Christmas Reading: 'Painting in the twenty-tens; where to now? (You can’t touch this!)'

Painting in the twenty-tens; where to now? (You can’t touch this!)
Max Olofsson
Kungliga Konsthögskolan (Royal Institute of Art - Stockholm), 2011

Contents
Painting 1
Hypo-cave 2
Utopia / U can’t touch this 3
Painthing 5
Body language 6
Painting is painting. Everything else is everything else 7
Everything else 8
Lost in translation 8
Passion art 10
2-D alliance 10
Conflict of the surface 11
Confusion of origin, mixing of styles 11
Showing 12
Video games 13
Digital painting 14
(K)not related 15
$ 15
Human 16

1
With this essay, I will present to you my distilled (re)definition of painting; what about it that
is important and what is not. These are my opinions – some based on observations, others
on assumptions. I will bring up and do my best to explain: Painthings, the Conflict of the
Surface and Information Painting.
Painting
Painting has been through a notoriously turbulent time during the last century, specifically in
the early years and around the middle. Some artists sought to make the final painting – the
truest, most painterly painting ever conceived of – beyond which there would be no
direction left to take. A long lasting quest during which some artists despaired, and gave up
on painting altogether (e.g. Duchamp, who in the nineteen-teens, as an act of renunciation
of originality of the art-object, presented an allegedly visually indifferent “ready-made” milk
bottle rack as a work of art, which led to a whole new way of looking at art other than
painting. However – since this essay is specifically dedicated to painting – this is something I
will not speak any more of). Others (Tatlin in the beginning- and Judd in the latter half of the
last century) concluded that painting had to evolve and somehow become more than it had
ever been before and consequently added a third dimension, which subsequently made it
something other than painting.
I can’t think of, nor ever hope to find the exact amount of proclaimed deaths of painting, I
am in any case of a diametrically opposite opinion: painting has far from exhausted its
potential, it is nowhere near an end; I would much rather say it can finally begin!

2
I’m not saying it can finally begin to be provocative; I did not set out to write this essay to
trash-talk previous generations of painters, nor to suggest that all of their efforts and
achievements somehow should have ultimately amounted to nothing, it is on the contrary: a
genuinely hopeful statement and a belief that the near future holds great things in store for
the continued evolution of painting, and the beginning of painting as non-object.
Hypo-cave
This paragraph is a hypothetical unfolding of events, a personal take on things – perhaps a
qualified guess would be a fitting description – above an accurate account of history, but
nevertheless it will provide a background story and set the mood. As I see it, back in the
cave-painting days, you took whatever was necessary to make visible to you and to others
your visions and observations. The paint, in itself, was just something that proved to be
much better at staying on the cave walls than any drawing in the sand would stay (untrampled)
in the sand. This improvement of duration facilitated visual communication, as it
could be shown to more cave-pals, and it would stay there. Suddenly an observation and a
painting made one day could be added to a week later, after having seen something new.
Through the use of this aid, more elaborate pictures could be worked on and important
observations could be recorded; knowledge was spread through the gathering and sharing of
images of encounters made in the world. I would assume at this time it had very little to do
with the paint and the current obsession with it, and infinitely much more to do with the
images you could produce.
I would argue that the ideal painting is a painting as a non-object; the recorded vision or
observation in itself. It is an ideal not easily achieved, but well worth striving for. And, I’d
even go so far as to say it is our duty, as painters – as artists – to work hard at realizing the
ideal. For love of tradition and feeling we’re a part of an ongoing writing of history, we can
only do our best to add to the tremendous group effort it takes to keep moving forward.
Through the history of painting, the paint and the object have gained superiority over the
image, to the point where they on their own (wrongly) represent painting. This shift of focus,
3
or perhaps better: this deliberate confusion of definition for the sake of reinvention started
bubbling with cubism, heated up further with the constructivist approach to painting and
reached its boiling point in and around minimalism and other materialistic, objectemphasizing
movements and positions. But no matter how much I may disagree with certain
views, I should make it clear that all of these twists and turns in and of definitions of painting
have been completely necessary for me to reach mine.
