In John Baldessari’s 1977 video Six Colorful Interior Activitiesthe camera is placed on the ceiling of the room, looking down on a man painting a small room during six days, from Monday to Saturday. A man paints a room red, then orange, then green, then purple. Images are sped up, so work becomes industrialized, fast-forward, repetitive, and meaningless work. A great tradition of painting, from Rembrandt to Pollock, is being stripped of its skill, creativity and personal oomph. Drawing is a never-ending, aimless job of complaining, with a certain godlike eye on the ground to make sure you stay within the lines and don’t miss a beat.
Baldessari’s video is part of a large (nearly 100 works) new exhibition, “The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,” curated by Jamilah James at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In a brochure accompanying the exhibition, James describes the exhibition as reflecting the continuing vitality of painting—”the diversity of ideas, materials and techniques associated with painting and its long history.”
However, in an interview with the Observer, James admitted that he “has not felt comfortable with painting for a long time.” What he calls his “confrontational” and “confrontational” attitude to media still informs the work here, as he has come to see painting as inclusive and productive. This exhibition, then, is a celebration of the power of culture and an exercise against painting. Organized partly chronologically and partly by theme or technique, the program is about how artists work and don’t escape the room in which they paint.
Part of the way Baldessari tries to get out of that room is by treating painting as performance; The finished painting, as an object, is removed by the painting process. The same goes for Carolee Schneemann in 1973 Up to and including His Limitsa video in which he hung himself naked from the ceiling with a harness and then filmed himself swinging from side to side, marking the walls with colored crayons.
Up to and including His Limits it’s a form of AbEx satire and painting culture where nude women are reduced, or turned into visual splotches that show artistic genius and virility. Schneeman is a living painting and takes the means of production to stand for itself and/or subvert its imagined creators.
Some of the artists in the exhibition reflect on or engage with how painting has competed with, or overused, other media. A wonderful 1996 piece by Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape in Fogit shows a mountain made of his usual Ben Day dots in the background, with a moving Ab-Ex swipe of gray paint in the front. The culture of painting seems to explode in final consumption before disappearing into mass production, as Lichtenstein mocks, half mourns the authentic representation it preserves and defiles.
Lichtenstein filters the painting from the print (or vice versa); Elaine Frances Sturtevant, a.k.a. Sturtevant, filters it through abstract photorealism. His 1989-90 painting Stella Bethlehem Hospital is Frank Stella’s 1959 careful compilation Bethlehem Hospital—a black canvas with white stripes that form half-erased concentric boxes.
James said the show is one of his favorites in the show because of its boldness and the way it “takes this ridiculous approach to someone else’s work and does it with glee and unapologetically.” Sturtevant mirrors or imitates the process of photography, relying on the way paintings can now be reproduced and re-imaged so easily by reproducing and re-imagining them with great effort and creativity.
What’s the point of intelligence—even a vague, terrifying intelligence like Stella’s—if it can be recreated in an instant by anyone? If you take a picture of Sturtevant, how would you say it to Stella? Sturtevant’s brilliant non-appearance makes Stella’s originality seem dull and bleak rather than strong or inescapable. If Schneemann restores the discourse of painting, Sturtevant renders painting powerless.
Photography has now been digitized, and many artists respond to recent innovations in representation and/or distortion. For example, Jacqueline Humphries’ large 114 x 127-inch 2023 oil on linen work, MN+//sss created by pushing paint through stencils of ASCII symbols. From a distance, it appears to be an invisible work, but when you get up close, the letters and numbers become visible, erased or smeared or blurred, creating moiré patterns and shadows. It’s like watching a drawing being generated or dissolved into binary code. You scan the canvas like a scanning browser to get an aesthetic sense of the glitch.
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In one sense, Humphries and Sturtevant responded playfully and imaginatively to the new media and communication environment and, in doing so, preserved the relevance of painting. In another sense, they can appear to underline or emphasize drawing to be indifferent. Transforming painting into photography or computers or video or performance perpetuates the tradition of painting as much as it rejects that tradition. Is a painting that turns itself into not painting still painting? Is anti-culture an extension of culture or its opposition?
The answer, of course, is both—as one of James’ favorite pieces, Sayre Gomez’s 2018 piece, cleverly demonstrates. Behind door #8. The painting is a hyper-realistic, life-size depiction of convenience store doors, complete with “Pull” instructions on the handles, stickers telling you which credit cards the store accepts (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) and depictions of palm trees and greenery.
As James told the Observer, Gomez’s work is part of a painting tradition in that he creates the perfect “illusion” of reality through seamless beauty. He says: “His work doesn’t look like everything is carefully painted, but it is.”
The pain, however, is in the service of a subject that doesn’t paint much. It is not a lofty religious image and not even an iconic figure or symbol, as in Warhol’s work. Rather, the narrative is a common one. When you get to it in the gallery, it feels like Gomez is pleading with you; put your hand on that door and you go from the artificial/real world of the commercial gallery/museum into the artificial/real world of commercial pharmacies and lottery tickets. Go through the painting and escape from the painting. Such is the disappointing, disappointing promise of painting, in The Living End and beyond that.
“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020” is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until March 16, 2025.
