<h3>(희민)</h3> <p></p> <p><strong>1. Introduction</strong></p> <p></p> <p>In the following I will first try to develop a medium-unspecific notion of painting that is nevertheless able to capture its residual distinctness even under the conditions that led to its dif-fuse boundaries. These conditions- often referred to as a post-medium condition" (Rosalind E. Krauss)_-will be addressed in view of their implications for painting. If painting has expanded and tends to be everywhere, as I will argue, then it seems to make little sense to delimit its realm. Yet this is what numerous painting exhibitions, from “Derzerbrochene Spiegel" (Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Kunsthalle Wien, 1993) to "Painting on the Move" (Kunsthalle Basel, 2002), or the notorious publications produced by Phaidon (Painting Today, 2009) keep doing: they treat painting as if it was a clearly circumscribed entity. However, painting has long since left its ancestral home--that is, the picture on the canvas-~-and is now omnipresent, as it were, and at work in other art forms as well.</p> <p></p> <p>We therefore cannot be sure what we are referring to when we talk "about painting." Do we mean painting in the sense of a medium, a technique, a genre, a procedure, or an institution? As a way out of these semantic quandaries I will propose a less substantialist notion of painting: a form of production of signs that is experienced as highly personalized. This understanding of painting as highly personalized semotic activity has several advantages-it is less restrictive, allowing us to see how painting is at work in other art forms as well, and it is able to capture what is specific about painting's codes, gestures, and materiality.<br></p> <p><strong>1</strong> "About painting" was the title of the 2011 art fair/exhibition abc - art berlin contemporary.</p> <p><br> In addition to this, the focus on painting's indexicality enables us to grasp the particularly strong bond that we encounter between the person and the product. 'This bond has been of particular relevance for anthropology, which tends to repped artworks as equivalents of people.* While this view underests mates the fact that the two groups function differently in many respects, I nevertheless find Alfred Gell's definition of artworks as "indexes of apency" yery useful.* Painting takes this apped. of artworks that they are perceived as social indexes-1o the very extreme, In order to argue painting's particular ability to wiggest social agency, I will investigate the highly personalized nature of this particular sign production and relate it to the way it obtains value,</p> <p><br>There are many indications of painting's lasting popularity: we keeps fetching the hiphest prices on the art market and it cue rived the manifold historical attempts to declare it finished, dead, obsolete, etc, I will conclude by offering one possible explanation for its tenacity, Granted, there are other, more prapmatic reasons for its lasting popularity that I won't elaborate on here (such as the easy transport and circulation of pietores on canvas), Moreover paintings are usually based an comparatively low production cost, which also contributes to their attraction, But I am more interested here in the power fid suggestion that painting is able to produce as an art form I will argue that it is particularly disposed to support the expectation wiespread in the art world that acquiring work of art means getting a hold on the artist's labor capacity and therefore owning a slice of her life. Buying artworks indeed comes close to buying people--and this is especially true for painting.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>2</strong> Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7.</p> <p><strong>3 </strong>Ibid., 17.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>2. For an Expanded Notion of Painting</strong><br></p> <p>I have already hinted at the problems of defining painting. When most artistic practices, not only painterly ones, have undergone massive differentiation and expansion, it becomes rather difficult to pin down painting. How do we determine an “unresolved category"?* I would like to suggest that we work with an expanded notion of painting that breaks with the modernist understanding of it as a clearly delineated practice characterized by given norms and conventions. Since the borders between the different art forms have become permeable, at least since the 1960s, we have found ourselves in a situation where different media relate to, refashion, and remodel each other. This process has been termed "re-mediatization,"'" and occurs when the features that have been ascribed to one medium-~-for instance, flatness or representational strategies in painting-~-are addressed by another medium--for instance, large-scale photography. And sure enough, artists from Jeff Wall to Wolfgang Tillmans have tirelessly demonstrated to us that photography can take up the representational and narrative strategies of painting; that it can aim at creating surfaces that suggest the materiality of abstract painting. </p> <p>The crucial point remains here that the modernist idea of an art that is defined by the "essence of its medium' has clearly lost its relevance. Once the medium can no longer be delimited, then no qualities can be inherent to it. Its character, rather. depends on how the artist will proceed with it.