Utopia / U can’t touch this
Now this may be romantic, but I’m completely serious: painting is the utopian dream of
being able to extract from within yourself your personal vision, your way of looking at the
world, the observations you think are important and strive to give meaning to, and being
able to show them to others so that they too can be enriched by them. Through it you
demonstrate your will to protect those precious observations and visions from the blight of
time and touch of man, by which I mean the grasp of greed and the desire to own. It is to
render them untouchable, painting them into the world beyond reach, where they forever
remain as the recording of an idea, subject only to eternal longing and continued watching.
The reason I use the word utopia (literally meaning “no place”, or “nowhere”) is because it is
the perfect analogy for painting. As I see it, and would even venture to say understand it,
this is what it was all about from the beginning. Granted, the word utopia and any
ponderings about what the image is or can be arrived in the discussion significantly later
than the painted image came into being, but it is still what one can hope it was all about.
It can never be sullied by ownership in the same sense that physical objects are attainable if
you have sufficient finances for them. It is not something for someone to hold, it is not that
simple – it is beyond that. In today’s society, you want something – you buy it. But the
instant you obtain it, the initial longing – that which got you interested in the first place –
ceases, and it swiftly assumes the role of just another thing in a line of hundreds of objects
you own. There’s this quick fix for every craving, if you have the money. Apart from, as the
Beatles sang: love and – as I would like to add to their statement – painting; you can never
4
reach the vision it holds. To quote another musician, who happened to create the perfect
theme song for painting with his 90’s megahit, Mc Hammer: “U can’t touch this”!
Painting was never about making an object, even when paintings became objects it was still
originally only about making paintings; the object only came into being as a clever invention
of a transport device that made images portable, so you wouldn’t have to abandon them
with the move from your home (cave/palace). This led to a better communication of visual
information as the paintings could travel to new locations and be seen by new eyes. Painting
has, however, become problematically tied to its supporting object, and today random
objects that somewhat resemble paintings are called paintings, when in fact they really are
objects.
I would like here to make a hopefully helpful parallel to music, which is also something we
produce and pass on to a state of being beyond touch. The production of it may, just as
painting, depend on our bodies to play the actual instruments or our mind and hand to
compose it on a computer, but what comes out is something untouchable, unreachable;
utopian. Something created by us human beings by whatever technical means necessary to
communicate beauty/X in one of its most intangible forms. (I put an “X” there since it might
otherwise exclude anyone striving to express something quite different.) And in the end it is
not about the speakers, or the CD-player (or computer) by use of which the recorded music
can be played and heard again and again, they are simply necessary to transmit the original
recording of the composition.
5
Painthing
If we, for the sake of argument, were to regard painting as a veil – beyond which we cannot
go – with physical painting we can still touch the veil, as it were, and a range of nonsensical
questions are bound to arise from it. And have arisen. Whether the veil itself is made of
fancy cloth (read: metal, cardboard, plastic, etc.), whether it’s thick or thin, heavy or light is
all beside the point – these are concerns belonging to fields other than painting. What is
behind the veil, however; what the “no place” it keeps us separated from looks like, and how
it has been arrived at – stylistically, compositionally and technically – isn’t. When the
materiality of the object confuses or questions the hierarchies of importance, and you don’t
know whether to focus on the probably very delicate and intricate suggestion of a new
flashy carrier of the image, or concentrate on the actual picture, it is, as I have chosen to
phrase it, a painthing. It puts materialistic and physical concerns over pictorial and depends
on a sculptural reading of the artwork.
To give a historical explanation of paintings becoming painthings: Cezanne’s structured way
to paint, his vision of how it should be, and what was then developed by Picasso and Braque
– cubism (or to be precise: analytic cubism) – is all about painting. And it remains so until
material beside paint – worldly things with the purpose of referring to itself, society or
everyday life in a direct, hands-on, materialistic way – is introduced in synthetic cubism.
With the invasion of real space (objects) into painted space, they immediately became
painthings.
I’m not saying painthings are in any way inferior, less worth or trying to make any other
disparaging insinuation, I’m simply stating that they are not so much paintings as they are
something else; the main points of interest lie someplace outside the plane, and a distinction
between the two is necessary to facilitate future discussion about painting. It is difficult to
6
talk about good or bad or well made painting today, when there is no real telling of when it
ceases to be what it wants to be. One painting might have a faint scent of perfume –a subtle
smell of Chanel; another might have been painted with liquid chocolate, and a third may
boast a neat fishbone pattern arrangement of cut up corduroy pants which probably would
be very tempting to touch. My point is, while it all may be very creative and fun and perhaps
even deep and involving, it is not painting. Everything a painting has to say resides within its
two dimensions; it should require no further information. It would be very difficult to say
which one was the better painting since they rely so much on material novelty and randomly
ascribed attributes (e.g. this painting absorbs sound!), whereas the true concerns
(production of fictional space, suggestion of – not physical creation of – a third dimension,
composition, color, etc.) are at most secondary. You are not supposed to smell, eat or touch
it; you’re supposed to look at it!
Body language
Painting, to my mind, has very little to do with the body. Dance, for instance, has very much
to do with it – but not painting. Should anyone insist that painting is like dancing, to me that
would simply be one out of a range of infinitely variable personal processes of painting;
saying painting is dancing is very confusing. What then is dancing, if it suddenly is also
painting? Paintings of a certain size could be argued to have a lot to do with the body, since
they might have been physically demanding to produce, but it is only true for the process of
making and not the visual information it holds, since the same painting could have been
made much smaller. Regarding the physical relation to looking at paintings it is true that a
tiny painting will give a much more intimate and private experience when looked at than a
huge one, which in turn can be imposing on the verge of threatening, and make us feel very
small. But this all has to do with decisions of scale, and is not something that is specific to
painting.
7
Painting is painting. Everything else is everything else
The main reason – should it not be self-evident – for re-defining, and thereby dismissing the
most recently acquired features of painting, is to bring it back to its main constitutive
powers. Before aspiring to merge with or become something else (dance, performance,
installation, sculpture, etc.) it should deal with its own unique intrinsic qualities; the
immediate abstraction from three dimensions to two and the inherent conceptuality of
showing something that isn’t present – whether it is no longer so or it never was.
I would like here to emphasize that I think painting is – and has been ever since its early
conception as a form of communication – a very conceptual idea. It depends on the viewer
to give it space and motion in his or her mind based only on the information it provides. As I
see it, there is little difference between the mental image projected into someone’s mind
through the use of guiding or triggering words, and the one generated by the information
given in a painting. The image is just as untouchable as any meaning of any word; you get
the idea of what it could or should be, but can never get there.
It can only try to overcome its obstacles through its own possibilities. Experimenting with the
third dimension is, as I see it, just an attempt to take a shortcut to making suggested space
real. And that already exists – in everything else. There is a certain beauty in the idea of
dealing with the overwhelming diversity of physical form and texture belonging to the real
world through the soothingly dimensionally limited structure of painting. It is something to
hang on to! To paraphrase Ad Reinhardt, one could put it like this: Painting is painting.
Everything else is everything else.
8
Everything else
Comparing a sound piece, for instance – or a sculpture for that matter – to a painting is quite
strange, as it presupposes a general, all-encompassing communication of ideas, suggesting
all means of expression are equally capable of communicating everything. The horrific
outcome of a fictional – but not unlikely to occur – comparison such as that would inevitably
be something like: “this is a better sound piece than that is a painting.” Looking at and
comparing art based on how interesting the choice of subject matter is and how successfully
the idea is communicated, is lacking something. It lacks a certain care (and by care I almost
mean love) for medium-specific detail, and is judged too broadly on content alone –for it is
not unthinkable that the person who makes the comparison is neither painter, nor soundartist.
I would say it is vital (and I hope I stress it enough by underlining it) that they are
cared for separately, in order to maintain the highest possible quality in each end every
discipline. And they all contribute, each by right of their own unique qualities, to the greater
discourse so that the joint efforts of all disciplines can ascertain a worthy continuation of art.
