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Painting in An Era of Critical TheoryAuthor(s): Dan NadanerReviewed work(s):Source: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), pp. 168-182Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1320467 .

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Copyright 1998 by the National Art Education Association

Studies in Art Education A Journal of Issues and Research

1998, 39(2), 168-182

Painting In An Era of Critical Theoryl

Dan Nadaner

California State University, Fresno2

What are the values of painting for the contemporary visual arts curriculum? One of the central tenets of critical theory holds that the value of art in conveying subjectivity has been superseded by the newer task of interrogating the nature of representation. In an art world dominated by critical theory and by new forms that speak to that theory, the contribution of painting to society and to education is not as firmly established as it was in the first half of the century. In this paper I review the challenge from critical theory to painting and construct an alternative relationship between the two fields. I attempt to reaffirm the relationship between painting and experience, and to articulate ways in which concepts in critical theory are informed and extended by the practice of painting. A constructive analysis of the relationship between critical theory and painting permits a positive reconception of the role of painting in a contemporary visual arts program.

1This paper was writ- ten while the author was a Visiting Scholar in the School of

Education, Stanford

University, with the

support of a sabbatical leave from California State University, Fresno.

2Inquiries about this

paper should be addressed to the author at Department of Art & Design, California State

University-Fresno, Fresno, CA 93740- 0065.

3It is understandable that the use of the term "critical theory" to refer to this grouping-typified by the works of Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, Irigaray, and Jameson-may seem unfair to scholars who would rather

apply the term to other literature in critical thinking and educational theory. Nevertheless, the term is used widely.

Critical theory has rapidly become a center of attention and energy in the visual arts. By critical theory I mean the grouping of semiotic, structural- ist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theory that has taken a leading role in the direction of art criticism and contemporary art history.3 The writ-

ings of many critical theorists-e.g., Irigaray (1985), Jameson (1984), Lacan (1977), and Lyotard (1979)-have contributed to an awareness of the social context of artistic production, a focus on relations of power in works of art, and a mistrust of claims of authenticity and subjectivity in the modernist tradition. Since 1970 there has been a close relationship between developments in critical theory and the emergence of "new forms" in visual art, such as language-based and conceptual installations, that speak directly to that theory (Gottlieb, 1976; Harrison & Wood, 1993; Rorimer, 1989). Painting is discussed most often as an artifact of modernism, and therefore an object of dismissal rather than a medium of promise for speaking to contemporary issues (Baker, 1996; Crimp, 1981; Kuspit, 1996; Lawson, 1984; Rubinstein, 1997). If painting is not "dead," it is not very healthy within the critical climate of recent years.

Yet little rigorous analysis has actually been applied to the relationship between critical theory and painting. As new forms demand attention and funding, it is easy for painting to get lost in the excitement. At a time when changes are being considered in many visual art programs, it seems imperative that implications for change be reasoned and not assumed.

I will argue in this paper that there is a positive relationship between critical theory and the practice of painting. I will make this argument in three stages. First, I will review and critique the challenge from critical theory to painting. Second, I will set forth several concepts that are constructive points of contact between painting and critical theory. Third, I will use these concepts to create an alternative view of painting in an era of critical theory. I will suggest that painting continues to relate to experience and to education in specific and significant ways.

Studies in Art Education 168



Painting in an Era of Critical Theory

The Challenge From Critical Theory One of the central arguments of critical theory holds that art is not a "fig- uration" (Jameson's term, quoted in Owens, 1982, p. 21) that is transpar- ent to either the world or our experience of it. Following Lacan (1977), painting has lost its role both as a window to the world and as a window on experience. Both sides of the signifier/signified relationship are viewed as problematic. Communication through paint (the signifier) is problematic because the paint masks the word. Language is the form in which thought occurs. Signification based on language is arbitrary and socially contexted rather than authentic and universal. And the notion of an identifiable "experience" (the signified) is problematic, because that "experience" is also constructed by language as it used within a specific social positioning (Harrison & Wood, 1993, p. 232). Therefore, one cannot claim that art is related to experience.