<br></p> <p><strong>4</strong> Quoted from the press release of the exhibition "Nikolas Gambaroff, Michael Krebber, R. H. Quaytman, Blake Rayne* at Bergen Kunsthall, November 5-December 22, 2010.</p> <p><strong>5</strong> See Ilka Becker, " The Image as Revenant: Retroactivity and Remediation in the Works of T.J. Wilcox," trans. Michael Lattek, Texte zur Kunst, no. 79 (December 2009): 126-31.</p> <p><strong>6</strong> Michael Fried has written a whole book about how the former themes that he detected in eighteenth-century painting--absorption, theatriciality-_-are now taken up by contemporary photographers. Michael Fried, "Introduction," in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1-4.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>3. Good-Bye to Medium-Specificity?</strong></p> <p></p> <p>Clement Greenberg was the leading champion of the idea that modernist painting in particular is not only characterized by "essential norms and conventions" such as the fatness of its surface, but that each painting has to ideally criticize these</p> <p>limitations "from the inside." It is interesting to note how the descriptive and the normative levels merged in his notion of the medium. Not only did he essentialize painting, ignoring the fact that it actually shares its supposedly essential condition-the flat surface-~-with writing, he moreover expected the artist to defend the imaginary purity of her medium by criticizing it from within. </p> <p><br>Now, this privilege that Greenberg had accorded to the medium became historically untenable once painting lost its purity and expanded into life, as in the Combine paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. Greenberg's position became even more questionable when those Conceptual art practices emerged in the late 1960s that strongly relied on different technologies, such as film photography or diagrams. This was an art that was more generic than medium specific, as André Rottmann has rightly pointed out." One might add to this that the rejection of the</p> <p>privileged status of painting has a much longer history, and regularly occured in painterly practices as well. As an example of a painting that says good-bye to the tradition of “pure painting,” I would refer to Francis Picabia’s Nature Morte(1920).</p> <p></p> <p><strong>7</strong> Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting* in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticium, vol. 4, Molemim with a Vengeance, 1957-1960, ed. John 'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 89, 85.</p> <p><strong>8</strong> André Rottmann *Networks, Techniques, Institutions: Art History in Open Circuits, Texte zur Kunst, no, 81 (March 201 D): 142- 44</p> <p></p> <p>The painting contaminates the alleged purity of its medium by drawing on different formats : the readymade ( in the form of the stuffed animal attached to the surface that "stubbornly clings to the domain of painting," as George Baker no adequately put it )9 and text (the written names of "great" male artists like Céanne, Rembrandt, and Renoir, whose portrait we are</p> <p>meant to see and who turn out to be nothing but a dead animal, natures mortes). Cézanne, for one, whose work was always considered to be the epitome of pure painting, is declared to be as dead as the stuffed ape. The status of painting as a higher art form and the correlating belief in its purity and essence are doubly threatened here: not only by the incorporation of a ready-made that enforces the external logic of the commodity and productive labor into the painting, but also by the textual elements, which equally threaten to bury painting's alleged essence.</p> <p>Are we then obliged to deduce from this that there is nothing medium specific about painting anymore? I believe that we have to concede at this point that some artists, and painters in particular, do indeed encounter problems in their practice that they ascribe to the specificity of their respective medium. But it is one thing to acknowledge a certain degree of medium-specificity at this level of artistic production, and another to derive a highly questionable general norm of medium-specificity from it.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>9</strong> George Baker, "The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Dada Painting" in The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 101.<br></p> <p></p> <p><strong>4. Painting and Indexicality</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>So, how to define painting once it has merged with other procedures-_from the readymade and linguistic propositions to the insights of institutional critique? How to determine practice that renders impossible the rigorous distinction between what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to it? I want to propose that we conceive of painting not as a medium, but as a production of signs that is experienced as highly personalized, By focusing on painting's specific indexicality, we will be able to grasp one of its main characteristics: it is able to suggest a strong bond between the product and the (absent) person of its maker. This is due to the way indexical signs actually operate: According to Charles S. Peirce, an index shows something about a thing because of its physical connection to it. ' Since he mentioned photography as an example for this "class of signs," art historians tend to mainly treat photography as the indexical art form par excellence." But I would argue that painting suggests such a physical connection even more strongly. Someone has lefther marks.