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The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi-Person Isabelle Graw 그림의 가치 : 불특정성, 지표성, 고(부가)가치의 유사-인물에 관한 노트 <h3>(희민)</h3> 1. Introduction 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 diffuse boundaries. These conditions 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, 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. We therefore cannot be sure what we are referring to when we talk "about painting."1 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 semiotic 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. 1 "About painting" was the title of the 2011 art fair/exhibition abc - art berlin contemporary. 1.개요 이 글에서 나는 먼저 장르적 경계가 확장된 동시대 매체 환경의 조건들 속에서도 여전히 특수성을 간직한 회화의 매체-불특정성에 대해 규명하려 한다. 종종 '포스트 미디엄 컨디션'(로잘린드 크라우스)이라 언급되는 이 조건들은 그것이 회화에 미치는 영향을 고려하여 다루어질 것이다. 만약 회화의 장이 확장되었고, 따라서 그림이 어디에나 있게 되었다면, 그것의 영역을 한정짓는 것은 적절하지 않다. 그러나 이는 “깨진 거울" (Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Kunsthalle Wien, 1993)에서 “Painting on the Move" (Kunsthalle Basel, 2002)에 이르기까지 수많은 회화 전시 또는 파이돈이 제작한 악명 높은 출판물들 (Painting Today, 2009)이 지속적으로 주장하는 바이다. 그들은 회화가 명확하게 제한된 매체인 양 위협한다. 그러나 회화는 이미 오래 전에 조상들의 터전인 캔버스를 떠나 지금은 어디에나 존재하며, 다른 예술 형태로도 작동하고 있다. 그러므로 우리는 우리가 "회화에 대해” 말할 때 무엇을 언급하고 있는지 확신할 수 없다. 1 우리가 회화에 대해 이야기 할 때 그것은 매체, 기술, 장르, 과정, 혹은 기관을 의미하는가? 이러한 의미론적 곤경에서 벗어나는 방편으로 나는 그림에 대한 조금은 덜 실재론적인 개념을 제안할 것이다. 그것은 회화를 고도로 개인화된 것으로 경험되는 표지의 생산 형태로 이해하는 것이다. 회화를 고도로 개인화된 기호학적 활동으로 이해하는 것에는 몇 가지 장점이 있다. 즉, 회화가 다른 예술 형태에서도 어떻게 작동하는지 볼 수 있도록 하고, 회화의 코드, 제스처 및 물질성이 갖는 특수성을 포착할 수 있도록 한다. 1 "About painting" 은 아트페어이자 전시인 2011년 abc-아트 베를린 컨템포러리의 제목이었다. 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.2 While this view underestimates the fact that the two groups function differently in many respects, I nevertheless find Alfred Gell's definition of artworks as "indexes of agency" very useful.3 Painting takes this aspects of artworks—that they are perceived as social indexes—to the very extreme. In order to argue painting's particular ability to suggest social agency, I will investigate the highly personalized nature of this particular sign production and relate it to the way it obtains value. There are many indications of painting's lasting popularity: we keeps fetching the highest prices on the art market and it survived 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 pragmatic reasons for its lasting popularity that I won't elaborate on here (such as the easy transport and circulation of pictures on canvas). Moreover paintings are usually based on comparatively low production costs, which also contributes to their attraction. But I am more interested here in the powerful 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 a 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. 2 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. 3 Ibid., 17. 여기에 더해, 회화의 지표성에 초점을 맞추면 사람과 사물 사이에서 발생하는 유독 강한 유대감을 파악할 수 있다. 이러한 유대감은 특히 예술작품을 사람과 동등한 것으로 만드는 인류학과 관련이 있다.2 이러한 견해는 두 그룹이 많은 면에서 다르게 기능한다는 사실을 과소평가하지만, 그럼에도 불구하고 나는 예술작품을 "대리의 지표"로 정의한 알프레드 겔의 정의가 매우 유용하다고 생각한다.3 회화는 예술작품의 이러한 측면들, 즉 그것들이 사회적 지표로 인식되는 것을 강하게 받아들인다. 회화가 사회적 대리물로 기능하는 특별한 능력에 대해 논하기 위해, 나는 이 특정한 표지 제작의 고도로 개인화된 성격을 조사하고 그것이 가치를 생산하는 방법과 연관시킬 것이다. 여기에 더해, 회화의 지표성에 초점을 맞추면 사람과 사물 사이에서 발생하는 유독 강한 유대감을 파악할 수 있다. 이러한 유대감은 예술작품을 사람과 동등하게 만드는 경향이 있는 인류학과 특히 관련이 있다.2 이러한 견해는 두 그룹이 많은 면에서 다르게 기능한다는 사실을 과소평가하지만, 그럼에도 불구하고 나는 예술작품을 "대리의 지표"로 정의한 알프레드 겔의 정의가 매우 유용하다고 생각한다.3 회화는 예술작품의 이러한 측면들, 즉 그것들이 사회적 지표로 인식되는 것을 강하게 받아들인다. 회화가 사회적 대리물로 기능하는 특별한 능력에 대해 논하기 위해, 나는 이 특정한 표지 제작의 고도로 개인화된 성격을 조사하고 그것이 가치를 생산하는 방법과 연관시킬 것이다. 그림의 지속적인 인기는 여러 조짐을 통해 발견할 수 있다. 