The collected art criticism of Michael Fried
appeared in 1998 with the title Art and
Objecthood. The centerpiece of the book is the
essay by the same name, FriedÕs most famous
statement regarding the art of the 1960s. In this
essay, Fried had articulated a critique of the
move toward ÒminimalismÓ or, in FriedÕs own
preferred term, ÒliteralismÓ in art. Whereas
painting involved the illusion of space and the
relation of parts, literalism aimed at a unitary,
three-dimensional object. These literal objects
would not be sculptures, however; they would
have a wholeness and singleness of ÒshapeÓ
inspired by recent painting, above all the work of
Frank Stella, that had reduced painting to its
most minimal, two-dimensional elements and
foregrounded the shape of the support. This new
kind of painting, Donald Judd remarked at the
time, Òoverpowers the earlier paintingÓ because it
is Ònearly an entity, one thingÓ; but it also
exhausted the specific art of painting, with its
restriction to two dimensions, and necessitated
literalismÕs opening to three dimensions.
To the arguments of the minimalists/literalists
Fried responded that literalism was the Ònegation
of artÓ because it was, in the terms of a complex
argument that I cannot reproduce here, nothing
more than Òa new genre of theaterÓ (153). In
FriedÕs view, it was imperative for painting to
fend off the literalist challenge by observing the
distinction between literal and pictorial shape,
thus disproving the charge that the art of painting
was now exhausted. The shape of which Judd
spoke was Òshape as a fundamental property of
[literal] objectsÓ; but this sense of shape was
distinct from the type of shape with which the
painter is concerned, Òshape as a medium of
paintingÓ (151) Ð ÒpictorialÓ shape. In order for
the specificity of the art of painting to remain
viable in the contemporary crisis, a painting had
to Òdefeat or suspend its own [literal] objecthoodÓ
by the assertion of pictorial shape (ibid.).
In the introduction to the collected work Fried
updates, but fundamentally reaffirms, the judgments
about contemporary art at which he had
arrived when he wrote the earlier work, and notes
that he stopped writing art criticism in the 1970s
because he was out of sympathy with the direction
art had taken and saw no point in continuing
to reiterate his opposition.
Just as Art and Objecthood appeared,
however, Artforum (Sept. 1998) carried a review
by Fried of monochrome paintings by the New
York painter Joseph Marioni. In this remarkable
document Fried declared, against all expectation,
that MarioniÕs monochromes were Òpaintings in
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henry staten
CLEMENT GREENBERG,
RADICAL PAINTING,
AND THE LOGIC OF
MODERNISM
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/010073-16 © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/0969725022014206 5
ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanities
volume 7 number 1 april 2002
radical painting
the fullest and most exalted sense of the word,Ó
and went on to this conclusion:
É I consider Marioni to be one of the foremost
painters at work anywhere at the present, and
the great and thought-provoking surprise his
work has given me is not only that it transcends
the previous limitations of the monochrome
but also that it is the first body of work
I have seen that suggests that the Minimalist
intervention might have had productive consequences
for painting of the highest ambition.
Simply put, the Minimalist hypostatization of
objecthood É seems to have led in MarioniÕs
art to a new, more deeply founded integration
of color, amateriality, and support, which is to
say to an affirmation of the continued vitality
of painting that has something of the character
of a new beginning. (149)
Who is Marioni, and what has he wrought that it
could cause a theorist as brilliant and polemical
as Fried to change his mind in such a fundamental
way about the possibilities of monochrome
Ð a type of work that, until he saw
MarioniÕs work, Fried associated with mere literalism
and considered Òa vehicle for a hackneyed
theoretical/ideological stanceÓ (ibid.)? Even more
important: could Fried be right in his assessment
of MarioniÕs achievement, and, if so, what would
this mean for the standard narratives about
modernism in painting, and, more broadly, for
our sense of the fate of painting (whose ÒdeathÓ
has been routinely declared for decades now) and
of art as a whole in the era of postmodernity?
I will give a quick introductory account of
Marioni and his work, then turn to the metacritical
issues raised by his work and its associated
theoretical apparatus. Marioni has been living and
painting in New York since the early 1970s, but
his career for many years was mainly in Europe,
especially Germany. His work has special significance
in my eyes because it is not an isolated
phenomenon, but part of a loosely structured
movement that has shown under different names
but has most consistently called itself ÒRadical
Painting,Ó and which has been quietly carrying on
the project of Òreduction to the essenceÓ of the art
of painting that Clement Greenberg, and Fried in
his wake, did so much to theorize some decades
ago Ð although this project has gone in a direction
that might have surprised Greenberg (as it does
Fried). Radical Painting has taken widely divergent
forms in the course of the two decades I have
been following it, and I will not try to survey this
variety; but Marioni is, along with his former
collaborator, the Cologne painter GŸnther
Umberg, the most theoretically minded of the
group, and his paintings manifest in an exemplary
way the relation of Radical Painting to the reductionist
Òlogic of modernism.Ó1
Now, whereas Greenberg in some famous
statements declared flatness the irreducible
element in the art of painting that modernism
had uncovered, Marioni focuses his meditation
on the question of articulated paint or painted
color Ð not paint as it exists in the tube but as it
exists when applied to a particular support by a
particular means of application.2 He uses acrylic,
applied with a roller to linen on a wooden
stretcher, always in a top-down direction, two to
six coats of varying hues, but such as to produce
a predominantly unitary color-image, each coat
monochrome and forming a more or less all-over
skin, with the texture of the linen visible to varying
degrees through the paint or at the edges. His
aesthetic aim is to create a total effect out of the
relation between the specific hues he attains, the
texture of the paint, the relation of the paint to
the linen, and the size and shape of the picture
support; this sense of the total physical presence
of the painting is what Fried refers to when he
mentions the effect on MarioniÕs work of the
Òminimalist intervention.Ó However, Marioni is
very insistent that his paintings should not cross
the line into literalness and become literalist or
minimalist Òpainted objectsÓ; they remain, and
are to be judged aesthetically as, paintings, and
their predominant effect is of breathtaking color.
The crucial figure in MarioniÕs sense of the
physical presence of the painting as painting, as
structure of paint plus support, is, however, not
any minimalist but the painter Robert Ryman,
without whose work it is impossible to understand
MarioniÕs project. Schematically, then,
Radical Painting of the sort done by Marioni is
modernism as analyzed by GreenbergÕs logic,
transformed by the achievement of Ryman, and
turned toward the exploration of the entire spectrum
of painted color.
