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Clement Greenberg, RadicalPainting, and the Logic ofModernismHenry StatenPublished online: 09 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Henry Staten (2002) Clement Greenberg, Radical Painting, and theLogic of Modernism, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 7:1, 73-89

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The collected art criticism of Michael Friedappeared in 1998 with the title Art andObjecthood. The centerpiece of the book is theessay by the same name, Frieds most famousstatement regarding the art of the 1960s. In thisessay, Fried had articulated a critique of themove toward minimalism or, in Frieds ownpreferred term, literalism in art. Whereaspainting involved the illusion of space and therelation of parts, literalism aimed at a unitary,three-dimensional object. These literal objectswould not be sculptures, however; they wouldhave a wholeness and singleness of shapeinspired by recent painting, above all the work ofFrank Stella, that had reduced painting to itsmost minimal, two-dimensional elements andforegrounded the shape of the support. This newkind of painting, Donald Judd remarked at thetime, overpowers the earlier painting because itis nearly an entity, one thing; but it alsoexhausted the specific art of painting, with itsrestriction to two dimensions, and necessitatedliteralisms opening to three dimensions.

To the arguments of the minimalists/literalistsFried responded that literalism was the negationof art because it was, in the terms of a complexargument that I cannot reproduce here, nothingmore than a new genre of theater (153). InFrieds view, it was imperative for painting tofend off the literalist challenge by observing thedistinction between literal and pictorial shape,thus disproving the charge that the art of paint-ing was now exhausted. The shape of which Juddspoke was shape as a fundamental property of[literal] objects; but this sense of shape wasdistinct from the type of shape with which thepainter is concerned, shape as a medium ofpainting (151) pictorial shape. In order forthe specificity of the art of painting to remain

viable in the contemporary crisis, a painting hadto defeat or suspend its own [literal] object-hood by the assertion of pictorial shape (ibid.).

In the introduction to the collected work Friedupdates, but fundamentally reaffirms, the judg-ments about contemporary art at which he hadarrived when he wrote the earlier work, and notesthat he stopped writing art criticism in the 1970sbecause he was out of sympathy with the direc-tion art had taken and saw no point in continu-ing to reiterate his opposition.

Just as Art and Objecthood appeared,however, Artforum (Sept. 1998) carried a reviewby Fried of monochrome paintings by the NewYork painter Joseph Marioni. In this remarkabledocument Fried declared, against all expectation,that Marionis monochromes were paintings in

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CLEMENT GREENBERG,RADICAL PAINTING,AND THE LOGIC OFMODERNISM

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/010073-16 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725022014206 5

AN GEL AK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 7 number 1 april 2002

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the fullest and most exalted sense of the word,and went on to this conclusion:

I consider Marioni to be one of the foremostpainters at work anywhere at the present, andthe great and thought-provoking surprise hiswork has given me is not only that it tran-scends the previous limitations of the mono-chrome but also that it is the first body of workI have seen that suggests that the Minimalistintervention might have had productive conse-quences for painting of the highest ambition.Simply put, the Minimalist hypostatization ofobjecthood seems to have led in Marionisart to a new, more deeply founded integrationof color, amateriality, and support, which is tosay to an affirmation of the continued vitalityof painting that has something of the characterof a new beginning. (149)

Who is Marioni, and what has he wrought that itcould cause a theorist as brilliant and polemicalas Fried to change his mind in such a funda-mental way about the possibilities of mono-chrome a type of work that, until he sawMarionis work, Fried associated with mere liter-alism and considered a vehicle for a hackneyedtheoretical/ideological stance (ibid.)? Even moreimportant: could Fried be right in his assessmentof Marionis achievement, and, if so, what wouldthis mean for the standard narratives aboutmodernism in painting, and, more broadly, forour sense of the fate of painting (whose deathhas been routinely declared for decades now) andof art as a whole in the era of postmodernity?

I will give a quick introductory account ofMarioni and his work, then turn to the metacriti-cal issues raised by his work and its associatedtheoretical apparatus. Marioni has been living andpainting in New York since the early 1970s, buthis career for many years was mainly in Europe,especially Germany. His work has special signifi-cance in my eyes because it is not an isolatedphenomenon, but part of a loosely structuredmovement that has shown under different namesbut has most consistently called itself RadicalPainting, and which has been quietly carrying onthe project of reduction to the essence of the artof painting that Clement Greenberg, and Fried inhis wake, did so much to theorize some decadesago although this project has gone in a direction

that might have surprised Greenberg (as it doesFried). Radical Painting has taken widely diver-gent forms in the course of the two decades I havebeen following it, and I will not try to survey thisvariety; but Marioni is, along with his formercollaborator, the Cologne painter GntherUmberg, the most theoretically minded of thegroup, and his paintings manifest in an exemplaryway the relation of Radical Painting to the reduc-tionist logic of modernism.1

Now, whereas Greenberg in some famousstatements declared flatness the irreducibleelement in the art of painting that modernismhad uncovered, Marioni focuses his meditationon the question of articulated paint or paintedcolor not paint as it exists in the tube but as itexists when applied to a particular support by aparticular means of application.2 He uses acrylic,applied with a roller to linen on a woodenstretcher, always in a top-down direction, two tosix coats of varying hues, but such as to producea predominantly unitary color-image, each coatmonochrome and forming a more or less all-overskin, with the texture of the linen visible to vary-ing degrees through the paint or at the edges. Hisaesthetic aim is to create a total effect out of therelation between the specific hues he attains, thetexture of the paint, the relation of the paint tothe linen, and the size and shape of the picturesupport; this sense of the total physical presenceof the painting is what Fried refers to when hementions the effect on Marionis work of theminimalist intervention. However, Marioni isvery insistent that his paintings should not crossthe line into literalness and become literalist orminimalist painted objects; they remain, andare to be judged aesthetically as, paintings, andtheir predominant effect is of breathtaking color.

The crucial figure in Marionis sense of thephysical presence of the painting as painting, asstructure of paint plus support, is, however, notany minimalist but the painter Robert Ryman,without whose work it is impossible to under-stand Marionis project. Schematically, then,Radical Painting of the sort done by Marioni ismodernism as analyzed by Greenbergs logic,transformed by the achievement of Ryman, andturned toward the exploration of the entire spec-trum of painted color.