This view refutes the modernist tradition of seeing increasingly deeper levels of human experience in art, and especially in the relationships among visual forms. An arrangement of forms by Kandinsky becomes a construction of signification within a particular social context and world- view rather than, as Kandinsky had hoped, a language for conveying the vibrations of the soul.

When the premise of art-as-arbitrary is substituted for art-as-experience, the stage is set for a variety of speculations about the contemporary function and direction of painting. Without confidence in the authenticity of the subjective, and believing that the plastic possibilities of expression are encrusted with dense layers of historical structuring, the argument for painting as a unique form of human expression loses its founda- tion. Speculations about the future status of painting follow. Some of the critical leaps regarding the nature of painting have included an insistence on language as the focal point of painting, and the demand that painting take as its subject the investigation of the nature of representation. If rep- resentational forms mask social constructions, then the artist deconstructs representation so as to disclose underlying content. Exemplars of this school include Rosler's inquiries into multiple forms of representation and also the works of Kosuth, Haacke, Burgin, and Syrop (Rorimer, 1989, p. 152), that use language to call attention to the arbitrary nature of art as signifier, and that position art within a socioeconomic context. Rorimer (1989, p. 153) sees these artists as "[succeeding] in the transfor- mation of previous concepts of art." Singerman sees these self-referential critiques as "mourning" the overblown claims of art as representation, and the critic as serving as a "watchdog...protecting the canon by patrolling the periphery" (1989, p. 116). Harrison and Wood celebrate conceptual art (e.g., the early work of the Art and Language group) for its use of hypothetical situations and events, and complex verbal texts, to




Dan Nadaner

inquire into underlying conditions of perception, representation, and social positioning.

These critical leaps put painting in a conflicted state. The ideals that make painters want to paint-e.g., the notion that painting must belong to its time-also make it difficult for a painter to avoid the theories that argue for the exhaustion of painting or the vitality of other forms. In the presence of Lacanian or Derridaist texts, no contemporary text on painting carries equal influence. Almost all of the great studio discourses- Hawthorne (1960, first published 1938), Henri (1923), Hofmann (1948), Kandinsky (1947), Klee (1953), and Nicolaides (1941)- emerged in the first half of the century. Kandinsky's Concerning The Spiritual In Art (1947) gave to the teaching of painting a concept of expressiveness that transcended particular schools of thought in painting. At mid-century Hans Hofmann brought to painting a similarly delineated conception of expression through non-objective means that had special relevance to contemporary developments in abstract painting. For decades ideas from teachers like Hawthorne-about finding beauty in the ordi- nary, making a lot of a little, avoiding the literary, going for studies rather than finish, painting more than drawing, and emphasizing large shapes- have remained the model of studio discourse. Today, in the presence of theories of interpretation that do not value painting, studio discourse is suffused with an unease that it lacks its own contemporary strengths.

Contemporary painters are likely to find themselves positioned some- where between the poles of critical discourse, studio discourse, and per- sonal ideas and intuitions. At times there seems to be little contact between these poles. Often the disjuncture between discourses is not only implied but demanded.

Questioning the Questions In order to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between critical theory and painting, the central concepts of each field, as they relate to other fields, require examination. This examination is especially needed because the influx of critical theory has been rapid and often wholesale in form. Pollitt has commented wryly on the often superficial handling of critical theory within academia:

...Often the postmodernists don't really understand one another's writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond, by way of lily pads. Lacan...performativity...Judith Butler...scandal... (en)gendering (w)holeness.. .Lunch! (1996, p. 9) Those painters and critics who have digested Lacan, Derrida, and

Lyotard tend to assume that implications for major changes in the arts are indicated. By contrast, the search for points of contact with the arts has





been slower to emerge. Very little effort has been addressed to the fleshing out of critical theory with reference to the concrete experience of painting, or to viewing painting in terms of the generative concepts of critical theory.