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de duve’s interpretation of greenberg
GreenbergÕs narrative about modernism has
recently been massively re-examined and recontextualized
by Thierry De Duve.3 De Duve has
heightened the philosophical stakes in this discussion
by extensive analysis of the conflicting
Kantian elements in GreenbergÕs problematic Ð
the fact that for Greenberg the beauty of a painting
always had to be evaluated by a Kantian judgment
of taste, while on the other hand the ÒlogicÓ
of modernism that Greenberg equally derived
from (his reading of) Kant implied that judgments
of taste were no longer necessary. Greenberg
wrote in his 1960 essay ÒModernist PaintingÓ that
Òthe essence of Modernism,Ó as observable in
Kant, Òthe first real Modernist,Ó lay Òin the use of
characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize
the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but
in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of
competenceÓ (85).4 Hence modernism in art
meant that each art was concerned with Òall that
was unique in the nature of its medium,Ó and Òthe
task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the
specific effects of each art any and every effect
that might conceivably be borrowed from or by
the medium of any other art. Thus would each art
be rendered ÔpureÕ ÉÓ (86). The quest for purity,
in the case of painting, yielded the reduction to
mere flatness:
It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness
of the surface that remained É more fundamental
than anything else to the processes by
which pictorial art criticized and defined itself
under Modernism. For flatness alone was
unique and exclusive to pictorial art. The
enclosing shape of the picture was a limiting
condition, or norm, that was shared with the
art of the theater; color was a norm and a
means shared not only with the theater, but
also with sculpture. É [F]latness was the
only condition painting shared with no other
art É (87)
The logic of this famous argument is considerably
less than compelling. Leaving aside its questionable
relation to KantÕs project, its shakiest
assumption is this: that if there is to be an
essence of painting, that essence must be
absolutely singular, there must be one characteristic
that is the essence and this one characteristic
cannot be shared with any other art. By parity
of argument, one would have to conclude that
sound is inessential to poetry because it is shared
with music, and the history of modernist poetry,
with its recurrent tendency toward pure musicality,
would be an unaccountable mistake.
In any case, this was the conclusion at which
Greenberg arrived, a conclusion that, on De
DuveÕs account, led him into an intolerable
contradiction. For if mere flatness is the essence
of the art of painting, then, as Greenberg
remarked in 1962 in ÒAfter Abstract
Expressionism,Ó a stretched, unpainted canvas
could be experienced as a painting or, in the
slightly weasally term that he actually used, a
Òpicture,Ó Òthough not necessarily as a successful
one.Ó5 According to De Duve (and I was
surprised to find this out), no one ever presented
a mere unpainted canvas as a painting; monochrome
or quasi-monochrome was thus the closest
thing to the limit-condition of the art of
painting at which modernism in fact arrived, Òthe
zero degree of paintingÓ (217). But when
Greenberg saw monochrome paintings, rather
than thinking that they had arrived at the
essence, he dismissed them as Òfamiliar and
slick.Ó Monochrome, he judged, had become
Òalmost overnight another taming conventionÓ
that Òautomatically declared itself to be artÓ (De
Duve 251).
If a work automatically declares itself to be
art, then no act of aesthetic judgment is required
from the viewer; yet Greenberg was irrevocably
committed to the necessity of aesthetic judgment.
De Duve comments:
Once an unpainted canvas can be called a
picture or a painting, then it is automatically
called art. With the dismissal of the very
last expendable convention of modernist
painting Ð that the canvas be painted at all Ð
the specific [i.e., the art of painting] surrenders
to the generic [ÒartÓ in general]. The
consequences branch out into two possibilities.
Either É the making and appreciation of
art require nothing but a mere identification
predicated on the conceptual ÒlogicÓ of
modernism, and aesthetic judgment is no
longer necessary; É or aesthetic judgment is
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radical painting
still necessary. But the pressure that the
conventions of painting had put on its practice
is now nil É (De Duve 222)
On De DuveÕs reading, then, if there is a reductive
ÒlogicÓ of modernism, it follows that, once
the reduction is complete, there will no longer be
any room for judgments regarding the beauty of
the work, either on the part of the viewer or on
the part of the artist as he creates his work; or,
conversely, if there is to be aesthetic judgment,
Òpurism or reductivism is no longer tenableÓ
(ibid.). Hence, GreenbergÕs choice in favor of
aesthetic judgment meant that he had to abandon
ÒmodernismÓ with its progressive paring away of
nonessentials from the medium.
De DuveÕs account, which skillfully exploits
the weaknesses in GreenbergÕs own formulations
(importing, however, these same weaknesses into
his own argument Ð as we will see), gains its plausibility
not only from its elegant formulation but
from the historical sequel, the ÒGreenbergian
anti-GreenbergianismÓ of Donald Judd and
Joseph Kosuth that developed the terms of
GreenbergÕs logic uncompromisingly away from
the specificity of the art of painting and toward
the negation of aesthetic judgment. Looking at
StellaÕs black paintings in 1962 with GreenbergÕs
doctrine in mind, Judd and his generation of
artists had Òno alternative other than to pursue
the modernist tradition even beyond the literal
monochrome where it actually meets its endÓ
(231). StellaÕs paintings, which seemed to mark
the limit to which the modernist reduction could
be pushed, were interpreted by Judd as really
more like objects than paintings. Ò[M]ost of the
works,Ó Judd wrote, ÒÉ suggest slabs, since they
project more than usualÓ (cited in De Duve 236).
But Judd argued that three-dimensional Òactual
spaceÓ is Òintrinsically more powerful and
specific than painting on a flat surface.Ó
ÒBecause the nature of three dimensions isnÕt set,
given beforehand, something credible can be
made, almost anythingÓ (in De Duve 235). As
these remarks indicate, Judd was still awkwardly
trying to work with GreenbergÕs idea of specificity
while loosening the traditional constraints
to which Greenberg had bound it: JuddÕs new
three-dimensionality in order to open its unlimited
new realm of freedom needed to keep clear
of the specificity of sculpture as well as that of
painting; the new minimalist or literalist art
could flourish only in the specificity of the space
between the older genres.
Joseph Kosuth went even further than Judd.
For him, Òthe propositions of art are not factual,
but linguistic in character Ð that is, they do not
describe the behavior of physical or even mental
objects; they express definitions of art, or the
formal consequences of definitions of art.
Accordingly, we can say that art operates on a
logic.Ó This new logic leaves specificity entirely
behind, for the artistÕs true task Ònow means to
question the nature of art. If one is questioning
the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning
the nature of art. É ThatÕs because the word art
is general and the word painting is specificÓ (in
De Duve 245).
In the space of art-in-general, anything whatever
could be an artwork; according to Kosuth,
the fiat of the artist and not anything intrinsic to
the work decreed that something be art. But this
was the door to Ògeneric artÓ that Duchamp had
already opened fifty years earlier with his readymades,
particularly the famous urinal (hence the
title of De DuveÕs book); the aftermath of the
implosion of modernism was thus, according to
De Duve, simply the final triumph of DuchampÕs
intervention.
from ryman to radical painting
The elegance of De DuveÕs argument conceals a
serious flaw, one that becomes evident in light of
the retrospective action on the history of
modernism of painters like Ryman, Marioni, and
Umberg. The flaw is De DuveÕs assimilation of
the monochrome to the blank canvas, as though
the conclusion drawn from the possibility of an
unpainted painting Ð Òthe pressure that the
conventions of painting had put on its practice is
now nilÓ Ð were with equal validity to be drawn
from monochrome, so that, in the absence of
actual unpainted canvases, the Òliteral monochromeÓ
would mark the place where the
modernist tradition Òactually meets its endÓ
(231). It is easy to see how this assimilation could
slip, uncriticized, into De DuveÕs argument on
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the basis of StellaÕs early work, which teetered on
the edge of the minimalist reduction; more
puzzling is how De Duve can praise Ryman as a
great painter but quickly assimilate his work,
because it Òacknowledge[s] the readymade,Ó to
the tradition of Duchamp (277). For RymanÕs
work in fact exploits to an unparalleled degree
the pressure that the conventions of painting put
on its practice.
