IIna Bierstedt. Ambulance 2004. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 65 x 90 cm.

Geraldine Gliubislavich . Untitled 2006. Oil on canvas. 60 x 60 cm.

Kati Heck,“PUSST'N”, 2006,Oil on canvas 160 x 195 cm, priv.collection

Hideko Inoue, Red Circle 2005. Oil on Canvas.

Arif Ozacka. Untitled (Green) 2006. Oil on canvas. 189 x 80 cm.

Gines Parra, oil on canvas, Paris,1932

Barry Reigate, Umbrella, 2006, oil on canvas, 189 x 150 cm

CANON
13th Oct- 18 th Nov2006

featuring

Ina Bierstedt, Geraldine Gliubislavich ,Katie Heck,Hideko Inoue, Arif Ozacka, Gines Parra, Barry Reigate

curated by Ken Pratt

Some contemporary painters and the canon of European modernist painting languages
Painting, we are told, has triumphed. Cavernous art temples that had become almost the exclusive domain of unwieldy installations and projected images are once again lined with canvases. Commercial galleries that built their cutting-edge reputations for advocating work in challenging media are now presenting works in the most traditional of materials; oil on canvas. And, collections that sought to assimilate the defiant demands of ephemeral works in conservation-unfriendly materials are having a “light work” day.
Exactly why painting has re-merged as a “hot” artistic process is, of course, open to debate. Whether all the buzz about painting is actually, as cynics would have it, the result of an intentional art market economic manipulation or the more general seduction of the art world into cycles of trends set up by a globalised fashion-media complex, remains conjecture. What cannot be ignored, however, is painting.