Lost in translation
Only a small part of the communication a painting produces today takes place in real space –
the room in which it hangs; the rest happens online or via books and magazines. What you
get with the documentation of a painting is a forced re-flattening of the flat surface, and if
the painting originally made a point of its physicality (thickness of paint, specific materials,
e.g. stuff belonging to painthings) the flattening will be ruthless. As a matter of fact, you
might as well call the documentation in that case obliteration of communication, as every
aspect beside the visual information on the picture plane is lost with the documentation:
every physical feature; its materiality, size, weight and texture. But, what’s worse is that not
even the flattest of paintings gets away unaffected. The information it holds will too be
transformed to pixels on screens, and the painting is lost in translation.
9
One could argue that with physical paintings, one thing that still is digitally unmatched is the
precise control of color. While it becomes problematic the very moment you decide to try
and document it – as you face in that instant the same problems of varying color experience
as with digital painting – there is at least one version that is exactly as you want it or left it.
This, however, is of course only viable in ideal, never changing, lighting conditions – which
means it has to stay in one place and also that you can’t document it without first of all
flattening it once more and also losing ultimate control of color.
I’ve mostly looked at images online, in books or seen them as slides. (The “history of slides”,
as Chuck Close very aptly put it about art history, in a conversation moderated by curator
Anne Umland at MOMA, on august 8th, 2007, in conjunction with the exhibition held at that
time called What Is Painting? Contemporary Art from the Collection.) His witty remark hits
the nail right on its head – many times you never get to see the real painting, the unique
object, because it is stashed away someplace safe, or in somebody’s home. Of course there’s
always the possibility it’s hanging in a museum somewhere, but that still might not exactly
be in your vicinity. My point is I’ve seen documentation of paintings far more than I’ve seen
real paintings, and when, on occasion, I go to see the real things I sometimes get a little
disappointed. It troubles me to realize they often have a specific physicality, and angers me
to see there are sometimes little tricks to them; features you would never have guessed
from looking at documentation. There are details suggesting that seeing the object is better
than seeing the documentation; things that seem to underline that the image was not
enough, there had to be some little twist to it.
Imagine painting that has learned to adapt to slideshows and the internet: that in itself
already is its own documentation, painting that finally is all about itself; the visual
information. There is nothing more to it than what you see, there’s no trick – no slightly
better experience requiring your physical experience. That is what information painting is.
10
Passion art
Many of the things I think are important in painting: clarity and decisiveness of the line, the
skill to compose a picture through simplification of space and figuration and what perhaps
could be called a disciplined use of color, all took cover during the reign of modernity. They
sought shelter in what was later to be referred to as popular culture, where they could
evolve and shape a new, characteristic language. They were widely spread through the
distribution of comics and more people than ever could look at line drawings and learn some
basics by copying their favorite comic book artists.
I have no specific feeling towards pop-art, it just so happens that many of the things I care
for and think are important and beautiful are categorized as pop, since they belong to a
certain culture, but should perhaps be called pass-art – for passionate – instead.
2-D alliance
I see little need for a distinction between painting and drawing today – they are birds of a
feather and should stay together. Contrary to how painthings distinguish themselves from
paintings by demanding real space and the physical attendance of the viewer to fully
experience the materiality of the work, drawing shares the same principles of visual
communication on a strictly two-dimensional plane as painting and its ideal form should be
the same: visual information only. They have only been separated because of two tiny – and
to my mind, completely unnecessary – reasons. First, drawing is generally considered to be
preoccupied with the line – preferably in a black and white setting or any other
monochrome scale. Second, there is a slight material difference, dictating drawing is this
medium and painting is that. But to go back to the cave paintings; they are as much drawings
as they are paintings. Does drawing become painting simply because it is filled in, and does
that then make painting with lines drawing? No, that is simply too fuzzy; I think they are
wrongfully separated. It is perhaps best to put it like this: the historical separation is
understandable, because you had only material, and subsequently expressional differences
11
to go on, but it is no longer necessarily so. Roy Lichtenstein, to use an exemplary, historical
blurring of the distinction, already made it quite clear in the 60’s with his paintings of comic
book drawings, that the separation is no longer necessary.
Conflict of the surface
The Conflict of the surface is a term I originally invented for dealing with the internal,
structural questions of painting –the varying compositional, stylistic, and technical ways to
create the illusion of space on the picture plane. When two or more different styles – or
elements – meet in the same picture, they each struggle to gain the viewer’s interest in a
competition for focus of attention. Looking at, for instance, a mix of the clashing
characteristics of a very distinct logo next to or on top of a realistically painted part, you
alternate between different ways of reading the painting as we have different ways of taking
in different types of information.
