Is painting dead?
Exhibition Review: The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies 1970-2020
By Kate Greenwell
As an individual with a painting and drawing degree, what comes to mind often when I'm at an impasse with my work is that painting is dead. By coming to this conclusion I permit myself to quit for the day and revel in the silly little thought that it's not my fault! Painting is dead! I am free! A conclusion that never lasts due to exhibits like The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies 1970-2020 curated by Jamillah James and Jack Schneider.
Sending visitors through a synchronous path on the fourth floor of the Contemporary Art Museum of Chicago, The Living End takes on its prompt directly, arguing that painters and other artists have grown through the age of technology more adept than before. Artists have not shirked their beliefs and passions due to new technologies, they have grown inspired by the changes, and whether inspiration comes from technophobia or the embrace of new media, painters have responded in swift discourse to the technologies that have overwhelmed the art world for the past 50 years.
Featuring over 60 artists, The Living End challenges what a painting can be by including digital art, collage art, performances, and even pieces made with Epson printers…
Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2011, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen
The exhibit contains many untraditional paintings, and by untraditional I mean it might be hard to argue their existence as paintings completely. Can a painting have no paint? In this century, James and Schnieder make a compelling argument for yes.
Wade Guyton's Untitled is one of the many works that contain no paint, what Guyton does have however, is the one material that is its partner, linen. The existence of stretched linen encapsulates painting, no matter what marks make their way onto the surface. Guyton also releases control by letting the jam of the Epson printer unleash upon canvas, the technology becoming painterly through its mistakes.
Painter and tech lean on one another in this exhibit in nearly every way, paintings of computer chat rooms with thick painterly lines that shouldn’t reflect a digital landscape so perfectly. Like Celia Hampton’s Chat Random series where her subjects are not just the people from chat rooms but the screen itself which has already rendered out the direct connection with the individual behind the screen. I was not looking at a painting of a tattooed man bearing his penis, neither was Hampton painting that man. I was looking at the screen that encapsulated that moment one impersonal step away.
Celia Hampton, Chat Random Series
The soft glowing light of the computer screen, the only thing illuminating its guests who take to the internet to find solace, to disperse a moment of loneliness perhaps. Only to become even more anonymous once eternalised as oil paint, the whites and yellows becoming illuminated pixels of skin against the mass of recorded information we willingly expose online.
In Hampton’s case, technology has not limited her scope or overtaken her painting practice, it has expanded her source material vastly and given her an unlimited amount of subjects who willingly become muses through their need to connect to others digitally.
Technology could never be the death of painting when it expands opportunity . Painters are scrappy, materialistic, using resources as they are invented and warping them into their individual practices.
Tala Madani, still from Solitaire, single-channel color animation, 5 minutes, 58 seconds. Courtesy the artist.
Madani’s animation switches the narrative when it comes to the subject of the female nude in painting. Her animation is fast paced, made up of hundreds of sparse paintings coming together to create a narrative. We are no longer looking at the carefully crafted female nude trope seen in painting throughout history, Madani has refocused her lens onto lone male figures, painted quickly and often nude, pushing and morphing their bodies into uncomfortable actions. One male stands nude in Solitaire while crudely painted knives thrust into him, making way for beams of light to emit from his body. Cartoon meets painting in this animation. The use of technology allows Madani to reconstruct a world through her paintings where voyeurism meets the lone male form and no longer traps women through the historical paths that painting has hung onto.
So is painting dead? As a favor to myself I could just not decide and in my ignorance I could take full advantage of the death and commit myself to a new career.
Fortunately for everyone, including myself, painting is not dead and as I type this article and gaze at the generic fields which grace the lockscreen of my laptop I fear I am calculating how to render them in oil paint and simultaneously I dread trying. The little folders and files scattered across my screen popping up in small strokes of cerulean blue labeled “Relocated Items” or “IMG_8473.” Technology is not a hindrance to the painter it is just another set of challenges which we have already begun to piece apart and reclaim on canvas.