우리는 미술 시장에서 그림을 계속 최고의 가격으로 팔고 있고, 그림의 종말, 죽음, 쓸모없음 등을 선언하려는 다양한 역사적 시도에서 살아남았다. 나는 이 끈기/지속성에 대한 하나의 가능한 설명을 제시하며 글을 마무리 할 것이다. 물론 회화가 살아남은 데에는 내가 여기서 자세히 설명하지 않을 다른, 더실용적인 이유들이 있다(예를 들면, 캔버스의 쉬운 운반과 유통). 게다가, 그림은 보통 상대적으로 낮은 제작비를 기반으로 하는데, 이것 또한 그림의 매력을 더해준다. 하지만 나는 이 글에서 그림이 하나의 예술 형식으로 만들어질 수 있다는 것을 강력히 주장하려 한다. 특히, 작품을 얻는 것이 예술가의 노동력을 장악하고, 따라서 그녀(작가의) 삶의 한 부분을 소유하는 것을 의미한다는 예술계에 널리 퍼져있는 기대를 회화가 뒷받침한다는 사실을 보여주려 한다. 미술품을 사는 것은 정말로 사람을 사는 것과 비슷하다. 그리고 이것은 특히 그림에 있어 진실이다. 2 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. 3 Ibid., 17. 2. For an Expanded Notion of Painting 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"?4 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,"5 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.6 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. 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. 4 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. 5 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. 6 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. 2. 확장된 회화의 개념을 위해 나는 이미 그림을 정의하는 문제의 어려움에 대해 암시했다. 화가로서의 행위 뿐만 아니라 대부분의 예술적 행위들이 엄청난 분화와 확장을 겪었을 때, 그림을 명확하게 정의하는 것은 오히려 어려워진다. 우리가 이 "확인되지 않은 범주"를 어떻게 규정할 수 있을까?4 나는 우리가 주어진 규범과 관습으로 특징지어지는 명확한 관행으로서의 모더니즘적 이해를 깨는 확장된 회화의 개념을 가지고 일할 것을 제안하고 싶다. 늦어도 1960년대 이후부터 서로 다른 예술 형태 사이의 경계가 유연해지면서, 우리는 서로 다른 미디어가 서로 관련되고, 재유행하고, 서로를 재구축하는 상황에 처해 있음을 알게 되었다. 이 과정은 "재매개화"라고 불리며,5 한 매체에 귀속된 특징들(예를 들어, 평면성 또는 회화에서의 재현적 전략)이 다른 매체에 의해 다루어질 때 발생한다(예를 들어, 대규모 사진처럼) 6 그리고 당연하게도, 제프 월에서 볼프강 틸만스에 이르는 예술가들은 끊임없이 사진이 회화의 재현적, 서술적 전략을 대신할 수 있다는 것을 우리에게 입증해 왔다. 달리 말해, 사진이 추상 회화에서의 물질성을 제시하는 표면을 만드는 것을 목표할 수 있다는 것을 말이다. 여기서 중요한 점은 예술을 "그 매체의 본질"에 의해 정의하는 모더니즘적 사고는 분명히 그 시의성을 상실했다는 것이다. 일단 매체를 더 이상 구분하지 못하면, 매체의 고유한 특성이란 있을 수 없다. 매체의 특성은 오히려 예술가가 그것을 어떻게 활용하느냐에 따라 결정된다. 4 Bergen Kunsthall에서 2010년 11월 5일에서 12월 22일까지 열린 전시 "Nikolas Gambaroff, Michael Krebber, R. H. Quaytman, Blake Rayne"의 보도자료에서 인용함. 5 Ilka Becker, " The Image as Revenant: Retroactivity and Remediation in the Works of T.J. Wilcox,"를 참고할 것. 번역. Michael Lattek, Texte zur Kunst, no. 79 (December 2009): 126-31. 6 마이클 프리드는 그가 18세기 그림에서 감지한 흡수와 연극성이라는 주제가 현대 사진 작가들에 의해 어떻게 받아들여지고 있는지에 대한 단행본을 썼다. Michael Fried, "Introduction," in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1-4. 3. Good-Bye to Medium-Specificity? 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 flatness of its surface, but that each painting has to ideally criticize these limitations "from the inside."7 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. 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.8 One might add to this that the rejection of the 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). 7 Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting," in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Molemim with a Vengeance, 1957-1960, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 89, 85. 8 André Rottmann "Networks, Techniques, Institutions: Art History in Open Circuits, Texte zur Kunst, no. 81 (March 2011): 142- 44 3. 매체 특정성과의 작별 클레멘트 그린버그는 특히 회화가 평면성과 같은 "필수적 규범과 관습"에 의해 특징지어진다는 모더니즘 사상 뿐만 아니라, 각 회화가 이러한 한계를 "내부로부터" 이상적으로 비판해야 한다는 사상의 선도적인 옹호자였다.7 매체에 대한 그의 관념이 서술적, 규범적 층위와 어떻게 합쳐지는지에 주목하는 것은 흥미롭다. 그는 그림을 본질화하고, 그것이 실제로 필연적인 상태, 즉 평평한 표면을 글쓰기와 공유한다는 사실을 무시했을 뿐만 아니라, 예술가가 그것을 내부에서 비판함으로써 자신의 매체에 대한 망상적 순수성을 옹호할 것이라고 기대했다. 이제 그린버그가 매체에 부여했던 이 특권은 로버트 라우셴버그의 Combine paintings에서처럼 그림이 순수성을 잃고 삶으로 확장되면서 역사적으로 수호될 수 없게 되었다. 그린버그의 입장은 1960년대 후반에 영화 사진이나 다이어그램과 같은 다른 기술에 강하게 의존하는 개념 미술이 등장했을 때 훨씬 더 의심스러워졌다. 