Ryman has made an entire career out of paintings
that are nominally white, yet each of which
is a distinctive exploration of the immense variety
of effects of texture, color, and reflectivity
that can be achieved within the limits of what
language labels univocally (and quite inadequately)
as ÒwhiteÓ; of the interaction of paint
with the immense variety of surfaces to which it
can be applied (linen, plastic, paper, metal, etc.);
and of the thematization, as part of the formal
whole, of the other, previously merely substructural
elements, such as the stretcher, the size of
the brush and the amount of paint it will hold,
the means of attachment to the wall (a very rich
element for Ryman, who has used tape, bolts of
various sorts, tacks, and so forth, exposing them
and making them part of the composition of the
painting) Ð and even the wall itself, which
Ryman also calculates as an integral part of the
aesthetic structure of the painting. De Duve
appears to leap from the fact that brushes, bolts,
and so forth are manufactured objects to his
conclusion that RymanÕs art is properly to be
understood as an Òacknowledgment of the readymade.Ó
There is some interest in linking Ryman
in this way to the tradition of Duchamp; but the
artistic goal at which Ryman aims could scarcely
be more distant from DuchampÕs. The thematization
of readymade elements in RymanÕs work
is subordinate to a more comprehensive logic of
making than that of the readymade Ð a logic,
older than modernism, that, before it involves
their manufactured character, involves acknowledging,
and drawing out the consequences
of, the materiality of the artworkÕs component
materials.
The characteristically modern critical awareness
that there is no pure, raw materiality, that
the materials of art come to us already worked
over by a long cultural history, becomes for many
contemporary theorists, including De Duve, a
vision of pure Hegelian Aufhebung in which the
materiality of art is entirely sublated into the
realm of Òconvention,Ó with convention itself
understood as ultimately discursive in nature.
The emergence of conceptualism can then be
narrated as the logical culmination of the ÒlogicÓ
of modernism. The narrative of sublation cannot,
however, do justice to the vital tradition of work
within which the unsublated substratum of materiality
of even the most readymade materials
continues to function. Such work must either be
reinterpreted against the grain or rejected as
merely naive. Yet the charge of naivety can
scarcely be sustained in the face of the fact that
Radical Painting is constituted through and
through as a continuing critical reflection, carried
on within and beyond the terms of the dialectic
of modernism developed by Greenberg and
Fried, on the techniques and conventional materiality
constituting the art of painting at the
present moment in culture history.
Ryman, a crucial figure in this alternative
tradition, is for his own part unequivocal about
the controlling aim of his work: ÒThe basic problem
is what to do with paint. What is done with
paint is the essence of all painting.Ó6 The significance
of the various material elements of the
artwork is wholly reconfigured by their subordination
to this aim; and RymanÕs work, rather
than confirming the tradition of Duchamp, might
be more readily understood as the triumph of
making, in the entirely specific form of the art of
painting, over the readymade. Which is to say,
not making ex nihilo, as the pure originating
power of a godlike genius (the model toward
which conceptualism gravitates), or as the imposition
of form on formless matter, but as the
process by which an artist operates the conventional
techniques and culturally worked-over
materials of a historically evolved tekhne and
evolves it further. (The crucial philosophical
reference for this tradition would then be not
Kant Ð whose aesthetics is the product of the
Romantic episode that briefly carried aesthetic
theory into the ether of the ineffable Ð but
Aristotle, the original theorist of art as tekhne
who is much more plausibly considered the
predecessor, even if not the actual inspiration, of
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radical painting
the modernist idea of the specific medium. I will
say more about this at the conclusion of this
essay.)
Now, Ryman is often praised for his pragmatic,
non-theoretical stance toward his work; yet
in his terse way he has situated himself very
precisely as working within the selfsame ÒlogicÓ
that was more fully theorized in the 1980s by
Marioni and Umberg in their jointly authored
account of the nature of Radical Painting.7 There
are, Ryman says, three kinds of painting ÒprocedureÓ:
representation, abstraction, and his own,
which has Òbeen called by various names, none of
them very satisfactoryÓ: ÒThereÕs been
Ôconcrete,Õ É itÕs been called ÔabsoluteÕ, ÔnonobjectiveÕ,
and itÕs even been called ÔabstractionÕÓ
(a list to which we can now add ÒradicalÓ).
Ryman prefers to call it Òrealism,Ó because,
unlike the first two procedures, this type of work
involves no picture, no illusion, only the perceptual
reality of the painting itself.
It is much harder to achieve freedom from
representation than one might think. The very
fact that ÒrealismÓ has been confused with
ÒabstractionÓ (a concept that retains the notion
of something represented, only ÒabstractlyÓ)
shows that even the idea of purely non-representational
painting is not easy to grasp. The notion
of a paintingÕs having no picture at all (not even
one that is abstractly gestured at), is deceptively
simple to state, yet the radical extirpation of
representation requires a thinking-through of
every conventional and material element of the
art of painting Ð a thinking-through that
produces a new logic of form. Realism, says
Ryman, Òuses all the devices that are used by
abstraction and representation such as composition
and color complexity, and surface and light,
and line and so on,Ó and yet all these terms are
transformed when their logic is reconfigured
from scratch without the relation to figure.
Consider an element as simple and fundamental
as line: if line is still to be found in the ÒrealistÓ
or radical painting, it cannot be drawn, because
drawing is a function Ð classically, for Aristotle
as much as for Kant8 Ð the defining function, of
the procedure of representation. Hence: ÒI would
not actually paint a line, I would paint an area of
paint and stop. And then at the edge of the paint
would be a lineÓ (Ryman, in Sauer and
RausmŸller 64Ð65).
By contrast with RymanÕs endless experimentation,
Marioni tinkers only in subtle ways with
the format of his paintings, focusing instead on
the exploration of an almost unlimited range of
hue. And, because the logic of his work is more
homogeneously than RymanÕs a paint-logic,
there is no place in it for composition or line,
even as paint-edge (one reason why he paints
with a roller). Yet, in part because of what he has
learned from Ryman, MarioniÕs paintings are
informed by the most refined awareness of the
full physicality of the painting as a composite
unity attached to a wall. The successive skins of
paint interlock in such a way as to create a highly
specific visual effect, as though we were looking
into the paint, into a color-space that is not illusionistic
but the actual space created between the
layers of paint; yet the paint is not laid on
thickly, does not create what Greenberg called
Òfurtive bas relief.Ó The successive layers are
veil-like in their subtlety, and the weave of the
linen shows through (Marioni paints only on
linen Ð eight different kinds depending on the
texture and porosity he needs to achieve a
specific color-image). Marioni is also acutely
attentive to the relation between the color he
creates and the shape and size of the painting.
The form, or Òstructure,Ó as he prefers to call it,
of the painting, arises, as in RymanÕs work Ð
although arguably, as Fried says, Òin a wholly
different spiritÓ Ð out of the interaction of all
these elements; hence there is no question of
falling into what Harold Rosenberg called mere
Òmatterism,Ó a false sense of aesthetic richness
arising from the intoxication of the eye that puts
itself to the tracing of raw physical textures in all
their endless variety. As always in art, it is a
matter of form; and yet this is form that is tied
in the most intimate way to the materiality of
the medium. The Òpressure of the conventions
of the mediumÓ does not disappear but is
transformed; painters are made more conscious
of this pressure by their own increasing articulation
of the mediumÕs material elements in all
their diversity, and this in turn leads to a yet
more refined articulation and a yet subtler
consciousness.