Painting, and more importantly painting by a younger generation of contemporary artists, has once more affirmed its place in key positions of visibility in the art world. Critical discussions and reappraisals of phenomena such as the Leipziger Schule, The School of Antwerp and the Neue Wilden in key spaces with an international audience –both physical and textual- seem to underscore the validity of the choice of younger contemporary artists to return to the most traditional of western artistic practices.
Reactionary or radical? Or the art world’s equivalent of a “third way”’; the neo-liberal agenda carved out with a palette knife?
The discussion is open. However, despite the potential political critiques, certain glaring circumstances surrounding this revival in painting should not be overlooked. The shifting context that has recently “allowed” the re-emergence of painting craft might be part of a broader realization that, in the digital age, the discussions that once informed conceptual practice and contemplations about representation and the nature of image production are fully assimilated into mainstream artistic practice and less pressing than they were even 15 years ago. Freed from the imperative to engage with photography, film and the other digital means of producing images now so widely available that their use is no longer sufficient to constitute an artistic action in and of itself, artists are free to return to researching other craft-based means of constructing arresting images and discourses.
Unsurprisingly, the new generation of painters –for the larger part trained in western(ised) systems of art education- will often look to the modernist languages that arose in the twentieth century to progress their research; the canon of languages, ideologies and practices in relation to which their roles in our current societies are still continuously negotiated.
In examining the work of a handful such emerging artists; younger painters, perhaps we are prompted into some secondary recognitions. Namely that European modernist painting languages have always had an intrinsic reflective gaze that fore grounds explorations of that which is outside the everyday reference, whether in terms of culture, states of consciousness or juxtapositional relationships. The mechanisms and locus of this expression of a desire to escape or transcend the immediate daily world may vary, but it is nonetheless the “red thread” that connects the major modernist languages of twentieth century art.
We all know the narratives. The naïve fantasies about freer “primitive” cultures were an understandable reaction to the straightjacketed society of fin de siecle Wilhelmine Germany; Expressionism. The sheer scale of the catastrophe that was the First World War and its political implications make it easy to understand how and why it would prompt so many artistic reactions in search of, no, even demanding, a reality beyond the daily nightmare; Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaism. The inter-war descent into a tension between hope and despair; the New Objectivity. Another world war and the subsequent divergence of political systems and daily realities demanding refusal or retouching; Abstraction, Social Realism….
In simplistic terms, the canon of European modernist painting languages is largely about artists seeking to escape, alter or resist the daily European (and later Western) reality. This commonality transcends the look of many of these languages, accounts for the multiple “calligraphies”. The fact that individual artists or groups of artists, developed different strategies, political views, preoccupations and strands may certainly account for the development of multiple “calligraphies”. Surrealism does not look like Expressionism. But, that does not necessarily negate the commonality that they are both forms of a plea or a demand for something other than the daily grind of their contemporaneous unjust and cruel societies. Focussing on the look, the “calligraphy” of a particular school or modernist painting language runs the risk of seeing primarily the difference –in form, palette, content- and not recognising the similarities – in the drive, the intention, the aspirations. Whatever the florid claims and stated positions of a particular movement might have been –in many cases they clearly saw themselves as very different from or existing in reaction against the preceding tendency- apart from the individual “calligraphy”, they nonetheless had commonalities.
However, even if one focuses on these “calligraphies”, the surfaces, there are similarities in the canonical languages; leitmotifs; liturgy.
One is the preoccupation with form related to culture and another is altered states of consciousness. Certainly, the style, the “look” of engaging with these varies and is constantly reinvented but their elements can be traced through the canon.
The third factor impacting on all of these, of course, is the autobiographical. This is frequently a key factor in the canon of European modernist languages, given the way in which a populist art historical overview has effectively created a “star” system of artists. The individual identity and experiences of artists has often played an important role, recognised or unacknowledged, in how they have engaged with the painting languages unfolding around them.
If one considers the aspect of form and culture, the leitmotifs are easily traceable. The Expressionist preoccupation with portraying imagery of “primitive” people and their “freer” way of living becomes more focussed on the actual forms of “primitive” art in later modernist painting; a strand that subsequently trickles into every aspect of modernist visual and design culture. Even once it is subsequently streamlined into pure geometric designs at the Bauhaus, it is now ridiculous to deny the role of visual forms lifted from non-European cultures in shaping the calligraphies of modernist art. After 80 years, the Bauhaus Archiv managed to recover Marcel Breuer’s 1921 “African Chair”, a pure indulgence of an African throne by the man associated heavily with a modernist, “international” style. If anyone ever had any doubt about the way in which European modernist languages lifted wholeheartedly from non-European cultures, this fantasy of African regal splendour readily convinces.
Of course, there is nothing radical in acknowledging these aspects of the European modernist canon. In broader art historical terms, this fascination and appropriation of forms from non-European cultures is merely a continuation of the 18th and 19th century traditions of Orientalism. What, however, was significantly different was the context. If earlier orientalist traditions in painting were primarily an expensive hobby for the rich; an escapist fantasy game lifting forms (and wealth) from distant and increasingly colonised cultures, then the modernist preoccupation with these foreign forms had a different agenda. Naïve, certainly at its birth, but nonetheless earnest. These artists and movements genuinely believed that they could contribute to changing the world in which they too were shackled by its ideologies and political structures.
Post-colonial cultural theory has pointed out, at best, the naiveté, at worst, the residual racism and collusion with imperialism of some of these artistic practices. But if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then it is worth noting that the very real hell of the First World War and its aftermath would hardly be a reason to discourage artists from finding solace or hope from outside their own social structures. The other, cultures beyond the old countries, remained a powerful source of promise and inspiration for European painters and artists for much of the first half of the twentieth century.
And beneath the wider trend, the autobiographical. It is also worth remembering that a number of recognised European modernists were the products of a 19th colonial Europe, either through choice -travelling to these “new” distant lands- or through circumstances, such as being born or spending formative years in the colonies. A number of artists engaging in the various early modernist circles who contributed to the canon had direct familiarity with at least the visual aspects of the cultures on which they drew; the look of the land, the colours and shapes, objects.
The neglected Spanish modernist, Gines Parra is a good example for consideration. Gines Parra was a contemporary of Picasso and a member of the Spanish enclave of the School of Paris. In his work, perhaps informed by his experiences of growing up in north Africa and South America, or perhaps merely as an adherent to the modernist concerns with “primitive art”, he uses form and colour in a twentieth century painting language alluding to visual elements of cultures beyond its native Europe. But Parra also raises other questions about the canon, namely the pecking order of contributors.
Although he showed with Picasso and sold work prolifically at the time, he has certainly been awarded a lesser place in our collective memory, in the populist art history star system. In fact, it might not be too brutal to say that he hasn’t even made the transition to a populist art history star.
Is this because he was, objectively, a lesser artist than Picasso? Or might it have to do with his biography? From a family of miners, Parra’s return to his native Europe to study and work as a painter was a very real economic struggle. He lacked the social capital of networks and connections easily made by more gregarious or privileged artists in his circle. He struggled with physical and psychological problems that made him less suited to playing the part of a bijou bohemian for an audience of patrons. How many artists like Gines Parra contributed to the canon without full acknowledgement, contributing to discussions and perhaps even showing images captured directly from the regions to which the larger group looked for inspiration?
There is a certain irony that, with all of their association with socialist and left wing political thinking, many of the groups and movements that are credited with the development of modernist painting languages now exist, as art historic entities, in a deeply hierarchical star system. Perhaps this has nothing to do with the mechanisms of these groupings of artists themselves, but instead underscores the underlying reactionary structuring of populist European art history that has, somehow, achieved the sleight of hand that implicitly accords importance to artists on the grounds of a false objectivity. Who was remembered and collected was as much part of the social structures and mechanisms of its day as it is now. Like in any textual or spoken language the process of painting is developmental. Each new development may expand a preceding tenet. It may even contain completely new elements not seen before. But, importantly, it must contain enough of an established recognisable language to make sense to its audience. It must locate itself in relation to historic developments to make sense in its own new terms.

Modern art has been afforded an almost fetishic mandate to be socially transgressive, rebellious and badly behaved in the way we carry the communal memory of its narratives and fables. It is not unexpected, then, that we have spent a lot of time fixating on its explosive potential. In the legends, Modernism is invented in a single orgasmic moment at the première of Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in Paris in 1913. In the way the legend circulates in popular parlance, one can almost imagine Diagahlev and Malcom McClaren sharing a crafty fag and wicked giggle at the back of the stalls as the bourgeoisie explode in outrage.
Punk, Modernism, Flower Power, Cabaret Voltaire, the first Surrealist salon….the short-hands and narratives we use to describe key moments in the cultures of artistic or creative expression inevitably share a language and structure even if using a different vocabulary. And in the case of modernism –and all of its related subcultures- these usually emphasize a romanticized explosive moment, something that is simultaneous a birth spasm and an orgasm.