In its extension, the term came to include questions related to showing painting, i.e. hanging
situations, and ultimately questions related to the significance of the surface itself – which
gave birth to the term painthings.
Confusion of origin, mixing of styles
Today, our relation to time and place is completely flattened by the images on the internet.
In a very interesting way, I might add. It is a confusion of origin; no history, no cultural
connection, just a flurry of styles and aesthetics to pick and choose from. This is what I
meant when I said earlier that painting has far from exhausted its potential; lots of things
that have been overlooked, or to be fair, haven’t been possible (which is only natural, given
12
the fact that communication of images was much more limited and the availability of
information about old or foreign paintings was very restricted) are possible today. Endless
stylistic combinations and compositions are readily available to us for our immediate
enjoyment and inspiration: a global, up-to-date bank of ideas.
With the internet, any form of imagined chronological timeline has been dissolved and what
exists in its place is what I like to think of as a panoramic view of styles and expressions, with
a complete disregard for – or rather inability to share and produce – any cultural,
geographical or other on-site specific contextual information. Which, to my mind, is never
present in any mystical lingering way in any form of painting anyway, but can only rely on
the way any such cultural flavors or specific traits might have been made visible in the
painting, stylistically and content wise; the surroundings are always only second in the
reading of a painting. Suggesting otherwise immediately moves you over to the field of
showing painting in real space, which is obviously something quite different.
It is a cultural equalizer: on a particle (which is to say pixel) level, there is no telling what is
fine or foul culture; there’s no high-brow, no low-brow – there’s only no-brow! I have made
a piece constituted of two monochrome pixel-realistic paintings, each 1x1 pixel in size, to
demonstrate this. One is a faithful recreation of one of the brightest pixels in the digital
documentation of Gerhard Richter’s Betty, from 1988, which I downloaded from his
homepage. It is called Bright Betty. The other is an equally faithfully recreated pixel from a
screenshot from the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros.3, which was also released in 1988.
The specific pixel I chose to paint is the button in Mario’s pants. This painting is called Mario
Button.
Showing
In a gallery setting, I like to think of showing painting as something similar to comics, a form
of narrative constructed of consecutive images along with text (although the text part is not
necessarily required). It doesn’t have to be a continuous narrative, from a to b, as you would
13
normally expect from a comic, but still all related to each other – sort of an exploded comic;
a puzzle to be laid out in the mind of the beholder in order for it to make sense. On this
level, the paintings are both themselves – with their own compositional and stylistic
concerns, each communicating their own visual information – and part of a group, acquiring
a second level of meaning in their relation to other paintings. Showing them next to each
other or far apart, you can either emphasize the struggle for attention they will inevitably
get into, or try to avoid it. This is only natural; you show two things at once, you have to
choose in what order to look at them. It is also where a painting’s social skills come into play:
a very undemanding painting might be easy to combine in a gallery space, whereas one with
a bold and challenging composition might not. It has to do with the conflict of the surface in
its extended sense: the room. This level is no longer painting, but showing; construction of
meaning by arranging the relation between two or more paintings in the gallery space.
Video games
Video games brought a new way of seeing into the field of painting, or perhaps a re-new way
is a better description. They have given us a speed-lecture in simplification and creation of
illusion of space (well, it has been some 60 years now, but still, compared to the history of
painting and the evolution of seeing and realization, I’d say the evolution of videogames
have gone by fairly quickly).
Granted, the history of painting has been available to the creators of video-games – they too
have learned from the old masters – but they had to reinvent painting through forced
simplification and a very limited palette due to what was technologically possible, so even
when they knew how to do it classically, they had to come up with a much more scaled
down way of doing it. Super Mario for instance was given many of his distinctive features out
of simplification reasons.
14
You could say video-games went through the reversal of the quest for the final painting:
starting with the most scaled down abstraction and moving towards realism. With
technological (hardware) advancement there was sure to follow an aesthetic progression. It
went through a beautiful pointillistic phase – although at this point I would rather call it
pixellistic – during which the level of detail increased, shadows on clothes and bodies
became technically possible to paint, and now it’s on the level of photorealism, having in
many cases abandoned the painting of earlier games, but it keeps evolving as a thing on its
own.