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The difference between RymanÕs work and
MarioniÕs, and then again between either of theirs
and that of Umberg, shows how vast is the range
of possibility of this fundamental or radical or
realist exploration of painting. Like the work of
the others, UmbergÕs has evolved through a
number of transformations, but in the 1980s
when he was collaborating with Marioni he
painted intensely black-looking paintings on thin
sheets of aluminum, made of dry particles of
graphite or ivory black, which he brushed dry
onto moist dammar, horizontally and vertically,
thirty or forty layers, building up a porous
texture that registers the disciplined lines of the
brush strokes in the strikingly dry painted
surface. This texture is extremely fragile: the
merest touch will destroy it. This fragility,
together with the thinness of the support Ð which
makes the painting seem at first to be part of the
wall Ð creates a sort of attenuation of materiality,
at least in the sense of withdrawal from threedimensionality.
Yet the paint, with its delicately
refined yet charcoal-like texture, remains
intensely material, and in the absence of any
figure, shape, or line, the eye can only perceive
the color as bound to this materiality. Black is
actualized in a specific painting-medium, and this
actualization can only be judged aesthetically in
the context of the specific history of aesthetic
exploration out of which it comes, the context of
fundamental, concrete, absolute, realist, or radical
painting.
The increasingly articulate consciousness of
the (historically, contextually significant) materiality
of painting, the nature of the pressure it
exerts on the quest for aesthetic form, and the
means by which that pressure can be put to
aesthetic account that painters in this tradition
have developed, give the lie to GreenbergÕs own
belief that painters had never been, and could not
be, explicitly aware of the ÒlogicÓ that had been
guiding their practice throughout the history of
modernism.9 Yet this increased awareness actually
has the opposite effect from that inferred by
De Duve, moving the art of monochrome farther
than ever away from any possibility of producing
a painting by mere deduction from a logic.
De Duve creates his dichotomy between
aesthetic judgment and conceptual deduction by
ignoring the micrology of the painterÕs practice
in its largely tacit interaction with the (materialist)
ÒlogicÓ according to which he works. In his
reconstruction of GreenbergÕs thought De Duve
pays lip service to the question of interaction
with the medium:
As to the modernist artistÕs aesthetic judgment,
it has to be suggested, inspired,
provoked by or received from the medium
itself, for the medium is the only subject
matter of modernism and the locus of the
artistÕs aesthetic constraints. (214)
Yet De Duve renders the reference to the inspiration
the painter receives from Òthe medium
itselfÓ effectively meaningless when, endorsing
GreenbergÕs narrowest interpretation of the logic
of modernism, he sublates the materiality of the
medium into the idea of convention. In the
context of this sublation, it is easy to conceive
monochrome as a bodiless Òzero degreeÓ of painting
that can provide no further inspiration (only
ÒconcoctionsÓ that are produced ÒautomaticallyÓ).
And the judgment of quality must now
hover in the thin air of a generalized or generic
ÒartÓ that has no palpable relation to the specificity
of a given medium, because this relation, if
conceived as a logic, would result in the automaticity
that renders aesthetic judgment irrelevant.
One should pay careful attention to the
sleight of hand with the word medium that is
required for the logic of this argument:
Between content and form, between the
generic value-judgment and the specific selfcriticism
of the particular medium, there has
to be a mediation, but one that doesnÕt allow
for a deduction. If it did, it would mean that
content Ð aesthetic value Ð could be inferred
from the state of the medium. Conversely, it
would mean that the medium could be deliberately
manipulated so as to produce content
or quality, thus allowing for what Greenberg
called ÒconcoctedÓ art. (213)
Only the evacuation of materiality from the
notion of the medium can justify the imposition
of the model of deduction on that of Òspecific
self-criticism.Ó If what De Duve has identified is
a problem that indeed arose in the conceptualist
aftermath of modernism and that might well have
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radical painting
been given an essential impetus by GreenbergÕs
Òlogic,Ó it is not a problem that is intrinsic to the
notion of modernism as specific self-criticism, if
that notion is going to be construed not in the
odd and indefensible form of its reductio in a
blank canvas but in the most expansive terms Ð
terms that look to GreenbergÕs critical practice,
which was, as Fried notes, separated by a ÒgulfÓ
from his theory Ð and to the history of the
modernist reduction since 1962.
an alternative version of greenberg
Greenberg was never in any danger, as De Duve
wants to think, of ÒsurrenderingÓ his taste in
front of StellaÕs black paintings (203Ð04).
Greenberg more than once indignantly denied
ever having confused the essentialism or purism
of a painting with its quality, and any unbiased
reading of his work will confirm this. He had a
remarkably catholic eye, and in fact confessed a
preference for figuration over abstraction. What
I want to focus on here, however, is his enthusiasm
for color, which shows up repeatedly and
which constitutes a sort of second, shadow
ÒlogicÓ leading to a different, and more pregnant,
conclusion about the future of modernism than
the one that leads to the blank canvas. His
remarks on Morris LouisÕs work, for instance,
reveal precisely the kind of eye for ÒliteralÓ qualities
that one needs in order to look at Radical
Painting:
The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than
merely covered with it, becomes paint in itself,
color in itself, like dyed cloth; the threadedness
and wovenness are in the color. Louis
usually contrives to leave certain areas in the
canvas bare, and whether or not he whitens
these afterwards with a thin gesso É the aspect
of bareness is retained. It is a gray-white or
white-gray bareness that functions as a color in
its own right and on a parity with other colors;
by this parity the other colors are leveled down
as it were, to become identified with the raw
cotton surface as much as the bareness is. (97)
There is clearly a relation between the way
Greenberg here reads color and the idea of the
reduction to flatness, and there needs to be; the
idea of flatness is not simply expendable. But
flatness is here fully materialized in the ensemble
of constituents that make up the painting, and
what Greenberg responds to is not flatness as
such but the integration of paint and support.
Yet Greenberg, under the influence of his
doctrine of pure opticality (another dogma of his
theoretical apparatus, and one which I cannot
here try to reconcile with the line of thought that
leads to the blank canvas), oddly concludes that
the color is Òdisembodied,Ó and argues that the
paintings need to be large so as not to be seen as
discrete, tactile objects. Thus, the overarching
ÒlogicÓ is not yet that of Radical Painting, but
GreenbergÕs articulation of the physical structure
of the painting comes very close.
That a new doctrine of the evolution of
modernism is brewing in such observations
becomes evident in the very same essay, ÒAfter
Abstract Expressionism,Ó in which Greenberg
makes the remark about the blank canvas.
Greenberg here rhapsodizes about the colorism of
Still, Rothko, and Newman in terms that
continue to resonate today and might be said to
presage the onset of Radical Painting (while
contrasting sharply with the ambivalent tones in
which a little later he speaks of the reduction to
mere flatness):
É the ultimate effect sought [by Still, Rothko,
and Newman] is one of more than chromatic
intensity; it is rather one of an almost literal
openness that embraces and absorbs color in
the act of being created by it. Openness, and
not only in painting, is the quality that seems
most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time.
É Let it suffice to say that by the new openness
they have attained, [they] point to what I
would risk saying is the only way to high pictorial
art in the near future. (Emphasis added)
ÒOpennessÓ is a difficult term to define, and of
course Greenberg could not have had in mind
quite the sort of thing that is achieved by Marioni
(radical painting cannot be deduced); yet when he
calls it Òalmost literalÓ he suggests precisely the
direction these painters marked out for MarioniÕs
further development of what he learned from
them. ÒI would like to do for color what Pollock
did for line,Ó Marioni remarks in an interview; ÒI
would like to free color from boundaryÓ
(Museum Abteiberg Catalog 25).