Like any theoretical argument, the challenge from critical theory to studio practice needs to be subjected to critique itself. Chief among the points calling for critique is the Lacanian assertion that language is at the heart of cognition and art. While the claim that language is at the center of representation has become a popular assumption in the contemporary art world, this claim is not fully supported by research in other fields. The study of cognition and imagery calls into question the claim that the word underlies human thought. The study of mental imagery demonstrates the central role of the visual image in cognition (Arnheim, 1969; Kosslyn, 1977; Paivio, 1971). There is evidence in psycholinguistics that concepts are created in the mind nonverbally before they are "mapped out" onto a linguistic form (Clark, 1977). Even psychologists skeptical of "pictorial thinking" believe that images and words are epiphenomena of mental processes that are neither verbal nor visual in form; very few believe that language is at the core of cognition (Finke, 1989).

Many semioticians, including Roland Barthes (1977), Umberto Eco (1976), Norman Bryson (1981), and James Elkins (1995) have been trou- bled by the dependence of semiotic theory on language. Elkins, in his study of the signification of marks and traces in paintings, questions the assumption that visual form is reducible to language for its meaning. Elkins speaks of a figure as being primarily a "mass of sticky oil." For Elkins, it is wrong to continue the semiotic practice of jumping to "sto- ries" (1995, p. 860) to extract meaning from the work. The artist Aimee Rankin speaks for those who would prefer to value the pictorial image in its own terms:

...I have problems with the way some artists have appropriated impressive-sounding arguments to legitimate their own reductive practice. The idea that a work of art would come equipped with footnotes underlines the role this work assumes, often illustrating what functions as a master discourse like a book report in rebus form. (In Foster, 1987, p. 97) In Elkins's view, critical theory must admit the "incoherence and

strangeness" of pictures. Critical theory must look at all elements of the picture, not only its identifiable subject, but its less easily identifiable marks, traces, and orli (shimmering auras) as well. Elkins's work summa- rizes an emerging direction that restores to the picture the primacy of visual signification, and calls for a new emphasis on understanding pictures in visual terms.




Dan Nadaner

4Diebenkorn and other people talked about "annihilating the image-if you get an image try to destroy it" (Tuchman, 1976, p. 13).

I would argue, then, that there is ample reason to question the lan-

guage-based critique of painting that comes from critical theory. By mak-

ing an analogy between painting and language and then by conflating painting with language, critical theory has created a body of discourse that is both useful and overly convenient. It is useful because it has raised consciousness about the texts and subtexts of power relations that pervade the creation, dissemination, and viewing of art. But it is overly convenient because it is addressed only to places that are well lit (i.e., that connect

easily to existing discourse in the literary realm). There is a wider field that needs illuminating.

There are many "less lit" aspects of painting requiring discussion. There is, for example, the task of analyzing visual form as visual form, as Elkins suggests, rather than through analogy to text. It is much harder to find words to interpret the entire painted surface than it is to describe

subjects that can be construed as signifiers, but it is also much more rele- vant to painting to consider the entire painted surface. Many painters eliminate recognizable subjects from their paintings specifically so as to

preclude facile interpretation.4 Another less lit place is the relationship of visual form to human expe-

rience. The argument that the correspondence between signs and refer- ents in human experience is arbitrary makes good sense, but it is facile. It looks under the light. It relies too much on Saussure's (1966) concept of

arbitrary signification to serve as a blanket negation of all claims of representation. Saussure (1966, p. 120) argued that signs (e.g., words and visual forms) function independently of the object world in creating meaning. But how does one account for the numerous and diverse indications that

painting is motivated by experience in the world, and that painting expresses lived experience? Elizabeth Murray speaks to the authenticity of

experience when she says that she finds "that anything I want to excise comes back" in her works (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 127). It is as if her images had a life of their own. When Munch says that he painted from the "lines and colors... of the inner eye," and that he painted "what I recalled, without adding anything" (Steinberg, 1995, p. 15), he is not

mouthing stereotypical phrases of self-expression, mere theoretical wish fulfillments. Or when Per Kirkeby speaks of his colors springing from a memory such as "a sinking ship or your wife leaving you" (Posner, 1991, p. 6) or when Murray speaks of a painting "reflecting a lunar oriental mood" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 28), there is a specificity to the language that transcends blanket theoretical negations of experience.

