the living end: painting and other technologies, 1970–2020 @ museum of contemporary art chicago.
First, you think The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020 is about painting and its persistence. It’s about how vital painting remains as a—maybe the—core form of visual art. Then you think, no, actually it’s about technology. The exhibition tracks pigmentation as it has migrated into pixelation. Ultimately, however the show becomes about something else. The brushwork does not merely mutate into bits and bytes, it also turns back to the biological. Reaching for technologies beyond painting’s traditional tools, the art form heads straight for the flesh. Yet the body, which in fact seems to be the key if unnamed theme of the exhibition, never quite appears. It always gets away. It brushes past.
Cloth instead of canvas, oil to bodily fluids, watercolors to electric lights, video cameras and televisions, copy machines, typewriters, glass, sculptural elements, interactive computer displays, painting directly on the walls of the gallery itself, performance art instead of the art itself: in this show, no artists want their art to stay in the conventional mode. Yet as far as the works range from painting’s traditions, almost all of them come back to the body. Skin and bones, organs and tissue, joint and muscle, limbs and heart, hand and eye—these artworks want to represent the real, the embodied, the human.
Particularly as other technologies of production and reproduction, of capture, transcription, and representation, have taken hold, painters have been keen to question the conventions of their practice. Yet they still want to be paint, to be painters. Why couldn’t one paint with a Xerox machine? Or a video camera? Or computer graphics software? Or even turn the body itself into the brush, or the canvas?
It turns out it’s difficult to abandon painting. In this exhibition, painters still want to be painters, but they want to reject the rules of the form. Could painting leave its past behind for more immediacy, more visceral representation, more compelling urgency? What’s funny, however, is that as one moves through the show, one often experiences not more immediacy, but less. One sees the artist, the painter, experiencing immediacy. Longing to leave the gallery space, the nicely framed art on its walls, many leave the viewer behind as well.
That’s fine. Art need not only be for museums, thank god. But what’s weird in this exhibition is that the works often feel less like works than like reports on works. The painting pulls away from the encounter with them. It appears as a trace of a trace. We get not painting but photographs of the event of painting. We get not painting but playlists of videos of painting. We get not painting, but the ability to click on an icon that opens up a computer graphic of a painting. If the goal once was to leave the conventions of painting behind so that the painting would leap off the canvas to the viewer, here, oddly, painting recedes into tape, behind screens, or within sculptural elements. There is a strangely confounding distancing effect produced by the effort to record and present moments of visceral embodiment.
To be sure, this is conceptually fascinating. if you know some of the history of the advanced artworld during the last century or so and some of its modernist and postmodernist debates, the show provides much to ponder. But it is less appealing sensorially. You can feel the conceptual flags being planted, the effort to stake out new terrain, the goal to reimagine paint and canvas; what you can’t always feel is the painting seizing your eye and mind.
This all seems a funny place for painting to arrive. After all, at least since Jackson Pollack, if not before him, the goal was to get the paint off the canvas and into the rest of the actual world. Think of Allan Kaprow’s essay about the action painter himself, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in 1958 just after Pollack’s death. Kaprow thought that post-Pollack, painters should get the paint to splash onto real life itself. Kaprow himself left brush and canvas behind and started producing ”happenings.” Painting with settings, participants, and events. Painting as performance, the “blurring of art and life,” as became the title of a Kaprow’s essay collection.
Painting is indeed good for blurring things. It melds colors, creates different textures, incorporates light and dark, pulls in the eye and asks it to look at things anew. In this exhibition, the painter’s hand sometimes grips with nails, with prints. Sometimes it clicks and drags. Sometimes the fingers go digital. We see augmentation of the body and sometimes even automation of the body. Yet the art never quite steps across the threshold between maker and made. As painters abandon the brush, the art brushes up against the body, but the works never quite dissolve the difference between core and skin, subject and shadow, essence and tint. In that gap, the paint, whatever form it takes, still drips. Which might be the point. The ends of painting still live on in The Living End.