stanley 3, 60, 126 Whitten, Jack 119, Birmingham; 124 Wilson, Rachel 128 Wolukau-Wanambwa, Stanley 59 Wool, Christopher 17–18, 65 Zen Buddhism 61–2 Zombie Formalism 133

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