Rudolf Arnheim has been a rare voice debating the role that critical theory has come to play within the art world. In Arnheim's (1992) view, the current critique of signification in art derives from the subjectivism of Hume and the nihilism of Nietzsche, neither of which he accepts as valid.





For Arnheim (1994), the mind actively structures perception in visual images, and the work of art acts as an equivalent for these images within a publicly observable medium. Therefore, there is a direct connection between representation in art and human experience.

There are many reasons to question the critical hegemony that is main- tained with respect to painting. The literature-based analysis of signification need not dominate the viewing of painting. The field for construct- ing an alternative viewing of painting is wide open. Nathan Oliveira has said "everything in life can occur in a painting, spontaneously in the work" (in Protter, 1963, p. 272). Oliveira speaks to an evaluation of painting that is open and multiple in its vision, at the same time that his work is sensitive to the contexts and contradictions that surround the art of painting (Nadaner, 1984). Could painting be re-viewed in an alternative way that speaks to this multiplicity of vision? And could this kind of reviewing be stated in terms that hold up to contemporary critical inquiry (i.e., avoid repeating the simple assertion of significance, meaning, spirituality in the work that characterized the many manifesto-like statements preva- lent in art discourse earlier in the century?)

Alternative Viewings: Conceptual Grounds What is needed is a re-evaluation of the points of linkage between painting and theory, as well as the direction of attention to aspects of painting that escape current theoretical paradigms. For example, Derrida's (1979) notion of the floating quality of both signifier and signified has applica- tion to the nature of painting. Not only has critical theory ignored the ways in which painting informs the concept of the floating signifier, but one could argue that the concept cannot be fully understood without reference to painting. Paint, as a plastic medium, is a medium of all possibilities. A single brushstroke by Monet can be decisive or awkward; it can be a figure or a blob of paint. A brushstroke by De Kooning can float as a signifier between the brush strokes of signpainting, classic Hals, and graf- fiti, and it can float as signified between the references of a roller coaster, an emotional crisis turned inside out, and numerous other things. Painting is a floating world, and as such remains a way of saying what cannot be said in ways that cannot be described.

The Lacanian idea that signification occurs metonymically (through adjacent terms) rather than metaphorically has proved a powerful concept for the interpretation of pictures (1977, p. 169). Yet, the converse proposition has not been valued; the proposition that painting is unique among the arts in its capacity to present significance through ambiguous juxtapositions, ambiguous presences, and elided relationships. When Joan Brown outlines a sock in the midst of a densely plowed field of paint she con- nects two things in a way that is irreducible to a "story," and yet that




Dan Nadaner

speaks for a consciousness of its times. The scratches on a Diebenkorn cityscape are only scratches, and yet they speak of another world of inquiry and inner life when compared to a typical rendering of the same subject.

Lyotard's idea (1971) that painting and poetry present incommensurable events is equally powerful in explaining the way that pictures function. Philip Guston's late-career presentations of cartoon-like, machine- like, figure-like forms delineated forcefully on expressionist pink grounds make no sense. They are incommensurable presentations. And yet, they speak precisely in a way that only painting can, presenting figures that are outside of discourse, in Lyotard's terms.

An alternative look at painting in relation to critical theory therefore discloses several concepts highly generative for the valuing of painting. These include, as discussed above, the floating signifier, metonymy, and incommensurabilty. Other concepts in critical theory that seem potent for the understanding of painting include the concepts of non-semiotic analysis (Elkins, 1995), stressed passages (Caws, 1989), eluding definition (Linker, 1984), transgression, and negation.