Digital painting
Throughout the history of painting – if you care for a moment to see it as I do – what until
now has only been the impossible dream of painting as non-object is suddenly possible.
Technology has reached a level where it allows us to get as close to the original vision as
possible. And it keeps evolving, at a steady, unbelievably high pace. Painting can finally be
what it has always wanted to be – a man-made production of an image. That is why I said
earlier on that it can finally begin.
David Hockney, to use a famous example of someone who has been working with digital
painting, has in my opinion missed the point with it. He uses it as a tool just as any other;
only this is conveniently smudge-free. It is not the novelty of digital painting as a trendy, fun
and high tech means, but its possibility of being an end – a way of painting as close to the
original idea or observation as possible. Painting that no longer has to be concerned with
producing an unnecessary object, which – due to specific physical features signifying its
uniqueness – will always be greater than its documentation, but rather a tech-metaphysical
existence of a painting. A painting that exists only as information; thus it is both itself and its
own documentation at the same time. This is what I call information painting
15
(K)not related
If you paint because you want to be able to share your ideas with someone else through a
visual message, and that in itself is self-sufficient, non-dependent on an exclusive physicality,
you shouldn’t have reason to oppose what I’m saying. Most painters I know, naturally, as a
form of instantly initiated subconscious self defense mechanism, oppose it simply because it
threatens everything they think they are involved with. Painting is to this day helplessly
intertwined with its physicality. Perhaps one could make the following allegory: Painting was
once forcefully wed to Physicality; only this happened so long ago that history has blurred
the fact that the marital knot was initially tied by force and not love. But the world soon
forgot about the original lovelessness and they were considered an ordinary couple, much
like any other. Today, they are still widely and firmly believed to be happily married, which is
why any attempt to untie the knot is generally frowned upon.
Even with the digitalization of the medium, or perhaps better: the discipline, the basics for
making paintings will never die; if you work figuratively, it is still advisable to study a bit of
anatomy; developing a feeling for color is not something that suddenly doesn’t apply, just
because it goes digital; and you probably want to take a look at composition as well. Or you
could simply choose to refuse it all – that choice is just as hopelessly boring in digital painting
as it is in physical painting. It is still and always will be dependent on the hand of the artist,
the mouse – which if you’d prefer could be regarded as an oddly shaped brush – won’t
accomplish much without the hand to control it. The only change is that the physicality is
gone. Everything else – the stuff that really matter – is there.
$
Perhaps the best known example – which is pretty dull in most aspects, but still worthy, as it
were, of a thought – would be money. Money has since long gone through the
metamorphosis from object to information, and has not lost its value because of it, and
people in general seem to have very little problem with that.
16
Gallery owners and collectors who, for entirely separate reasons than painters, might
shudder at the very thought of painting as non-object can be somewhat reassured that
commerce may proceed still. The objects might fade, but trading value never will. They can
still go on, and we painters too, dealing in information instead of objects. Without the
painter: no painting – whether physical or not. To me, one way to get around losing all hopes
for making a living as an artist in times of fading significance of objects would be to make
certificates validating the authenticity of the information paintings, similar to how Sol Lewitt
seems to have gotten around unauthorized production of his instruction pieces.
Human
Finally, I would like to say that a painting has very little to do with its traces, its drips and
scratches and splashes and what have you. It seems to me a strange fixation with an idea
that we should somehow have to prove our involvement in the process of making a painting
by leaving traces of physical presence. Those are to me desperate attempts at clinging to
some form of proof of human error, which I don’t think needs to be displayed – at all – as
though the humanity of it somehow should prove that it is painting. The real human aspect
of painting is that we – humans – have the capacity and privilege to select and produce
images we think are meaningful and want others to see. That is strong evidence of a very
personal and unmistakably human connection. If a computer were to paint an image for me,
and say “this is what I think is beautiful and special, you should see this” – I might give up.
But I don’t think that is liable to ever happen. Cars may outrun us, computers outthink us,
but no thing can outfeel us; passionately we do what we do.