It’s easy to see why the more dramatic narratives might literally prove popular (or more accurately populist) but this may also account for how we have overlooked the crucial need of early modernists to connect to preceding languages. In our popular myths, we want to see them as radicals, fiercely throwing new unrecognizable forms into a resistant world. But, how could one express altered states of consciousness -deeply personal subjective and affective experiences- without some commonality of language? Would not the experiments of Surrealism have slipped into the realms of a schizophrenic’s failed attempts to communicate had they not deftly deployed realistic and figurative elements that made sense in the banal daily world? Could one have expressed the world of the subconscious and dreams without drawing on the quintessentially conscious and normative?
The expression of states of experience and consciousness beyond the daily world was a strong preoccupation for many twentieth century modernist art movements, no doubt taking the textual language of Freud as a starting point. And, indeed, it is a feature of a number of younger contemporary artists who choose to paint.
In examining Expressionist or Surrealist works that seek to communicate some experience of an altered state of consciousness it becomes rapidly clear that it is what the artist shares with the viewer that is key, not the differences between them. We retell a lot of narratives that highlight the modernist artist’s separation from the society in which he or she worked; the artist as a catalytic rebel. And we neglect to examine the evidence that the choices of many artists to use shared visual languages –for example figurative or representative elements- underscores their desire to communicate with the audience. We would be wise to reconsider the modernist artist as a mediator for shared experiences of altered consciousness.

It is sensible that we don’t apply a transhistorical reading of this imagery, that we avoid confusing it with the languages that postdate mass drug use. Science still has no viable model to explain human consciousness in biophysical terms: we cannot point to the chemistry that is responsible for making us know that we are because we think. But there are some credible and rationale reasons to believe that the brain requires altered states in order to orientate itself to the normative in much the same way that an intentional lie, when recorded, can help to make a polygraph reading more accurate.

Without ignoring any of the biopsychosocial factors that are currently used to understand such behaviours that result in us altering our perception of the daily world around us, some scientists postulate that the need to do so is an inbuilt feature. It might be one of the means by which the brain measures our individual position in a relational actuality, practicing all its necessary skills – locomotor to social- under a range of operating conditions.
It is therefore possible to acknowledge the implicit attempts to engage with altered states of consciousness in modernist painting languages without confusing them with the image cultures arising from later drug subcultures and mass intoxication cultures. Certainly, many modernist movements were about making new meanings, about giving expression to ideas and experiential states that were taboo or were simply not able to be discussed. Again, the development of an appropriate non-visual language –for example, Freudian- had to exist first. But, for the greater part, this did not or could not involve refusing common language. Even where the figure or objects from daily life is absent, the most classical of languages are reworked; composition, line and form taken directly from great masterpieces of old European painting dating back hundreds of years.
Perhaps many of the essential greatest modernists are lost to us now; were diagnosed as mentally ill and unfairly forgotten because they defiantly refused any shared language, any point of consensual connection. But that was certainly not the case for hundreds who have passed into historic reverence; the early makers of the modernist canon.

Bearing all this in mind, it is fitting then that many of the newer generation of painters make use of painting languages we already understand, least of all since most western systems of art education place high import on justifying the art historical precedent for one’s own artistic practice. Certainly in the case of some, their practice, either at its core or additionally, involves an intrinsic concern that relates to this modernist preoccupation with expressing altered states whether these be cultural, psychological or even purely in terms of sensibility.
The individual bodies of work of Kati Heck and Barry Reigate share certain such preoccupations even where the content and intent is almost in radical political opposition. One can only imagine a Beckettian conversation between the two artists if locked in a confined space. Her fierce post-feminist discourse might have some issues with his big piles of tits. On the other hand, the similarities that connect them might well prove rich grounds for shared concerns.
Emerging from two different European cultures and each trained in respective systems with notable differences in emphasis, these are two individual artists that both find their individual way –very probably to different ends- to the painting languages emerging from the Surrealist use of the human body and everyday objects. The Surrealists held a certain preoccupation with the body, often placed it into compositions that suggested some kind of social taboo-breaking or hubris; nudes appearing in public, genitals on parade.
Again, the debt of Freud is well acknowledged. But what might be neglected is the efficacy of connecting a visual language to a social language; of penetrating the popular psyche. If there is now a certain snobbery about the work of the Surrealists it risks dismissing the popular as populist. One of the reasons the mundane suburban dwellers of today will readily accept Dali or Ernst as “art” whilst still tut-tutting about the amount of public money spent on more recent conceptual works is because the transition to a broader cultural understanding of the work was made a long time ago.

Pretty soon after the fuss, Freud’s ideas became a popular pastime with tabloids and magazines all playing their part in dumbing down –and transforming- his language into something that was readily embraced in a popular way. A popular language that had a conversational and textual grasp of “dream analysis”, for example, could readily make the connection to visual languages that seemed to be dealing with similar ideas. In many senses, this is pure coincidence. The fact that their visual language distilled into a form that could be easily read (and actually accepted as art) by the societies they hoped to whip into a frenzy would probably come as a disappointment to some of the Surrealist gang. It is important to recognize, for example, that many of the outrages occurring in relation to the Surrealists were based on the offence to public decency. In order to understand that its decency had been offended, there is an implicit acknowledgement of understanding the offending works; getting its content. The general and generic publics were offended because they correctly understood that a lot of the work was about sex.
A similar corporal preoccupation, and the presence, subtle or otherwise, of the sexualized body is something we find in both the work of Kati Heck and Barry Reigate. Interestingly enough, both share another sensibility of Surrealist languages: a certain trangressive humour. Theirs are often very funny works.
In the case of Kati Heck’s work, this kind of language is reworked into a clearly (post)feminist discourse. These can be works about women behaving badly, defiantly refusing the games and roles that are forced upon them as little girls. But these are not the images of women casting off the trappings adapted to pleasure the male gaze; no campaign posters inviting women to don overalls and throw away their make-up bags. Her images are far more enigmatic and, frankly, threatening. The female figures in Heck’s work demand to have it all and, perhaps, exist in a world of complex thoughts where we make assumptions about them at our own peril. Her female figures are all the more powerful because they acknowledge their interest in a kind of post-feminist relationship to their own sexualized identity: their bodies may be a battleground, but if they are, they are defining the terms of combat. Conversely, the male body may merely exist as a humorous iconography, a big juicy sausage.
Of course, importantly, like many younger painters researching the canon of modernism, Heck’s references and painting languages are not confined to a single modernist language. We are invited to dip in and out of the pool of languages in a way that best suits the intention of the work. Pop Art-like outlines might draw attention to key elements of the painting; Expressionist or Neue Wilden brush-stokes may stand for a certain emotional wildness on areas of the canvas; a certain New Objectivity framing of the portraiture elements may, at once, connect to the canon of historic languages and, simultaneously, more conceptual preoccupations for “the documentary” in the last decade….
This polyglot approach is also very much in evidence in Barry Reigate’s work. The notion that his work shares with Heck’s a certain Surrealist language might raise eyebrows. Surely it’s the influence of Philip Guston that is glaringly obvious? His deployment of a kind of thwarted cartoon language pioneered by Guston is very much in evidence. Hands flail in revolutionary, epic struggle. Or just engage in groping nipples. The jaundiced view that Guston brought to the way in which he represented the human condition, a reduction to a kind of visual shorthand drawing on a language accessible to the masses through comics and newspaper cartoons, is very much in evidence in Reigate’s work, as it should be given his acute awareness of the mass media’s production of images. But as with Guston, Reigate’s insight is ultimately deeply serious and informed: the centuries of art constructing meanings through use of the human body underlies this practice in a way that is often modest in its ability to be communicated to a broader audience. If painting is something of a personal quest for him, as it appears to be, then this work both addresses an honesty of personal identity and the discipline of the academic artist. On one level this really is the tit-crazed vision of a man who will readily enjoy the pleasures of tabloid offerings. But, beneath the brutal honesty, there is also recognition of how these more garish pleasures connect to hundreds of years of painting the human body. Somewhere in the garish slapped-on paint we recognize the iconic connection. We see those fingers in 1594 reaching out to the nipple as the topless d'Estrée sisters get down to a bit of nipple tweaking….
And so back to Surrealism. The dumping of naked human parts into everyday situations from the machine age was not only prompted by Freud. In more closed professional terms, in terms of the “insider” trade secrets, Surrealism like most other modernist forms looked to European painting history.
In a television interview, Vivienne Westwood was asked what her advice was for budding young designers who wanted to come up with revolutionary, new fashion. Her response was that what the aspirants should do is visit The National Gallery in London with a sketchbook and copy the clothes in the great masters. In a sense, her advice was to find the meaning of cut and line through an age-old craft. Only then could one be qualified to define the new and revolutionary through its connections to what had already been achieved.
The Westwood interview highlights that this practice is hardly hidden from the public awareness: Westwood stated to millions what Ernst or Picabia might have said on a prime time chat show had they existed in their day. But somehow, this element, the apprenticeship to the craft, seems to be overlooked when considering how it was that developers of modernist painting languages actually nurtured the necessary craft to make their contributions. Why is it that every provincial heavy metal fan owns both a Salvador Dali and a Hieronymous Bosch poster? The answer might be as simple as a self-inflicted apprenticeship on the part of Dali, effectively connecting painting languages across time.
Barry Reigate’s practice involves a conscious study of modernist painting languages to explore his preoccupations, concerns and personal questions. The language of Surrealism extends beyond the more general depiction of the physical body in a sexualized context. In his case, the work of Magritte is a conscious starting point, particularly the works from the artist’s self-proclaimed “Le Vache” period.
In about 1948, the Belgian painter René Magritte threw himself into a body of work that he called his “La Vache” period. This body of works, largely featuring the female nude was a direct attack on what Magritte saw as the smug comfort of the French art establishment with modernist tropes. The name he chose for this period is itself a bitter pun alluding to Fauvism and the rather unflattering depictions of the female nude. Whether the brunt of the joke was actually women or the male-dominated art establishment is subject to disagreement. In either case, Magritte’s impassioned change of direction was not well received commercially or critically and he later returned to the fold, producing works more akin to his earlier style as befitted an elder statesmen of Surrealism.
In considering the source of inspiration, it is easy to see how it appeals within Reigate’s practice. The depictions of the sexualized body and particularly the female body as a simultaneous object of desire and derision (or even repulsion) make immediate sense within Reigate’s use of painting as a means of a personal exploration of identity. But, of course, painting is not a practice without serious intellectual consideration for him. Magritte’s experience also highlights the political contexts in which art is made both on a lager societal scale and in terms of the industry; the petty politics of the art world.