앙드레 로트만이 올바르게 지적한 바와 같이, 이것은 매체 특정적이기보다 더 일반적인 예술이었다.8 누군가는 여기에서 회화의 특권적 지위에 대한 거부감은 훨씬 더 긴 역사를 가지고 있으며, 화가로서의 행위 차원에서도 정기적으로 일어 왔다고 첨언할 수 있다. ‘순수 회화'의 전통에 작별을 고하는 그림의 예로는 프란시스 피카비아의 Nature Morte(1920)를 들 수 있다. 7 Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Molemim with a Vengeance, 1957-1960, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 89, 85. 8 André Rottmann "Networks, Techniques, Institutions: Art History in Open Circuits, Texte zur Kunst, no. 81 (March 2011): 142- 44 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) and text (the written names of "great" male artists like Cézanne, Rembrandt, and Renoir, whose portrait we are meant to see and who turn out to be nothing but a dead animal, natures mortes).9 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. 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. 9 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. 이 그림은 (조지 베이커가 적절하게 말했듯이 "그림의 영역에 완고하게 달라붙는”, 표면에 부착된 박제 동물의 형태로 만들어진) 레디메이드와 (우리가 보게 될 세잔, 렘브란트, 르누아르와 같은 "위대한" 남성 예술가들-죽은 동물이자 네이처 모르테에 불과한-의 초상화 위에 적힌 이름들과 같은)9 텍스트라는 다른 형식으로 그려냄으로써 매체의 순수성을 오염시킨다. 예를 들어, 언제나 순수 회화의 전형으로 여겨졌던 세잔은 박제된 유인원처럼 죽었다고 선언된다. 여기서 상위 예술 형식로서의 회화의 지위와 그와 결부된 회화의 순수성과 본질에 대한 믿음은 상품이라는 외부 논리와 생산적인 노동을 그림에 강요하는 레디메이드(ready made)와의 통합뿐만 아니라—마찬가지로 그림의 본질을 묻어버릴 위험이 있는—텍스트 요소들에 의해서 이중으로 위협받고 있다. 그렇다면 우리는 여기에서 회화에 더 이상 매체적 특징이 없다는 것을 추론할 의무가 있는가? 나는 이 시점에서 일부 예술가들, 특히 화가들이 각자의 매체의 특수성에 기인하는 실제적인 문제에 직면한다는 것을 인정해야 한다고 생각한다. 그러나 이러한 예술적 생산 수준에서 어느 정도의 매체 특이성을 인정하는 것과 그로부터 매우 의심스러운 일반 규범을 도출하는 것은 별개의 문제이다. 9 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. 4. Painting and Indexicality 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. 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. 10 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 11 See Rosalind E, Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America;" October à (Spring1977): 68-81 12 Druce Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd; in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 157. 13 Jacques Derrida, quoted in Rosalind B. Krauss, "Six,? in The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 260. 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. 14 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. 15 "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. <h3>(나하) </h3> V Painting as a Thinking Subject '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?17 16 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 17 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). 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. 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. 18 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans, John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT) Yale University Press, 1966), 06. 19 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. 20 Ibid, 21 Ibid. 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. VI Painting as a Highly Valuable Quasi-Person 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 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. 22 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. 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. 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. 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 seemingly 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. 23 Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic value" allows us to theorize this non-equation, There can be symbolic value without market value. 24 “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. 25 But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general.," Ibid., 51. 26 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, 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. 