Each of these concepts contributes considerably to the understanding of painting as painting. By painting as painting, I mean the sort of thing that Diebenkorn speaks of when he says that what interests him most in painting are the "events on the canvas" (Ashton, 1985, p. 6). In the 20th century many painters do not so much translate pre-formulated thoughts into paint as they do search for ideas in the process of painting. These thoughts are integrally connected to lived experience. But they are not necessarily connected through signification alone. Rather, the painting is a world of events which relates to experience in complex ways.

The relationship between painting and concepts such as metonymy, floating signifiers, and the incommensurate may be better understood through critical readings of specific painters and works. Through these readings the complex relationships between painting and experience can be more fully articulated.

Memory and Metonymy When Edvard Munch exhibited his painting The Sick Girl, which sig- naled his turn away from naturalism, in Christiania in 1886, the work was not received well. Munch defended the work by saying "I paint not what I see, but what I saw" (Steinberg, 1995, p. 9). The Sick Girl was completed only after years of reworking. It is a masterpiece of searching and discovery. It is based on memories of his sister's last illness, when he was 13 years old, but the memory is not a fixed template. The painting is "permeated with the adult Munch's pain at her loss" (Steinberg, 1995, p. 16). It is also permeated with the events on the canvas as they emerged through scratching, wiping out, and overpainting. And finally, in creating





a print of the same subject with a master printmaker in Paris, Munch invited chance, gesturing with closed eyes in order to choose one group of colors or another (Steinberg, 1995, p. 16). The work emerges from a search through life and through artistic means, taking real chances in both.

Munch's experience with The Sick Girl demonstrates the contribution of memory painting to the expression of subjectivity. By reading into the past but necessarily working in the present, painting from memory invites juxtapositions and the creation of metonymic relationships. Just Munch's adult consciousness intersects with his childhood memory, his childhood memory intersects with his adult exploration of marks and colors. The painter sacrifices fixed contours for change and surprise.

Elizabeth Murray's work stands as further evidence of the contribution of memory painting to the expression of subjectivity. Murray's work uses metonymy to structure diverse elements of memory. The work responds to the initial impetus derived from memory, but takes off from there as an active search during which ideas are discovered. She describes Searchin'as being about "a face crossing the moon; only later did I realize how Brancusi-like the face was" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 28). For Can You Hear Me? she says that she was thinking about Munch, about "making a sound... the green felt painful and screechy" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 72). In interviews Murray has described the images in her work as being related to her family, her childhood, and thoughts as diverse as the color yellow, cubism, a chair, and Vermeer's woman reading a letter. The specificity of her accounting is revealing precisely because the works are not mimetic representation. They are painted constructions, built of heavily painted organic and linear shapes, that are arranged and rearranged with tremendous energy.

Through memory painting, painters create a kind of productive confu- sion in the thoughts they brings to their work. This state of staying con- fused is one that is difficult or even a sign of failure for the logocentric thinker, but it is not necessarily unconducive to painting. One of the more constructive implications of Derrida is that productive thought occurs at that state of analysis where there is no closure, where ideas remain open and evocative (1979). Speaking of her work More Than You Know, Murray says that she "wanted to paint a chair realistically. At the same time it's a big heart" (Graze & Halbreich, 1987, p. 68). Here Murray exemplifies the kind of metonymic presentation the plastic arts make possible, the kind of presentation that would be so difficult to make in language. Surrealism explored this world with great deliberateness; more recently painters such as Bacon, Rothernberg, and Murray have created metonymic images with increasing obliqueness and mystery.




Dan Nadaner

Marks and The Floating Signifier As a series of marks, painting embodies the concept of floating signifier. The markings in many of Monet's works are painted to have a life of their own. In Church at Varengeville: Morning Effect (1881) and Track Signals Outside Saint-Lazare Station (1877), Monet shows us more than an

"impression" of an ocean or train station. What is revealed is produced in a moment but does not refer to any particular moment. The marks of the artist relate to the experience of the artist as it has developed over time and is manifested in the performance of painting that we see.