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de duves interpretation of greenberg

Greenbergs narrative about modernism hasrecently been massively re-examined and recon-textualized by Thierry De Duve.3 De Duve hasheightened the philosophical stakes in this discus-sion by extensive analysis of the conflictingKantian elements in Greenbergs problematic the fact that for Greenberg the beauty of a paint-ing always had to be evaluated by a Kantian judg-ment of taste, while on the other hand the logicof modernism that Greenberg equally derivedfrom (his reading of) Kant implied that judgmentsof taste were no longer necessary. Greenbergwrote in his 1960 essay Modernist Painting thatthe essence of Modernism, as observable inKant, the first real Modernist, lay in the use ofcharacteristic methods of a discipline to criticizethe discipline itself, not in order to subvert it butin order to entrench it more firmly in its area ofcompetence (85).4 Hence modernism in artmeant that each art was concerned with all thatwas unique in the nature of its medium, and thetask of self-criticism became to eliminate from thespecific effects of each art any and every effectthat might conceivably be borrowed from or bythe medium of any other art. Thus would each artbe rendered pure (86). The quest for purity,in the case of painting, yielded the reduction tomere flatness:

It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatnessof the surface that remained more funda-mental than anything else to the processes bywhich pictorial art criticized and defined itselfunder Modernism. For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art. Theenclosing shape of the picture was a limitingcondition, or norm, that was shared with theart of the theater; color was a norm and ameans shared not only with the theater, butalso with sculpture. [F]latness was theonly condition painting shared with no otherart (87)

The logic of this famous argument is consider-ably less than compelling. Leaving aside its ques-tionable relation to Kants project, its shakiestassumption is this: that if there is to be anessence of painting, that essence must beabsolutely singular, there must be one character-

istic that is the essence and this one characteris-tic cannot be shared with any other art. By parityof argument, one would have to conclude thatsound is inessential to poetry because it is sharedwith music, and the history of modernist poetry,with its recurrent tendency toward pure musical-ity, would be an unaccountable mistake.

In any case, this was the conclusion at whichGreenberg arrived, a conclusion that, on DeDuves account, led him into an intolerablecontradiction. For if mere flatness is the essenceof the art of painting, then, as Greenbergremarked in 1962 in After AbstractExpressionism, a stretched, unpainted canvascould be experienced as a painting or, in theslightly weasally term that he actually used, apicture, though not necessarily as a successfulone.5 According to De Duve (and I wassurprised to find this out), no one ever presenteda mere unpainted canvas as a painting; mono-chrome or quasi-monochrome was thus the clos-est thing to the limit-condition of the art ofpainting at which modernism in fact arrived, thezero degree of painting (217). But whenGreenberg saw monochrome paintings, ratherthan thinking that they had arrived at theessence, he dismissed them as familiar andslick. Monochrome, he judged, had becomealmost overnight another taming conventionthat automatically declared itself to be art (DeDuve 251).

If a work automatically declares itself to beart, then no act of aesthetic judgment is requiredfrom the viewer; yet Greenberg was irrevocablycommitted to the necessity of aesthetic judgment.De Duve comments:

Once an unpainted canvas can be called apicture or a painting, then it is automaticallycalled art. With the dismissal of the verylast expendable convention of modernistpainting that the canvas be painted at all the specific [i.e., the art of painting] surren-ders to the generic [art in general]. Theconsequences branch out into two possibili-ties. Either the making and appreciation ofart require nothing but a mere identificationpredicated on the conceptual logic ofmodernism, and aesthetic judgment is nolonger necessary; or aesthetic judgment is

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still necessary. But the pressure that theconventions of painting had put on its practiceis now nil (De Duve 222)

On De Duves reading, then, if there is a reduc-tive logic of modernism, it follows that, oncethe reduction is complete, there will no longer beany room for judgments regarding the beauty ofthe work, either on the part of the viewer or onthe part of the artist as he creates his work; or,conversely, if there is to be aesthetic judgment,purism or reductivism is no longer tenable(ibid.). Hence, Greenbergs choice in favor ofaesthetic judgment meant that he had to abandonmodernism with its progressive paring away ofnonessentials from the medium.

De Duves account, which skillfully exploitsthe weaknesses in Greenbergs own formulations(importing, however, these same weaknesses intohis own argument as we will see), gains its plau-sibility not only from its elegant formulation butfrom the historical sequel, the Greenbergiananti-Greenbergianism of Donald Judd andJoseph Kosuth that developed the terms ofGreenbergs logic uncompromisingly away fromthe specificity of the art of painting and towardthe negation of aesthetic judgment. Looking atStellas black paintings in 1962 with Greenbergsdoctrine in mind, Judd and his generation ofartists had no alternative other than to pursuethe modernist tradition even beyond the literalmonochrome where it actually meets its end(231). Stellas paintings, which seemed to markthe limit to which the modernist reduction couldbe pushed, were interpreted by Judd as reallymore like objects than paintings. [M]ost of theworks, Judd wrote, suggest slabs, since theyproject more than usual (cited in De Duve 236).But Judd argued that three-dimensional actualspace is intrinsically more powerful andspecific than painting on a flat surface.Because the nature of three dimensions isnt set,given beforehand, something credible can bemade, almost anything (in De Duve 235). Asthese remarks indicate, Judd was still awkwardlytrying to work with Greenbergs idea of speci-ficity while loosening the traditional constraintsto which Greenberg had bound it: Judds newthree-dimensionality in order to open its unlim-

ited new realm of freedom needed to keep clearof the specificity of sculpture as well as that ofpainting; the new minimalist or literalist artcould flourish only in the specificity of the spacebetween the older genres.

Joseph Kosuth went even further than Judd.For him, the propositions of art are not factual,but linguistic in character that is, they do notdescribe the behavior of physical or even mentalobjects; they express definitions of art, or theformal consequences of definitions of art.Accordingly, we can say that art operates on alogic. This new logic leaves specificity entirelybehind, for the artists true task now means toquestion the nature of art. If one is questioningthe nature of painting, one cannot be questioningthe nature of art. Thats because the word artis general and the word painting is specific (inDe Duve 245).