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. 27 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 & 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 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 want they want. 28 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. <h3> (은비)</h3> Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer 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. 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? 1 André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4-9 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. 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?) 2 Rosalind E. Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311-19 Response to Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi-Person Isabelle Graw 그림의 가치 : 불특정성, 지표성, 고(부가)가치의 유사-인물에 관한 노트 <h3>(희민)</h3> 1. Introduction 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 diffuse boundaries. These conditions 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, 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. We therefore cannot be sure what we are referring to when we talk "about painting."1 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 semiotic 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. 1 "About painting" was the title of the 2011 art fair/exhibition abc - art berlin contemporary. 1.개요 이 글에서 나는 먼저 장르적 경계가 확장된 동시대 매체 환경의 조건들 속에서도 여전히 특수성을 간직한 회화의 매체-불특정성에 대해 규명하려 한다. 종종 '포스트 미디엄 컨디션'(로잘린드 크라우스)이라 언급되는 이 조건들은 그것이 회화에 미치는 영향을 고려하여 다루어질 것이다. 만약 회화의 장이 확장되었고, 따라서 그림이 어디에나 있게 되었다면, 그것의 영역을 한정짓는 것은 적절하지 않다. 그러나 이는 “깨진 거울" (Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Kunsthalle Wien, 1993)에서 “Painting on the Move" (Kunsthalle Basel, 2002)에 이르기까지 수많은 회화 전시 또는 파이돈이 제작한 악명 높은 출판물들 (Painting Today, 2009)이 지속적으로 주장하는 바이다. 그들은 회화가 명확하게 제한된 매체인 양 위협한다. 그러나 회화는 이미 오래 전에 조상들의 터전인 캔버스를 떠나 지금은 어디에나 존재하며, 다른 예술 형태로도 작동하고 있다. 그러므로 우리는 우리가 "회화에 대해” 말할 때 무엇을 언급하고 있는지 확신할 수 없다. 1 우리가 회화에 대해 이야기 할 때 그것은 매체, 기술, 장르, 과정, 혹은 기관을 의미하는가? 이러한 의미론적 곤경에서 벗어나는 방편으로 나는 그림에 대한 조금은 덜 실재론적인 개념을 제안할 것이다. 그것은 회화를 고도로 개인화된 것으로 경험되는 표지의 생산 형태로 이해하는 것이다. 회화를 고도로 개인화된 기호학적 활동으로 이해하는 것에는 몇 가지 장점이 있다. 즉, 회화가 다른 예술 형태에서도 어떻게 작동하는지 볼 수 있도록 하고, 회화의 코드, 제스처 및 물질성이 갖는 특수성을 포착할 수 있도록 한다. 1 "About painting" 은 아트페어이자 전시인 2011년 abc-아트 베를린 컨템포러리의 제목이었다. 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.2 While this view underestimates the fact that the two groups function differently in many respects, I nevertheless find Alfred Gell's definition of artworks as "indexes of agency" very useful.3 Painting takes this aspects of artworks—that they are perceived as social indexes—to the very extreme. In order to argue painting's particular ability to suggest social agency, I will investigate the highly personalized nature of this particular sign production and relate it to the way it obtains value. There are many indications of painting's lasting popularity: we keeps fetching the highest prices on the art market and it survived 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 pragmatic reasons for its lasting popularity that I won't elaborate on here (such as the easy transport and circulation of pictures on canvas). Moreover paintings are usually based on comparatively low production costs, which also contributes to their attraction. But I am more interested here in the powerful 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 a 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. 2 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. 3 Ibid., 17. 여기에 더해, 회화의 지표성에 초점을 맞추면 사람과 사물 사이에서 발생하는 유독 강한 유대감을 파악할 수 있다. 