오늘의 회화 Painting Today

Wilhelm Sasnal

최근 회화의 귀환을 감지한다. 우선, 그 마르지 않는 회화의 보고에 경의를 표한다. 근현대미술사에서 몇차례 겪어온 회화의 복귀는 제각기 달랐다. 그렇기에 오늘날 다시 돌아오는 회화의 시의성에 관심이 쏠린다. 가장 오래된 예술매체인 회화는 과연 최근의 시대적 맥락에 뒤지지 않는 것인가. 오늘의 회화가 겪어온 미술사의 우여곡절을 간략히 살펴보고 회화의 매체를 둘러산 담론을 핵심적으로 다뤄보고자 한다.

 

 

그런데 세상에 똑같은 연애가 없듯이 그림을 보는 방식은 천차만별이다. 복잡한 연애 감정과 당사자 간의 취향의 문제는 절대적으로 고유하다.

 

연인 사이에 궁합이 맞아야 완성되듯, 취향이 맞아야 그림을 제대로 감상하고 소유할 수 있다. 그런데 그렇기에 쉽지 않은 애인은 때로는 새침스럽고 까다로워 어떤 땐 완전히 무관심한 듯 냉담하다가도 때로는 지나치게 격한 감정을 내보인다.

 

그림을 그리는 화가나 관람자나 그림에 자신을 욕망을 투영한다. 회활는 미적공간에서 양자의 욕망이 만난다. 그림의 욕망이 작품에 남아있다. 미술사가 미첼의 말대로, ‘욕망은 이미지를 생성해내고 이미지는 욕망을 만든다.’

 

우선 작가의 욕망을 살펴본다. 여러장르중에서 미술의 근본에 관여하는 것이 회화이다. 조각,설치, 디자인 등 여러 다른 표현방식에서도 기본적으로 드로잉, 스케치에서 시작된다. 완성된 회화는 이렇듯 그리다는 행위를 독집적으로 진전시킨 작업인 셈이다. 원시 동굴에서 시작된 인류의 첫 미적 행위에 대한 향수는 언제ᄁᆞ지나 사라지지 않을 것이다. 그림에 대한 주체의 욕망은 글에 대한 것보다 근원적이다.

 

이렇듯 시각 언어의 슨본 속성에 대해서 기호학이 현대미술에 도움을 준 바 있다. 기호학자이자 철학자이 그리스테바가 말과 글에 비해 상대적으로 가려진 시각언어에

Hernan Bas

 

To look at a pictures is to fall on love. The feeling gets when conpletely immersed in it is d? from being in a passionate relationship. As ? relationships are the same, the way of seeing picture are also limitless. The complexsity of love and matter of taste remain strictly individual.

 

Just as love is based on the chemistry between two people, the same compatibility of taste is what allows one ? fully appreciate and own the ?. However, this ? lover called painting is never easy, at times completely indifferent and other times dramatically emotional.

 

Whether it is the artist who paints the picture or the viewer, one is bound to project his or her desire onto it. It is in the aesthetic space called painting where the desires of the two unite, which then becomes wholly contained in the artwork itself. As art historian W,J.T Mitchell described, "Desire produces an image and an image creates desire"

 

First, there is the desire of the artist. Among the many artistic media, painting is the one that is fundamentally involved in all others. From sculpture, installation to design, any one mode of artistic expression requires preliminary drawings or sketchs. Painting is an art form that solely expands on this act of 'drawing'. Nostalgia for this very first act of artistaric expression, which traces back to the prehistiric caves, will never be relinquished. Thes subject`s desire for the picture is more fundamental than that for writing.

 

Semiotics has proven helpful for contemporary art in understanding such essential mature of the visual language. The semiotic and philosophical theories of Julia Kristeva, Which examined the overshadowed realm of visual language in relation to language and text, stressed on the power of vision in enabling the semiotic function of the image in ways inpassible through languages and symbals.

