Painting Beyond Itself

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation. Contributors Carol Armstrong, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, René Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy Sillman Institut für Kunstkritik Series

Introduction : remarks on contemporary painting's perseverance André Rottmann -- Painting and atrocity : the Tuymans strategy Peter Geimer -- Questions for Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw -- Response to Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer -- The value of painting : notes on unspecificity, indexicality, and highly valuable quasi-persons Isabelle Graw -- Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Gaimer -- Response to Peter Gaimer Isabelle Graw.

First published in Spanish in 2010, Art beyond Itself is Néstor García Canclini's deft assessment of contemporary art. The renowned cultural critic suggests that, ideally, art is the place of imminence, the place where we glimpse something just about to happen. Yet, as he demonstrates, defining contemporary art and its role in society is an ever more complicated endeavor. Museums, auction houses, artists, and major actors in economics, politics, and the media are increasingly chummy and interdependent. Art is expanding into urban development and the design and tourism industries. Art practices based on objects are displaced by practices based on contexts. Aesthetic distinctions dissolve as artworks are inserted into the media, urban spaces, digital networks, and social forums. Oppositional artists are adrift in a society without a clear story line. What, after all, counts as transgression in a world of diverse and fragmentary narratives? Seeking a new analytic framework for understanding contemporary art, García Canclini is attentive to particular artworks; to artists including Francis Alÿs, León Ferrari, Teresa Margolles, Antoni Muntadas, and Gabriel Orozco; and to efforts to preserve, for art and artists, some degree of independence from religion, politics, the media, and the market.

This book examines psychoanalysis, feminism, philosophy, and semiotics to examine late 19th- and 20th-Century Spanish and Spanish-American literature in relation to painting, and to larger questions of art theory and literary history.

Jutta Koether's translucent color fields, expressive brushstrokes and female subjects--as well as her use of poetry, art history and Mylar--can make her seem like a feminist answer to the Cologne art scene, a counterpart to artists like Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. In fact, she is a central contemporary painter in her own right, as well as a performance artist, a musician and a critic. She collaborates musically with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Television's Tom Verlaine, contributes regularly to Artforum and the respected German culture magazine Spex, and teaches in Bard College's MFA program--and has recently shown her work at Reema Spaulings Fine Art and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York. Koether's work, which the New York Times has called "vibrant" and "intriguing," was a standout in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This look back documents the artist's oeuvre from the mid-80s forward, with an extensive selection of images.

These essays examine the transformation and expansion of the field of painting in relation to the more general lines of development in culture and visuality. The book is divided into five parts, with each of them pursuing a distinct line of inquiry.

A collection of writings on art by Barry Schwabsky. “Many consider Barry Schwabsky to be the critic on painting today, even if he does write copiously on other art forms,” write editors Rob Colvin and Sherman Sam in their foreword to this selection of Schwabsky's writings. Written since the turn of the millennium, the texts in The Oberver Effect include meditations on the broader context of painting today alongside reflections on such well-known American painters as Alex Katz, Kerry James Marshall, Nicole Eisenman, and Dana Schutz, as well as practitioners from Europe and beyond—Bernard Frize, Tal R, and Ha Chonghyun among them. As Colvin and Sam point out, the book “documents a dialogue between abstraction and the image” in which “images serve less to represent their described subject than to articulate the sort of painting each one desires to be.”

Adapted from the lecture she delivered at the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's essay explores the dimension of self-reflexivity in the work of eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Siméon Chardin. Focusing on the material aspects of Chardin's practice, Lajer-Burcharth asks: In what ways were Chardin's painterly procedures "his own," and what were the implications of his possessive and personalized approach to the process of making? The author delves into these questions by examining a crucial moment in the artist's career, when he, for reasons we can only speculate about, temporarily abandoned his still life practice and turned to painting genre scenes. The essay is joined by responses from Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, followed by the author's replies. Institut für Kunstkritik Series