THE TRIUMPH OF PAINTING
Saatchi Gallery, SE1
The new Saatchi Gallery exhibition shows that reports of the death of painting were greatly exaggerated
The scorched-earth progress of conceptualism, supposedly, left the canvas a wasteland. Painting was declared dead. After all, what more could it contribute? We had seen Ad Reinhardt’s all-black works — “just the last paintings anyone could make”, he had called them. We had looked into Robert Ryman’s uninflected white squares. Surely there was nowhere to go after that.
Or was there? Nothing is ever black and white — and not least art history. The death of painting has been proclaimed repeatedly — with the advent of photography, for instance, or the rise of Duchamp — but rumours of its demise always proved premature. A miraculous resurrection was inevitably announced later.
Painting was not dead; it was just up against the wall and being shot at — and often by its own practitioners, who wanted to clear the ground so that they could reclaim it. Reinhardt might have seemed to be forecasting the end of an art form in the 1960s, but what he was actually doing was challenging it to break free from a prison of period rhetoric and find new possibilities. He was provoking the painter to change the rules of his game.
So, when painting was said to be dead in the 1980s, it was only one particular view of the medium that was passing. It was only the end of one game and the start of another. And this is the start that the latest Saatchi Gallery show now looks back to as it opens the first of a series of three shows — The Triumph of Painting — that will run over the year.
Part one, which opens today, represents the work of six painters who, while Damien Hirst was out shark fishing and Tracey Emin was lounging in bed, kept on working in a traditional medium — or at least, as in the case of the irrepressibly subversive (but prematurely deceased) Martin Kippenberger, looked for ways in which painting could still be relevant amid an oeuvre that included anything from the invention of a non-existent global subway system for which he installed fake entrances in cities the world over to the buying of a run-down petrol station in Brazil which he named after a Nazi war criminal.
But don’t expect dramatic new discoveries from this opening section of the show. Saatchi is not setting trends; he is catching up with them. These are artists who have been in the picture for at least 20 years. Their visions may have been forged in the fires of unfashionability, but now they are famous — or infamous in some cases. Their work sells for hundreds of thousands. It has been shown in major gallery spaces. Only last year Luc Tuymans was the subject of a major Tate Modern exhibition.
And don’t expect any coherent aesthetic — not even, necessarily, within the work of one artist. Kippenberger smashed the sacrosanct notion of the trademark style. He signs anything from a billboard poster that derides the enticements of advertising to a rubber-latex-skinned canvas that mocks sexual taboo. This is not a show that attempts to define a movement or shared aim. The artists come from anywhere. Marlene Dumas is South African-born and Amsterdam-based. Peter Doig was brought up in Canada but now lives in Trinidad. And their work goes everywhere. There are landscapes and figure paintings, still lifes and abstracts. There is anger and humour and politics and porn, satire and nostalgia, loveliness and ungainliness, reticence and overkill.
But what, broadly speaking, they share is the attempt to return to a traditional form (often after exploring other media) and reclaim it for a postmodern world in which fixed meanings and functions have been lost amid a swarm of competing references, implications and truths. Art-historical markers — allusions to anyone from Edouard Manet to Joseph Beuys — stick up like tide measures amid the swirling flood. They are swept away into surfaces in which reality can be based on the falsity of the photograph, in which authenticity has dissolved along with any romantic notions of artistic genius. These are savaged in paintings that are wilfully bad. Peter Doig’s lambent meditations on landscape may ease the spectator into this show, but after that prepare for the belligerently clumsy or the brutally tawdry, the brazen or the deliberately shabby.
If you hoped that the triumph of painting meant that old-fashioned craftsmanship was about to overtake new-fangled conceptualism, then think again. These painters are not backtracking on Post-Modernism’s progress. If anything they are pushing it further, testing ways in which painting can become relevant in its context. Their works should be approached in the same way as conceptual pieces. “A good artist has less time than ideas,” Kippenberger said.
Painting is dead! Long live the spectator! A critical faculty is as much a part of these works as their painterly surface. The visitor is entangled in the densely problematic vision of artists such as Dumas, whose declared aim is “to reveal not display”.
He soon finds himself tripping over his own thoughts as he struggles to make sense of meanings that are embedded as much in the medium as in his own mind.
The mistake of this show is the inclusion of works by the “Pope of Viennese Aktionism”, Hermann Nitsch, whose splatterfest abstracts are the spin-off of ludicrous performances involving buckets of blood and lashings of gore. His belief that art should break out from the canvas and incorporate the reality of visceral emotion and raw corporeal experience goes little further than Grand Guignol. And the catalogue (which includes all the images from future shows in this series) seems to presage the sort of splashy Expressionism that might make you start wishing that painting would indeed undergo a dramatic decline.
Saatchi clearly hasn’t completely abandoned his taste for publicity-hungry sensationalism. He also includes several works by the German Jörg Immendorf, whom he has been collecting for years. In these political rants, the polemics take precedence over the painting. The images tell, not show.
Perhaps this show relies too heavily on what was lying around in the stockroom — padded, to judge by a slant towards later works, by more recent purchases. There are several painters who could (and perhaps should) have been represented but aren’t. The visual puzzles of the freewheeling iconoclast Sigmar Polke, for one, would have made an informative addition. And for all the rebellious energy, the cultish flamboyance, the belligerent provocation of Kippenberger, for all his importance as the poster boy of Post-Modernism, a show of this sort should perhaps have left him out. Put into what is starting to seem like an art-historical box, his complex and prolific vision feels cramped.
But where Saatchi succeeds is in offering viewers the chance to recap or catch up with the careers of artists as pioneering as Dumas and Tuymans. These are artists whose works are as visually compelling as they are intellectually complex, who even as they discomfit also fascinate. They lure the spectator into a sort of symbiotic alliance with their work.
They do not, of course, prove that painting has definitively triumphed over other media. A good painter is as rare as a good artist of any sort. Nor does their painting spell a radical change in aesthetic outlook. They are still conceptual. But what they do show is that painting has continuing possibilities, that it can still effect that magical alchemy that has been practised since our prehistoric ancestors first turned muddy ochres into magical beasts.
They prove that painting is not dead. And it helped that some workmen were thumping away in the far-off bowels of the building. Their banging was like the pulse of some waking leviathan’s heartbeat.
BRITS AND PIECES...
1985 Charles Saatchi launches his gallery with heavyweight modern masters including Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.
1992 First of his Young British Artists shows. Perhaps the adman’s most successful brand label.
1994 Young British Artists III: “Our most voracious contemporary collector confounds all expectations . . . the hallowed business of mark-making on canvas is once again a focus for debate.” — Richard Cork in The Times.
1997 Saatchi’s masterstroke, Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997. Paint and eggs are thrown, critics’ responses are mixed but the show boosts YBA market value and the ailing RA, with over 2,800 visitors daily.
1999 New Neurotic Realism, an attempt to move away from Brit Art, ends in critical disaster. In 2003, Saatchi moves his Brit Art greatest hits collection to County Hall.
2004 The fire at Momart storage hits the media mogul hardest. Tabloids cry divine justice, critics rally around the loss of the art, despairing at public philistinism.
Also 2004. . . Saatchi’s contentious status as art patron is highlighted when he claimed that Nicholas Serota had refused to accept his collection for the Tate. Serota said that Saatchi never made an offer, countering that for years Saatchi had refused to aid the Tate with purchasing key British artworks.
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