In the space of art-in-general, anything what-ever could be an artwork; according to Kosuth,the fiat of the artist and not anything intrinsic tothe work decreed that something be art. But thiswas the door to generic art that Duchamp hadalready opened fifty years earlier with his ready-mades, particularly the famous urinal (hence thetitle of De Duves book); the aftermath of theimplosion of modernism was thus, according toDe Duve, simply the final triumph of Duchampsintervention.

from ryman to radical painting

The elegance of De Duves argument conceals aserious flaw, one that becomes evident in light ofthe retrospective action on the history ofmodernism of painters like Ryman, Marioni, andUmberg. The flaw is De Duves assimilation ofthe monochrome to the blank canvas, as thoughthe conclusion drawn from the possibility of anunpainted painting the pressure that theconventions of painting had put on its practice isnow nil were with equal validity to be drawnfrom monochrome, so that, in the absence ofactual unpainted canvases, the literal mono-chrome would mark the place where themodernist tradition actually meets its end(231). It is easy to see how this assimilation couldslip, uncriticized, into De Duves argument on

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the basis of Stellas early work, which teetered onthe edge of the minimalist reduction; morepuzzling is how De Duve can praise Ryman as agreat painter but quickly assimilate his work,because it acknowledge[s] the readymade, tothe tradition of Duchamp (277). For Rymanswork in fact exploits to an unparalleled degreethe pressure that the conventions of painting puton its practice.

Ryman has made an entire career out of paint-ings that are nominally white, yet each of whichis a distinctive exploration of the immense vari-ety of effects of texture, color, and reflectivitythat can be achieved within the limits of whatlanguage labels univocally (and quite inade-quately) as white; of the interaction of paintwith the immense variety of surfaces to which itcan be applied (linen, plastic, paper, metal, etc.);and of the thematization, as part of the formalwhole, of the other, previously merely substruc-tural elements, such as the stretcher, the size ofthe brush and the amount of paint it will hold,the means of attachment to the wall (a very richelement for Ryman, who has used tape, bolts ofvarious sorts, tacks, and so forth, exposing themand making them part of the composition of thepainting) and even the wall itself, whichRyman also calculates as an integral part of theaesthetic structure of the painting. De Duveappears to leap from the fact that brushes, bolts,and so forth are manufactured objects to hisconclusion that Rymans art is properly to beunderstood as an acknowledgment of the ready-made. There is some interest in linking Rymanin this way to the tradition of Duchamp; but theartistic goal at which Ryman aims could scarcelybe more distant from Duchamps. The themati-zation of readymade elements in Rymans workis subordinate to a more comprehensive logic ofmaking than that of the readymade a logic,older than modernism, that, before it involvestheir manufactured character, involves acknowl-edging, and drawing out the consequencesof, the materiality of the artworks componentmaterials.

The characteristically modern critical aware-ness that there is no pure, raw materiality, thatthe materials of art come to us already workedover by a long cultural history, becomes for many

contemporary theorists, including De Duve, avision of pure Hegelian Aufhebung in which themateriality of art is entirely sublated into therealm of convention, with convention itselfunderstood as ultimately discursive in nature.The emergence of conceptualism can then benarrated as the logical culmination of the logicof modernism. The narrative of sublation cannot,however, do justice to the vital tradition of workwithin which the unsublated substratum of mate-riality of even the most readymade materialscontinues to function. Such work must either bereinterpreted against the grain or rejected asmerely naive. Yet the charge of naivety canscarcely be sustained in the face of the fact thatRadical Painting is constituted through andthrough as a continuing critical reflection, carriedon within and beyond the terms of the dialecticof modernism developed by Greenberg andFried, on the techniques and conventional mate-riality constituting the art of painting at thepresent moment in culture history.

Ryman, a crucial figure in this alternativetradition, is for his own part unequivocal aboutthe controlling aim of his work: The basic prob-lem is what to do with paint. What is done withpaint is the essence of all painting.6 The signif-icance of the various material elements of theartwork is wholly reconfigured by their subordi-nation to this aim; and Rymans work, ratherthan confirming the tradition of Duchamp, mightbe more readily understood as the triumph ofmaking, in the entirely specific form of the art ofpainting, over the readymade. Which is to say,not making ex nihilo, as the pure originatingpower of a godlike genius (the model towardwhich conceptualism gravitates), or as the impo-sition of form on formless matter, but as theprocess by which an artist operates the conven-tional techniques and culturally worked-overmaterials of a historically evolved tekhne andevolves it further. (The crucial philosophicalreference for this tradition would then be notKant whose aesthetics is the product of theRomantic episode that briefly carried aesthetictheory into the ether of the ineffable butAristotle, the original theorist of art as tekhnewho is much more plausibly considered thepredecessor, even if not the actual inspiration, of

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the modernist idea of the specific medium. I willsay more about this at the conclusion of thisessay.)

Now, Ryman is often praised for his prag-matic, non-theoretical stance toward his work; yetin his terse way he has situated himself veryprecisely as working within the selfsame logicthat was more fully theorized in the 1980s byMarioni and Umberg in their jointly authoredaccount of the nature of Radical Painting.7 Thereare, Ryman says, three kinds of painting proce-dure: representation, abstraction, and his own,which has been called by various names, none ofthem very satisfactory: Theres beenconcrete, its been called absolute, non-objective, and its even been called abstraction(a list to which we can now add radical).Ryman prefers to call it realism, because,unlike the first two procedures, this type of workinvolves no picture, no illusion, only the percep-tual reality of the painting itself.