Norman Bryson's distinction between gaze and glance informs the

floating function of the mark. Bryson (1983) argues that Western painting fixes the gaze of the viewer where social conventions intend. In order to fix this gaze of pleasure Bryson argues that Western painting has tradi-

tionally concealed the mark as mark, so as to conceal the status of the sign as sign. When painting is conceived alternatively as glance, the mark is valued for itself rather than subjugated within a seamless illusion.

Bryson's analysis opens up the surface of the painting. Elkins (1995) follows Bryson by looking at the marks of the painted surface and calling for a non-semiotic analysis of the mark. Cy Twombly evidences some of the contrary possibilities of the mark. Barthes sees Twombly as non- aggressive, negating tradition, and playful. But play, for Barthes, is not just the stereotype of free and beautiful lyricism; it is also awkward and clumsy, sparse and insubstantial. For Barthes, Twombly's marks are produced without wanting to be produced, and without becoming a prized production for the artist. As such they stand as a negation of the "fine hand" that is at the very center of traditional notions of painting. For Barthes, Twombly deconstructs the aesthetics of painting at its very core, which is not only the concealment of the mark but the nature of the mark itself.

The humility of Twombly's work is its achievement. His mark is not beautiful; it deconstructs beauty. It is a kind of common experience, set in opposition to the Western tradition that presents painting as a unique- ly significant experience.

Twombly's example, although it is singular in its sparse, deconstruc- tionist aspects, helps to direct attention to similar aspects in the paintings of Rembrandt, Daumier, Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Diebenkorn. Oliveira has used the mark to document his inquiry into the uncertainty and limitations of the act of painting (Nadaner, 1984). In the painting as mark there is the conveying of experience in motion, floating freely, close to experience and far from aesthetic dictum.





Change and The Incommensurate As Elkins (1995, p. 841) points out, marks made in clusters become sur-

faces, losing their identity as marks, until the surfaces in turn become marks themselves. For many artists painting involves numerous layers of surfaces. Rembrandt, with his lengthy reworkings and secret, almost alchemical methods (van de Wetering, 1991, p. 31), can be taken as a

progenitor of painting as change.5 For the painter Gillian Ayres, the

buildup of the paint "is merely the residue of my attempt to resolve a

painting over a period of time" (Jamie, 1983, p. 43). Matisse (quoted in Flam, 1973, p. 73) said that "a large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium."

Per Kirkeby is a contemporary painter with an energetic engagement with change. Kirkeby paints in a way that invites impulsive gesture and then refutes it, works up compositions and destroys them, transforms

composition with emotion and then exchanges emotion for the evidence of the paint itself. What remains is not a simple effort of either nature or emotion, but of his complex and conflicted experience as contemporary person. The effect of these works, as Schjeldahl describes them, is their best characterization:

[The viewer experiences] a slower, inchoate, darker contemplation, a state of mind hypersensitive and a bit stupid... The effect is somber, even sullen, but with patience there is stirring in its depths, the

beginning of a grateful joy. (quoted in Posner, 1991, p. 10) Kirkeby is as accomplished a painter of the incommensurate as any

working today. His work evidences the possibilities of painting to deal with the incompatible, to go beyond an insistence on the singularity of

expression. A simplistic view of the incommensurate would hold other- wise. A simple critical leap might call for a more digital form, the kind of

word/photograph/paint juxtapositions or interruptions that are ubiqui- tous in the contemporary art world. Works like these function mainly to

repeat an analytical discourse such as Lyotard makes, rather than to present in artistic form the inexplicable figurations that are the subject of

Lyotard's analysis. Kirkeby, on the other hand, perseveres with the figural, in paint. The reward is an extension of insight and the extension of painting as medium. References to earlier painters are implicit in this achievement. Turner's paintings are sustained as valid and still informative forays into overpainting and change, as are Matisse's, Pollock's, and De Kooning's. The decisions not made by Kirkeby, the refusals of total coherence, the resignation of emotion before the mark, are negations and self-referential commentaries that carry weight because they are made within the realm of painting, because they follow these other painters but exhibit difference as well.