이러한 유대감은 특히 예술작품을 사람과 동등한 것으로 만드는 인류학과 관련이 있다.2 이러한 견해는 두 그룹이 많은 면에서 다르게 기능한다는 사실을 과소평가하지만, 그럼에도 불구하고 나는 예술작품을 "대리의 지표"로 정의한 알프레드 겔의 정의가 매우 유용하다고 생각한다.3 회화는 예술작품의 이러한 측면들, 즉 그것들이 사회적 지표로 인식되는 것을 강하게 받아들인다. 회화가 사회적 대리물로 기능하는 특별한 능력에 대해 논하기 위해, 나는 이 특정한 표지 제작의 고도로 개인화된 성격을 조사하고 그것이 가치를 생산하는 방법과 연관시킬 것이다. 여기에 더해, 회화의 지표성에 초점을 맞추면 사람과 사물 사이에서 발생하는 유독 강한 유대감을 파악할 수 있다. 이러한 유대감은 예술작품을 사람과 동등하게 만드는 경향이 있는 인류학과 특히 관련이 있다.2 이러한 견해는 두 그룹이 많은 면에서 다르게 기능한다는 사실을 과소평가하지만, 그럼에도 불구하고 나는 예술작품을 "대리의 지표"로 정의한 알프레드 겔의 정의가 매우 유용하다고 생각한다.3 회화는 예술작품의 이러한 측면들, 즉 그것들이 사회적 지표로 인식되는 것을 강하게 받아들인다. 회화가 사회적 대리물로 기능하는 특별한 능력에 대해 논하기 위해, 나는 이 특정한 표지 제작의 고도로 개인화된 성격을 조사하고 그것이 가치를 생산하는 방법과 연관시킬 것이다. 그림의 지속적인 인기는 여러 조짐을 통해 발견할 수 있다. 우리는 미술 시장에서 그림을 계속 최고의 가격으로 팔고 있고, 그림의 종말, 죽음, 쓸모없음 등을 선언하려는 다양한 역사적 시도에서 살아남았다. 나는 이 끈기/지속성에 대한 하나의 가능한 설명을 제시하며 글을 마무리 할 것이다. 물론 회화가 살아남은 데에는 내가 여기서 자세히 설명하지 않을 다른, 더실용적인 이유들이 있다(예를 들면, 캔버스의 쉬운 운반과 유통). 게다가, 그림은 보통 상대적으로 낮은 제작비를 기반으로 하는데, 이것 또한 그림의 매력을 더해준다. 하지만 나는 이 글에서 그림이 하나의 예술 형식으로 만들어질 수 있다는 것을 강력히 주장하려 한다. 특히, 작품을 얻는 것이 예술가의 노동력을 장악하고, 따라서 그녀(작가의) 삶의 한 부분을 소유하는 것을 의미한다는 예술계에 널리 퍼져있는 기대를 회화가 뒷받침한다는 사실을 보여주려 한다. 미술품을 사는 것은 정말로 사람을 사는 것과 비슷하다. 그리고 이것은 특히 그림에 있어 진실이다. 2 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. 3 Ibid., 17. 2. For an Expanded Notion of Painting 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"?4 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,"5 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.6 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. 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. 4 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. 5 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. 6 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. 2. 확장된 회화의 개념을 위해 나는 이미 그림을 정의하는 문제의 어려움에 대해 암시했다. 화가로서의 행위 뿐만 아니라 대부분의 예술적 행위들이 엄청난 분화와 확장을 겪었을 때, 그림을 명확하게 정의하는 것은 오히려 어려워진다. 우리가 이 "확인되지 않은 범주"를 어떻게 규정할 수 있을까?4 나는 우리가 주어진 규범과 관습으로 특징지어지는 명확한 관행으로서의 모더니즘적 이해를 깨는 확장된 회화의 개념을 가지고 일할 것을 제안하고 싶다. 늦어도 1960년대 이후부터 서로 다른 예술 형태 사이의 경계가 유연해지면서, 우리는 서로 다른 미디어가 서로 관련되고, 재유행하고, 서로를 재구축하는 상황에 처해 있음을 알게 되었다. 이 과정은 "재매개화"라고 불리며,5 한 매체에 귀속된 특징들(예를 들어, 평면성 또는 회화에서의 재현적 전략)이 다른 매체에 의해 다루어질 때 발생한다(예를 들어, 대규모 사진처럼) 6 그리고 당연하게도, 제프 월에서 볼프강 틸만스에 이르는 예술가들은 끊임없이 사진이 회화의 재현적, 서술적 전략을 대신할 수 있다는 것을 우리에게 입증해 왔다. 달리 말해, 사진이 추상 회화에서의 물질성을 제시하는 표면을 만드는 것을 목표할 수 있다는 것을 말이다. 여기서 중요한 점은 예술을 "그 매체의 본질"에 의해 정의하는 모더니즘적 사고는 분명히 그 시의성을 상실했다는 것이다. 일단 매체를 더 이상 구분하지 못하면, 매체의 고유한 특성이란 있을 수 없다. 매체의 특성은 오히려 예술가가 그것을 어떻게 활용하느냐에 따라 결정된다. 4 Bergen Kunsthall에서 2010년 11월 5일에서 12월 22일까지 열린 전시 "Nikolas Gambaroff, Michael Krebber, R. H. Quaytman, Blake Rayne"의 보도자료에서 인용함. 5 Ilka Becker, " The Image as Revenant: Retroactivity and Remediation in the Works of T.J. Wilcox,"를 참고할 것. 번역. Michael Lattek, Texte zur Kunst, no. 79 (December 2009): 126-31. 6 마이클 프리드는 그가 18세기 그림에서 감지한 흡수와 연극성이라는 주제가 현대 사진 작가들에 의해 어떻게 받아들여지고 있는지에 대한 단행본을 썼다. Michael Fried, "Introduction," in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1-4. 3. Good-Bye to Medium-Specificity? 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 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. 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 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). 7 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. 8 André Rottmann *Networks, Techniques, Institutions: Art History in Open Circuits, Texte zur Kunst, no, 81 (March 201 D): 142- 44 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 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. 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. 9 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. 4. Painting and Indexicality 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. 