Painting Overview
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Literally, painting is regarded as a medium in that it is a physical
substance used to picture. There is a dichotomy where painting is
framed as a use of a material (paint), as in "the result of applying
paint or color." [1] And in another sense painting is defined as a
vehicle for "the representing of objects or figures by means of colours
laid on a surface; the art of so depicting objects." [2] This
dichotomy is succinct with the literal outlines of a medium itself,
understood as a "pervading or enveloping substance; the substance or
'element' in which an organism lives," as well as "an intermediate
agency, means, instrument or channel." [3] In this light, painting is
considered as if synonymous with the meanings if not the uses of such
ideas as 'picture, work of art, image, canvas, oil,watercolor, and
print.' This list exemplifies the duality of painting as a medium
conditioned both as a form (oil, canvas) that representation is
embedded in and as means that representation moves through (picture,
work of art). As well the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics lists
discussions of painting through movements in historical categories:
Abstract Expressionism, Abstraction, Classicism, Contemporary Art,
Expressionism, Formalism, Impressionism, Landscape, Pop Art,
Portraiture, Renaissance Italian Aesthetics, Romanticism and articles
on Visual Art, Russian Aesthetics, Suprematism, and Surrealism.
Historically, the ability to picture, or signify by likeness, was the
chief identifying characteristic that guided painting in conception and
practice. The culmination of this ability to represent is steeped in
the advent and subsequent implications of perspective; which "refers
generally to the devices used by painters to represent space on plane
surfaces...The earliest written account of perspectival projection is
found in the treatise De Pictura (1435) of Leon Battista Alberti, a
Florentine humanist and architect. Alberti defined a painting as 'the
intersection of a visual pyramid at a given distance, with a fixed
center and certain position of lights, represented by art with lines
and colors on a given surface.' This conception of painting as the
transcription of an imaginary 'picture plane' suspended between the
beholder and the viewed scene was revolutionary. It linked the art of
painting to the sciences, in particular to medieval optics and to
Euclidean geometry (p.478)." [4] Additionally, "In twentieth-century
thought, painterly perspective, with its hypothesis of a fixed and
stationary beholder, its respect for the evidence of the senses, and
its endowment of a subjective point of view with objective validity,
has in turn been repeatedly enlisted as an emblem for Western
empiricism, rationalism, individualism, anthropocentrism, or relativism
(p.480)." [5] These conditions of picturing hinged on historical
contentions of the collapse between the subjectivity of the beholder
and the objectivity of that which is pictured. The agent of picturing
(Becoming) was considered to be one in the same as reality (Being). In
this model, the fundamental identity of 'painting' is entirely
engrossed in that of 'picturing.' In "The Age of a World Picture,"
Martin Heidegger posits, "the word 'picture' (Bild) now means the
structured image(Gebild) that is the creature of man's producing which
represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the
position for which he can be that particular being who gives the
measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is (p.134)."