 

Authorship and Readership

 

'The Death of the Author' was a tenet raised by Raland Barthes and Michel Faucault in the late 1960s. Providing the seeds of postmodernist aesthetics, it privileged the viewer`s authority on the interpretation of an artwork, answering to "see what they want" to those who questioned "what to see". At the same time, this autonomy also became a burden. The death of authorship and the consequent birth of readership were no easy feat for public. Moreover, the intenional recjction of all aesthetic standards faced criticism for relegating to cultural relativism.

 

In the beginning, postmodernism had no bad intentions. Upholding the sprit of May 68`, its original motive was to achieve the 'decentered self' though the anti-authoritarian and democratic logic of post-structuralism. Postcolonialism is in essence a mature form of altruism, rejecting a singular canon in place for multicultural pluralism.

 

At the center of postmodernism was installaion and conceptual art. These practices, however, were often difficult and incomprehensible to the viewer, as most artists sought to obscure their artistic intentions as a way of yielding authority back to the viewer. In ther frontline of contemporary art, installation takes the lead with its colossal and financial rescurces invested in public art.

 

At same point, one must question the relationship between the individual viewer and the work in such cases of architectural installation. The viewer becomes a miniscule part of the larger public and ? his subjectives stance for autonomy. The public becomes more anonymous, as does their response to their overwhelming spectacle become more monotanous. By no means could this be perceived as an autonomous readership.

For example, viewers who have experienced such massive work such as James Turrel`s subline light installations or Anish Kapoor`s uncanny Jeviathan display identical expressions of owe? regardless of their different cultural backgrounds . In many ways, the exhibition space resembles a holy shrine. Are the artists coverting the realm of the divine by creating pseudo-nature? From the perspective of the viewer, individuality is no langer valid and their autonamy id dead.

 

Such change of position and nature of spectatorship in contemporary art encourages the reexamination of painting today. By tradition, painting is a medium that has always centered of the authorship of the artist. For postmodern of the viewer, this justified its appression of painting. But what if painting presents a new expression that could communicate with minimal authorship in moacceptainly unexpected, recent tendercies have proven this transition.

 

The Relationship between the Artist and the Viewer in Painting : Theatricality and Absorption.

 

Postmodern art encourage the viewer`s subjective self-consciousness. The artist, on the other hand, renders his artistic intention unclear and indeterminatey. It was the viewer who was given the authority for interpretation. Therefore, artist practices of conceptual art, installation and media art were not, in the strictest sense, truly interactive. In the case of painting, where authorship of the artist remains strongly present, it is likely to bais towards the perspective of the artist. For this reason, painting reached its heyday in modernism and has been in decline ever since.

 

The core of this argument is the relationship between the viewer and the work. Highlighting this important problem was art historian Michael Fried. In his praise for modernist abstraction, he identified their essence as being "anti-theatrical". Its most representative examples were the paintings of Morris Loius. Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella, as well as the sculptures of David Smith and Anthony Caro. The defining trait of their works was their disregard of the viewer. Unlike theater, which is based on the presence of the audience, these works were essentially"anti-threatrical'. For Fried, this was also synonymous with the term "absorption".

 

"Self-sufficient impeccable and automatic", this absorption transcends desire. Desire only exists where there is a lack. When there is no lack, there is nothing to be desired. Therefore, absorption assumed in modernist paintings desires nothing from the viewer. It is self-sufficient in its unwillingness for the viewer`s intervention, similar to how Fraud understood a self-reliant cat and a self- content, beautiful woman in the same way.

 

According to Fried, the emergence of modernism comes from renouncing the direct signs of desire. His attraction to the paintings he praised was precisely dependent upon this "indirectness". As described in his words, paintings such "indifference" to its viewer is the anti-theatrical "absorption". In other word, it is a state of absorption through the inner drama of the picture. The artwork is self-contained and the viewer contemplates the work visually from a distance. It was through this relative positioning between the viewer and the work that enabled art to become art in the modernist perspective.

