Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition

by Isabelle Graw (Editor), Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Editor)

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation.

Genres: Art

292 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2016

Reviews

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Amy Sillman’s essay on color here and a couple of the other essays interested me. But some of it was beyond me.

[Zsuna Barger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experience varies wildly depending on what essay you choose

[Elli · Rating 4 out of 5]

there is no black in nature, there are no dead parts in painting.

been feeling like shit about my painting practice lately but this nice lil mix of essays made me think about painting as something interesting and fun again so thanks!

[Med Fezz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graw’s discussions on authorial ghosts existing within painting signals Booth’s theory of the ‘implied author’, creating an interesting link between literary and painting theory. The difference between the two being Booth’s implied author is a temporary companion guiding the reader through the text, with an implicit morality (oft attributed as a necessary feature of successful fiction), whereas the authorial ghosts generated within a painting can be flattened, caricatural selves without a didactic or necessarily moral function. In this sense the authorial ghost is similar to the Nabakovian aspiration for ‘aesthetic bliss’, they strive to be divine, not holy.

Semantically, ghosts imply a timeless, post-living status, that reflects notions of the eternalised moment captured within painting, whilst authors (imo) suggest a still living being. When we read literature, we bring the dead back to life so to speak. We hear the narrator’s voice again, akin to playing a recorded voice message of a now deceased friend, whereas the presence of said friend within an image/pictorial representation is omnipresent at any point the image crosses our mind. We can visualise the image and thus keep a ghostly equivalence of it instilled in our subjectivity but the same ease of access to that friend is not as attainable through text/trying to remember their thoughts. We can remember the visual and tacit moments of a positive experience but the specific words inherent in dialogue (minus a few one-liners) tend to be lost to time. Rambling a little, but the discussion made me appreciate differences between the verbal and visual as well as question their moments of intersection within ekphrasis and other verbal-visual hybridised forms (film, video-games etc).

There are common themes within the essays, primarily a shared understanding of painting as a phenomenological event occurring spatially through time. In this definition, paintings encode the physicality of the painter (regardless of the machinisation inherent in their production), the implication being that an authorial spectre/ghost can be discerned through analysis of a painter’s paintings and their wider context. This is an interesting discussion to be had, it overcomes the subject/object dichotomy inherent in Ruskin’s sister-arts theory (or Horace’s et picture poesis) and Greenbergian formalism that predates it.

Understanding the content of the essays requires an acute awareness of ABR methodological frameworks. An appreciation that poeticism within academia, is a means of generating qualitative research, may help some readers access the depth of the essays, and explain idiosyncrasies in the writing.

[James Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed and would have given it a better rating if the images regarding the colour essays were in colour not B/W

[Annie Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Need to buy this for my own collection! Love!