8 0
staten
De Duve passes lightly over this praise of Still,
Rothko, and Newman, taking it as somehow
restoring GreenbergÕs confidence in the thesis of
flatness and thus as leading up to the remark
about a bare canvas; Fried more acutely notes
that GreenbergÕs remarks on color are ironically
at odds with the remark about the bare canvas,
but argues that Òthe reductionist logic of
GreenbergÕs theory of modernism meant that
color or indeed ÔopennessÕ in recent painting
could not assume the constitutive or essentialist
significance of flatness and the delimitation of
flatness ÉÓ (39). And it is true that Greenberg
now suggests the old logic has expended its impetus
as Still, Rothko, and Newman have opened a
Òsecond phaseÓ in the Òself-criticismÓ of
modernism. In this new phase, the delimitation
of flatness is replaced as the central question by
that of Òthe ultimate source of quality in artÓ
(Greenberg 132) Ð a source that Greenberg identifies
as Òconception,Ó in the quite traditional
sense of Òinspiration.Ó But this proclamation of a
new phase does not erase from the record the
previous remark in which he marks out color and
openness as the exclusive formal pathway to the
future of painting Ð precisely the role he had
formerly assigned to the problematic of flatness
(of which, properly conceived, the questions of
color and openness are aspects Ð as I will argue
below).
The statement about a new phase confusedly
implies both that the old formalist logic is no
longer relevant as painting turns from questions
of form to questions of aesthetic quality Ð an
implication contradicted by the declaration
concerning color and openness; and that the
question of quality in painting was not formerly
a problem for modernism as it pursued its quest
for flatness Ð an implication that is contradicted
by GreenbergÕs own earlier critical practice, in
which he insisted on the distinction between
formal means and aesthetic quality. In 1959, for
instance, in ÒThe Case for Abstract ArtÓ
Greenberg had written that ÒAbstract painting
may be a purer, more quintessential form of
pictorial art than the representational kind, but
this does not of itself confer quality upon an
abstract pictureÓ (82).10
It is clear, despite GreenbergÕs muddled
formulation, that the formal logic of modernism
he had done more than anyone else to define had
not all of a sudden shifted course with the
achievements in color and openness of Still,
Rothko, and Newman; these painters continued
to follow out the consequences of the turn in the
modern period away from the illusionistic space
of representation. Thus, necessarily, they continued
to work in a crucial, even an Òessential,Ó
sense within a Òlogic of flatnessÓ Ð the logic of
the reduction of representation according to
which the form of painting is reconceived in what
Ryman calls a realist way. This in fact was how
Greenberg himself initially developed his thesis
about flatness; what was fundamentally at issue
in this thesis was the rejection of representation,
figuration, illusionism, Òthe flat pictureÕs denial
of efforts to Ôhole throughÕ it for realistic perspectival
space,Ó as Greenberg termed it in 1940 (vol.
1, 34). Clearly, this denial must remain at the
center of any reflection on the modernist problematic;
the work of Still, Rothko, and Newman
cannot be understood without it. But because he
came to isolate flatness pure and simple as the
essence of painting-logic, GreenbergÕs recoil from
flatness seemed to leave him no recourse but to
conclude that his problematic, and that of
modernism, had shifted in a fundamentally new
direction.
If we were to choose one term to replace ÒflatnessÓ
as the best single index of the modernist
reduction, at least within GreenbergÕs work, it
should probably be Òpainterliness.Ó Painterliness
is a much richer concept than flatness, more
adequately suggesting the complexity of
GreenbergÕs insights into painting, as well as
pointing toward the primacy of paint stressed by
the radical painters. It is in fact a concept to
which Greenberg himself accords centrality (as is
indicated, for instance, by his thinking
ÒPainterly AbstractionÓ was a better name than
ÒAbstract ExpressionismÓ for the phenomenon
in question). Painterly qualities are those that
pull the viewerÕs attention away from what the
painting represents toward the physical fact of
paint-applied-to-a-surface, of paint applied on top
of paint, of density and flow and so forth, and the
problematic of painterliness therefore calls up as
interdependent, intertwined questions the denial
8 1
radical painting
of figuration, the physical and perceptual qualities
of painted color, and the flatness of the nonillusionistic
painted surface.
the painting is the body of color
Now, however, as we move away from representation
toward the full materiality of painting, we
run up against the other limit of this logic: the
limit of objecthood on which Fried has so richly
meditated, but which Greenberg already detected.
A painting cannot be a literal object, not even a
literal painted object. The minimalists were very
insistent on the difference between objects and
paintings, and their acute investigation of the
nature of literal objects is essential to the project
of radical painting, a blinking red light that warns
the painter how far he can go in this direction and
still be making a painting. How can we tell an
object that is a painting from a painted object?
Only by becoming attuned to the painting-logic
that produces the specific type of object that,
within a certain history as construed by a certain
interpretation of that history, has become as
literal in its objecthood as it can be and still be a
painting Ð that has, in fact, become most fully a
painting, and nothing but a painting, by the path
of its own particular brand of Òliteralness.Ó
ÒThe radical painter creates an object whose
content is dependent on the intrinsic logic of its
own material form,Ó claim Marioni and Umberg
(Outside the Cartouche 22). This logic has to be
understood in terms of what they call the function
of this object (23). ÒPaintings are not found
objectsÓ; they are ÒmanmadeÓ and hence must be
understood in terms of the purpose or function
that motivates their making (19). Of course
paintings can be made for a variety of purposes,
including the purpose of representation. But
representation would be a purpose external to the
Òlogic of the material formÓ of the painting. ÒThe
material itself has perceptual content that is
intrinsic to its functionÓ (24); the support, for
instance, Òis an object whose specific purpose is
to-be-paintedÓ (ibid.). According to this functional
definition, then, flatness could not, logically,
be the essence of the painting, because
everything about the painting has to be understood
in relation to what Marioni and Umberg
could easily have called the telos of the paintingobject
or object-that-is-a-painting, which irreducibly
involves being painted.11 Unlike, say, a
wall that one paints, the painting-support is
created purely in view of this function.
(Greenberg ignored this fact and thus curiously
gave way to literal ÒliteralismÓ when he started to
think of the flatness of the support in abstraction
from the purpose for which painting-supports are
made.) The function of the whole painting, in
turn, is to be perceived as a painting, to give
human beings the perceptual experience that is
the experience of looking-at-a-painting, where the
painting, and not the illusion of space or the
figure of something in the world, is indeed what
is looked at Ð and where, of course, this entire
complex of function, artifact, and experience is
constituted ÒconventionallyÓ by a given society
with a given history. The functions of the physical
support and its qualities, including flatness,
are definable only with reference to the function
of the full perceptual unity that is defined by this
history, or by a certain appropriation of it, as the
finished painting; and the form or essence of the
finished painting is the Òcolor-imageÓ that it
constitutes. In the final analysis, the ÒobjectnessÓ
of the painting is color (ibid.); all the physical
parts of which the painting is made are brought
into their unity of aesthetic form by their subordination
to the color. This does not mean that
they are effaced, as was the tendency in representational
painting. On the contrary, color is a
dimension of materiality and the radical painter is
not trying to detach it from materiality. ÒAristotle
defines color as the Ôlimit of the translucent in a
determinately bounded body.Õ This is a superb
definition for the painter. It locates color within a
material (even though it is, in AristotleÕs concept,
the outermost part of a thing) and it implies the
limitation of its form as materialÓ (24). The color
of a painting, if it gives the rule to the physical
constituents, is itself bound to or determined by
their materiality (first of all, that of the paint) as
this materiality has historically evolved in relation
to the evolving function of painting. But the size
and shape and texture and absorptiveness of the
support, the relation to the wall, and so forth,
must co-operate in an overall perception, the decisive
or ruling factor of which is color. Color is the
8 2
staten
essence of the painting in much the way that for
Aristotle the soul is the essence or form of the
body. Even though the form is in perception
detached from the material, substance or ousia is
embodied form; and the radical painting is ousia
as embodied color.
