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The Message beyond the Medium
published in tate #15, summer 1998
Painting is a medium, not a subject, and it is certainly not a lifeform. It is neither dead nor alive, but inert. It is free from the need to feed itself, exempt from the obligation to make decisions. Paintings demand that the viewer invest them with significance to render them noteworthy. In the truest sense, they only exist when they are being looked at. Paintings are a product of human creativity and dwell in the realm of the make-believe. They inhabit the imaginative domain.
Why do painters paint? Just as importantly, why do painters bother to paint at the end of the twentieth century when so much painterly ground has already been covered by their predecessors? Paintings perform few religious or spiritual roles any more. In addition, their claim to hold up a mirror to nature was supplanted long ago by photography, film and graphic illustration. Painters, it seems, are constantly required to reassess their function in society, to negotiate new boundaries and allegiances in order to define and express their chosen profession. Now, the assumption that the new digital media are set to become the dominant carriers of meaning in the next century threatens to impinge even further on their traditional territory.
The schism between the plastic and the digital arts has been narrowing ever since artists first began to make use of broadcast technology. At the end of the twentieth century, the apparent dichotomy between light-reflecting surfaces and the back-lit screen is no longer tenable. Some artists continue to produce extraordinary work in established media. The practices of others, rising on a tide of television and video, cinema, advertising and interactive multimedia, are better served by tools that allow them a greater flexibility in the manufacture and dissemination of their work.
Products of any culture invite us to experience them first-hand. In order to appreciate painting in all its physical, contextual and cultural complexity we feel compelled to visit the canvases themselves rather than fall back on the distorting mirage of photomechanical reproduction. But a new form of art developed on, for and by the internet, for example, has no geographic home and can be received in every corner of the planet. The ways in which cross-platform digital art allows audiences to select the same image, word and sound files from workstations in Birmingham and Bangalore transforms the whole notion of site-specificity. When a medium takes on global proportions, specificity becomes a function of form. The networked single-screen computer is already determining new modes of behaviour, new forms of education and new forms of art. It is encouraging artists to ask where and how they fit themselves and their work and shaping the direction of lives and practices publicly lived. How can painting, the aged progenitor of aesthetic self-expression, ever hope to maintain its validity alongside the slickly-efficient technologies of today?
Crucially, some of the more famous premonitions about how the singular art object will become subsumed over time in the profusion of new media have come to little. Seen from the perspective of the late 1990s, Walter Benjamin's predictions, for instance, have all the authority of Pointillist colour theory. The images of paintings confronting us from the pages of newspapers and magazines and from our television sets and computer monitors serve only to increase the public thirst for encounters with the originals. Many commentators would question the premium placed upon this tryst with the authentic, preferring paintings as texts. While such thinking allows paintings to be unpacked in didactic terms, it underplays the consequences of the medium's opacity, an emblem of our essential fallibility as human beings.
It is at the level of painting's palpability that we detect the slippage between the intentionality of the artist and the expectations of the viewer. Such a slippage does not debase the encounter between artwork and onlooker. The faultline between intention and expectation is a profoundly important part of the way paintings work. Only if we continue to accept that painting has a uniquely has a uniquely poetic aspect, divisible from language, and may even be meaningfully understood, can we account for its continuing worth as a mode of inventive declaration. Even if paintings are only complete when they become the focus of discussion, this does not render them fully explicable. In an era defined by the desire for ever-increasing information, their identities remain beyond the remit of words.
The modern imagination is compendious, its range encyclopaedic. Debate is frequently vigorous. But knowledge is also about how the different parts of information fit together and merely extending one's reach doesn't necessarily strengthen one's grasp. At best, the quest for evidence generates real curiosity and an analytical frame of mind. At worst, it breeds no more than a safari mentality. A cautionary approach appears apt then when we come to consider the internet. Extravagant claims have been made for this technology and in pointing to its liberating virtues some apologists like to recall that it was printing which broke priestcraft. The sheer excitement of accumulating facts via information technology is also subconsciously presented as proof of its desirability. One 'surfs' the net whereas one 'trawls' through libraries, galleries and museums. Yet the irony is that the internet might ultimately prove to be the most limiting phenomenon. Instead of producing a new age of polymaths and world citizens, it is possible that the net will marginalise people as individuals begin to retribalise around new coordinates.
The fracturing of society into coteries that stop having conversations with each other is a commonplace. One of the reasons why painting remains purposeful is that it creates a contiguous space which is open to constant interpretation, subject to claim and counter-claim by factions with differing points if view. Put another way, painting is all about inclusivity. As complex structures which give up their content only reluctantly, paintings constitute an essential body of evidence about one aspect of the human condition which endorses the primacy of lived experience over momentary stimulation. It is their very refusal to march in time which gives paintings a contemporary currency.
Paul Bonaventura and Jeffrey Dennis
Paul Bonaventura is Senior Research Fellow at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. Jeffrey Dennis is an artist.