[6]
This system of rationalized picturing posits aspirations traditionally
understood to be aligned with a conception of medium as an instrument
to uncover knowledge. In this vein, Plato's interest in the mimetic
status of images laid the philosophical platform for painting to be
regarded as a vehicle for transmission of such truths. With
Parrhasius, "Socrates starts from the premise that painting is
'imaging/modeling of the visible world' (eikasia ton horomenon) and
moves to overcome the painter's initial doubt whether visual mimesis
can depict 'character 'through' its physical expression (p.101)." [7]
Plato's sense of doubt lies in the capacity for painting to move
beyond the realm of appearances to the realm of truth. "Socrates'
questions to the artists focus on how we get, or whether we can get,
from the design of a visual field ('shapes and colours') to the
representation or expression of non-material properties (p. 101)." [8]
For Plato, this 'expression of non-material properties' is equated with
an image of truth and leads him to dismiss writing and painting for the
more transparent form of spoken word. "I cannot help felling Phaedrus,
that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the
painter have attitude of life, and yet, if you ask them a question they
preserve a solemn silence (p.278)." [9]
Certainly, the epistemological claims of perspective in painting
instigated elaborate challenges and redirections serving broader
aspirations centered on painting as founded on matters of visual
perception. Arnheim, dependent on Gestalt thinking, characterizes a
dynamic transaction between the subjective through and the objective in
of painting. "When it depicts three-dimensional space, it squeezes
depth into surface, thereby obtaining a dynamic effect. This effect is
perceived as the effort to unfold distances where none are actually
given. The compressed surface pattern, however, has a compositional
organization and meaning of its own, and this surface image interacts
in a dynamic counterpoint with the composition of the objects occupying
the three-dimensional arena (p.113-114)." [10] Moreover, Goodman,
posited a thorough effacement of the objectified subjective; "In
general, he maintained that 'no degree of resemblance is sufficient' to
establish a relationship of reference between picture and an object
(p.50)." [11] Panofsky instigated (through Cassirer's 'symbolic form'
and Kant's notion of "category") a process of "iconographic analysis"
of the picturing in painting. For example, questions of the Last
Supper are revealed on conscious literary precedents and unconscious
intrinsic insinuations. "On this level, the subject of the painting is
identified: its moment and place of enactment, the names of its actors,
its historical precedents, and so forth.... The Last Supper might be
read not only as a 'document' of Leonardo's personality but also as an
expression of the worldview of the Italian High Renaissance
(p.437-438)." [12] Cultural and historical painting categories like
Pastoral, Genre, Portraiture, Religious, and Epic typify this
contingency of the object and the subject. Merleau-Ponty organized the
phenomenology of painting in relation to the structures of history and
institutions on paintings capacity to liquefy the threshold between the
"visible" and "invisible." "Painting is an intentional,
nonetic-noematic act, and therefore referential, but a painting is not
about itself as formal elements and relations on a canvas, nor is it
about the history of painting, but about the visible world that is all
too often invisible (p.205)." [13] Painting as holding the subject to
be perception is epitomized in classifications systems reliant on form:
Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism for example. Hence, contentions of
perceptual picturing have saddled on aims to be defined in relation to
other sign systems, sparking ontological considerations.
In the Preface to his Laocoon (1766), Lessing, before arguing for the
distinction of painting from poetry, states that both "present us with
appearances as reality." Lessing's distinction of painting and poetry
as separate forms insinuates a relational definition not entirely
suspending questions of reality but as well not levying the means for
the ends. Underlining, Lessing's argument is the simultaneity
intrinsic in painting as opposed to a linguistic system of notation;
"It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which
good taste can never sanction, when the painter combines in one and the
same picture two points necessarily separate in time... It is an
intrusion of the poet into the domain of the painter and a squandering
of much imagination to no purpose when, in order to give the reader an
idea of the whole, the poet enumerates one by several parts or things
which I must necessarily survey at one glance in nature if they are to
give the effect of the whole (p.91)." [14] The complex relationship
of image and text has poignant grounding in the positioning of the
'through' with respect to the 'in' of medium. This comparison method
suggests a reorientation of the implications surrounding appearances of
reality. The disposition of Being is not beyond appearances, but in
Aristotelian fashion, between or in them. Hence investigations of
knowledge, turn to examinations of language. And painting is grounded
within the language of the iconic (resemblance) generation of meaning
[see symbol, index, icon]. This model acts like a model of models with
great difficulty in equating the picturing capacities of one process of
signification from another. "No method--semiotics, iconology, discourse
analysis--is going to rescue us from this dilemma. The very phrase
"word and image," in fact, is a way of signaling this. It is not a
critical "term" in art history like the other concepts in this
collection, but a pair of terms whose relation opens a space of
intellectual struggle, historical investigation, and artistic/critical
practice (p.56)." [15] In this regard, the tradition of abstract
painting has come to be postured as holding its primary project as
repressing or overcoming verbal language.