It is much harder to achieve freedom fromrepresentation than one might think. The veryfact that realism has been confused withabstraction (a concept that retains the notionof something represented, only abstractly)shows that even the idea of purely non-represen-tational painting is not easy to grasp. The notionof a paintings having no picture at all (not evenone that is abstractly gestured at), is deceptivelysimple to state, yet the radical extirpation ofrepresentation requires a thinking-through ofevery conventional and material element of theart of painting a thinking-through thatproduces a new logic of form. Realism, saysRyman, uses all the devices that are used byabstraction and representation such as composi-tion and color complexity, and surface and light,and line and so on, and yet all these terms aretransformed when their logic is reconfiguredfrom scratch without the relation to figure.Consider an element as simple and fundamentalas line: if line is still to be found in the realistor radical painting, it cannot be drawn, becausedrawing is a function classically, for Aristotleas much as for Kant8 the defining function, ofthe procedure of representation. Hence: I wouldnot actually paint a line, I would paint an area ofpaint and stop. And then at the edge of the paint

would be a line (Ryman, in Sauer andRausmller 6465).

By contrast with Rymans endless experimen-tation, Marioni tinkers only in subtle ways withthe format of his paintings, focusing instead onthe exploration of an almost unlimited range ofhue. And, because the logic of his work is morehomogeneously than Rymans a paint-logic,there is no place in it for composition or line,even as paint-edge (one reason why he paintswith a roller). Yet, in part because of what he haslearned from Ryman, Marionis paintings areinformed by the most refined awareness of thefull physicality of the painting as a compositeunity attached to a wall. The successive skins ofpaint interlock in such a way as to create a highlyspecific visual effect, as though we were lookinginto the paint, into a color-space that is not illu-sionistic but the actual space created between thelayers of paint; yet the paint is not laid onthickly, does not create what Greenberg calledfurtive bas relief. The successive layers areveil-like in their subtlety, and the weave of thelinen shows through (Marioni paints only onlinen eight different kinds depending on thetexture and porosity he needs to achieve aspecific color-image). Marioni is also acutelyattentive to the relation between the color hecreates and the shape and size of the painting.The form, or structure, as he prefers to call it,of the painting, arises, as in Rymans work although arguably, as Fried says, in a whollydifferent spirit out of the interaction of allthese elements; hence there is no question offalling into what Harold Rosenberg called merematterism, a false sense of aesthetic richnessarising from the intoxication of the eye that putsitself to the tracing of raw physical textures in alltheir endless variety. As always in art, it is amatter of form; and yet this is form that is tiedin the most intimate way to the materiality ofthe medium. The pressure of the conventionsof the medium does not disappear but istransformed; painters are made more consciousof this pressure by their own increasing articula-tion of the mediums material elements in alltheir diversity, and this in turn leads to a yetmore refined articulation and a yet subtlerconsciousness.

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The difference between Rymans work andMarionis, and then again between either of theirsand that of Umberg, shows how vast is the rangeof possibility of this fundamental or radical orrealist exploration of painting. Like the work ofthe others, Umbergs has evolved through anumber of transformations, but in the 1980swhen he was collaborating with Marioni hepainted intensely black-looking paintings on thinsheets of aluminum, made of dry particles ofgraphite or ivory black, which he brushed dryonto moist dammar, horizontally and vertically,thirty or forty layers, building up a poroustexture that registers the disciplined lines of thebrush strokes in the strikingly dry paintedsurface. This texture is extremely fragile: themerest touch will destroy it. This fragility,together with the thinness of the support whichmakes the painting seem at first to be part of thewall creates a sort of attenuation of materiality,at least in the sense of withdrawal from three-dimensionality. Yet the paint, with its delicatelyrefined yet charcoal-like texture, remainsintensely material, and in the absence of anyfigure, shape, or line, the eye can only perceivethe color as bound to this materiality. Black isactualized in a specific painting-medium, and thisactualization can only be judged aesthetically inthe context of the specific history of aestheticexploration out of which it comes, the context offundamental, concrete, absolute, realist, or radi-cal painting.

The increasingly articulate consciousness ofthe (historically, contextually significant) materi-ality of painting, the nature of the pressure itexerts on the quest for aesthetic form, and themeans by which that pressure can be put toaesthetic account that painters in this traditionhave developed, give the lie to Greenbergs ownbelief that painters had never been, and could notbe, explicitly aware of the logic that had beenguiding their practice throughout the history ofmodernism.9 Yet this increased awareness actu-ally has the opposite effect from that inferred byDe Duve, moving the art of monochrome fartherthan ever away from any possibility of producinga painting by mere deduction from a logic.

De Duve creates his dichotomy betweenaesthetic judgment and conceptual deduction by

ignoring the micrology of the painters practicein its largely tacit interaction with the (material-ist) logic according to which he works. In hisreconstruction of Greenbergs thought De Duvepays lip service to the question of interactionwith the medium:

As to the modernist artists aesthetic judg-ment, it has to be suggested, inspired,provoked by or received from the mediumitself, for the medium is the only subjectmatter of modernism and the locus of theartists aesthetic constraints. (214)

Yet De Duve renders the reference to the inspi-ration the painter receives from the mediumitself effectively meaningless when, endorsingGreenbergs narrowest interpretation of the logicof modernism, he sublates the materiality of themedium into the idea of convention. In thecontext of this sublation, it is easy to conceivemonochrome as a bodiless zero degree of paint-ing that can provide no further inspiration (onlyconcoctions that are produced automati-cally). And the judgment of quality must nowhover in the thin air of a generalized or genericart that has no palpable relation to the speci-ficity of a given medium, because this relation, ifconceived as a logic, would result in the auto-maticity that renders aesthetic judgment irrele-vant. One should pay careful attention to thesleight of hand with the word medium that isrequired for the logic of this argument:

Between content and form, between thegeneric value-judgment and the specific self-criticism of the particular medium, there hasto be a mediation, but one that doesnt allowfor a deduction. If it did, it would mean thatcontent aesthetic value could be inferredfrom the state of the medium. Conversely, itwould mean that the medium could be delib-erately manipulated so as to produce contentor quality, thus allowing for what Greenbergcalled concocted art. (213)

Only the evacuation of materiality from thenotion of the medium can justify the impositionof the model of deduction on that of specificself-criticism. If what De Duve has identified isa problem that indeed arose in the conceptualistaftermath of modernism and that might well have

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been given an essential impetus by Greenbergslogic, it is not a problem that is intrinsic to thenotion of modernism as specific self-criticism, ifthat notion is going to be construed not in theodd and indefensible form of its reductio in ablank canvas but in the most expansive terms terms that look to Greenbergs critical practice,which was, as Fried notes, separated by a gulffrom his theory and to the history of themodernist reduction since 1962.

an alternative version of greenberg

Greenberg was never in any danger, as De Duvewants to think, of surrendering his taste infront of Stellas black paintings (20304).Greenberg more than once indignantly deniedever having confused the essentialism or purismof a painting with its quality, and any unbiasedreading of his work will confirm this. He had aremarkably catholic eye, and in fact confessed apreference for figuration over abstraction. WhatI want to focus on here, however, is his enthusi-asm for color, which shows up repeatedly andwhich constitutes a sort of second, shadowlogic leading to a different, and more pregnant,conclusion about the future of modernism thanthe one that leads to the blank canvas. Hisremarks on Morris Louiss work, for instance,reveal precisely the kind of eye for literal qual-ities that one needs in order to look at RadicalPainting:

The fabric, being soaked in paint rather thanmerely covered with it, becomes paint in itself,color in itself, like dyed cloth; the threaded-ness and wovenness are in the color. Louisusually contrives to leave certain areas in thecanvas bare, and whether or not he whitensthese afterwards with a thin gesso the aspectof bareness is retained. It is a gray-white orwhite-gray bareness that functions as a color inits own right and on a parity with other colors;by this parity the other colors are leveled downas it were, to become identified with the rawcotton surface as much as the bareness is. (97)

There is clearly a relation between the wayGreenberg here reads color and the idea of thereduction to flatness, and there needs to be; theidea of flatness is not simply expendable. But

flatness is here fully materialized in the ensembleof constituents that make up the painting, andwhat Greenberg responds to is not flatness assuch but the integration of paint and support.Yet Greenberg, under the influence of hisdoctrine of pure opticality (another dogma of histheoretical apparatus, and one which I cannothere try to reconcile with the line of thought thatleads to the blank canvas), oddly concludes thatthe color is disembodied, and argues that thepaintings need to be large so as not to be seen asdiscrete, tactile objects. Thus, the overarchinglogic is not yet that of Radical Painting, butGreenbergs articulation of the physical structureof the painting comes very close.

That a new doctrine of the evolution ofmodernism is brewing in such observationsbecomes evident in the very same essay, AfterAbstract Expressionism, in which Greenbergmakes the remark about the blank canvas.Greenberg here rhapsodizes about the colorism ofStill, Rothko, and Newman in terms thatcontinue to resonate today and might be said topresage the onset of Radical Painting (whilecontrasting sharply with the ambivalent tones inwhich a little later he speaks of the reduction tomere flatness):

the ultimate effect sought [by Still, Rothko,and Newman] is one of more than chromaticintensity; it is rather one of an almost literalopenness that embraces and absorbs color inthe act of being created by it. Openness, andnot only in painting, is the quality that seemsmost to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time. Let it suffice to say that by the new open-ness they have attained, [they] point to what Iwould risk saying is the only way to high picto-rial art in the near future. (Emphasis added)

Openness is a difficult term to define, and ofcourse Greenberg could not have had in mindquite the sort of thing that is achieved by Marioni(radical painting cannot be deduced); yet when hecalls it almost literal he suggests precisely thedirection these painters marked out for Marionisfurther development of what he learned fromthem. I would like to do for color what Pollockdid for line, Marioni remarks in an interview; Iwould like to free color from boundary(Museum Abteiberg Catalog 25).

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De Duve passes lightly over this praise of Still,Rothko, and Newman, taking it as somehowrestoring Greenbergs confidence in the thesis offlatness and thus as leading up to the remarkabout a bare canvas; Fried more acutely notesthat Greenbergs remarks on color are ironicallyat odds with the remark about the bare canvas,but argues that the reductionist logic ofGreenbergs theory of modernism meant thatcolor or indeed openness in recent paintingcould not assume the constitutive or essentialistsignificance of flatness and the delimitation offlatness (39). And it is true that Greenbergnow suggests the old logic has expended its impe-tus as Still, Rothko, and Newman have opened asecond phase in the self-criticism ofmodernism. In this new phase, the delimitationof flatness is replaced as the central question bythat of the ultimate source of quality in art(Greenberg 132) a source that Greenberg iden-tifies as conception, in the quite traditionalsense of inspiration. But this proclamation of anew phase does not erase from the record theprevious remark in which he marks out color andopenness as the exclusive formal pathway to thefuture of painting precisely the role he hadformerly assigned to the problematic of flatness(of which, properly conceived, the questions ofcolor and openness are aspects as I will arguebelow).

The statement about a new phase confusedlyimplies both that the old formalist logic is nolonger relevant as painting turns from questionsof form to questions of aesthetic quality animplication contradicted by the declarationconcerning color and openness; and that thequestion of quality in painting was not formerlya problem for modernism as it pursued its questfor flatness an implication that is contradictedby Greenbergs own earlier critical practice, inwhich he insisted on the distinction betweenformal means and aesthetic quality. In 1959, forinstance, in The Case for Abstract ArtGreenberg had written that Abstract paintingmay be a purer, more quintessential form ofpictorial art than the representational kind, butthis does not of itself confer quality upon anabstract picture (82).10

It is clear, despite Greenbergs muddled

formulation, that the formal logic of modernismhe had done more than anyone else to define hadnot all of a sudden shifted course with theachievements in color and openness of Still,Rothko, and Newman; these painters continuedto follow out the consequences of the turn in themodern period away from the illusionistic spaceof representation. Thus, necessarily, they contin-ued to work in a crucial, even an essential,sense within a logic of flatness the logic ofthe reduction of representation according towhich the form of painting is reconceived in whatRyman calls a realist way. This in fact was howGreenberg himself initially developed his thesisabout flatness; what was fundamentally at issuein this thesis was the rejection of representation,figuration, illusionism, the flat pictures denialof efforts to hole through it for realistic perspec-tival space, as Greenberg termed it in 1940 (vol.1, 34). Clearly, this denial must remain at thecenter of any reflection on the modernist prob-lematic; the work of Still, Rothko, and Newmancannot be understood without it. But because hecame to isolate flatness pure and simple as theessence of painting-logic, Greenbergs recoil fromflatness seemed to leave him no recourse but toconclude that his problematic, and that ofmodernism, had shifted in a fundamentally newdirection.

If we were to choose one term to replace flat-ness as the best single index of the modernistreduction, at least within Greenbergs work, itshould probably be painterliness. Painterlinessis a much richer concept than flatness, moreadequately suggesting the complexity ofGreenbergs insights into painting, as well aspointing toward the primacy of paint stressed bythe radical painters. It is in fact a concept towhich Greenberg himself accords centrality (as isindicated, for instance, by his thinkingPainterly Abstraction was a better name thanAbstract Expressionism for the phenomenonin question). Painterly qualities are those thatpull the viewers attention away from what thepainting represents toward the physical fact ofpaint-applied-to-a-surface, of paint applied on topof paint, of density and flow and so forth, and theproblematic of painterliness therefore calls up asinterdependent, intertwined questions the denial

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of figuration, the physical and perceptual quali-ties of painted color, and the flatness of the non-illusionistic painted surface.

the painting is the body of color

Now, however, as we move away from represen-tation toward the full materiality of painting, werun up against the other limit of this logic: thelimit of objecthood on which Fried has so richlymeditated, but which Greenberg already detected.A painting cannot be a literal object, not even aliteral painted object. The minimalists were veryinsistent on the difference between objects andpaintings, and their acute investigation of thenature of literal objects is essential to the projectof radical painting, a blinking red light that warnsthe painter how far he can go in this direction andstill be making a painting. How can we tell anobject that is a painting from a painted object?Only by becoming attuned to the painting-logicthat produces the specific type of object that,within a certain history as construed by a certaininterpretation of that history, has become asliteral in its objecthood as it can be and still be apainting that has, in fact, become most fully apainting, and nothing but a painting, by the pathof its own particular brand of literalness.

The radical painter creates an object whosecontent is dependent on the intrinsic logic of itsown material form, claim Marioni and Umberg(Outside the Cartouche 22). This logic has to beunderstood in terms of what they call the functionof this object (23). Paintings are not foundobjects; they are manmade and hence must beunderstood in terms of the purpose or functionthat motivates their making (19). Of coursepaintings can be made for a variety of purposes,including the purpose of representation. Butrepresentation would be a purpose external to thelogic of the material form of the painting. Thematerial itself has perceptual content that isintrinsic to its function (24); the support, forinstance, is an object whose specific purpose isto-be-painted (ibid.). According to this func-tional definition, then, flatness could not, logi-cally, be the essence of the painting, becauseeverything about the painting has to be under-stood in relation to what Marioni and Umberg

could easily have called the telos of the painting-object or object-that-is-a-painting, which irre-ducibly involves being painted.11 Unlike, say, awall that one paints, the painting-support iscreated purely in view of this function.(Greenberg ignored this fact and thus curiouslygave way to literal literalism when he started tothink of the flatness of the support in abstractionfrom the purpose for which painting-supports aremade.) The function of the whole painting, inturn, is to be perceived as a painting, to givehuman beings the perceptual experience that isthe experience of looking-at-a-painting, where thepainting, and not the illusion of space or thefigure of something in the world, is indeed whatis looked at and where, of course, this entirecomplex of function, artifact, and experience isconstituted conventionally by a given societywith a given history. The functions of the physi-cal support and its qualities, including flatness,are definable only with reference to the functionof the full perceptual unity that is defined by thishistory, or by a certain appropriation of it, as thefinished painting; and the form or essence of thefinished painting is the color-image that itconstitutes. In the final analysis, the objectnessof the painting is color (ibid.); all the physicalparts of which the painting is made are broughtinto their unity of aesthetic form by their subor-dination to the color. This does not mean thatthey are effaced, as was the tendency in represen-tational painting. On the contrary, color is adimension of materiality and the radical painter isnot trying to detach it from materiality. Aristotledefines color as the limit of the translucent in adeterminately bounded body. This is a superbdefinition for the painter. It locates color within amaterial (even though it is, in Aristotles concept,the outermost part of a thing) and it implies thelimitation of its form as material (24). The colorof a painting, if it gives the rule to the physicalconstituents, is itself bound to or determined bytheir materiality (first of all, that of the paint) asthis materiality has historically evolved in relationto the evolving function of painting. But the sizeand shape and texture and absorptiveness of thesupport, the relation to the wall, and so forth,must co-operate in an overall perception, the deci-sive or ruling factor of which is color. Color is the

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essence of the painting in much the way that forAristotle the soul is the essence or form of thebody. Even though the form is in perceptiondetached from the material, substance or ousia isembodied form; and the radical painting is ousiaas embodied color.

How can color be a form? A form is by defin-ition bounded or what gives boundary; Aristotlehimself in the Poetics used the drawn line as aparadigm of form, but the drawn line is one ofthe remnants of representation that the radicalpainter eschews in his search for openness. Butcolor becomes, or can become, a form when itfinds the absolutely specific, bounded body thatit reciprocally determines and is determined by.There is no notional answer to the question ofhow color can function as form, only the histori-cal fact that certain painters have worked out anaesthetic and a painting-practice that treats it assuch, and the proof is in the experience of theirwork (or not).

art vs. craft

If Radical Painting is what gives importance toyet another reconsideration, at this late date, ofthe logic of modernism, what gives importance toradical painting itself is the act of aesthetic judg-ment that says this is good to the work ofRyman or Marioni or Umberg. And this aestheticjudgment itself, made in the strong form thatboth Greenberg and Fried emphasize, in which itexpresses not just a feeling of pleasure but a judg-ment of aesthetic quality, is indissociable fromknowledge of modernism as a tradition of specificself-criticism. This tradition has not primarilybeen a matter of conceptual formulations anddeductions concerning conventions and thestate of the medium, but an education for theeye, yet an education that has of course essen-tially involved the brain and language as well asthe hand and the brush, and increasingly so asthe tradition has become more articulately self-aware a self-awareness that has increasinglybecome, among the practitioners of the art, anexplicit logic of purism and reduction to theessence. Whatever it might be for the theorist,the concept of essence is for the painter not adogmatic doctrinal simplification but a tool with

which to meditate on materiality and objecthoodand which through this meditation participates inbringing forth new work. The theorist might,correspondingly, avail himself of the concept in anon-metaphysical, ordinary-language way, as ahistorically contingent notion, in something likethe way Fried already proposed in Art andObjecthood. Nevertheless, if Greenbergs owndogmatic reduction is too essentialist to beuseful, Frieds version of a contingent essence ofmodernism is a little too flexible to capture whatis distinctive about Radical Painting.

Greenberg himself suggested that the idea ofpurity could be merely an illusion, but auseful one, that had led to good new develop-ments among the artists under its spell. The ideaof a mere illusion functioning in this way,however, is a hangover from nineteenth-centurypositivism and is inadequate to describe the func-tional role, within the micrology of radical paint-ing practice, of the idea of reducing painting toits fundamentals. It is necessary to take the ideaof an essence of painting seriously in order tounderstand Radical Painting from within, andeven really to see it, to see it understandingly inits profound relation, not along one axis but interms of a myriad of threads, to a tradition out ofwhich this work grows, and which is retrospec-tively reconstituted once again as a tradition,with a somewhat altered meaning, in view of thisnew development.

Such conviction of aesthetic quality as may bederived from a radical painting, because specificto the historical-conceptual lineage of the type ofartwork in question, is not of the transcendentallycompulsory sort implied by De Duves version ofKantian aesthetic judgment. The version ofspecificity that I am arguing here implies thatone can, and indeed ought to, refrain from thejudgment this is art while making the judgmentthis is a good painting. This is not to deny thatthe generic concept of art is meaningful; only tosay that the large questions of art that De Duveraises obfuscate the issue of the logic of reductionin the history of modern painting at least alongthe line that leads to Radical Painting. If oneknows the most resourceful form of the thesisabout reduction to the essence, and if one hasspent enough time looking at the most serious

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work that has been produced either on the basisof this thesis or in a way that supports it, then onecan in principle have an aesthetic experience thatstands up to the experience one has had of theaesthetic objects that have formed ones sense ofoptimal aesthetic experience; but it is only as aquite specific experience that one can have it.Contrary to De Duve, it is not only not necessaryto judge this is art before one can judge this isa painting, and a good one; it is necessary not todo so (though one might go on to the genericjudgment afterwards, recognizing that one is nowswitching language-games in so doing).

As in any other question of aesthetic experi-ence, the judgment of quality in front of a radi-cal painting is not a matter of deduction and it isnot compulsory. But Radical Painting has theearmarks of a well-grounded and valid aestheticmovement, and forces a reconsideration of ques-tions that had seemed to be closed when it lookedas though the modernist logic had hit a dead end.What all this betokens regarding the larger ques-tions of the culture wars is a further questionthat I will touch on below; for now what I wantto stress is that, if we are going to use modernismas an example of anything on the way to a largerargument, we should address it in its fullness asa historically evolving phenomenon, along withthe most resourceful statement of its rationale ortheory; and this involves criticizing and reject-ing Greenbergs own dogmatic theses and DeDuves interpretation of them.

Nevertheless, I want to pay tribute to thescope and seriousness of Kant after Duchamp,particularly because of the framework of sociopo-litical reflection that gives point to De Duvesgenealogical reconsideration of modernistpainting. My remarks here have focused onnarrowly aesthetic issues, and I recognize thatthese issues may appear trivial compared tothe question of the cultural and political missionof the artist, in the context of the great upheavalsof the twentieth century, which De Duve triesto understand. I am especially troubled by the problem of the esoteric nature of themodernistformalist aesthetic I have defendedhere, its seemingly elitist adherence to a refine-ment of aesthetic taste that can perhaps only everbe the possession of a privileged few. I have no

doubt that the ultimate and genuine significanceof the debates over essentialism are rooted in theproblems of democratization that De Duveaddresses.

However, the great democratizing movementthat De Duve sees as the legacy of Duchamp everyone an artist, the artwork as anything what-ever is achieved at the cost of an elision of thephysical labor involved in making a work of art,and which is the ultimate source of the worksspecificity. Duchamp did not make his urinal,but someone or a group of someones did anony-mous workmen in a urinal factory. I am not soworried about the possibility that artworks couldbe automatically created by deduction from alogic (a rather specialized and even artificialproblem, in my view) as I am by the fact that thework of their making could then be assigned tosomeone else, or, in the case of the readymades,has already been done by someone else. One ofthe things that strikes me most about Rymans,Marionis, and Umbergs art is that, for all itsconceptual sophistication, it has a strong affinitywith craft an affinity that, incidentally, goesback to the roots of modernist art-theory inBaudelaire, that great early debunker of thegenius-and-inspiration theory of aesthetics andpioneer of the notion that the specific province ofpoetry is language as a material medium.12

Marioni and Umberg, in a striking move,compared the purpose and usability of theirpaintings to that of an ordinary chair (Outsidethe Cartouche 2324); and Marioni goes so far asto entirely abjure the honorific art for his work,defining his work strictly and solely as painting.

We are so inured to thinking of painting as artthat Marionis resistance to this assimilationmight seem incomprehensible or even senseless.If painting isnt art, what is it? And if it isnt art,why should it have any claim on our attention?

