The Painting of Modern Life, the first show at
the Hayward Gallery curated by its American director, Ralph Rugoff, is
an ambitious attempt to see how this artistic project stands nearly 150
years after Charles Baudelaire proposed it in his essay 'The Painter of
Modern Life' (1863). There the poet called for a shift in subject
matter – already begun in the practice of Manet and others – away from
the grand themes of myth and history, and towards the everyday
activities of urban life, especially of middle-class leisure. Such a
shift in content implied a shift in form, even in medium; for example,
to capture the mobility of bourgeois types on the town, the sketch
might be more useful than other means (the exemplar in the essay is not
the great Manet but Constantin Guys, who was then known for his quick
studies). What better vehicle to convey 'the ephemeral, the fugitive,
the contingent' – key qualities of the metropolitan kaleidoscope,
according to Baudelaire – than the photograph? Yet the poet remained
suspicious of the new medium, in part because he did not see its
potential for imaginative invention, in part because he did not deem it
suited to the 'other half' of his mandate for art, which was to extract 'the eternal and the immutable' from this protean modernity. The other
half was still the province of painting, and so painting – perhaps
pressured by photographic attributes – remained the essential medium.
The
Hayward show picks up the representation of modern life a century
later. In the interim, Rugoff suggests in the catalogue, the tense
relationship between painting and photography slackened, as painting
withdrew into abstraction (a comment on modernity in its own right),
and photography became the favoured means of modern imaging (there are
many exceptions, of course, but the curator should be allowed his
premise). However, as the 1960s began, Rugoff continues, artists
associated with Pop and photorealism – Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol,
Gerhard Richter, Richard Artschwager, Vija Celmins and Malcolm Morley –
turned again to photography, not only as a source of images but as a
way to convey the look of consumer society, already processed as so
much of it was through photographic media: that is, through the ads,
news photos, amateur snapshots and postcards that the painters had
begun to adapt.
The exhibition begins here, and the early work
looks superb still, fresh to the eye, however familiar the artists are
now, and incisive about its times. In the first galleries Rugoff offers
a nice range of photographic effects translated into painting in this
initial moment: Hamilton capturing the tabloid glare of celebrity
visibility in a lurid image of Mick Jagger handcuffed to the art dealer
Robert Fraser after a drugs bust; Warhol eliciting shock cut with
indifference with a newswire photo of a car crash silk-screened 11
times across a rust-orange canvas; Richter producing an empathic
response in his blurred representation of a pretty woman distorted by
grief (we learn it is Jackie Kennedy after the assassination); and so
on – so many visions of a world more and more mediated by images, which
painting, because of its remove and its delay, is able to explore in
ways that photography cannot.
Yet the great interest of the show
is the uncertainty – the epistemological ambiguity, the historical
instability – visited on both photography and painting over the last
four decades. The two media partake of different sign systems:
photography is conventionally seen as indexical, a photochemical
impression of the world, and (representational) painting as iconic,
with a resemblance to the world that is less direct, more mediated by
material, touch and tradition. A painting is also worked up over time,
and usually taken in over time too; Rugoff writes well about the 'slowness' of painting, which in this instance allows us to review and
to reflect on its photographic sources. Yet even in the 1960s these
different attributes are not easily assigned to one medium or the other.
Take
the vaunted reality effect of photography, affirmed by theorists from
André Bazin to Roland Barthes. Some of the artists in the show are not
so sure. Richter remarks that photography is 'a crutch to help me get
to reality', yet that he can approximate this goal only through
painting; this leaves him with the paradoxical formulation, 'I am
practising photography by other means.' For Celmins, whose meticulous
translations of a Time magazine cover, military craft and a
Los Angeles freeway are on display, it is also painting, and not
photography, that puts the image 'back into the real world – in real
time . . . the here and now'. Moreover, as the show proceeds, the
source images become less photochemical, more electronic, less
analogue, more digital (they often derive from television, video and
the internet), and so what counts as the photographic gets stretched –
stretched, in fact, towards painterly manipulations. Hamilton explored
this complication early on; as early as 1969 he noted the proliferation
of 'lens-formulated images whatever the chemistry or electronics
involved.'
Consider, too, the question of spectatorial distance:
is this a photographic quality or a painterly one? For Rugoff, it
seems, it is painting that builds such detachment into the work, yet
for others this distance is associated with photography: Richter speaks
of his photographic blur as a 'protection', and Warhol of his
photographic repetition as an anaesthesia ('meaning goes away'). Or
consider, conversely, our proximity to the image, as with the
photorealist canvases of Morley, who describes his painting as a 'hallucination', or of the Swiss artist Franz Gertsch (a welcome
rediscovery), whose huge scenes of hippy life loom towards us with
garish details: neither strictly photographic nor strictly painterly,
this visual intensity is effected through a combination of properties
of both media. Indeed, some of the best works in the show mix effects
of distance and proximity, the detached and the insistent, through a
precise complication of painting and photography. Rugoff describes this
mixed quality as 'uncanny' or 'absurd', but little seems repressed
here, and nothing nonsensical; his impression of a 'denatured' world is
more exact. Abstract painters like Kandinsky, Foucault once argued, did
away with resemblance, but still affirmed the real; they simply located
it elsewhere, in a transcendental beyond. Surrealist painters like
Magritte performed a stranger trick: they held on to resemblance, but
allowed the real to slip away; similitude remained while reference
vanished. For some of the artists here this appearance without
substance is the odd nature of the postwar world, and they bring us
back compelling probes of it – of where the real looks lost and where
it erupts again.
<First edition of T.J.Clarke's eponymous book (1985).
A divide opens in the show as one moves through
it. Is its principal concern the photo-painting relation or the
representation of modern life? Some works lean to one side, others to
the other, but only the best hold the two subjects together, and they
are able to do so precisely because the photographic and the painterly
charge each other, and burn the image into its moment (and vice versa).
Often in the more recent paintings this tension slackens, and purchase
on the world slips as a result (the loose categories – looser than in
Baudelaire – don't help much here: 'History & Politics', 'Leisure
& Everyday Life' etc). Sometimes, too, even as the category of the
photographic expands, the use of the photographic contracts; it becomes
more traditional, mostly a matter of sources again, with the result
that little pressure is put on painting, which in turn can scarcely
push back on photography. How different from Warhol, who places nasty
news photos in the space of exalted abstraction, or Hamilton, who tests
the great tradition of the tableau with the slick devices of
advertisements. In short, many of the younger artists allow painting to
trump photography too easily. Painting gets the victory, but it is
Pyrrhic, and for all its advocacy the show might make some viewers feel
less sanguine, not more, about the current state of the art.
The
reason this issue is more than academic is that the representation of
social existence is at stake here. If, for Baudelaire and company,
modernity was a great fiction to celebrate, it was also a terrific myth
to interrogate – and how much more so is it for us today. As art
historians such as T.J. Clark and Thomas Crow have helped us to see,
the great painters of modern life – from Manet to Hamilton – are also
its great dialecticians; they are able to celebrate and interrogate it
by turns. Hamilton uses the Duchampian phrase 'ironism of affirmation'
to convey his edgy position on this score. Too many of the artists in
this show are neither affirmative nor critical enough – of painting,
photography, electronic images or modern life. In 1865 Baudelaire wrote
to Manet that he was the first in the 'decrepitude' of his art; it was
meant as a compliment.
Hal Foster chairs the department of art and architecture at Princeton.
