Archivo F. Conz, Verona

Günther Brus, "Selbstbemalung" (Self-painting) (1964). One of nine silver gelatin prints, 9½ x 7 in.

Collection of the Artist

Jasper Johns, "Target" (1958). Oil and collage on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

November 2009 Reviews

The Audio Show

Dorothy Iannone

Anton Vidokle

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Walid Raad

Richard Long

Song Dong

Bruce Nauman Robert Rauschenberg Arman Jasper Johns Lucio Fontana Joseph Kosuth John Baldessari Lawrence Weiner

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"Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78," at the Seattle Art Museum this summer, focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40 talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the best contemporary-art survey in the museum’s history.

SAM curator Michael Darling selected not only key works from familiar figures but also pieces by less-established artists that nevertheless hold up well. In the latter category is Lygia Pape’s 1958 video Divisor. In it Pape makes slits in billowing sheets through which children poke their heads. Cut the canvas, and the future pops out.

In the context of his own slashing, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1952) is a delicate work. While Fontano made a career out of tearing canvas, Jasper Johns, another of the better-known names in the show, put the capstone on such efforts in 1964 with Untitled (Cut, Tear, Scrape, Erase).

Shozo Shimamoto’s Holes (1954), in which whitewashed layers of newsprint are pierced with a pencil, captures the tragic state of postwar Japan in its combination of delicacy and violence. The Japanese had a strong presence in the exhibition, especially Ushio Shinohara, whose early 1960s performances with paint (seen in large photos) were the equal of anything happening in Europe and America at the time.

Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction, from his best period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, hung near Lynda Benglis’s Chi (1973), which was on the floor. His is a giant shawl and hers a tumorous type of jewelry.

Large video projections of Bruce Nauman’s 1967 film Art Make-Up occupied four walls of a gallery, surrounding visitors with the artist’s self-absorption. Looking in a mirror, he covers his face and chest in white and then black paint, serving as both object and viewer. In a gallery nearby, John Baldessari’s Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977) made fun of painting. Every day for a week, he painted himself into a corner — a different color daily, each a dead end.

Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) was an essential inclusion. Arman’s mounds of mass-produced objects are a harder sell. They tend to fall into a rut. Not Ochre (1967). In it, more than 200 tubes of paint trapped in resin vomit color, each a gesture. And a gesture, in the Roland Barthes phrase quoted in the catalogue, is "something like the surplus of an action."

If Johns’s Cut, Tear, Scrape, Erase is the cool end of "Target Practice," Otto Muehl’s Untitled (1963) is the hot. Made of sand, plaster, stockings, and emulsion on sackcloth, with gaping holes bound by knotted ropes, it has golds and blacks that gleam like excavated jewels. Andy Warhol might have wanted to be a machine, but in the end, he was a painter. One of his "Oxidation Paintings" from 1978 — urine on copper panels — serves as a subtle version, and an obvious critique, of Abstract Expressionism.

Text paintings shine in this environment. What a bowl of flowers was in 17th-century Holland, text is to us. Forget ragged, though. These artists — Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Marcel Broodthaers — are meticulous. In Peintures (série l’art et les mots) from 1973, Broodthaers imitates Magritte’s cursive writing from La trahison des images (1929) well enough to forge a check.

"Target Practice" makes the case for painting’s cutters, stompers, burners, melters, and satirists. The patronizing put in an appearance too. Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961) invites viewers to select a nail from a box nearby and pound it into a white canvas, helping Ono color within the lines of her didactic idea. In Seattle, visitors didn’t stick to the assignment, instead topping the nails with bits of paper, charms, tiny toys, and jewelry. Her rectangle became a swollen orb of pocket clutter. If art, as Carl Andre is quoted as remarking in the catalogue, is the "exclusion of the unnecessary," it can also be an excess producing — at long last for Ono’s piece — a genuine experience.