Exactly what it means to make paintings and how one achieves valid artistic expression through painting in the light of all the preceding developments in contemporary art is one of the core questions of Barry Reigate’s practice. His work reflects not only on the developments of modernist painting languages but also their relationships to the political structures from within which they are produced. The failure of ideologies seems to hover within the paint. And, it is important to remember that although representational and figurative modernist languages –such as the Surrealist tropes- are strongly represented, his work is not confined to exploration in only these forms. The “clown” paintings featuring large dots reference both Abstract Expressionism and Hirst-style art market commodifications; paintings of soggy brown rainbows question and oddly reassert the validity of abstraction and the Guston-esque cartoon elements contain a certain admiration not only for a style of figurative modernist painting, but by implication, acknowledge the power of “low culture” to produce a lingering and powerful visual alphabet.
At times the cynicism almost burns. Hungover clowns and flaccid, spent members are hardly heroic or attractive. Yet, the total commitment to painting as a practice remains.. There is recognition that by fully engaging in the canon of modernist languages and then painting like it still matters, with intelligent forethought and a healthy dose of skepticism, an arresting post-ironic position can be reached.
Irony has been used as the antidote for the failures of modernism.….
Fashion has taught us that we live in a world in which an assault on our hippness and coolness could come at any time, from any place. This is not what Nicolas Bourriaud meant when he coined “relational aesthetics”, but perhaps it should have been. We have learned to live in a world in which we must negotiate our position in three dimensions, in relation to many points in space rather than the historical “trickle down” hierarchy. And with so many media-empowered positions, it is only natural that the locus of beauty, too, has shifted to being relational. We must negotiate the values of our personal tastes in relation to the values of the opinions of the media-empowered stakeholders. When there simply become too many positions to simultaneously appease, then irony is our friend.
The reasons for which early conceptualist artists refused to paint had very little to do with the reasons for artist resistance to the medium in more recent decades. But the fact that the non-painting visual artist became an orthodoxy has also allowed the game of reputedly ironic positions to prosper. In an art world in which naiveté is unacceptable, unless it’s ironic, why show your real artistic craft in the most traditional of terms? Better to be “ironic” if you do or to be even more “ironic” by being a professional visual artist who can’t or won’t paint or who chooses to only make bad paintings.
The fragmentation of positions standing as arbiters of quality and taste have made the whole notion of beauty –a traditional aspiration of the visual artist- a huge problem. At the risk of generalization, perhaps this is why one of the strategies that the contemporary art machine appears to have adopted in recent decades is to simply avoid the question in many cases. Museums have been filled with works that foreground the documentary aesthetic. Commercial galleries have been keen to showcase works in which any discussion of beauty in art historical terms could be circumvented. Or passed off as ironic. Intensity has had to be measured in directly political or anti-political terms. Curators became frightened of beauty or worried that they would not know how to recognize it. The criteria for art had to be shifted to the more intellectual realms; to be justified in academic terms that shied away from trying to engage with the nature (or visual manifestations) of beauty.
Of course, this is an overstatement and a generalization. It should not be understood as a negation of all the important work of Conceptualism and critical discourses in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, it was the very natural progression of Modernism to explore all of the different ways in which artists contribute to cultural knowledge that do not involve painting pictures or making traditional physical objects. The question it does raise, however, is about the nature of the art machine’s strategies for coping with its own relational place in a world in which visual and textual languages defining or representing beauty have become so fragmented.
Perhaps it acts as a background for the drives behind certain artists’ decision to return to painting and the increased preparedness of curators, galleries and collectors to engage with works made in traditional media and drawing on visual languages that pre-date Conceptualism as well as those painting languages that post-date it.
If we acknowledge the generalized resistance to holding up painting as state-of-the-art in recent decades, then it is only sensible to examine the qualification of the phenomena; the conditions in which painting was held up as good art during the height of its being unhip and uncool.
One obvious qualification was where painting extended the discussions of Conceptualism. One need only think of the work of Luc Tuymans and other painters of the School of Antwerp or even the work of Kippenberger to see where painting and Conceptualism could co-exist in a contemporaneous, validated form.
And, indeed, the persistence of interest in the work of artists arising from such positions means that for some of the younger painters now exploring a post-ironic path, asking questions about the nature of representation and beauty in very traditional media, it is inevitable that such influences –as much as earlier European modernist languages- might be visible.
The works of the German painter Ina Bierstedt pursue both an intellectual and an intuitive path to arrive at their resolutions. And often these resolutions are about that now problematic concept of beauty. These are very much works that examine the formal nature of painting and how painting constructs what we understand in narrative terms even when what actually remains on the canvas gives us very little hard evidence to believe the things we believe about the work. There is a wild romanticism about Bierstedt’s work, something of an achievement in itself since many of the works are constructed in disciplined techniques of combining abstraction and representational or illustrative elements on a canvas using the unusual combination of both oils and acrylics.
Taken at this description of her practice, one might immediately make connections to the Leipzig painting traditions of the DDR where Bierstedt herself grew up. And certainly, the combination of figurative and abstracted elements, no to mention the sublimated romanticism, connects her work to this tradition. But the painting languages she uses, in part, almost bear more connection to abstract expressionist and neo-expressionist traditions, at least in their constructions. This is painting that seeks to find the beautiful construction of the purely abstract where paint runs and is forced to swathe in barely controlled ways.
The dimension of her work that makes it particularly fresh and interesting is the way in which this abstraction is combined with representational elements to lead our mediations and associations on particular routes. In many works, these elements are drawn from nature – hawks and other beasts of the wild- and we dutifully combine these cues with palette to dive into a world of woodlands and forests. Even with these restrained modernist languages, we can follow Bierstedt back to much older German romantic traditions.