</p> <p></p> <p>Frank Stella's observation that painting is a sort of handwriting was actually quite to the point. '2 Its signs are indexical insofar as they can be read as traces of the producing person. Now even if we opt for a deconstructionist approach, insisting how the trace equally addresses "the formal conditions of separation, division, and deferral,;"3 we are still dealing with the ghost of a presence. This is also true for those paintings that avoid hand-writing by using a technical device, as in Gerhard Richter's abstract paintings produced with a squeegee.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>10</strong> Charles S. Peirce, What Is a Sign?, in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writingt vol 2, 1893 -1913, ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998),9 </p> <p><strong>11 </strong>See Rosalind E, Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America;" October à (Spring1977): 68-81</p> <p><strong>12</strong> Druce Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd; in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 157.</p> <p><strong>13</strong> Jacques Derrida, quoted in Rosalind B. Krauss, "Six,? in The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 260.</p> <p></p> <p>By moving the squeegee up and down the painting in a particular way, Richter inscribes his own body movement into the painting. In other words, attempts to eliminate the subjectivity of the artist into painting.14 Yet linking indexicality to painting does not imply that we ignore the split that occurs between the artwork and the authentic self. What we encounter in painting is not so much the authentically revealed self of the painter, but rather signs that insinuate that this absent self is somewhat present in it. As a highly mediated idiom, painting provides a number of techniques, methods, and artifices that allow for the fabrication of the impression of the author's quasi-presence as an effect. For this indexical effect to occur, the artist does not need to have literally set her hand on the picture, or to have brandished a brush, or to have thrown paint on it. A mechanically produced silkscreen by Andy Warhol, who often delegated his work to his assistants, or a printed black painting by Wade Guyton, is no less capable of conveying the sense of a latent presence of the artist--by virtue, for instance, of imperfections deliberately left uncorrected, selected combinations of colors, or subsequent improvements, Painting, then, would have to be understood as the art form that is particularly favorable to the belief- widespread in the visual arts more generally--that by approaching or purchasing a work of art, it is possible to get a more immediate access to what is assumed to be the person of the artist and her life.<br></p> <p><strong>14</strong> See Isabelle Graw, " The Knowledge of Painting: Notes on Thinking Images, and the Person in the Product," trans. Gerrit Jackson, Texte zur Kunst, no. 82 (June 2011): 114-25.</p> <p><strong>15 </strong>"Noch (kann] die Wahl eines Mediums, das Handschriflichkeit ausdrücklich negiert, Ausdruck (oder 'Medium') eben der Handschrift eines Künstlers sein." Michael Luthy and Christoph Menke, "Einleitung," in Subjekt und Medium in der Kunst der Moderne, ed. Michael Lüthy and Christoph Menke (Zurich: diaphanes, 2005), 9.</p> <p><br></p> <h3>(나하)<br> </h3> <p></p> <p><strong>V Painting as a Thinking Subject</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>'There is one feature of the indexical sign that I have not yet mentioned: according to Peirce, the indexical sign is able to capture our attention because it is affected by the power of its object. *• Now, in the case of painting's indexicality, this object is a subject- the person of the artist. This is why painting can be potentially experienced as being intriguing in a way that only an intriguing person could be. You might object that sculpture is able to do exactly the same thing. Isn't sculpture marked by a similar kind of indexicality and it therefore also suggest that it is a quasi-person?<strong>17</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>16</strong> An index is a thing which having been forcibly affected by its object, forcibly affects its interpretant and causes that interpretant to be forcibly affected by the object, and to affect, (Ch interpretant in turn; and which, further, so Far as if is a sig0, becomes a sign in this wah Charles S, Peirce, 1902, The Papers of Charles S. PelIce, R 509, Floughion Library, Harrard</p> <p><strong>17</strong> The term quasi-person evokes Bruno Latour's actor-network-theory and his understanding of things as "quasi-objects" or "actants." Latour famously proposed that objects are to be recognized as taking part in actions. They do not act as such- they have their role to play in the course of an action. While I find his call for considering objects decisive for an action interesting, I am less sure of his overall project that attacks critical sociology. By replacing the concept of "society" with a more progressive-sounding "collective" that includes nonliving objects as well, the different action potentials of subjects and objects are underestimated as much as the power relations and hierarchies between subjects are left out of sight. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).</p> <p><br></p> <p>Yes, it does, but to a lesser degree. Only painting has many historical arguments pointing to its subject-like power--arguments that I believe do reach into our present. The very first systematic treatise on painting produced in the modern era, for instance, Leon Battista Alberti's Della pittura (1453), already aimed to raise the reputation of painters in order to advance their emancipation from the larger class of craftsmen. Indicatively enough, Alberti based his preference for the painter over the sculptor on his view that the former worked with more difficult things,"'S thereby implying that painting possesses a challenging materiality and that to paint is an intrinsically intellectually demanding activity.</p> <p></p> <p> Once painting was declared to be intellectually challenging, it was only a matter of time before it would be claimed to have the intellectual powers of a subject. Hegel defined painting as a mode of artistic representation into which the "principle of finite and inherently infinite subjectivity" had forced its way.” Everything that is fundamentally part of a subject accordingly urges towards painting's surface. Subjectivity, however, is here not that of the artist but a universal faculty--"the principle of our own being and life"' According to Hegel, we see in the artifacts of painting what is "at work and operative within ourselves." And it is precisely because we believe we recognize in it a familiar potential that we at once feel "at home" in it. In other words, painting, in Hegel's view, moves us also because it stages principles that strike us as familiar and that constitute us. 'The decisive point of this argument is that Hegel aligns painting with the subject by ascribing a capacity for it—the capacity of subjectivity- which is, properly speaking, the exclusive privilege of subjects. Only subjects possess the ability to evolve an independent mental life. By according a subject-like power to painting, Hegel laid the ground for what I would describe as the central trope around painting in the twentieth century- namely, the assumption that there is thought in painting, that painting itself is able to think.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>18</strong> Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans, John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT) Yale University Press, 1966), 06.</p> <p><strong>19</strong> G. W. R. Hegel, "The Romantic Arts? in Aestheties: Lectures on Ane Art, vol. 2, trane. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 797.</p> <p><strong>20</strong> Ibid,</p> <p><strong>21</strong> Ibid.</p> <p><br></p> <p>French painting theorists like Louis Marin or Hubert Damisch in particular have put forward this argument -that painting is a sort of discourse producer that arrives at its own insights. Once it is declared to be able to think it becomes subject-like.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>VI Painting as a Highly Valuable Quasi-Person</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>But how does painting's capacity to evoke the sense of a subject-like force--its power to suggest that it actually operates like a person--relate to the value that is attributed to it?22 </p> <p><br></p> <p>For an artwork to be considered valuable, it first of all has to be attributable to an author--one could say that it thereby gets loaded with intentionality. This process gets intensified in the case of the indexical signs of paintings. Here, someone has left her traces (even if mechanically produced, this suggestion of a handwriting persists) and this enhances the impression of an intentional artwork, of an artwork that itself has agency. While all artworks have to function as an index of the one who brought them into existence in order for value to be attributed to them, painting seems to go further by suggesting that it is a quasi-person. Or to put this slightly differently: painting is particularly well equipped to satisfy the longing for substance in value. It indeed seems to demonstrate how value is founded in something concrete- the living labor of the artist.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>22</strong> 1'm not distinguishing between symbolic and economic value here on purpose. I am referring to value in the sense of the place where social relevance is attributed to an artwork. All the claims that have been made for painting constitute its symbolic value. While symbolic value does not automatically get translated into economic value, it is never the precondition for economic value to occur.<br></p> <p>Let's recall how Karl Marx conceptualized value. While it is certainly true that his reflections on value were bound to the commodity and that he did not consider artworks commodities of a special kind, his notion of value has two undeniable advantages: it does not confound value and price, and therefore it prevents us from equating the value of an artwork with its market value.23 Even more importantly, Marx insisted on the relational, metonymic quality of value, thereby reminding us that value has no substance and is always elsewhere.