How can color be a form? A form is by definition
bounded or what gives boundary; Aristotle
himself in the Poetics used the drawn line as a
paradigm of form, but the drawn line is one of
the remnants of representation that the radical
painter eschews in his search for Òopenness.Ó But
color becomes, or can become, a form when it
finds the absolutely specific, bounded body that
it reciprocally determines and is determined by.
There is no notional answer to the question of
how color can function as form, only the historical
fact that certain painters have worked out an
aesthetic and a painting-practice that treats it as
such, and the proof is in the experience of their
work (or not).
art vs. craft
If Radical Painting is what gives importance to
yet another reconsideration, at this late date, of
the logic of modernism, what gives importance to
radical painting itself is the act of aesthetic judgment
that says Òthis is goodÓ to the work of
Ryman or Marioni or Umberg. And this aesthetic
judgment itself, made in the strong form that
both Greenberg and Fried emphasize, in which it
expresses not just a feeling of pleasure but a judgment
of aesthetic quality, is indissociable from
knowledge of modernism as a tradition of specific
self-criticism. This tradition has not primarily
been a matter of conceptual formulations and
deductions concerning ÒconventionsÓ and Òthe
state of the medium,Ó but an education for the
eye, yet an education that has of course essentially
involved the brain and language as well as
the hand and the brush, and increasingly so as
the tradition has become more articulately selfaware
Ð a self-awareness that has increasingly
become, among the practitioners of the art, an
explicit logic of purism and reduction to the
Òessence.Ó Whatever it might be for the theorist,
the concept of essence is for the painter not a
dogmatic doctrinal simplification but a tool with
which to meditate on materiality and objecthood
and which through this meditation participates in
bringing forth new work. The theorist might,
correspondingly, avail himself of the concept in a
non-metaphysical, ordinary-language way, as a
historically contingent notion, in something like
the way Fried already proposed in ÒArt and
Objecthood.Ó Nevertheless, if GreenbergÕs own
dogmatic reduction is too ÒessentialistÓ to be
useful, FriedÕs version of a contingent essence of
modernism is a little too flexible to capture what
is distinctive about Radical Painting.
Greenberg himself suggested that the idea of
purity could be Òmerely an illusion,Ó but a
ÒusefulÓ one, that had led to good new developments
among the artists under its spell. The idea
of a Òmere illusionÓ functioning in this way,
however, is a hangover from nineteenth-century
positivism and is inadequate to describe the functional
role, within the micrology of radical painting
practice, of the idea of reducing painting to
its fundamentals. It is necessary to take the idea
of an essence of painting seriously in order to
understand Radical Painting from within, and
even really to see it, to see it understandingly in
its profound relation, not along one axis but in
terms of a myriad of threads, to a tradition out of
which this work grows, and which is retrospectively
reconstituted once again as a tradition,
with a somewhat altered meaning, in view of this
new development.
Such conviction of aesthetic quality as may be
derived from a radical painting, because specific
to the historical-conceptual lineage of the type of
artwork in question, is not of the transcendentally
compulsory sort implied by De DuveÕs version of
Kantian aesthetic judgment. The version of
ÒspecificityÓ that I am arguing here implies that
one can, and indeed ought to, refrain from the
judgment Òthis is artÓ while making the judgment
Òthis is a good painting.Ó This is not to deny that
the generic concept of art is meaningful; only to
say that the large questions of art that De Duve
raises obfuscate the issue of the logic of reduction
in the history of modern painting Ð at least along
the line that leads to Radical Painting. If one
knows the most resourceful form of the thesis
about reduction to the essence, and if one has
spent enough time looking at the most serious
8 3
radical painting
work that has been produced either on the basis
of this thesis or in a way that supports it, then one
can in principle have an aesthetic experience that
stands up to the experience one has had of the
aesthetic objects that have formed oneÕs sense of
optimal aesthetic experience; but it is only as a
quite specific experience that one can have it.
Contrary to De Duve, it is not only not necessary
to judge Òthis is artÓ before one can judge Òthis is
a painting, and a good oneÓ; it is necessary not to
do so (though one might go on to the generic
judgment afterwards, recognizing that one is now
switching language-games in so doing).
As in any other question of aesthetic experience,
the judgment of quality in front of a radical
painting is not a matter of deduction and it is
not compulsory. But Radical Painting has the
earmarks of a well-grounded and valid aesthetic
movement, and forces a reconsideration of questions
that had seemed to be closed when it looked
as though the modernist logic had hit a dead end.
What all this betokens regarding the larger questions
of the Òculture warsÓ is a further question
that I will touch on below; for now what I want
to stress is that, if we are going to use modernism
as an example of anything on the way to a larger
argument, we should address it in its fullness as
a historically evolving phenomenon, along with
the most resourceful statement of its rationale or
ÒtheoryÓ; and this involves criticizing and rejecting
GreenbergÕs own dogmatic theses and De
DuveÕs interpretation of them.
Nevertheless, I want to pay tribute to the
scope and seriousness of Kant after Duchamp,
particularly because of the framework of sociopolitical
reflection that gives point to De DuveÕs
ÒgenealogicalÓ reconsideration of modernist
painting. My remarks here have focused on
narrowly aesthetic issues, and I recognize that
these issues may appear trivial compared to
the question of the cultural and political mission
of the artist, in the context of the great upheavals
of the twentieth century, which De Duve tries
to understand. I am especially troubled by the
problem of the esoteric nature of the
modernistÐformalist aesthetic I have defended
here, its seemingly elitist adherence to a refinement
of aesthetic taste that can perhaps only ever
be the possession of a privileged few. I have no
doubt that the ultimate and genuine significance
of the debates over essentialism are rooted in the
problems of democratization that De Duve
addresses.
However, the great democratizing movement
that De Duve sees as the legacy of Duchamp Ð
everyone an artist, the artwork as anything whatever
Ð is achieved at the cost of an elision of the
physical labor involved in making a work of art,
and which is the ultimate source of the workÕs
specificity. Duchamp did not make his urinal,
but someone or a group of someones did Ð anonymous
workmen in a urinal factory. I am not so
worried about the possibility that artworks could
be automatically created by deduction from a
logic (a rather specialized and even artificial
problem, in my view) as I am by the fact that the
work of their making could then be assigned to
someone else, or, in the case of the readymades,
has already been done by someone else. One of
the things that strikes me most about RymanÕs,
MarioniÕs, and UmbergÕs art is that, for all its
conceptual sophistication, it has a strong affinity
with craft Ð an affinity that, incidentally, goes
back to the roots of modernist art-theory in
Baudelaire, that great early debunker of the
genius-and-inspiration theory of aesthetics and
pioneer of the notion that the specific province of
poetry is language as a material medium.12
Marioni and Umberg, in a striking move,
compared the purpose and usability of their
paintings to that of an ordinary chair (Outside
the Cartouche 23Ð24); and Marioni goes so far as
to entirely abjure the honorific art for his work,
defining his work strictly and solely as painting.