The ultimate aesthetic retort to the promises of Renaissance
perspective is found in the promises of twentieth-century pure abstract
painting. This is the reverse side of painting as picture, and the
over embellished zenith of the perspectival revisions/upheavals
perpetuated by theorists like Goodman and Merleau-Ponty. As Greenberg
wrote in "Avant-garde and Kitsch;" "Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro,
Kandinsky, Bancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cezanne derive their chief
inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art
seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with inventionand
arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion
of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors (p.9)." [16]
These claims exaggerate a dialectical relationship between different
forms (painting and photography) and arenas of cultural production
(avant-garde and kitsch), as well as dichotomies within painting such
as: abstract versus representational, figural versus geometric, and
intuitive versus rational.
Subsequently, the aim of Abstract Expressionist painting was to
distinguish its process of signification from that of other forms of
art (as well as verbal language) through an extreme focus on the
inherent materiality of the act of painting. Intrinsic to the
extinguishing of the picture (external signification) is his declared
affirmation "to reject the purist's assertion that the best of
contemporary plastic art is abstract. Here the purist does not have to
support his position with metaphysical pretensions (p.23)." [17] This
aimed to reorientate the very action of picturing (making) as
encapsulating the notion of the essential nature of a picture itself.
The painted object acts as an indexical trace signifying the conditions
of itself as constituted by it's making: personifying McLuhan's dictum
"the medium is the message."
Reshuffling Greenberg, Fried in his own rigid dialectic of "Art and
Objecthood," attempted to establish the criteria of painting (art) as
defined by a disposition of shape oppositional to minimalism and
theatricality (objecthood). "Roughly, the success or failure of a
given painting has come to depend on its ability to hold or stamp
itself out or compel conviction as shape - that, or somehow to stave
off or elude the question of whether or not it does so (p.14-15)" [18]
[see objecthood]. Notably, in a theoretical wake of Benjamin's notion
of the "aura" external and surrounding an artwork, Greenberg attempts
to characterize the conditions of painting as contingent on the making
of the work (before), while Fried shifts the emphasis to the literal
reception of the work (after): "it is concerned with the actual
circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work (p.15)."
[19] Ironically, Fried and Greenberg were attempting to stave off
ubiquitous relationships of media while reserving a similar, if not the
same, exuberant philosophical allocation of subjective Being (in paint)
as accessed through claims of an objectified transparent Becoming
(through picturing). These formalist propositions marked the necessary
and dire circumstances of painting to hold onto the authority as the
figurehead of art by aiming to crystallize the facility to represent
postured as total denial of pictorial convention.
Marcel Duchamp put forward a wider scope, conjecturing pictures as well
as the paint as "readymades:" mere conventions. Practitioners like
Mondrian and Ad Reinhart served to lay a foundation of painting systems
that sought to make manifest the inherent conventionality of picturing:
albeit with quite different strategies. In their own suggestions,
these processes of systematization instigated the "death of painting,"
with the deployment of conventions not bound to the paint itself.
Frank Stella's desire to "preserve the paint on the canvas as good as
it is in the can," turned the locus of painting to the can itself
framed as an industrial mass produced commodity of circulatory exchange
instigating a reorganization of painting as a medium embedded in a
field of cultural production. As Joesph Kosuth in "Art After
Philosophy" wrote "With the unassisted Readymade, art changed its focus
from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that
it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a
question of function (p.842)." [20] In this light, currently painting
takes a rearguard position negotiating itself as a system of media,
within a system of media constituted by an abundant and dynamic matrix
of images and corporeal realities. The most current debate of the
viability of painting contends it as a critical post-mortem activity
dealing with its own death and on the other hand as it reveling in its
own frivolity ignoring prescriptive historical paradigms that both
killed it and continue to define its potency.
Dustin Larson
Committee on the Visual Arts
Winter 2002
Works Cited
Alberti, Leon Battista, De Pictura (1492). rev. Paris: Macula, Dedale.
1992.
Arnheim, Rudolf. "Visual Dynamics." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the
Creatice Eye. Exp. rev. ed. Berkeley, 1974.
