The Brooklyn Rail

It could be argued that Marlene Dumas solved the ongoing problem of painting’s viability all the way back in 1993 when she wrote, “[Painting] circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last.” Walking through this variety-pack of an exhibition triggered one déjà vu moment after another, most of them related to other attempts to survey the terrain of painting since the productive unraveling of modernism. As someone who was given his own chance to take a stab at just what is it about painting—in my case, an edited reader, rather than a show—I don’t think I’m part of the target audience for this exhibition, yet another attempt to encapsulate how so-called other technologies (tools, that is) have been incorporated into the enterprise. Given that the scope of the exhibition goes back a half century, its overall array, in the end, reinforces Dumas’s point (warning?) about first and last really being perpetual firsts and lasts.

Despite its necessary presentation as documentation, some of the earliest work on view remains the strongest. Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits (1976), funnily enough, is canonical because it mixes the “new” medium of performance with the oldest, drawing. It is presented nearby video documentation of some of Paul McCarthy’s slightly earlier works like Face Painting – Floor, White Line (1972); the coupling borrows two legends from MOCA Los Angeles’s exhaustive 1998 exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 in which Schneemann’s and McCarthy’s efforts were put into context alongside, for example, a thorough range of work by the Japanese Gutai artists, represented in Chicago by a well-known photograph of Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting performance in New York in 1965. You gotta start somewhere, such as Janine Antoni’s inspired revitalization of McCarthy with her 1992 performance Loving Care, presented here in video documentation.

Traversing the remainder of the exhibition reveals that the 1970s works together the best; no surprise, it should be said, given the proximity to modernism. The best hanging here of two paintings side-by-side—Richard Jackson’s energetic Untitled (1979) with Jack Whitten’s sumptuous Pink Psyche Queen (1973)—provides further critical and visual context to the documentation of the performances: for some artists, performing was still making a painting. Making a painting into a painting has, of course, returned and then some in recent painting, new tools notwithstanding, and one might think that full circle moments would be found throughout the remainder of the exhibition. However, it doesn’t happen, leaving open the question of why.

Well, I would argue it’s because so many of the most recent works in the exhibition just aren’t very strong. The following will come across as if I’m picking on certain artists, but to my mind they are not alone, no matter if many others’ work isn’t included here. The imagery of Avery Singer’s The Studio Visit (2012) may be the result of incorporating the use of a 3D-modeling program (it’s no Minecraft), but the actual painting of this acrylic on canvas work is dull. Conversely, Petra Cortright’s fox999arizona@morning-pro(version_final_Hirva).execute (2016) strives for flash and bling produced by way of the digital paint brushes from the enticingly-named DeviantArt and leaves us with fluff. To my eye the best new-ish work included took the form of video: Jacolby Satterwhite’s exuberant Country Ball 1989–2012 (2012). It doesn’t really give off much of a painting-adjacent vibe, but I’ll take what I can get. Another video, one that is key to the exhibition’s premise yet strangely strangled in its presentation, is Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002). Inexplicably it is only presented on a very small video monitor installed far above eye level on the wall (I get it, it’s in the clouds). Even the press checklist, however, shows it in the way I’ve always seen it: a couple of differently sized projections of its languid yet crisp rectangular fields along with a small monitor on the floor. It’s too important to be shown incomplete.

It is unfair to find the paintings by the youngest artists not up to snuff when there aren’t all that many significant works in the exhibition after the 1970s representatives. (Or the even earlier wall of amazing silkscreen prints—ranging from 1967 to 1973—by the major yet still under-recognized Thomas Bayrle.) Tishan Hsu is provided a singular and welcome opportunity with two works installed in different rooms: Portrait (1982), from the emerging moment of his idiosyncratic work, and Watching 5 (2024), an equally mesmerizing work completed this year. They suggest that Hsu knows all about that wheel, and that he is a painter.