ART&RESEARCH

David Batchelor

My relationship with painting is ambivalent. I use the term in its strict sense, which is that I am, I guess, motivated by entraption, a simultaneous attraction to it, and repulsion from it. I used to paint and I haven’t painted for a good fifteen years, more than that actually. I’ve never showed the painting in anger and I doubt if I ever will, but who knows. And yet at the same time, pretty much everything I do in the studio and I am a studio artist and I’m very interested in the subject of studio, what it means to work in a studio in what some people have described as the post-studio world of art, including from the 1970’s people like Daniel Buren. So I work in a studio and my work in studios is certainly informed by painting. Even if my work is mainly three dimensional and some would call it sculpture, but I don’t think I would. Painting still informs it more than anything else. I can’t get away from painting entirely, at the same time I can’t do it. And so probably you could describe all my work as failed painting. I thought I’d begin by noting the title of this conference, which is ‘Painting as New Medium’. And I asked Francis who came up with that title. He said ‘It was either me or Ross’. They don’t seem to know. I’m not quite sure how to understand that phrase ‘Painting as a New Medium’, but the term medium it seems to me never far away from the question of painting. And I’ve often wondered whether we need the term medium any more and partly because obviously the term medium was so prominent in the discourse of our art from the last century. But also because in recent years you’ve had a lot of critics and artists talking about the idea of a post-medium practice. But if we’re over Modernism, which is arguable, then maybe we’re over the whole business of medium specificity or medium in general. We now make art in general rather than medium-specific art. I don’t think one or another is true. When I ask the question about medium I always end up not knowing what my art would be, whether it’s a necessary condition or not. And it seems a lot of the bigger thinkers who’ve dwelt on this subject, like Rosalind Krauss, for example, can’t make up their mind either. In the 1970s she was writing about the idea of the ‘Expanded Field’ of sculpture and she talks quite specifically

in certain essays about the medium being an outdated and unnecessary term for discussing art, and yet when we look at that vast new tome which the October bunch have published, Art Since 1900, in this round table discussion at the end of the book, she reasserts the necessity of the idea of medium, without which she says, you just have arbitrariness. Medium becomes the condition of rigour and developments in any art form. Which appals her colleagues, Hal Foster and so on. So, the problem when you talk about medium is that you get dragged back to talking about Clement Greenberg, and I don’t want to do that. Ever. Not that I have any problem with Greenberg as an writer, what I have a problem with is that generations of art historians who continue to bang on about Modernism, nearly half a century after he stopped writing about it seems rather a curious thing to do. It seemed increasingly bizarre to me that bloody essay, Modernist Painting written back in 1961, has held sway hell sway in a way that it appears to have done, not least because while Greenberg and then later Michael Fried were writing about ideas of medium specificity, self-definition and even purity within their theory of art, at exactly that time, which is say the first half of the 1960s approximately, it seems to me that almost all the best artists were heading pretty much in the opposite direction.

While the theory of medium-specific purity is very fine and good, if you look out there, it seems to me that the practice of art when it was at its most dynamic and most vivid was when it was doing exactly the opposite; when it wasn’t refining and purifying medium, but on the contrary it was fucking it up, it was corrupting the medium, it was about making works which were extremely unrefined and extremely impure. They were very hybrid like works which on the one had I think, certainly threatened the idea of the medium of painting, but I think in another way also, where the condition for the continuation of the medium of painting by the process of contaminating it in a way. And the obvious example for me, just to get personal, is the work of Robert Rauschenberg. It seemed to me that Rauschenberg made wonderfully, deeply, problematically impure paintings. There were works which were paintings, but there were also works which were always corrupted by materials which have stood and remain outside the condition of painting. In this instance a bed but also photographs, text, pattern, design objects, fragments of, to use a Ross’s term, the real life, the everyday world of New York city in the 1950s and 1960s. I think with the project if you like was wanting to see, maybe no what happens if I throw this stuff at the painting, does it stick? And if it sticks, what does that say about painting and art and where it can go and where it can’t go. If it doesn’t stick and what does that say? And I think that, that’s what Rauschenberg was brilliant at. And the reason this is a personal incidentally

is because Rauschenberg was my entry into the idea of being an artist and doing art. It was the first work I saw when I was a teenager which made me think that painting art could be like the best books and the best movies and the best records. It wasn’t a remote and exclusive and a rather intellectual activity, it could be as funky as the rest of it. And it was seeing a Rauschenberg combine from the 1950’s - and incidentally not in London at the time because in London at the time, there was nothing to see of recent and contemporary art at all. The Tate as was in Pimlico was just a dark brown place, as I remember it, with dark brown paintings in it. And it was actually going to Amsterdam, to the Stedelijk Museum in about 1974, there was a kind of revelation to me that art could look contemporary, modern, fast, funny, insolent. So that’s why I start with Rauschenberg. It seems to me that Rauschneberg in a way does offer completely another way of thinking of the medium of painting than that being promoted by very loudly by the likes of Greenberg and Fried. I’ve got this which Bed which hangs obviously in MoMA in New York, from 1955, the one I saw in the Stedelijk was actually one called Charlene which was a very bright red object. And I remember it being very big and very bright red and it had a kind of flashing light in it, and I couldn’t believe you could have art with a flashing light in it, well not a painting, of course, and I know more now than I knew then. When I saw the combine again it somehow seemed rather less red, rather less big and rather less insolent than when I was 17, but that happens. It looked rather classical in fact, but never mind, those moments are very important ones.