5In a sense the penti- mento was manifesta- tion of the artist's freedom and power over his own cre- ations. This is illus- trated by Houbraken's statement that Rembrandt was self- willed and that he took his right of sole decision to such lengths that "he is said to have tanned over (overpainted with brown pigment) a beautiful Cleopatra in order to give full effect to a single pearl" (van de Wetering,

1991, p. 31).




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The changing that goes on in painting is often more connected to the flow of experience than to the residual image on the canvas. Diebenkorn has said "It is a great experience to violate my overall conception of what a picture has to be and find that in doing so, that it has changes me" (quoted in Cathcart, 1978, p. 25). Paint can always be painted over. Lines can be changed. Forms can be moved. Unsuspected possibilities can be brought together. Painting as change leaves us with further insight into the subjectivity of contemporary life.

Extension and Possibility The fourth relationship between painting and the painter's experience involves the painter's search for that which is outside of his or her experience, extending into the realm of belief or the unknown. This approach to painting is connected to an overt interest in the imagination. Through the imagination the painter can extend the realm of search beyond what- ever bounds are accepted as the contemporary norm. Thus Redon could extend subject matter from the natural to the supernatural (in his "blacks" prints) in reaction to the norm of 1850s naturalism.

A more recent artist, Sylvia Lark, makes extensions of different kinds: she alludes to the icons of diverse cultures, and she challenges the domi- nant formal structures of painting. Lark's work sets up an alternative formal structure by flooding pictorial space into a region in front of the canvas. For Lark paint is to be touched and yet it conveys, through its atmos- pheric veil, a sense of what cannot be touched. These formal means are appropriate to their subject, which is ostensibly (in a painting such as

Chanting) a Tibetan prayer ceremony. Richard Wollheim has said of her work:

...what impresses me most about these paintings is the return jour- ney they record. Amulets, archaic rocks, scraps of veil and silk, passages of half-erased script, lie side by side with her father's bric-a- brac, with vestiges of the body, and now...with lumps of paint exploding onto the palette... Lark's art is, among other things, an art of equivalences. It equates, by means visible to us, affections and feelings we would have thought irreconcilable. (1990, n.p.) Lark's work emerges from abstract expressionism, as Kirkeby's does.

Like Kirkeby's, it extends the expressionist tradition in ways that leave behind a simple assumption in the power of paint to express emotion. It works to extend painting to places where the irreconcilable can be held in view.

It was Redon who most explicitly conceptualized an art of extensions. Calling his work "suggestive art," Redon spoke of creating images so as to evoke thought and inquiry by the viewer: "My drawings inspire and do





not offer explanations. They resolve nothing. They place us, just as music does, in the ambiguous world of the indeterminate" (1961, p. 26).

Redon's search took on a distinctive character because of his will to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible" (1961, p. 29). The work of Giorgio Morandi fulfills the same mission, but in reverse: giving the logic of the invisible to the visible. A group of bottles, bowls, cups, flowers and a tree or side of building sufficed for several decades of work. What he did with these subjects was not, however, conservative. In the still lives of the 1940s and 1950s the paintings are worked over for months until they are both solid and ephemeral. Vibrations suffuse the works in a way that recalls heat waves, but the waves are emanating from the objects rather than surrounding the objects. Franco Solmi says that

Painting had become a land of the infinite, a time with no present... Morandi's emblematic images seem to dwell both at the very core and at the extreme borders of inner transgression, tokens of an inchoate but measured rejection of the system of codes which have come to threaten the innermost substance of the highly individual style of the artist, the raw structure of his art, the apprehensive magma in which the innate partiality of language dissolves, and find resolve, in the work of art, with its reserve of poetry. (1988, p. 5) Morandi's work, like Lark's and Redon's, is a sustained challenge to

what cannot be done-to render visible (in Klee's terms) what cannot be seen, to body forth (in the painter Elmer Bischoff's terms) a substance incorporeal enough to convey the life of feeling. Morandi's achievement throws light on one of the dark places that theory fails to observe.

