Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. Photo by Thomas Mueller

Wade Guyton, "Untitled" (2007). Epson UltraChrome ink-jet print on linen, 84 x 69 in.

Courtesy Galerie Ben Kaufman, Berlin

Poul Gernes, "Untitled" (1974–75). Enamel on masonite, 35 7⁄16 x 35 7⁄16 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

George Condo James Siena Bill Jensen Harriet Korman Ellsworth Kelly Franz Ackermann John M Armleder Steve DiBenedetto

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In 1998, Matthew Marks and Pat Hearn, who was fatally ill with liver cancer at the time, teamed up to mount “Painting: Now and Forever,” an exhibition of 45 artists, ranging from the up-and-coming to the well-known, and including a number of artists that Hearn was the first to show (George Condo, Jeff Elrod, Monique Prieto, and Philip Taaffe) and one whose career she did much to advance (Mary Heilmann). A pioneer dealer, Hearn was one of the very first to open a gallery in Chelsea, in 1995, and the show (whose title was a bittersweet evocation of ars longa, vita brevis) was a celebration of her discoveries, efforts, generosity, and style.

According to the press release for the current exhibition, the first was meant to be “a highly subjective, celebratory survey of contemporary painting,” and it is in this same “spirit” that “Painting: Now and Forever, Part II” has been mounted, this time by Matthew Marks and Carol Greene—positioning Greene as the replacement star for Hearn, who died in 2000, leaving the art world without one of its most influential, rebellious, and beloved dealers. But if this show is meant to represent Greene’s vision of painting, as well as highlight her discoveries, she falls well short of the mark. There is nothing new under this sun.

By professing to be subjective and celebratory, the organizers of this exhibition seem to be rejecting the opportunity to make a timely, interesting, or even insightful observation about painting (a practice that in my mind continues to fly under the radar). One has only to consider who isn’t in the show to deduce that subjectivity is a cover for an agenda. For it’s as if all the mature painters committed to craft and the slowness of paint (however casual it might in the end look) were not worth the slightest consideration (Suzan Frecon, Leiko Ikemura, Bill Jensen, Harriet Korman, Catherine Murphy, Dona Nelson, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, James Siena, Juan Uslé, and Stanley Whitney, just to mention a few). The shift from the late-20th-century I-am-a-machine- who-makes-paintings to early-21st-century artists who actually engage with painting is not even given a cursory nod (Birgit Antoni, Gillian Carnegie, Steve DiBenedetto, Merlin James, Chris Martin, Ruth Root, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Dan Walsh, and Chuck Webster, for example). Rather, “Part II” promotes a teleological view, which is that the next right thing to do is to become more machinelike, parodic, and de-skilled. Wade Guyton, Josh Smith, Gelitin, along with Mary Heilmann (the only holdover from the first show), Anne Truitt (1921– 2004), Ellsworth Kelly, and the optical abstractions of the Danish artist Poul Gernes (1925–1996) are each given a room (or nearly all of one). This fact lent transparency to the show’s title, as well as subverted the claim that it was a “survey.” Suddenly, “Now and Forever,” conveyed the motive to turn certain younger artists’ present moment of impact (their “now”) into the elevating status of “forever”—thus establishing for them a more enduring place in art history. However, what the installation ended up doing was calling attention to the central weakness of its hypothesis, which is that painting is governed by Greenbergian teleology, the idea that there is a namable goal (flatness and the optical) to which all must aspire.

The organizers of this exhibition seem to have no idea how interesting painting is right now, because they approached it with an idea of what are the right next moves, all of which have been made before. Is combining the optical with a machine to make paintings that evoke Minimalism and Russian Constructivism (Guyton) that much of an advance over Elrod’s use of a computer to mimic doodling? Is parodying authenticity (Smith and Gelitin) something that Condo and John Armleder (who was in the first show) didn’t cover? Is having a style and technique really all that it’s cracked up to be? Aside from the obvious fact that painting isn’t teleological, at least as theorists have narrowly construed it, the idea of the right next move has become trivial. In the aftermath of “the death of painting,” the cutting-edge assertion of what to do next is predicated on outmoded paradigms, such as the ideal of progress.

Because the show falls in the gap between “historical survey” and irrelevant “summer group show,” the viewer might become distracted by seeing it as a promotional device for select artists, one that seems directed toward art-market shoppers who bank on the artist who is gullible enough to try and do the next thing. In subtitling the exhibition “now and forever,” the organizers seem to have overlooked another meaning of this phrase, which is that we live in an eternal present that is constantly changing. Had they thought of that, they would have come up with a show that didn’t announce “the death of painting” all over again, and instead dealt with mortality, contingency, and the dream of freedom and possibility that the artists I have cited have been quietly toiling at throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Ten years ago, Marks and Hearn didn’t seem to have much of an agenda, and they grouped together artists as diverse as Franz Ackerman, Joanne Greenbaum, Sherrie Levine, Larry Poons, and Susan Williams. There was something oddball, anarchic, and finally endearing about seeing those works together. “Part II” is a long way from that one, and not just in terms of time. The title of the exhibition could have come from Michael Krebber’s painting, Contempt for One’s Own Work as Planning for Career. "Painting: Now and Forever, Part II" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.