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. 10 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 11 See Rosalind E, Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America;" October à (Spring1977): 68-81 12 Druce Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd; in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 157. 13 Jacques Derrida, quoted in Rosalind B. Krauss, "Six,? in The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 260. 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. 14 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. 15 "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. <h3>(나하) </h3> V Painting as a Thinking Subject '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?17 16 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 17 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). 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. 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. 18 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans, John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT) Yale University Press, 1966), 06. 19 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. 20 Ibid, 21 Ibid. 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. VI Painting as a Highly Valuable Quasi-Person 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 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. 22 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. 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. 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. 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 seemingly 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. 23 Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic value" allows us to theorize this non-equation, There can be symbolic value without market value. 24 “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. 25 But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general.," Ibid., 51. 26 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, 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. 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. 27 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 & 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 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 want they want. 28 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. <h3> (은비)</h3> Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer 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. 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? 1 André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4-9 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. 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?) 2 Rosalind E. Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311-19 Response to Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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heeminchung

2022.09.15

practice를 어떻게 번역할 것인지

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nahalee

2022.09.19

Quasi-Person 유사-인물
indexicality 지표성
indexes of agency 대리의 지표
signs 흔적
indexical signs 인덱스 부호
Subject 주체

2022.09.19 @nahalee님이 업데이트한 위키 이력의 댓글입니다.

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heeminchung

2022.09.20

highly valuable 이라는 수식이 경제 용어를 암시하는 것인지 아닌지

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말하는손

2022.09.21

작가님들 덕분에 재밌게 잘 읽었습니다. 국문으로 번역하실 때 적절한 단어가 없거나 모호해서 어려우셨을 것 같은데, 전체적인 내용을 이해하는데 큰 무리가 없었던 것 같아요! 제 분량도 잘 번역해보겠습니다 : )

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The Value of Painting (희민, 나하, 은비)