We are so inured to thinking of painting as art
that MarioniÕs resistance to this assimilation
might seem incomprehensible or even senseless.
If painting isnÕt art, what is it? And if it isnÕt art,
why should it have any claim on our attention?
MarioniÕs stubborn adherence to the specificity
of the practice of painting indicates an
ethicopolitical resonance of the question of the
medium, of its irreducibly material nature, and
of the craftsmanÕs attunement to that materiality,
which modernity, first in the aftermath of KantÕs
and RomanticismÕs infatuation with Ògenius,Ó
later under the spell of the poststructuralist
Aufhebung of materiality into language, has had
8 4
staten
trouble keeping consistently in view Ð in spite of
the modernist intervention. The continuing
significance of the thesis of specificity is for me
grounded in the indissociability it suggests of the
labor of the artist from the specific nature of his
medium in its complex, socially conditioned
materiality Ð which is the same as the indissociability
of art from its craft-aspect. The generic
judgment Òthis is artÓ is no doubt necessary in
the language-game that has developed around art
that intentionally wanders away from the
constraints of established, specific art-forms. As
I have tried to show in this essay, however, this
development does not mean that some generic
judgment of value has now superseded, wholly
and in all contexts, the modernist logic of specificity.
Moreover, De DuveÕs arguments that a
picture must be judged to be art before it can be
judged to be a picture, and that the judgment
Òthis is beautifulÓ is identical with the judgment
Òthis is art,Ó strike me as no friendlier to a
democratization of art and the creative process
than they are to the vacuous cult of art-fetishism
of which we already see signs in KantÕs almost
helpless awe before the inexplicability of genius,
and of which the only slightly more foolish
descendant is the contemporary worship of the
art-superstar.13
In this essay I can only indicate the outlines
of the full theorization that Radical Painting
invites, and to which the current notion of the
conventionality of art practices is so inadequate.
The convergence once more at this late date in
history of the notions of art and craft requires a
rethinking of the entire history of the concept of
art as this history has been configured by the
evolutionary narrative of its emergence Ð more
than once; in ancient Greece and again in the late
Middle Ages Ð in its purity from a more generalized
notion of making. Modernism is
commonly Ð and rightly Ð understood as the
final step in the emergence of the pure concept
of art, and GreenbergÕs ideas about the specificity
of the individual arts are an important
chapter in the history of this emergence. Hence
the notion that Radical Painting is a continuation
of the logic of modernism, yet an overcoming
of the distinction between art and craft,
might seem paradoxical.
The paradox is neither illusory nor necessary.
The truth is that more than one thread of ÒlogicÓ
traverses the history of modernism, and where we
end up depends on which thread we take up. De
Duve has articulated for us with great precision
the decisive line that is crossed with Duchamp
and conceptualism, when, following one development
of the logic of specificity, the bond between
artistic practice and the specificity of the medium
is broken and the concept of art emerges in its
own generic rather than specific purity. Once this
bond is broken, everything about art begins to
dissolve in the universal medium of discursivity,
and this marks the final break between the
profession of the artist and the guild tradition in
which this profession had continued to be,
however distantly, rooted. What I have tried to
show in this essay is that the terms in which
Radical Painting is conceived are terms that lead
us ineluctably away from the universal solvent of
discursivity and back toward the realm of material
practices. I have been concerned to show that
there is nothing naive about this turn; that it
incorporates as an essential part of its conception
and of its practice a reflection on the conventional
nature of the materiality of the medium Ð
that this, too, is a rigorous unfolding of the logic
of specificity.14
I am more inclined to the latter than the
former development for two interrelated reasons.
First (a point I have stressed), because the sublationist
narrative empties most or all of the materiality
out of the notion of the medium, in favor
of the notion of convention. Radical Painting, by
contrast, in its reflection on the materiality of the
medium, does not in any way slight the conventional
element in this materiality. Second,
because the sublationist dematerialization of the
medium opens out an unlimited field of critical
discursivity about art in which the critic or theorist
is authorized to say practically anything since
the entire cultural field can now be framed as
aesthetic Ð and art itself in this postmodern
regime, as Rosalind Krauss writes, Òmimics just
this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social
field in general.Ó15 Not everyone will consider
this a demerit; and I myself do not believe in any
juridical prohibition on the criticÕs discourse
becoming autotelic, nor am I immune to the
8 5
pleasures of postmodern cultural aesthetics.
Nevertheless, there is something specific to the
painterÕs, sculptorÕs, musicianÕs É practice that
is also autotelic, or which might be so conceived,
and as so conceived made the basis of that practice,
and to which justice can be done only by a
critical discourse that does not auto-authorize
itself but binds itself as tightly as possible to that
practice in the fullness of its conventional mate-
riality.
Here I can only sketch the outlines of the full,
historically articulated account of human praxis
as a whole that would constitute a more adequate
account of artistic convention as grounded in
what I have been calling conventional materiality.16
Such an account would take as its fundamental
reference points, on the one hand,
AristotleÕs analysis of the teleology of human
practices and, on the other hand, MarxÕs analysis
of human productive activity, that is human
labor as the foundational fact of social existence.
A fully articulated theory of conventional
materiality would begin with the beginnings of
human culture in order to excavate the residue of
fatality, the unpredictable system of limits, that
arises at the point of intersection of multiple acts
of individual exertion that are carried on within
a social context and leave their residue on the
physical world, long before the emergence of
even the most rudimentary arts and crafts, and
even before the advent of language. The most
primordial inscriptions on the world of these
residues are the rubbing clear of the ground
where a group of humans or proto-humans sits to
rest or lies down to sleep, of pathways where one
walks after the other, of trees stripped bare of
fruit around these inscribed areas so that the
people are constrained to move along, fraying
new paths and making new clearings. Here is the
beginning of history as the simple deposit of
accumulated acts within the context of sociality,
and the landscape is the incipiently socialized
materiality that serves as the support of this
inscription. Later on in history, as Marx observes
in The German Ideology, there will no longer be
any nature left; it will all have been absorbed into
the network of cultural inscription; in this earlier
period there is as yet nothing that can be called
a convention, and nevertheless there is already
the interaction between sociality and the physical
world that leaves a perduring trace that then acts
as a partial determinant on the purposeful action
of human beings: precisely the fundamental
structure that underlies those later features of
social activity, more complexly sedimented with
the history of a culture, that are properly understood
as conventions. Then there begins the
making of tools, which are once again initially the
residue of repeated acts of fraying, say to make a
point or an edge, and the material of which the
tool is made Ð hard or frangible, offering a firm
grasp or slippery, etc. Ð together with the shape
with which it has now been inscribed, is henceforth
a fatality or system of limits that conditions
the further development of the sociality that has
brought it into being as just this tool (and even,
as some theorists have argued, the further development
of the human brain itself). The methods
by which the tool is made are themselves the
social inscription of historically accumulated
individual acts in their effective interaction with
the material of the tool, and might have their own
further development in interaction with new
materials and in combination with methods
derived from other contexts. Now labor, craft,
and art might begin to be differentiated; but they
are part of a matrix that never entirely comes
undone Ð or, rather, that ought never be allowed
to come entirely undone.
What is brought to light in such an account,
beyond or beneath the question of conventions, is
the teleology of social practice that conditions all
materiality within culture, and which ordains that
praxis must always be grounded in its specificity.