 

While modernism values anti-theatricality and absorption, postmodernism prioritized theatricality and diffusion분산. The art emerging after minimalism, aesthetically adapted to the temporal and spatial self-conscuousness of theater, the Brechtiam alienation effect and the physical relationship to the viewer. The autonomy of the viewer is directly related to the theatricality of this kind. Postmodern aesthetics called for a self-conscious reader with an individual perspective who was strongly aware of one`s position, as opposed to one reaching the sublime by absorption. It required an intelligent viewer who understood the work in its temporal and spatial specificity, defined by the two axes of generation and geography. This perhaps speaks for the difficulty many feel towards contemporary art.

 

However, do such concepts of "anti-theatricality"and "absorption" still remain relevant today on this side of postmodernism? The answer is most certainly positve. Although it may seem contradictory, both sides concern the relationship between the viewer and the relationship between the viewer and the work. The theatricality of postmodernism was mostly expressed in installation, sculpture and conceptual art than painting. While painting could display theatricality by involving the viewer into the work, the problem is one of artistic sensibility. Intervention requires specifi narratives and intentional provocation or direct messages that hinder artistic expression. Political propaganda(plate 1) and commercial posters(plate 2) are such examples. Art histarian W.J.T. Mitchell nated that direcaesthetic expression often becomes associated with the 'vulgar속된' modes of images, such as commercial advertisements of political and religious propaganda. The problem then, is the way of expressing pictorial desire.

 

Today, the involvement of the viewer and his interpretation must be actively accommodated by the artwork. Painting is no exception. On the other hand, there is no other artistic medium that encompass아우르다 the physical traces and subjective intentions of the artist more than painting. Therefore, if painting could reconcile조합화합 its authorship and readership, it can achieve a much more liberal and contextualily open aesthetic space that stands in-between its content and expression, as well as the viewer`s stance. To communicate proactively with the artist`s open intentions posits a new discussion. It directs the focus on the encounter between the author and the reader, and their mutual interaction.

 

In efforts to inspire a dialogue in and out of the work, the core practices of postmodern art ultimately set its own limits by emphasizing a readership based on dichotomy. Despite their democratic stance, the direction was often lost to the unprepared viewer.

 

The fundamental problem problem is the dichotomy이분법 of logic. It would be safe to predict that such division of authorship and readership will increasingly disintegrate해체되다. It is unclear yet whether this is headed for the Hegelian dialectic of synthesis or the post-structuralist deconstruction. What is evidenet at leatst is that it somehow seems related to the return of painting. Painting is a medium based on authorship, but its return seems to signal a new intersection. The desires of the author and the reader that meet on the surface of the painting must find a way to communicate. The communication of desires through pictorial images is bound to open up a new presence that is neither authorship nor readership but one that represents the very desire of our times.

 

Painting today is already adapting to the remands of the times. Therefors, it is important to examine how its painterly expressions are evolving. Moving on from modernism and its revered존경받는 abstract paintings, we now look their postmodernist counterparts and their evolution through the crisis and challenges over time. More specifically, this text examines the distinctive특별한 aspects of the postmodernist paintings that emerged after the late 1970s. Ultimately, one hopes to gain at least the slightest sense of what the pictures want today and what they demand from us. The final objective is to glimpse the aesthetic desires of our time.

 

2. Main Currents in the History of Painting

 

Contemporary painting resists the boundaries of a singular "-ism". The grand narrative no longer exists. Today, art historical classification and categorization are not only avoided but also considered invalid. At the same time, this is not to reject the art historical disclosure in entirely. Creating new discourse,discussion and criticism of the time is still necessary, but now they can exist in multiple forms thanks to the pluralist tenet of postmodernism.

 

From the origin of painting in Altamira to its new horizon in the fourteenth century with Giatto, and later the pioneering modernism of Manet and the countless movements that followed-impressionism, Postimpressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Modernist abstractionand beyond -painting stood at the center of art until the mid-20th century. Its of each period. It was a history of "-ism" built above middle-class background. With no need to art history is essentially a history of authoritarian discourse. The freedom of recognition precisely comes from the ability to identify and criticize such mechanisms of power.

 

The paintings that thrived under the twentieth century modernism could be seen in the same context. Prior to its history, painting already underwent several periods at crisis and challenges. First, there was the invention of photography in the rise of abstraction. The role of photography in the rise of abstract painting into the mainstream could not be more emphasized. Although it later also intensified the realism of painting in some aspects, it cemented the primacy of abstract painting that has been cutivating over time from impressionsim of the 1870s, followed by Postimpressionism, Fauvism and Cubism.

 

 

Painting was once again challenged by the Dadaists led by Mercel Duchaml in the 1910s and later faced an internal crisis with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, the emergence of postmodernism brought its final callapse. The "return" of painting was first announced on the late 1970s and early 80s, sometime after its "death". This period of Western art history witnessed the plague떼,전염병 of Neo-espressionism and photorealism(hyperrealism).

 

Postmodernist Painting since the late 1970s

 

The influnce of Neo-expressionism and photorealism, as two representative currents of postmodernist painting, still maintains today. In particular, the expressive force, the diversity of material and narrative character that define Neo-expressionism were directly reinforced by the theories of deconstructivism해체주의 of the 1970s and 80s. Opposition against the authority of the system and cultural conservatism was no longer directe at the center, but now reflected itself through the political incentive and interest towars the marginal. The disorder and diversity of the 1980s postmodernist society were expressed across artistic practices by examining the disperal of the subject and deconstruction of boundaries.

 

Perhaps it is no surprise that the painters of the New Leipzig School came to prominence in the late 1990s after the Neo-expressionists that swept across Europe and America in the 1980s. Mostly figurative, their painting depicted natural or interior landscapes and portraits with careful precision정밀 in both their composition and expression. The bold brushwork and the dramatic emotion of the Neo-expressionists are nowhere to be found in these works. Even so, their works still remain deeply subjective주관적 and strictly repressed억압되다 in many ways. Neo Rauch`s paintings, as representative example, appropriate차용하다 the color scheme of the 1950s decor and style of popular illustrations. His allegorical paintings resist저항하다 simplicity in their interpretation. While based on the traditions of German Expressionism, the New Leipzig School found itself in new and different directions.

 

However, the center of mainstream since the late 1980s was conceptual art, with installation and body art at the forefront along with various other media including sculpture, photography and video. While painting remained in its cours, it nevertheless failed to produce a central discourse. Its dialogue with the mainstream was often limited to strategies of conversion such as approprioting foxea? or photocopied images into the work. This phenomenon continued into the new millennium. In a 2004 poll among five hundred leading art world professioinals, Marcel Duchamp`s 1917 work Foundation was voted the most influential work in modern art history, once again testifying to the postmodernist resistance to painting.

 

By the nature of the medium, painting is subject-centered, with its physical traces of the body and individual expressians of the brushwork. In other word, it strongly presumes여기다 its authorship. From the postmodernist perspective, it was highly criticized as an essentially bourgeois, collectible art object that is inevitably linked to the basis of capitalism. Painting, in its inherent subjectivity and tradition, conflict between bourgeois and popular culture, and ultimately the problem of commodification상업화 all contributed to the deliberate의도적 critical distance towards the medium.

 

In contract, the diversified language and expression in recent painting aim for new possibilities of overcoming its limits. For instance, it looked to strategies of taking a socio?-critical stance against the systems of authority or rejecting commodification and capital by seeking new methods of distribution and aesthetically minimizing individaulim. Conversely, it was the postmodern avant-garde practices such as photography and installation that began to emulate모방하다 the traditional authority of painting that it once authority, system and financial capital even more so than painting ever had.

 

Therefor, today one can never define a practice작업 by its medium. Whether painting , photography or installation, it can now overcome the limitations of its medium through modes of expression, social relevance관계 and concept itself-in the true sense of emancipation해방.

 

Return of Painting in the Twenty-First Century

 

The new turn of the century demanded an overall change in the global art world. It was during this time that painting resurged부활하다, and its staring point was London. Charles Saatchi, one of the biggest names in the contemporary art market best known for his inauguration of the YBAs into the mainstream in the 1990s, set his sights on painting. In 2005, he opened a massive exhibition of contemporary painting under the title, Triumph of Painting.

 

Returning to the London art world in over twenty years, the diversity of paintings presented in the exhibition was as broad as the overwhelming scale of their exhibition space. Among the fifty-six artists presented, the first installment of the exhibition included the German artist Martin Kippenberger . Belgian minimalist Luc tuymans, and Amsterdam-based South African painter Marlene Dumas. Most of their works were figurative but clearly different from the past. Their paintings were interested in neither narrative nor social commentary. In true diversity, it was difficult to identify any common interest across theit broad spectrum.

 

'The resurgence of painting witnessed in the Saatchi exhibition was also echoed in the global context. The 2005 Venice Biennale also redirected its focus to painting, with its German Pavillian represented by the Berlin painter Thomas Scheibitz and the U.S.Pavillon by the world paintings of Ed Ruscho. In the same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York also presented the works of artists Peter Doig and Chris Ofill in the inaugural개회의 exhibition of their reopening.

 

In retrospect, the concurrence of these exhibition? liely no coincidence, which leads to consideration of the following paints. An art exhibition is an espression of a phenomenon, and underneath ? was naturally followed by a series of publications that examined the phenomenon on a more fundamental level. The reexamination of painting during this period further refined the ? historio should also definition is necessary. It is also important to identify its trajectory. as seen in the work as follows.

 

Expressionistic Painting, Post-Conceptual Painting and New Realism

 

Even when avoiding definitive categorization, three types of currents could be detected발견하다 in painting today-expressionistic painting post-conceptual painting and new realism. While the expressionistic and the post- conceptual paintings are marked draws closer to a way of seeing. Although these currents maintain their distinct characteristics, in many works they overlap겹치다 or connect with one another.

 

First, the expressionistic paintings recall the revival of painting in the 1980, but assumes a broader context than the precedents. In many cases, these works are marked by their narratives and symbolism, frequently focusing on urban decay and future technology in terms of content. In formal aspects, their expressionistic tendencies are revealed through the impastos surface and bold brushstrockes marked with drips and traces of the paint. Its representative case is Daniel Richter, who transitioned전환하다 from abstraction into figuration in the late 1990s. His expressionistic paintings are filled with narratives and symbols.

 

The expressionistic tendencies of recent paintings are too diverse and individually distinct to form a clear definition. It is only in their loose depiction, irrotional and nonsystematic expression through which they cammonly reflect their boundless visual language. Moreover, it advocate반영하다 the ? stance of expressionism through its subjectivity human reaction against the advances ? technology implicity ? digital culture.

 

Another important current to the ? inflences of conceptual art. As ? Lewis, this tendency could be ? conceptual. As seen ? paintings of Luc Tuymans ? on the basis of conceptualism. ? Tuymans`s images ? clips, film still and close ? illustrations from the Reader Digest. The ? are obiviously banal, most of them depicted a melancholic grayish ? . His work? and complies all kinds of ...

resemble an indifferent photograph on a mass fabricated minimalist object.

 

Aside from Tuymans, there is the controlled expressionism of Dumas and Doig, whose paintings critically adapt to the conceptualist practices. Dumas painted pornography with measured expressionism. Doig painted frightening scenes of horror movie, in the manner of post-impressionism and symbolism. As painting started to absorb conceptualism into its practice in the 1990s, these artists played an important role in the transition.

 

These artists ultimately broke the cycle of death and rebirth in painting. It would be unlikely from this point that painting. It would be unlikely from this paint that painting relinquishes포기하다 itself once again or remains in the simple categories of tradition. Painters have been unfairly exclude from the progress of art in the past decade. Now, these painters are taking a proactive role in generating new creative oppertunities by expanding on conceptualism. They have self-deconstructed the traditional codes of the medium in time for a new era of post-conceptual painting.

 

In addition to the currents discussed above is the emergence of new realism. Although realism is traditionally linked to figurative representation, its recent manifestation징조 rejects previous nations. Ever if it appears figurative on the surface, it often distances itself from the realist tendencies and veers towards the conceptually abstract. The core visual language of postmodernism was the ....