<br></p> <p>Indeed, Marx on the one hand emphasized that no commodity is valuable in itself, that value is a "purely social" phenomenon.? This is also true for artworks: No artwork is valuable per se-its value is the result of an ongoing and never-ending social negotiation. If the symbolic value of Damien Hirst's work, for instance, is considered questionable because of his general strategic attitude towards the market, then his overall project will start to lack credibility and its price will eventually fall. But the worth of his practice is never fixed and is always open for reconsideration.</p> <p></p> <p>On other hand, Marx pointed to how value represents “the diture of human labor in general.”25 This would mean that value eclipses concrete labor and turns it into its opposite-abstract human labor,."26 Now, painting seems to be one of the last places where the desire for a concrete foundation of value <em>seemingly</em> gets fulfilled. Not only does it generate the illusionary impression that it is possible to grasp a fiber of the lived labor that was mobilized for it, but it moreover promises the existence of an imaginary place where labor actually remains private and concrete, detectable in the concrete materiality of its surface and the gestures that it displays. The process of labor is not hidden but seemingly exposed, as if the lived labor of its author was something we could hold onto, as if it had not been transformed into "objectified labor" (vergegenständlichte Arbeit, Marx) during the process of exchange. Painting's capacity to appear particulary saturated with the lifetime of its author makes it the ideal candidate for value production.<br></p> <p><strong>23</strong> Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic value" allows us to theorize this non-equation, There can be symbolic value without market value.</p> <p><strong>24</strong> “Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet insofar as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only insofar as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity," Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, Part 1:'The Process of Capitalist Production, ed, Friedrich Engels, trans, Ernest Untermann (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 55.</p> <p><strong>25</strong> But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general.," Ibid., 51.</p> <p><strong>26</strong> Hence, the second peculiarity of the equivalent form is, that concrete labour becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself" Ibid., 67,</p> <p><br></p> <p>It is important to note that this search for value within lived labor gets even more pronounced in the current context of ongoing devalorization. One of the effects of the 2008 financial crisis Is that more and more desperate searches for value take place. The belief in the "personality" of the artwork and painting in particular is of course not a solution to the crisis, it is rather a way of both delaying and extending it.</p> <p></p> <p>Let me conclude by saying that the topos of painting as a quasi-person has historically turned up in many different guises-starting from painters themselves, who have either seriously (like Francis Bacon or Charline von Heyl) or ironically (Albert Oehlen) referred to the idea that painting tells them what to do,? The belief in the self-activity of painting is one of its central myths, a myth that is of course closely interwoven with the experience of production. I have mentioned already how several French art historians like Marin or Damisch have made a slightly different claim for a metapictorial “thinking* of paintings, demonstrating how it is able to produce its own discourse,28 While I wouldn't deny the possibility that a painting can occasionally deliver its own interpretation, I find it nevertheless important to realize that by claiming agency for painting (or for artworks in general), by treating them as quasi-persons, as I have aimed to show here that we tend to do, we become somewhat implicated in the process of value attribution, a process that has in any case already been fired up by our propositions regarding the nature of the artwork.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>27</strong> Francis Bacon: "I find that if I am on my own I can allow the paint to dictate to me." David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames &amp; Hudson, 1988), 194. Charline von Heyl: "For me, what makes a painting is a mixture of authority and freedom, where it really just wants to be itself, where there is no justification, or explanation, or anything</p> <p>like that. Where it's just what it is for whatever reason." Claire Barliant and Christopher Turner, "Painting Paradox," Modern Painter (Summer 2009): 45. Albert Oehlen: "When I step into the room, I face them- which is extremely unpleasant. Each one shoots me a dirty look, as if to say, you idiot, you loser, you'll never make it." Albert Oehlen, interview by Eva Karcher, Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 9-10, 2010; trans. my own. In Corinna Bela’s documentary Gerard Richter Painting (2011), Richter jokingly says that his paintings do</p> <p>want they want.</p> <p><strong>28</strong> See Louis Marin on Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepards: "The painting in the Louvre is a representation of the process of narrative representation associated with history." Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), 26.</p> <h3> <br>(은비)</h3> <p></p> <p><strong>Questions for Isabelle Graw</strong></p> <p>Peter Geimer </p> <p><br></p> <p>What I find interesting about your thesis is that you do not work with the term "indexicality" in its widely understood sense, but, instead, you mobilize it to mean the exact opposite, In the theory of photography, index, trace, and reprint count as modes by which an object registers itself physically. These do not necessarily require the presence of an author, and it is precisely through this quality that they open up an empty space of subjectivity and intentionality (somewhat like André Bazin’s statements about photography being the first of the arts to derive an advantage from man's absence), ' Your understanding of indexicality- transferred to painting:-implies just the opposite; the promise of value being awarded by the visible or imagined presence of an author. You use the definition of painting as a "form of production of signs that is experienced as highly personalized" in place of the modernist and substantialist concept, and suggest this as an alternative trait of painting. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Here, I begin my two questions: Firstly, in this transfer, what happened to the condition, central to the Peircean definition, of physical contact between sign and signified? If mechanical means, printing, and the involvement of third parties have been employed in painting production for quite Some time now (as in your examples of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton), then Peirce's central motif of direct physical contact has simply been canceled. Peirce also understood indexicality as more than mere construct or pure attribation, convention, or sug gestion, but instead as a real existent physical connection (in his example, something like that between the path of the sun and the analog shadow cast on the sundial, or between the wind's direction and the analog movement of the weather vane). What exactly do you gain in this argument by taking on Peirce's concept of indexicality, though in doing so varying one of his central conditions?</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>1</strong> André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4-9</p> <p></p> <p>I also ask myself whether indexicality in your understanding is in fact specific to the contemporary discourse on painting. Why wouldn't this also be valid for a film or a video, where the carnera work or editing can count as visible marks of the producer? (And, as Rosalind E. Krauss showed so well in her essay *Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," there have been many art historians who were anxious to establish a conceptualization of authorship and personal style, which is rooted in painting, within the medium of photography as well.) 2 The will to trace subjectivity in art seems to me to be effective in a medium-encompassing way, and not specific to painting.</p> <p><br>Secondly, can painting's function of reifying an artist's efforts-as shown in the exhibitions you mentioned-in fact serve to comprehensively explain the lasting painting boom? “Buying artworks indeed comes close to buying people-however, most of the players do not approach painting from the perspective of potential buyers, but as gallery and museum visitors, curators, critics, or art historians. Would you say that their experiences with art-and even our conversation here-are also effects of economic structures? (Wouldn't that, in turn, be a quite determinist point of view, similar to the essentialist view of the media-specificity of art?)</p> <p><br><strong>2 </strong>Rosalind E. Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311-19</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>Response to Peter Geimer</strong></p> <p>Isabelle Graw</p> <p></p> <p>It is true that at first glance it may be surprising that I make a claim for Peirce's definition of the index, and this even in light of those forms of painting based on mechanical processes like silk screen-and thereby contradict his central point about physical connection. Although, the mechanical process need not necessarily exclude a moment of physical contact, as seen with Warhol, who cultivated mistakes in his silk screens, or made improvements, or painted over the surface after the fact. All the same, I should likely have stressed the point that I am not adopting the Peircean model one-to-one, but modifying it. Whereas Peirce places the accent on the factual, physical connectedness of the index to its object, I highlight the index’s faculty for evoking this physical connection. In other words, photography-basically the recording of lighting conditions via a chemical process-evokes, or even better, suggests that it is the trace or the reprint of a real object. It is not this print, but much more--it suggests the presence of such a physical connection.<br></p> <p>I attribute a comparable potential for suggestion to the indexical signs in painting, except that here, a physical connection with the artist-subject as its author is evoked. I also consider this valid for every painterly practice that undermines the authority of the author by different means (for example, through non-subjective methods like the readymade, aleatoric procedures, or the delegation of the painterly process to someone else). Here, the avoidance of signature becomes the artist's signature. What do I gain, though, by adopting and modifying Peirce’s concept of indexicality? First of all, a more exact understanding of the nature of such a bond between product and person, which is especially tight in painting. But unpainterly practices also lend themselves to being read as traces of the producer. You were right in referring to this with the editing of film. However in painting, this bond between product and person is especially unbreakable, as its signs refer to the producer consistently and not only selectively, like in film. The recourse to a semiotic approach presents the additional advantage of allowing for a media-unspecific understanding of painting, Because, as soon as I understand painting as a form of sign production, I can also pursue the presence of painterly signs in nonpainterly practices or consider expanded forms of painting that go beyond painting and have burst open the narrow confines of the canvas long ago. My model takes this despecification into account and also acknowledges the specific codes of painting.</p> <p></p> <p>Moreover, the focus on its specific indexicality allows me to better understand the attraction of a painterly practice that deals with images interceded by photographic media, like the early work of Gerard Richter. I believe that the reason for the lasting fascination with this painting form, which numerous artists have taken on, lies in its coordination of the indexicalities of two media: painting and photography. </p> <p></p> <p>As paintings of photographs, these images evoke the indexicality characteristic of photography: a reference to life. They are loaded with a sense of the real (Lebenswirklichkeit) as photography, so to speak. However, this is accompanied by an explicit painterly act through Richter's often-invoked blur technique, which not only abstracts the motif, but even further incorporates the painter's person, and this even despite the mechanical look and feel of this painterly blurring. In this way, the photographic element provides the image with a reference to life, which, nonetheless, will be molded by the painter's signature at the end. With Richter, you get both: the reference to reality and the suggestion of the presence of the painter.</p> <p></p> <p>Now, it is certainly true that not only painting but art in general is marked by the desire for traces of subjectivity. All artworks can be described as "indexes of agency" (Alfred Gell), though only in painting are aesthetics and subjectivity strongly interconnected. In this context, one need only recall Hegel’s "principle of finite and inherently infinite subjectivity," which would be groundbreaking for painting and allow us to feel more at home and somewhat familiar there (einheimischer). Painting's orientation towards subjectivity--subjectivity in the sense of a general capacity-leads to a problematic, anthropomorphic projection. Despite this, it is still important to maintain that it is painting (and not sculpture) that Hegel used as an example here; that it was painting, after all, which provided him with an occasion and reason for such projection, In my opinion, the unique dynamic developed by paint on a surface the understanding that, here, we are also dealing with a model of subjectivity in the sense of an independent, mental life.<br></p> <p>Coming to your last point—of course, not everyone approaches painting as a potential buyer. But, if we understand painting as a specific form of sign production, perhaps it has an especially intense way of misleading its receivers to read its products as synonyms of their producers? There are certainly other historical explanations for its rise to a "success medium” (Niklas Luhmann), which I have cited, like the mobility of the work on canvas or the comparably low production costs, for example. Painting seems to lend itself especially well to being fetishized and effectively possessed. This also explains its lasting attraction from the viewpoint of artists.</p> <p></p> <p>We have both thought about painting today, no doubt, as a consequence of the most recent economic and symbolic painting boom. In fact, painting started to be considered (seemingly) unproblematic since the late 1990s at least. There is no longer any pressure for justification. You could say that this situation was (involuntarily) prepared in the early 1980s by artists like Albert Oehlen or Martin Kippenberger. At that time, it was absolutely necessary to attack painting, even by means of its own tools, in order to grasp and drain the medium as a questionable belief system. Today, many artists consider this "painting against painting* that followed modernism's belief in painting's essence to be finished and resolved. Instead, in many exhibitions and in the statements of young painters, the mythical belief in Painting is revitalized, also in the sense of a self-acting entity.</p> <p></p> <p>I have of course contributed to this rehabilitation of painting in my own work, when for instance relating Kippenberger’s paintings to institutional critique or when interpreting his seemingly expressive gestures as a form of conceptual expression. Instead of not having any more problems with painting, I want to keep discussing it as a "constellation of problems" (Problem-zusammenhang, Theodor W. Adorno) in my examination of the medium's specific indexicality, and, consequently, as something that is- like other art forms-problematic and markedly questionable per se. This is, not least of all, due to painting’s inherent personalization.</p>