Painting As Acceptance and Resistance By looking under the light, critical theory of the last two decades has changed the landscape in which painting is created and discussed. It is now a landscape that is self-aware of the text and subtext of power relations pervading all of the visual arts. It is also, by comparison with the first half of the century, a flatter and less colorful landscape. Text is privileged over vision; discourse is privileged over presentation. Claims of self- expression, authenticity, truth to the emotions, and spiritual discovery either are not permitted or not believed. It is a no-nonsense place, and along with the absence of nonsense there is very little mystery or inven- tion as well.

What I have attempted to suggest here is that by considering painting more fully as painting, not just as sign system or as an archaic system of illusion, a more complete view of the landscape can be restored. Painting can never again make blanket claims of self-expression; but to argue that painting depended on this claim was to miss the point in the first place.




Dan Nadaner

Painting carries on a complex relationship to experience, as memory, as mark, as change, and as extension.

Painting accepts. It accepts the problems involved in the definition of experience in the contemporary world. It accepts a medium (paint) that does not speak, that is physically difficult to work with, as a means of presentation. Painting accepts the kinds of incommensurates, negations, and transgressions to which critical theory calls attention. Painting offers a view, perhaps the only view, of what these things look like.

Painting also resists. It resists what cool rationality insists it cannot do. Faced with the impossibility of conveying experience, Murray or Twombly or Kirkeby or Lark search, summon from memory, mark, change, and extend their searches until improbable things are held up to view. At the very least the unexpected is presented; at most, in the belief of some viewers, the invisibles of human experience are conveyed. Because these things happen in the paintings themselves, painting remains an irre- placeable occasion of culture. At its best it has little in common with discourse and cannot be replaced by didactic statements, verbal or visual.

Educational Implications If insight and understanding are accepted as values central to education, then the educational contribution of painting is clear. Painting plays a significant role in education by contributing to the understanding of human experience, and by engaging students in the active exploration of experience through means that are open, flexible, challenging, surprising, and powerful.

In order to realize the values of painting in education, art educators must engage actively in the practical and theoretical dimensions of painting. To do this requires an engagement with studio work, history, theory, and criticism. It is the role of the university, and especially programs that train teachers of art, to provide the courses that permit these several kinds of engagement. If preservice teachers do not study painting in a sustained way in the university, they will not be able to pass an understanding of the medium along to their students in secondary education.

In addition to gaining first-hand experience with painting, teachers need to address philosophical and critical issues. How do paintings carry meaning if not through language? In light of the challenge to the significance of painting presented by many textbased works, how does painting continue to function with vitality in the current era? I have argued in this essay that painting maintains a complex relationship with experience by allowing the presentation of elusive aspects of experience such as memory, change, irreconcilable experiences, and extensions to new realms of experience.

To realize these possibilities of painting in the studio requires a trained and deliberate attitude of openness. The teacher's capacity to model and





encourage exploration and openness is essential to the student's success in pursuing discoveries and accepting them when they present themselves on the canvas. Teachers must encourage students to take risks with their cri- teria as well as their brushes if students are to allow the unexpected to emerge. The practice of art criticism is a concrete means for secondary teachers and students to develop a sensibility that is broad and open to the possibilities of painting.

In 1985, I argued that art education should concern itself with the critique of media images, the expansion of multicultural imagery, and the creation of inventive, non-stereotyped images. I still agree with this position today. However, I believe that the creative dimension is suffering a benign neglect and needs attention. There is a need to look critically at arguments that would abruptly negate the creative possibilities of studio work, or that argue that visual form does not have the capacity to repre- sent experience. There is a need to relate creative practices like painting to inquiries in critical theory. There is a need to engage actively in the creation of works that speak to contemporary experience. I believe that the strengthening of the creative dimension is central to the development of an art that is truly responsive to multicultural society.

To sustain the vitality of painting requires the maintenance of breadth and quality in secondary and post-secondary studio programs, and the active engagement of teachers in both practice and theory. What is at stake is a central component of the humanities and its continuing contribution to the quality of life of future generations.

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