From 2004// Saltz on the use of photography in painting

The Richter Resolution

Photo finish: Calling for a four-year moratorium on a fashionable, far too overworked trend

By Jerry Saltz Tuesday, Mar 2 2004

In defense of the staggeringly radical act of really looking, the wildness of the imagination, and the limitlessness of pictorial invention, I propose a 48-month moratorium on the reproduction of photographs via overhead, opaque, or slide projectors in paintings (this means tracing too). Call this the Richter Resolution, the Polke Principle, or the Tuymans Rule. Whatever you call it, it means that photographs, film stills, snapshots, or whatever may be used as starting points, references, or inspiration, but for the next four years let's pretend there's a ban against the use of mechanical devices to replicate these images in paintings.

This is not a geezer rant about loss of skills, bad drawing, laziness, or cheating. I'm not trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Like brushes and rulers, projectors are tools. This is about how these tools are used, which lately has become unadventurous. I address this mainly to students and do so provisionally, not prescriptively or prohibitively. Basically, this is a celebration of artists who find original ways to use these devices and an indictment of those who have turned this type of depiction into a tedious tic.

By now, almost everyone would agree that the traditional Warhol-Richter-Walter Benjamin defense of the use of photography in painting, the "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" argument, and the chatter about "interrogating representation" or "investigating the problem of the photograph," isn't just dated, it's shtick. We all know that photography is a remarkable and remarkably complex way of seeing and picturing the world; that the space between the photograph, the photographer, and the thing photographed is incredibly rich; that the graphic field of the photograph is often scintillatingly alive, specific, and very post-Renaissance; and that reproducing photographs in paintings once represented a significant repudiation of dearly held beliefs. There's always a buzz about seeing images of images, or in the case of Pop art, icons of icons. But there hasn't been a "problem of the photograph" for more than a decade, only a problem with the people who think there is. The camera, which was supposed to supplant painting, didn't. Instead, painting—ever the sponge and always elastic—absorbed it and discovered new realms to explore.

photo: Robin Holland

Don't try this at home: Gerhard Richter's S. With Child (detail, 1995)

These days, much photo-based painting looks the same (ditto digitally based abstraction, but we'll deal with that another time): a newspaper photo, picture of an urban or suburban setting, an airport or a hotel; a celebrity, fashion model, or porn star; a stadium, pavilion, or modernist interior; a still from a film; a yearbook pic; shots of young people doing anything; or any advertisement. These images are typically rendered in kaleidoscopic color, blurred pigments, or washy black and white. Regardless of who makes these monotonous knockoffs, the results are the same: variations on Richter, Warhol, Tuymans, Polke, Celmins, Fischl, Rauschenberg, Peyton, Doig, Close, Robert Longo, Lisa Ruyter, or any original photorealist. Unlike their lemming-like imitators, all these artists have employed photographs in original ways.

Like all media, painting has certain weapons of mass destruction at its disposal. Fervent fans of painting (like me) think these WMDs are the reasons painting has been around for so long and why it's so bottomless. They include drawing, color, surface, touch, working from the imagination or observation, and the mystical ability to embed thought in viscous substance. This alchemical artillery is typically restricted or curtailed altogether in work that simply reproduces a photograph by mechanical means. The results are what I often think of as fake artand easy solutions.

Often, faint pencil marks are visible where the artist has carefully followed projected outlines (see especially nostrils, mouths, and hands). This isn't drawing, or even an idea of it. It's mindless copying. Yet even this nondrawing would be fine if it were purposeful. Usually, it's not. These painters are just trying to get the photo right, like diligent grade-schoolers. There's little ad-libbing, invention, exploration, or discovery, just standard twists, shifts, and blurs. There's no exultation in looking or seeing or space. Yet painting is so powerful that it can run effectively with almost all of its cylinders rendered ineffective. That's why some of this art passes as something rather than nothing—although all of it will look dated in no time.