It seems to me that an essential beginning toward
the thinking-through of this problematic Ð and at
precisely the conjunction between Aristotle and
Marx Ð was made by Georg Luk‡cs in his final
work, The Ontology of Social Being. ÒThrough
labour, a teleological positing is realized within
material being, as the rise of a new objectivity.
The first consequence of this is that labour
becomes the model for any
social practice, for in such social
practice Ð no matter how ramified
its mediations Ð teleological
positings are always realized, and
ultimately realized materially.Ó17
radical painting
8 6
staten
notes
1 The movement was formally baptized in the
public eye by a special issue of Kunstforum
International (Mar.–Apr. 1987), edited by Amione
Haase, that focused on “Radikale Malerei.” Among
the pieces included in this issue are my “Joseph
Marioni: Malerei Jenseits Narrativität” and articles
on Umberg and other German radical painters
who have continued to figure significantly: Ullrich
Wellman, Ingo Meller, and Peter Tollens.
2 See the essay on Umberg by Hannelore
Kersting, “Painting as Articulated Paint,” in the
catalogue to the exhibition Gunter Umberg,
Städelsches Kunstinstitut Frankfurt, 1985.
3 Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp
(Cambridge: MIT P, 1996). All citations of De
Duve refer to this volume.
4 All citations of Greenberg are to Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,
Modernism with a Vengeance (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1993).
5 Painting and picture are normally synonymous in
art-critical talk, and I won’t object to this usage.
However, the idea that there can be an unpainted
picture seems to me to dissimulate an absurdity
that is patent in the phrase “unpainted painting.”
This absurdity that Greenberg created is exploited
at great length by De Duve, who buys into it
because it serves his purposes admirably.
6 Stedelijk Museum Catalog, 1975; quoted by
Sauer in Christel Sauer and Urs Rausmüller (eds.),
Robert Ryman, catalog for Ryman exhibition in the
Espace d’Art Contemporain, 1991, 31.
7 Joseph Marioni and Günther Umberg, Outside the
Cartouche: Zur Frage des Betrachters in der Radikalen
Malerei. English and German; German trans.
Nikolaus Hoffmann and Rolf Taschen (Munich:
Neue Kunst, 1986). Umberg’s work in the 1990s
took new directions; in this essay I refer only to
the period of his collaboration with Marioni.
8 Aristotle remarks in the Poetics, chapter 10, that
in a painting “the most beautiful pigments smeared
on at random will not give as much pleasure as a
black-and-white outline picture.” Aristotle, Poetics,
trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P)
28. And Kant comments in the Third Critique that
“delineation is the essential thing” in all the “formative
arts” (61), and painting is the foremost of
these arts because “as the art of delineation it lies
at the root” of all the others (175). Kant, Critique
of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York:
Hafner, 1951).
9 Behind this belief of Greenberg’s, once again we
might discern Kant, for whom “express rules”
cannot be the basis on which an art is transmitted.
For Kant, there is no middle term between the
pure originating power, granted by nature, of the
genius, on the one hand, and the explicit rules that
the schools derive from the genius’s original
works of art in order to train subordinate, unoriginal
talents to trudge in his footsteps. An art develops
historically by the immediate communication
of the inspiring force of nature from one genius to
another, without the mediation of “rules.” Kant
thinks of the tekhne of an art only in this sense of
“express rules”; he has no concept of the medium
in the modern or modernist sense – not as a
system of explicit rules but as an ensemble of techniques
in dialectical interaction with the materiality
of a specific material (words, tones, colors,
stone, etc.). Third Critique, sects. 45–50.
10 Despite the impression De Duve creates of a
sudden choice in favor of quality in 1962, this
distinction had been consistently maintained by
Greenberg. The remark from 1959 is worth quoting
in full: “I still know of nothing in abstract painting,
aside perhaps from some of the near-abstract
Cubist works that Picasso, Braque, and Leger
executed between 1910 and 1914, which matches
the highest achievements of the old masters.
Abstract painting may be a purer, more quintessential
form of pictorial art than the representational
kind, but this does not of itself confer quality
on an abstract picture. The ratio of bad abstract
painting to good is actually much higher than the
ratio of bad to good representational painting.”
“The Case for Abstract Art” 82. And in “After
Abstract Expressionism” itself, Greenberg refers
to his 1948 refusal of the “dogmatism that held
that one species of art must in a given period be
better than any other species,” and then asserts
that Pollock’s and Gorky’s pictures stayed
“further behind their frames than Mondrian’s or
Picasso’s post-1913 pictures did,” but that going
“backwards in terms of the evolution of style” was
at that time “almost the only way to go forward in
terms of major quality” (124). The simple statement
in 1964 that “form as such is a neutral
element as far as quality is concerned” (180) thus
reaffirms Greenberg’s consistent view. Cf. Fried,
who agrees that Greenberg is “right to say that he
8 7
never presented flatness and the inclosing of flatness
as criteria of quality” (66).
11 The conclusion that a painting must be painted,
obvious from the ordinary person’s standpoint,
and which I am thus slightly embarrassed to draw,
has to be argued in the face of De Duve’s argument,
which keeps alive Greenberg’s suggestion
that a painting (or “picture”) need not be painted
(see n. 5 above).
12 See Graham Chester, Baudelaire and the Poetics
of Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).
13 I say “almost” helpless because Kant does
choose the primacy of rules over mere undisciplined
genius.
14 Yet another, deconstruction-based, development
of the logic of specificity is that by Rosalind
Krauss, who in her reading of Marcel Broodthaers
argues that “the specificity of mediums, even
modernist ones, must be understood as differential,
self-differing, and thus as a layering of conventions
never simply collapsed into the physicality of
their support.” “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in
the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York:
Thames, 1999) 53. Although the artist she
discusses, and the theory she elaborates, are very
distant from Radical Painting, her essay, like mine,
rejects the vulgar idea of the medium as “a layering
of conventions … simply collapsed into the
physicality of their support.”
15 “A Voyage on the North Sea” 56.
16 The earliest stimulus to the interpretation
of Radical Painting, and the following reflections
on praxis, that I present here was a fascinating
essay by Lothar Romain on Analytical Painting,
a movement which I interpret as a precursor
of Radical Painting. See Lothar Romain, “The
Artistic Truth of Things that Exist: Reflections
Pertaining to (the Theory of) Analytical Painting,”
trans. Antony de Nardini and Paul Angus
in A Proposito della Pittura/Bettrefende Het
Schilderen/Concerning Painting, catalogue Museum
Van Bommel–Van Dam Venlo/Stedelijk Museum
Schiedam/Hedenaagse Kunst Utrecht 1975–76,
27–32.
17 Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being:
Labour (London: Merlin, 1980) 3. This volume is a
translation of the first chapter of Part Two of the
larger work.
radical painting
Henry Staten
Department of English
University of Washington
Box 35436
Seattle, WA 98195
USA
E-mail: hstaten@u.washington.edu
He jotted down this thought, if it can be called that, on a loose sheet of paper, hoping to use it later,
perhaps in some pondered statement about the mystery of writing which will probably culminate, following
the definitive lessons of the poet, in the precise and sober declaration that the mystery of writing
lies in the absence of any mystery whatsoever, which if accepted, might lead us to the conclusion
that if there is no mystery about writing, neither can there be any mystery about the writer.
8 9
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/010089-01 © 2002 John X. Berger