Michael Greaves, “Smoke and Mirrors” (2010), installation shot.As a self-confessed ‘painting lover,’ it is quite a joy to experience a show entirely devoted to the practice of painting and find that three artists’ works are contemporary, relevant and challenging; addressing multiplicity and tackling issues of representation that can only be resolved in paint. “Smoke and Mirrors” (a direct reference to the role of painting as a contemporary practice) showcases three Dunedin-based artists working primarily in the medium of paint: Peter Cleverley, Michael Greaves and Anya Sinclair.1
CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
Painting has been heavily criticized as the production of bourgeois commodity, useless when confronted with the need for revolutionary change of society. Its death was announced innumerable times, but it always survived, revitalized by its disciples who believe that it is a useful tool to depict nothing less than the human thinking process.2
So, how does painting continue to operate as significant in the contemporary art environment? An environment that is pungent with a history that is impossible to ignore. A history that has suggested painting is dead, not just because ‘it’s all been done before,’ but also because photography has surpassed the role of painting – why depict something in paint, when one can photograph it? A history that through modernism opened an awareness – a painting is an object in itself, not just an object solely representing or illustrating subject matter.3
No longer can a painting only be about something other than itself, it must be conscious that it is first a painting; it is ‘smoke and mirrors,’ a constructed illusion made from pigment on surface. Barry Schwabsky writes in his essay “Painting in the Interrogative Mode,” from Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting that “artistic positions are now themselves received aesthetically more than in terms of some kind of truth claim … artistic positions are now recognized as fictions, though perhaps necessary ones – as enabling devices.”4
Contemporary painters must consciously explore and reveal in their practice that a “painting is not only a painting but also the representation about painting.”5 And in order to do this it seems that anything and everything goes. Style, subject matter, materials, techniques, conventions and influences are up for grabs. As a viewer, one is invited to indulge in the plethora of traditions and references (more than one person could possibly know or even imagine), homing in on historical signifiers, constructing a reality from the illusion and experiencing the work as text.6
Together, the paintings in “Smoke And Mirrors” offer a diversity that could almost see the works split into three entirely separate exhibitions. However, as a group of works, “Smoke and Mirrors” offers a viewer a direct experience of contemporary painting, a relevant practice that continues to push the boundaries of perception and culture. In my own experience of the artworks, I can only offer a glance, but hope to suggest ways in which each practice stands strong in the field of contemporary painting, tackling issues of today by using pigment on surface.
1. “Smoke and Mirrors: Painting, Isolation and Tradition” at Dunedin School of Art Gallery, 15 September –1 October 2010, is an exhibition that showcased three individual and in-depth practices, generating questions, definitions and meaning, exploring the role of painting today and contributing to the ever-evolving practice that is contemporary painting.
2. Leonhard Emmerling, PX: A Purposeless Production/ A Necessary Praxis, 2007, http://www.aut.ac.nz/study-at-aut/study-areas/art-design/learning-environment/st-paul-street-gallery/exhibition-2007/september/px---a-purposeless-production-a-necessary-praxis.
3. “Clement Greenberg, the theoretician of Abstract Expressionism, once noted that ‘one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture,’ whereas ‘one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first.’” Barry Schwabsky, “Painting in the Interrogative Mode,” in his Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 5.
4. David Altmejd, Hernan Bas, Peter Doig and Kaye Donachie, Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005)..
5 Ibid.
