Art Lies, Volume 47, Summer 2005 Page: 32
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what he believed painting should be and do, as well as the historical
position painting was in. To that end, his 1981 painting Don't Hit Her
Again, an agreeably sized canvas in monochromes that goes almost
abstract while clearly revealing the face of a child with a black eye,
seems iconic of that moment in painting.
That moment is still very much with us. Nowhere has it been more
evident than in two recent exhibitions, both in Los Angeles: Jack
Goldstein: Paintings from the 1980s, organized by Julie Joyce at the
Luckman Gallery, California State University Los Angeles, and The
Undiscovered Country, organized by Russell Ferguson for the Hammer
Museum at UCLA. To be clear, neither of these was an exhibition
about the death of painting or a crisis in painting, but both shows
resonated with-and showed the reverberations of-the discourse of
painting's implied death or crisis. Initiating a wave of interest that has
only accelerated since his suicide in 2003, Goldstein-who stopped
making work and disappeared from the art scene in the early nine-
ties-resurfaced in the new millennium, exhibiting some of his work
through Brian Butler at 1301PE Gallery in Los Angeles. The 2002 exhi-
bition of his paintings at CSULA was a punctuating moment-an
incredible visual postscript to the writings of Crimp and Lawson. In
that show, one could see that Goldstein's paintings did what Crimp
wanted art to do, pulled off what Lawson believed painting could pull
off and, equally important, they looked like they could have been made
yesterday.Everyone quibbles about inclusions in group exhibitions-and
everyone did so regarding The Undiscovered Country-but Goldstein
was the only painter I thought really was missing. A strange echo of
New Image Painting, the exhibition explored representational paint-
ing from the '60s onward and specifically tried to address painting's
place in a post-photographic, post-abstract field, thus inevitably rub-
bing against some of the anxieties involved in the death of painting
discourse. It brought together works from the likes of John Baldessari,
Vija Celmins, Philip Guston, Neil Jenny, Gerhard Richter, Richard
Hamilton, Thomas Lawson and Richard Prince-all artists who through
their work and painted representations have dealt, in different ways,
with questions about what painting should and could do-hung with
younger artists like Luc Tuymans, Enoc Perez, Kirsten Everberg and
Laura Owens.
Among the assorted possibilities it raised, the exhibition confirmed
that (1) painting had been capable of what Crimp considered impos-
sible well before he made such a declaration and that (2) in the wake
of the surge from the seventies through the eighties-in what really is
an older, ongoing discourse of the crisis of painting-a younger gener-
ation of painters has emerged bearing the mark of a climate informed
by the likes of both Crimp, with his naysaying, and Lawson, with his
strained boosterism.
The product of this generation is that of artists who came of age
amidst both the pressures and permissions imposed by the emer-
gence and subsequent dominance of a culture of critique within the
field of contemporary art. This critique, thrust negatively by Crimp and
somewhat more positively by Lawson into the field of painting, yielded
results, which are not all Lawsonesque in appearance. In fact, they
reflect the full breadth of pluralism that has come to define contempo-
rary painting, from the sort of edgy, painterly representation exempli-
fied by Tomory Dodge to the odd melange of style and reference offered
by the likes of Anton Henning and Richard Hawkins; from the self-
conscious and self-effacing abstraction of Pia Fries to the color-field
graffiti of Katharina Grosse and the new-and-improved Neo-expres-
sionism of Cecily Brown; from the hyper-fauvism of Daniel Richter to
the recent, quasi-abstract text paintings of Monique Prieto. As David
Joselit, riffing on the sentiment of Yve-Alain Bois' 1986 essay Painting:
The Task of Mourning, commented in a roundtable on painting's death
published in Artforum's March 2003 issue, the death of painting might
more have been a case of the end of one "game" of painting, played by
specific rules, and the emergence of a new game of painting with new
rules. These artists indeed seem to be working with an awareness of a
changed or changing set of rules of the game.
As Crimp wrote of the term postmodernism in Pictures, to be mean-
ingful the term needs to do more than signal chronology; it needs to
signal a change. With such a demand for useful terminology in mind, it
seems reasonable to refer to much of our current painting not in terms of
post-death or post-crisis but, in consideration of the influence it shows
and the role it assumes via such varied forms, as post-critique.32 ARTL!ES Summer 2005
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Bryant, John & Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 47, Summer 2005, periodical, 2005; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228012/m1/34/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .