Painting Is Alive

REBECCA SCHULTZ: The last century has declared painting dead, not once but several times.  Possible causes of death include, but are not limited to, photography, Andy Warhol, and, most recently, the Internet.  “Painting is dead” has been a rallying cry, as loud as several hundred balloon-dogs popping in Man Bartlett’s 2010 performance piece 24h #class action.  It has been a whisper, the ironic shrug of a successful painter whom I heard speak last spring: “painting is dead, so…”.

Probably the first cause of all this is Marcel Duchamp. In his essay “The Avant-Gardiste Work of Art,” Peter Burger wrote that in the wake of, for instance, Duchamp’s ready-mades, “we are dealing not with development but with a break with tradition….It is no longer artistic techniques or stylistic principles but the entire tradition of art that is negated”.  In signing a urinal, calling it Fountain and bringing it to a gallery, Duchamp has united art with what Burger calls the praxis of life.  Where a painting mimetically pretends at reality, where it separates art from life by the use of a literal frame and, within the frame, presents a world that is cohesive, harmonious and whole, Duchamp brings in real, lived reality, fragmented and jarring.

I don’t think that painting is dead.