Art in Theory 1900-1990: an Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood. Blackwell Publishing. Oxford, U.K., Cambridge,
MA. 1993.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry
Zohn. Schocken Books. News York. 1977.
Fried, Michael. "Art and Objecthood." Artforum, Summer 1967. pp.12-23.
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of
Pictorial Representation (1960). 2d rev. ed. Reprint, Princeton, NJ,
1969.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a theory of Symbols.
2d ed. Indianapoplis, 1976.
Greenberg, Clement. Clement Greenberg: The Collected essays and
criticism. Edited by John O'Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986. Vol.1, pp.4-22.
Halliwell, Stephen. "Plato and Painting." Word and image in ancient
Greece. Rutter, N. Keith; and Brian K. Sparks, eds. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Age of the World Picture." In The Question
concerning Technology, translated by William Lovitt, pp. 115-154. New
York,1977.
Holly, Michael Ann. "Erwin Panofsky." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1998.
Johnson, Galen A. "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.
Ed. Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998.
Kosuth, Joseph. Art after philosophy and after: collected
writing,1966-1990. ed.Gabriele Guercio. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1991.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. "Laocoon: An essay on the Limits of Painting
and Poetry." Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. 1962.
"Medium." The Oxford English Dictionary. 1993.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude
Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL, 1968.
Mitchell, W.J.T. "Word and Image." Critical Terms for Art History.
Nelson, Robert S. and Schiff, Richard, eds. University of Chicago
Press, 1996. Chapt. 4, pp.47-57.
"Painting." The Oxford English Dictionary. 1993.
Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by
Christopher S. Wood. New York, 1991.
Plato. "Phaedrus." The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Benjamin
Jowett. New York: Random House, 1937.
Wood, Christopher S. "Perspective." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998.
Notes
1 "Painting." The Oxford English Dictionary. 1993
2 "Painting." The Oxford English Dictionary. 1993
3"Medium." The Oxford English Dictionary. 1993
4 Wood, Christopher S. "Perspective." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998
5 Wood, Christopher S. "Perspective." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
6 Heidegger, Martin. "The Age of the World Picture." In The Question
concerning Technology translated by William Lovitt, pp. 115-154. New
York, 1977.
7 Halliwell, Stephen. "Plato and Painting." Word and image in ancient
Greece . Rutter, N. Keith; and Brian K. Sparks, eds. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2000.
8 Halliwell, Stephen. "Plato and Painting." Word and image in ancient
Greece . Rutter, N. Keith; and Brian K. Sparks, eds. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2000.
9 Plato. "Phaedrus." The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Benjamin
Jowett. NY: Random House, 1937 Vol.1, pp. 233-282.
10 Arnheim, Rudolf. "Visual Dynamics." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics . Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
11 Wood, Christopher S. "Perspective." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed.
Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford U,. 1998.
12 Holly, Michael Ann. "Erwin Panofsky." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics .
Ed. Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
13 Johnson, Galen A. "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice." Encyclopedia of
Aesthetics . Ed. Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP. 1998.
14 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. "Laocoon: An essay on the Limits of
Painting and Poetry." Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. 1962.
15 Mitchell, W.J.T. "Word and Image." Critical Terms for Art History .
Nelson, Robert S. and Richard Schiff, eds. University of Chicago Press,
1996. Chapt.4, pp.47-57.
16 Greenberg, Clement. Clement Greenberg: The Collected essays and
criticism. Edited by John O'Brian. Chicago : University of Chicago
Press, 1986. Vol.1, pp.4-22.
17 Greenberg, Clement. Clement Greenberg: The Collected essays and
criticism. Edited by John O'Brian. Chicago : University of Chicago
Press, 1986. Vol.1, pp.4-22
18 Fried, Michael. "Art and Objecthood." Artforum , Summer 1967.
pp.12-23.
19 Fried, Michael. "Art and Objecthood." Artforum , Summer 1967.
pp.12-23.
20Kosuth, Joseph. Art after philosophy and after: collected writing,
1966-1990. ed Gabriele Guercio. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.