In other works, associations exist much more freely. In “Ambulanz” for example, a large swirling red and orange form at the heart of the painting exists as a beautiful thing, perhaps a seductive coral or sea anemone. But, juxtaposed with the eponymous ambulance, perhaps it is something less celebratory; a fire or a crash that might be the reason the ambulance is needed. However, regardless of whether she is leading us up the woodland path in search of implied narratives or simply making visually associative connections, the work is always underpinned by an intellectual understanding of how the paint itself is applied to an intended end. She considers its formal role in facilitating the process through using the languages of abstraction with an appropriate proximity to representation to deliver what she requires.
The Paris-based painter Geraldine Gliubislavich cites Tuymans, along with the likes of Marlene Dumas and Peter Doig, as a direct influence on her work. There are some similarities in the use of colour at times or even the type of seemingly opaque, almost irrelevant vignettes some of her works depict that connect her with Tuymans in only the vaguest way. However, her brushstrokes often share a looser even more flamboyant sensibility about them even if it is to actually give more detail than he might. There is something of very early modernist languages here; something of Post-Impressionist techniques hidden beneath the sombre tones. More accurately, there is something of painting languages on the cusp of modernity fusing the heritages of both romantic and realist traditions.
Perhaps more strangely, the groupings of her figures in her battle paintings share a certainly sensibility with Ensor. It's not in style or palette, but rather in the composition of a dense grouping of people at once littering and being consumed by the messy environments in which they find themselves, more usually found in his drawings.
But, what does connect her to Tuymans and the other artists that advocated a strong conceptualist approach to painting is that she is as much interested in the relationships that develop between works when they are displayed. She is interested the way in which we change our reading of images based on the relational values we assign to works in new contexts. Hence, she sometimes shows works in a way that is perhaps more accurately labeled “installation”, the space filled with paintings –sometimes piled against walls rather than hanging in the usual manner- in which the totality of the experience is rather different from what we might read in a single painting.
As with the School of Antwerp and other painters influenced by its distillation of a conceptual painting practice, there is opacity to this work. Certainly, we may readily read an image in the most straightforward sense –see that it is a woman in a rustic interior or recognize a swarming crowd- but the relationships between the works hold a strange opacity. What exactly is it? How are these images related? Why has she painted this image? We are almost challenged to answer the questions by the paintings.
We have become so informed about the practice of the most successful pioneers of such painting practices and their visual languages, that we sometimes forget the level of obliqueness in the work; yes, we are allowed to readily read the image because of its use of realistic and figurative imagery, but are we really able to “read” it? If it were not for the media exposition of Tuyman’s starting points and concerns, the “back stories” behind his presented images, would we implicitly know what was going on?
This is not a value judgment about the quality of the works arising from this tendency of conceptual painting so much as framing a question about its mechanism. The intentional refusal of an easily understood narrative, the creation of multiple or open-ended narratives is as much characteristic of its mechanisms as the sexual-punchline is in many Surrealist works. And so it should be given the stage at which it emerged historically.
If Surrealism’s visual language is bound up in the broader cultural language of Freud that emerged before it, then the visual languages emerging from certain types of conceptual painting arising in the 1980’s are heavily bound up in the broader dissemination of philosophy and cultural theory, memes during that period; semiotics, deconstruction, post-modernism. And, more importantly the memes that connected them in popular awareness: a pluralism of readings, meanings and histories; the shift of emphasis to the one who reads, sees or analyses over the one who intends, makes or does. The audience as much as the painter must become responsible for deciding what the work is about.
It is probably inevitable that the question of a post-modernism would emerge at this point. And it may or may not prove a useful aspect to consider in relation to a younger generation drawing on modernist painting languages. In effect, it raises the much broader question of whether a “post-modern” painting language actually exists or, more convolutedly, whether, in fact, many of the younger generation of painters referencing modernist painting languages actually do so from a post-modern vantage point, creating their discourses through a pastiche that draws on numerous forms arising in the preceding eras.
It is fairly unlikely in any case to be fully resolved here.
It is senseless to deny is the influence of theoretical post-modernism on the development of conceptual painting practices in the 1980’s. In much the same way that Freud’s ideas had a clear influence on Surrealism, notions of post-modernism influenced many of the artists applying their conceptual painting practices at that time. But does Post-modernism translate into a distinct visual language? Did it have its own house style?
If it did, it certainly never arrived with the clarity that architecture and furniture from the late 1980’s can now be recognized as using a “post-modern” vernacular. And, perhaps that is because, unlike the relationship between Surrealism and a popular Freudian language, the impact of theories of “post modernism” arrived with painters in a different way. For a start, it wasn’t through a popular language already established in a broad cultural framework. These theories were more likely to be introduced within the confines of formal education structures or rarified intellectual artistic circles rather than through the tabloids and magazines. Secondly, these theories were received and applied, rather than developed by the conceptual painters. Many of the thinkers having an important influence published works in specialist academic scenarios decades before their secondary influence on a generation of artists. And, therein, there are a number of differences between it and the relationship of Surrealism to Freud.
In simplistic terms, the theoretical discourses impacting on the development of painters in the 1980s and early 1990s was more likely to equip them with practices rather than content. Surrealist works are laden with content taken straight from personal dreams fused with a popular Freudian tone of the dream world and juxtapositions reminiscent of Freud’s widely read case studies. Whereas, the painters in the 1980’s had been posed a series of questions or offered ideas about “the image” and visual signs as a starting point from which they must conduct their own research.
Of course, the theorists Baudrillard, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault- all had their unique views. But, either coming directly from their work or through the numerous academics and critics who extended it “The Image” was everywhere, especially if it was photographic or cinematic. And in a sense, that seems to be the starting point for the vague characteristics that may have distilled into a semblance of a language: inevitably figurative/realistic/naturalistic/hyperrealistic and vaguely cinematic.
Yet these ideas were received as a written language (talking about a visual language) and then translated back into a visual realization. Obviously, this meant that these similarities remained fairly loose in character. And, the level to which artists introduced a conceptual practice into their painting practice varied greatly.