The point is, cameras see things in a very particular, very identifiable way—with a single "eye," usually a 50-millimeter one. Our eye's lens is variable (to focus near and far) and is approximately 80mm. The perception of space varies from person to person and depends on experience and emotional and refractive state. Nearsighted people tend to be center-oriented while ignoring the periphery. Others have difficulty focusing on details, but notice everything around them. The eye is round; the film plane is flat. Camera lenses correct for chromatic and spherical abnormalities; we don't. Eyes scan; cameras crop. Either way, the instant I see a painting with an image that has been reproduced by rote, I know it: Much of the life of the painting drains away, and I die a little. All I am saying is give the alchemy of painting a chance.

Saltz/Neo-Mannerism

 William Powhida's good imitations of bad art, at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.
He's right: Don't paint like that.

Jerry Saltz on Art’s Insidious 

New Cliché: Neo-Mannerism

• By Jerry Saltz

Call it Neo-Mannerism. We all know it. That ever-expanding assembly of anemically boring, totally safe artistic clichés squeezing the life out of the art world right now. Earlier this week, I called out one of them, in a review of the (very good) work of Bjarne Melgaard: bad-boy installations, reeking of transgression but not actually transgressing much. That got me thinking about a trend that's even more widespread and just as annoying.
Scads of artists are trying to be junior postmodernists. A phalanx of work has appeared that might be called "Modest Abstraction" or "MFA See, MFA Do." It's everywhere, and it all looks the same. In sculpture there's Anarchy Lite. Those post-minimalist formal arrangements of clunky stuff, sticks, planks, bent metal, wood boxes, fabric, old furniture, concrete things, and whatnot leaned, stacked, stuck, piled, or dispersed around a clean white gallery. There's usually a subtext about wastefulness, sustainability, politics, urbanism, or art history. That history is almost always straight out of sixties and seventies Artforummagazines or the syllabi of academic teachers who've scared their students into being pleasingly meek, imitative, and ordinary.
Looking at 2-D work, I'm this close to that old Carter-administration-era croak of "Painting is dead." Again. Nowadays we see endless arrays of decorous, medium-size, handsome, harmless paintings. It's rendered mainly in black, white, gray, or, more recently, violet or blue. Much of it entails transfer techniques, silkscreening, stenciling, assemblage, collage, a little spray painting or scraping and the like. There might be some smooshy blocks of color or stripes or other obvious open-form abstraction or geometric motif. A few painters are doing the same thing but with brighter colors, larger areas of paint, hints of gesture, or even drips. All this work has readymade references to preapproved, mostly male painters like Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Michael Krebber, Wade Guyton, Laura Owens, and Sergej Jensen*, or to the Minimalism or Pop movements, and of course it all calls up Warhol, Richter, Kippenberger, or Prince.
Then there are all the fussy collages of cut-up porn, furniture catalogues, ads, Internet screen-grabs, modernist architecture, urban wastelands, endangered species, sixties protests, or (of course) art-historical jpegs. We also see small-scale, colored, neatly framed, or cut-up photographs about photography. All of this Neo-Mannerism is an art of infinite regress. Defensive. Predictable. Safe. Well-defended. Loved by brainy magazines, websites, and curators but so far up its own ass that it can't breathe.
If art comes from everywhere and everyone thinks differently, why does so much of what we see these days look the same? Reams of artists influenced by and using the same art-history, artists, styles, and stuff. You know what that leads to. As Keith Richards wrote of a former dope dealer of his who got addicted to his own stuff, "Brad's dead now. It was the usual old story. If you're dealing in this shit, don't dabble in it." Artists making this generic work are Brad.
It's spreading, too. Even our wonderful smaller galleries on the Lower East Side, in Bushwick, and the like are awash in it. All this art is dying to beunderstood. And it is, instantly, by everyone, in the exact same way. Never mind that Oscar Wilde said, "The moment you think you know a work of art, it is dead to you." It fills galleries and biennials and is already so dead-on-arrival it may as well put a gun to its own head. It's all intellectual wallpaper, pricey placeholders, ham-acting, and showbiz. I know artists are facing knotty times, and I say this with love, but: Enough.

*An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the artist Sergej Jensen. Also, an earlier photo appearing with this story showed art that did not represent this trend.

Jerry Saltz on Matisse for NYMag

Saltz: The Met’s Matisse Exhibit Is Intoxicating, Possibly Dangerous

• By Jerry Saltz

Midway through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Matisse: In Search of True Painting,” I ran into the painter Alex Katz. He looked at me, agog, and said, “I thought I was going to faint when I saw these paintings.” He gestured at two Matisse still lifes from 1946. Already in a stunned state of my own, I followed his lead and gulped at the revolutionary pictorial power and radical color radiating off these two powerhouses, one dominated by a celestial red and an arrangement on a table. In the foreground were either a dog and cat chasing each other or a pair of animal-skin rugs.

Then I looked at the painting next to it. I saw the same still life depicted on the same table with the same vase, goblet, and fruit. But this version was totally different. Where the dog and cat were, there’s an ultraflat still life within the still life. It’s so categorically compressed that it looks less than two-­dimensional — maybe one-half-­dimensional. I thought I, like Katz, might pass out.

What makes this show so ravishing is, improbably, that it’s arranged like an art-history-class slideshow time line. Paintings from the same period hang in pairs and trios, according to subject matter and theme. The revelations produced by this back-and-forth viewing make these 49 paintings blossom anew — this after a lifetime of being overwhelmed by the swarming multiplicity of Matisse’s paintings. At the Met I saw new optical fatness, freshness, experimentation; hidden levels of Matisse’s ever-unfolding opulence. “In Search of True Painting” lifts up an always-present veil of reticence and perplexity in Matisse’s art. His decisions come into focus, and their effects are shocking.

The show starts with several jolts. In two still lifes from 1899, we can watch the late-­blooming 30-year-old assimilate Impressionism in one painting. In the second 1899 still life, he moves beyond it, grasping Cézanne’s flattened planes and shards of space. Through these two works Matisse travels a painterly lifetime. In a pair of 1904 landscapes, he turns himself into a great Post-Impressionist, a couple of decades after the fact. Then come two sailor portraits from 1906. One has Pointillist dots and daubs. Disorganized, patchy, impatient, this is an artist saying good-bye forever to following other people’s isms. The other sailor, done the same month, is so visually riveting I surmise it could hang next to Velázquez’s epic portrait of Leo X and survive. The sailor undulates in space. He’s a rag doll, a cutout puppet, something from folk ceramics, an almond-eyed alien. His arcing left leg crosses in front of the right, then somehow bends behind it again. The torque of the body is almost Egyptian: in profile and dead-on at the same time. Matisse was on fire.

By this point it seemed like the back of my head was, too. Having seen only a handful of pairings, I’d slipped into a chasm: I saw myself seeing Matisse, getting glimpses of how intentional each decision was, feeling very close to his pictorial intelligence, almost merging with it. Giddy, I floated toward a wall of four paintings of Notre Dame as seen from Matisse’s Seine-side studio. The pictures start out journalistic, then become sketchy, then depict passing time, and go all the way to the timeless abstract majesty of MoMA’s great masterpiece from this series, the blue almost-monochrome one with black lines and churchlike proportions. I’ve seen this picture hundreds of times. Never like this.

I looked around. A tiny detail in another masterpiece, Le Luxe II, filled my vision. Matisse renders a bather’s right arm so that it is behind and in front of her hip simultaneously. That shouldn’t be possible in paint, but there it is. In the same gallery are two 1914 studio interiors with goldfish: As I sized up their solidity and density, I was pulled in by the angle of the windowsill, relishing the receding space. Before I recovered, the gigantic-seeming painting next to it preempted my vision. It’s the same scene from a different angle. The goldfish are directly in front of the window. Everything flattens and breaks into striated geometric spaces. The entire left-hand part of the picture is dominated by those hot tangerine goldfish. A detail lurches into sight: The right side of the bowl turns into a world unto itself. Matisse has taken some tool and scratched and scribbled into the paint. The gestures turn the goldfish bowl solid, transparent, and incandescent all at once. I think I am seeing what is there and what is not, the quiver of the lack of a real visual edge between a glass of clear water and real space.

By this time, there was only one thing left to do. I left the show and returned on other days. If I hadn’t, I don’t think I’d have gotten out of there on my own. Matisse is a beast.

Matisse: In Search of True Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Through March 17.

*This article originally appeared in the February 4, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

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