The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi-Persons - Isabelle Graw

In this essay, I set out Isabelle Graw’s observation that painting has long since pushed back its boundaries and can now be found everywhere, that it is omnipresent, and should not be limited by historical conditions around medium, technique, genre or process. Like a horse that has bolted, contemporary painting should not be brought to heed, by a ‘substantialist notion’ of painting, but rather have free rein to exist in or borrow from other art forms, as well as occupy the conventional position of a “picture on canvas”.[1] She rallies against art publications and exhibitions in Germany and Austria, that treat painting as a ‘circumscribed entity,’ and that since painting has moved on and ‘left its ancestral home,’ they fail to recognize this departure in their writing and curation.[2]

She quantifies this pronouncement by first setting out her ideas of an expanded notion of painting, where the modernist understanding of painting characterised by ‘norms and conventions’ is dismissed.[3] The borders between different mediums and practices have become permeable and work to influence each other, she argues, and she borrows the term ‘re-mediatization’ from Ilka Becker in describing the scenario where a set of characteristics for one medium are also suitably ascribed to another, thereby blurring the definition of each through use of these characteristics.[4] She uses an example of how painting and photography have merged with artists such as Jeff Wall and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Graw references Rosalind Krauss’ book, A Voyage on the Northern Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999), in which Krauss argues that traditional distinctions around mediums like painting and sculpture should not limit artistic practice. Rather than abandoning the conditions altogether, she argues that instead, with an easing of restrictions, a redefinition or reorganization of that practice should occur.

Many more possibilities open up for the artist when the ring fencing of specific mediums is removed; “[The medium’s] character, rather, depends on how the artist will proceed with it.”[5] Without this expansion, an artwork loses its definition and rigour and, as a result, is often defined by what museums or galleries decide is art or by the general discourse around visual culture.

Much of the pendulum swing away from traditional ‘norms and conventions’ around painting is a reaction to the modernist essentialization of painting. Krauss’ book’s preface is written by German art critic, Benjamin Buchloh, and begins:

At first, I thought I could simply draw a line under the word medium, bury it like so much artificial toxic waste, and walk away from it into a world of lexical freedom. "Medium” seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically, too discursively loaded.[6]                                    

Buchloh describes how for him the word ‘medium’ was too discursively loaded and invoked the name of Clement Greenberg to such an extent that it was hard not to ‘Greenbergize’ its meaning and strip it of all its historical complexities. It is Greenberg’s thinking around ideas of medium-specificity and artistic purity, treating painting as a ‘circumscribed entity’, that both Krauss and Graw refuse to accept. Krauss describes it as a “story of militantly reductive modernism” that narrowed painting down to what was assumed its essence, which was ‘flatness’.[7]

Graw highlights how Greenberg’s thinking began to erode with artists like Robert Rauchenberg who expanded painting into life and in turn disrupted the purity of painting. She further illustrates this with Francis Picabia’s Nature Morte (1920), which introduced the ‘readymade’ (a stuffed monkey) and text (the names of the great painters, Cezanne, Rembrandt and Renoir) into the mix, disturb the idea of painting having a privileged status.

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 labour into the painting, but also by the textural elements, which equally threaten to buy painting’s alleged essence. [8]

However, if we deduce that there is nothing medium-specific about painting anymore, how do we define painting when it has merged with other procedures. It is at this point she introduces the proposition that “we conceive of painting not as a medium, but as a production of signs that is experienced and highly personalized”.[9] She continues by suggesting that focusing on this specific indexicality, we stumble across one of painting’s main characteristics: not that of flatness of plane, but the strong bond of product and maker.[10]

Graw discussed the concept of painting as semiotic activity in her introduction: a series of codes, gestures and materiality. The bond she identifies between person and product has references in the field of anthropology, which regards artworks as equivalents of people.[11] Although she recognizes the shortcomings of this description, she finds Alfred Gell’s definition of artworks as ‘indexes of agency’ “very useful”.[12]

According to Charles S. Peirce, an American philosopher and pioneer of Semiotics, an index shows something about a thing because of its physical connection to it.[13] Graw would argue that painting, more than photography or sculpture, suggests the stronger physical connection and tangible evidence that “someone has left her marks”.[14] Graw uses Frank Stella’s observation that painting is a sort of handwriting, read as traces of the producing person.[15] Even when a technical device is used, such as Gerhard Richter’s squeegee, she argues, the physical movement of the artist’s body is inscribed into the painting.

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.[16]

Graw suggests that painting can therefore be understood as the artform that offers the closest glimpse of “what is assumed to be the person of the artist and her life”, which explains why painting continues to be popular and has the highest assumed value. By acquiring a work of art, you are also getting hold of the artists’ labour capacity and a “slice of her life”.[17] Graw references Marxist theory around value and commodities, where value is intrinsic to the commodity due to the labour embodied in it. It is the perceived presence of the artist (even in their absence), the labour of the artist and the life of the artist that gives an artwork its value. The value therefore becomes a purely social phenomenon, “the result of an ongoing and never-ending social negotiation”.[18]

While I wouldn’t deny the possibility that a painting can occasionally deliver its own interpretation, I find it nevertheless important to realise that by claiming agency for painting (or for artworks in general), by treating them as quasi-persons … 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.[19]

Graw’s essay rumbles through several gripes she has with how painting is perceived by various institutions and publications. Much of her argument is directed at happenings around the time of her writing in her native Germany: exhibition titles and curation that have irked her and publications that have neglected to mention the evolution that painting has enjoyed since modernism and how it has retaliated against the ‘Greenbergization’ of the medium as an artform since the1960s.

She then sets out a series of criteria on which she bases her assessment on the value of painting. Dispensing with medium-specificity, she broadens the scope of work that can be regarded as painting, applauding the blurring of definition and the freedom it now provides the artist. However, she is aware that with the erosion of boundaries, definitions are harder to agree upon and therefore she proposes that painting be read as a production of signs that are highly personalized, as an index of agency. The artist not only has greater freedombut also now has a greater role to play in how the artwork is perceived: the person of the artist becoming the subject in the object of a painting, and the role of the artist, becoming the subjectivity.

Painting’s capacity to appear particularly saturated with the lifetime of its author makes it the ideal candidate for value production.[20]

The perceived artist’s presence and labour provide a physical connection, and it is the illusion of this strong physical bond between product and maker that helps maintain its value above all other artforms in the art market.

[1] Isabelle Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi-Persons,” in Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas, ed. Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsh (Steinberg Press, 2012), 45.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 47

[4] Ilka Becker as cited in Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 47

[5]  Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 48.

[6] Buchloh as cited in Krauss “The Voyage on the North Sea,” 5.

[7] Krauss, “The Voyage on the North Sea,” 9.

[8] Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 49.

[9] Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 50.

[10] Graw, 50.

[11] Graw, 46.

[12] Alfred Gell as cited by Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 46.

[13] Charles S. Peirce as cited by Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 50.

[14] Graw, 50.

[15] Frank Stella, cited by Graw, “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,” 50.

[16] Graw, 51.

[17] Graw, 49.

[18] Graw, 55.

[19] Graw, 57.

[20] Graw, 56.