Not surprisingly, the brief period in which paintings and artists were neatly consigned to the “post modernism” section of coffee table books seems to be over. Post-modernism in painting, like Postmodernism, seems to have fragmented rather than still talking about fragmentation. Painters who were once lumped together then are now being reassigned to new labels like “contemporary realism” and “conceptual figurative”. At some point, someone seems to have realized that the works of an artist like Eric Fischl might share a commonality with other painters being hailed as “post modernist” in the late 1980’s but the glaring gap in their practice – the level of Conceptualism inherent in it- meant they were actually doing very different things.
And, of course, the second problem faced by painters addressing these ideas of multiplicities or pluralisms within a conceptual framework from the 1980’s onwards is how exactly does one make a new visual language without referring to precedents (avoiding the trap of merely producing neologisms)?
Given that the breakthrough for the truly innovative painters was realizing the benefit of using the ideas and theories as a research starting point, it seems fairly self-evident that the results would be divergent, that, apart from the vaguest of visual similarities, the languages, though mapping onto traditions and painting languages in a historic sense, would emerge as fairly individual, bordering on neologisms in some cases. This might count as one reason behind the kind of opaqueness and obliqueness we experience in the work of some painters developing their practice at that time. Viewed from another angle, this was also almost inevitable. After all, they were somewhat isolated as the vast body of contemporary artists rushed to explore the nature of “the image” through newer technologies for making “the image”; film, video, photography. It stands to reason that those approaching the same concepts from the somewhat unfashionable stance, as painters, would end up with a certain idiosyncratic output.
The reason that this question of a possible post-modern painting language is an important one is because it remains a lingering question in relation to current painting practices and more specifically in relation to the work of younger painters who, whilst undoubtedly using or referencing modernist painting languages, have a whiff of a possible post-modernism about them. After all, just because they relate to modernism, it does not necessarily exclude that they might do so in a post-modernist way. Even if we immediately conjure up a “look” to post-modernist architecture and furnishings, the issue remains more open in painting or other forms such as cinema and literature.
And yet, some of what we see as being the “shorthand” of a post-modern sensibility is evident in the work of a number of these painters: Geraldine Gliubislavich displays the same kind of coexistence of historically different time periods that led critics to scream, “postmodernism!!!” at Jarman’s “Caravaggio". Arif Ozacka’s recent paintings show a mélange of cultural histories and forms in single works. And, Hideko Inoue’s paintings are painted in a way that mixes narratives and offers flickers of potential meanings without showing signs of preference for one over another. Numerous hallmarks which indicate “postmodernism” are evident in their work. Nonetheless we can also ascertain from both the works and the artists themselves that their practice is located in the kinds of conceptual painting practices we have seen elevated to the state of contemporary virtuosity.
Perhaps they are even from a generation whose notion of Postmodernism is so refractory, so after the debate that, even if it was a conscious concern, they could only ever exist within it rather than make the choice to try to enter it. However, their lineage to the languages of modernism, whether they do so as postmodernists or otherwise, remains strong.
Hideko Inoue’s paintings exist in a conceptual framework of both a deeply personal and more general nature. A substantial number of paintings in her body of work have derived from using her grandfather’s photograph albums as source material. Scouring the albums of the man with whom she felt a particularly close emotional affinity, she selects images documenting his travels in Japan and Asia in the 1950’s and 1960’s from which she makes paintings. Sometimes these are executed in a relatively straightforward style, painstakingly replicating the images he and his friends chose to record, at other times, making subtle alterations. For example, the choice to paint on mirror alters the entire experience of the viewer literally “looking in” to the painting.
There are also aspects of the apparently straightforward, if clearly skilled, painting language that brings subtle surprises. Are the deeply "Scottish" landscapes that surround her grandfather and his friends in some paintings an accurate rendition based on the original source material or has Inoue’s own experience of living in Scotland played an influence? Sometimes the reality depicted in realism might have more to do with the reality of the artist than any objective reality held within an image.
More recently, her practice has extended to removing the process from her immediate blood ties; painting images taken from albums of other people, such as from her Scottish husband’s family or based on found materials and stories told to her by friends about their relatives.
As with Gliubislavich, her work exists in a framework in which the relationships between the paintings –and indeed the people within them, reconstruct potential meanings in each new juxtaposition of relationships. And as with the overarching practice of conceptual painters, there is a certain opacity. We aren’t always clear, why we are seeing these images, why the painter has painted them. There are evidently some of the contemporary concerns about the nature of authorship: who owns these images? Inoue herself through her meticulous rendering of the works in paint? Or her grandfather (or the other people) without whom the source material would not have existed? Perhaps this is even more deeply evident in recent works such as “Red Circle” not based on images from her grandfather’s photo albums but instead based on the image of a German friend’s relative as a prisoner of war.
In this painting, the "real" story of the red circle is that it was a painting made by the friend as a child as a gift for the grandfather she never met. But clearly, games are played with the reality. The coincidental similarity of this child's painting to a Japanese flag (with all of its connotations in juxtaposition to a nazi uniform) and the vaguely visible Japanese language copy of a book by Richter on the bookshelf draw our attention to the painter herself, her identity and all of the related questions of authorship.
There is a use of a painting language in these works that links it strongly to European inter-war traditions of realism that were, of course, a particular kind of realism, depicting particular kinds of reality. No one familiar with the works of German artists that get grouped under Neue Sachlichket completely buys the "Sachlickeit". Objectivity or more accurately, the appearance of objectivity can be brought to bear for a lasting impact in part due to the subjective intonations of the allegedly objective images.
One of the key criticisms of works from these movements is that they were reactionary, anti-modernist works. This fails to engage with the way in which, whilst being a sobering response to the indulgent excesses of expressionism, they are too readily dismissed as reactionary because they were tarred with the political agendas of those who subverted their realistic, figurative and representational languages for their own political ends.
Some of the works of artists like Christian Schad, for example, share a mechanism with much more contemporary painters such as Inoue.
In their bodies of work, we see images that, though beautifully executed, might be absorbed effortlessly. We don't immediately see the depth of the work because of the ease of the surface language. They are only given a new understanding once we think about exactly what it is we have been looking at.
And, then, rather unexpectedly, another image executed in a similar, apparently matter-of-fact style can suddenly arrest and jar with a lasting effect in a completely different way. In Schad’s case, for example, his image of “Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove" (1929) is like cold water in our faces after we think we know his oeuvre. The unexpected identity politics and social issues it raises about pre-Nazi Germany come almost as a shock. We do not expect to see this image in this context and immediately we wonder what it is about whilst implicitly understanding it. It lingers.
Similarly, Inoue’s “The Red Circle” seems to be an effortless painting until we realize that we are being confronted by a man, painted in a very human way, in nazi uniform seated in front of what appears to be a Japanese flag. What does this image mean? And why has she painted it? Presented in a different way, we struggle to find the visual signs of how we know we should interpret a nazi. Where are the neo-expressionist howls of Kiefer? Do they hover in the Japanese flag with its face-like swirls? Perhaps we are almost shocked at ourselves for not having reacted immediately as we should have towards a clearly “bad” man. What trick has been carried out to make us engage with him on human terms?
If this illustration is somewhat laboured, it is nonetheless useful in reassessing just how “anti-modernist” mid twentieth century movements using realism actually were. Politically ambivalent and uncertain, maybe, but to dismiss the realism as being unsophisticated in its context is somewhat assumptive and foolish. The painters of Neue Sachlichkeit and other European mid twentieth century movements sought to bring modernist thinking to the use of realism. And this might include using a realistic and figurative painting language to acknowledge the awful truth of the alienation and dislocation they experienced in their societies even when looking at the realities that should, in an ideologically responsible world, demand action or, as Brecht put it, provide redress. Images painted in this period often have a strange coexistence of empathy and distance. Painters draw our attention to the implicit humanity of the people depicted but make little attempt to suggest an intervention nor, indeed, to invite the viewer to intervene. The complexity of this “culture of despair” as it has been called, acquires an implicit dressing down when analyzed from the first Marxist positions that examined it in the 1960’s. Put, perhaps, a little amusingly, postmodernist thinking has influenced a better understanding of the use of realism in a modernist construct.
The development of our understanding of how visual languages develop out of complex relationships between signs and visual signifiers -each loaded with connotation and meaning informed by social, cultural and personal layers- afford us a more recent understanding and appreciation of the mechanisms for which realism was harnessed in the inter-war years. We have had to, at least, adjust the implicit criticism of a “culture of despair” into an understanding that, like the visual language of Neue Sachlichkeit itself, an apathy resulting in a political void that is tantamount to colluding with the rise of extremism is only one possible reading. Just as the depression that is now pathologized as mental illness was once understood as willful misery, so too can we understand the psychological constructs behind this visual language differently from the doctrine-adherent Marxist critiques that were initially prevalent in relation to this work. Literally illustrating the failure to commit to or believe in any specific ideological position can be a deeply confessional exposure of an almost existential position.
In many ways Inoue’s use of realism in a conceptual framework links, in terms of visual language, to this tradition. In both, there is a subversion that relies on a subtle construction and context of the image, intentionally not drawing immediate attention to the surface of its technique whilst playing on our expectations of what we think we might see. Modernism need not be all swirling lines and overt brush strokes.
Conversely, Arif Ozacka’s paintings draw us very much towards their construction, if not art the level of brush strokes and blotches, then very immediately to recognize how it is made up of composite imagery drawing on disparate historical sources and diverse visual cultural sources to construct its whole. And, if like Inoue, he straddles more than one culture, it might be obvious that we should understand these works for their transcultural aspect; their postmodernist hubris.
In his work, we clearly see the elements of the total construction in enough detail to link them to a contextual origin: figurative elements that draw on his fascination for painting of the human body from the Italian Renaissance; vignettes and enclaves of action drawing on ancient Persian legends, textual elements clearly visible; and abstracted form and pattern drawing on western abstract traditions growing fluidly out of Middle Eastern decorative elements. In some places these discussions are clearly played out. For example, it is made very transparent for the viewer to see the discussion he is having with himself about the relationship between ancient Middle Eastern decorative traditions and abstract pattern. Ancient tile designs easily fuse with geometric abstraction.
Less obviously –and perhaps completely unintentionally- these works connect with other modernist traditions such as Cubism that took disparate sources –from still life to music- to examine the interplay of surfaces and depictions of surface through painting. Similarly, the examination of pattern undertaken by Op Art and the examination of image construction through collage techniques undertaken by diverse modernist schools from the 1930s onwards are also evident in Ozacka’s paintings, sometimes as separate discussions occurring on specific parts of the canvas.
Just as Gliubislavich’s connection to the visual languages of early modernist painting are camouflaged beneath an altogether different palette, here we could also fail to make the connection because of the deployment of colour. Where Cubism conducted its study of surfaces in somber browns and blacks, Ozacka works with the colourful palette drawn from the tile patterns and Ottoman miniatures he has absorbed as study images into the works. In so doing he has also effectively formed a kind of riposte to one of the western modernist preoccupations with form and motifs lifted from other cultures. This is a painter who turns Breuer’s “African Chair” on its head. Instead of taking literal non-western forms and working them into an abstraction in which we can no longer recognize the source, instead, he represents the source very clearly before elaborating it the end point; a painting that can be understood and validated in terms of western modernist languages.
His end point is the point at which we now expect to read a painting; its location in relation to the canon of modernist painting languages. Interesting then that his practice should quite literally demonstrate a series of relationships that has become hidden -without closer inspection- in the popular consciousness of just how the canon of European painting languages evolved. In effect, his work brings us back –from a different starting point and via a new route- to the discussion initiated by early modernist movements about the way in which forms appropriated from non-European cultures could be utilized to develop new painting languages.