Marionis stubborn adherence to the speci-ficity of the practice of painting indicates anethicopolitical resonance of the question of themedium, of its irreducibly material nature, andof the craftsmans attunement to that materiality,which modernity, first in the aftermath of Kantsand Romanticisms infatuation with genius,later under the spell of the poststructuralistAufhebung of materiality into language, has had

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trouble keeping consistently in view in spite ofthe modernist intervention. The continuingsignificance of the thesis of specificity is for megrounded in the indissociability it suggests of thelabor of the artist from the specific nature of hismedium in its complex, socially conditionedmateriality which is the same as the indissocia-bility of art from its craft-aspect. The genericjudgment this is art is no doubt necessary inthe language-game that has developed around artthat intentionally wanders away from theconstraints of established, specific art-forms. AsI have tried to show in this essay, however, thisdevelopment does not mean that some genericjudgment of value has now superseded, whollyand in all contexts, the modernist logic of speci-ficity. Moreover, De Duves arguments that apicture must be judged to be art before it can bejudged to be a picture, and that the judgmentthis is beautiful is identical with the judgmentthis is art, strike me as no friendlier to ademocratization of art and the creative processthan they are to the vacuous cult of art-fetishismof which we already see signs in Kants almosthelpless awe before the inexplicability of genius,and of which the only slightly more foolishdescendant is the contemporary worship of theart-superstar.13

In this essay I can only indicate the outlinesof the full theorization that Radical Paintinginvites, and to which the current notion of theconventionality of art practices is so inadequate.The convergence once more at this late date inhistory of the notions of art and craft requires arethinking of the entire history of the concept ofart as this history has been configured by theevolutionary narrative of its emergence morethan once; in ancient Greece and again in the lateMiddle Ages in its purity from a more gener-alized notion of making. Modernism iscommonly and rightly understood as thefinal step in the emergence of the pure conceptof art, and Greenbergs ideas about the speci-ficity of the individual arts are an importantchapter in the history of this emergence. Hencethe notion that Radical Painting is a continua-tion of the logic of modernism, yet an overcom-ing of the distinction between art and craft,might seem paradoxical.

The paradox is neither illusory nor necessary.The truth is that more than one thread of logictraverses the history of modernism, and where weend up depends on which thread we take up. DeDuve has articulated for us with great precisionthe decisive line that is crossed with Duchampand conceptualism, when, following one develop-ment of the logic of specificity, the bond betweenartistic practice and the specificity of the mediumis broken and the concept of art emerges in itsown generic rather than specific purity. Once thisbond is broken, everything about art begins todissolve in the universal medium of discursivity,and this marks the final break between theprofession of the artist and the guild tradition inwhich this profession had continued to be,however distantly, rooted. What I have tried toshow in this essay is that the terms in whichRadical Painting is conceived are terms that leadus ineluctably away from the universal solvent ofdiscursivity and back toward the realm of mater-ial practices. I have been concerned to show thatthere is nothing naive about this turn; that itincorporates as an essential part of its conceptionand of its practice a reflection on the conven-tional nature of the materiality of the medium that this, too, is a rigorous unfolding of the logicof specificity.14

I am more inclined to the latter than theformer development for two interrelated reasons.First (a point I have stressed), because the subla-tionist narrative empties most or all of the mate-riality out of the notion of the medium, in favorof the notion of convention. Radical Painting, bycontrast, in its reflection on the materiality of themedium, does not in any way slight the conven-tional element in this materiality. Second,because the sublationist dematerialization of themedium opens out an unlimited field of criticaldiscursivity about art in which the critic or theo-rist is authorized to say practically anything sincethe entire cultural field can now be framed asaesthetic and art itself in this postmodernregime, as Rosalind Krauss writes, mimics justthis leeching of the aesthetic out into the socialfield in general.15 Not everyone will considerthis a demerit; and I myself do not believe in anyjuridical prohibition on the critics discoursebecoming autotelic, nor am I immune to the

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pleasures of postmodern cultural aesthetics.Nevertheless, there is something specific to thepainters, sculptors, musicians practice thatis also autotelic, or which might be so conceived,and as so conceived made the basis of that prac-tice, and to which justice can be done only by acritical discourse that does not auto-authorizeitself but binds itself as tightly as possible to thatpractice in the fullness of its conventional mate-riality.

Here I can only sketch the outlines of the full,historically articulated account of human praxisas a whole that would constitute a more adequateaccount of artistic convention as grounded inwhat I have been calling conventional material-ity.16 Such an account would take as its funda-mental reference points, on the one hand,Aristotles analysis of the teleology of humanpractices and, on the other hand, Marxs analysisof human productive activity, that is humanlabor as the foundational fact of social existence.

A fully articulated theory of conventionalmateriality would begin with the beginnings ofhuman culture in order to excavate the residue offatality, the unpredictable system of limits, thatarises at the point of intersection of multiple actsof individual exertion that are carried on withina social context and leave their residue on thephysical world, long before the emergence ofeven the most rudimentary arts and crafts, andeven before the advent of language. The mostprimordial inscriptions on the world of theseresidues are the rubbing clear of the groundwhere a group of humans or proto-humans sits torest or lies down to sleep, of pathways where onewalks after the other, of trees stripped bare offruit around these inscribed areas so that thepeople are constrained to move along, frayingnew paths and making new clearings. Here is thebeginning of history as the simple deposit ofaccumulated acts within the context of sociality,and the landscape is the incipiently socializedmateriality that serves as the support of thisinscription. Later on in history, as Marx observesin The German Ideology, there will no longer beany nature left; it will all have been absorbed intothe network of cultural inscription; in this earlierperiod there is as yet nothing that can be calleda convention, and nevertheless there is already

the interaction between sociality and the physicalworld that leaves a perduring trace that then actsas a partial determinant on the purposeful actionof human beings: precisely the fundamentalstructure that underlies those later features ofsocial activity, more complexly sedimented withthe history of a culture, that are properly under-stood as conventions. Then there begins themaking of tools, which are once again initially theresidue of repeated acts of fraying, say to make apoint or an edge, and the material of which thetool is made hard or frangible, offering a firmgrasp or slippery, etc. together with the shapewith which it has now been inscribed, is hence-forth a fatality or system of limits that conditionsthe further development of the sociality that hasbrought it into being as just this tool (and even,as some theorists have argued, the further devel-opment of the human brain itself). The methodsby which the tool is made are themselves thesocial inscription of historically accumulatedindividual acts in their effective interaction withthe material of the tool, and might have their ownfurther development in interaction with newmaterials and in combination with methodsderived from other contexts. Now labor, craft,and art might begin to be differentiated; but theyare part of a matrix that never entirely comesundone or, rather, that ought never be allowedto come entirely undone.

What is brought to light in such an account,beyond or beneath the question of conventions, isthe teleology of social practice that conditions allmateriality within culture, and which ordains thatpraxis must always be grounded in its specificity.It seems to me that an essential beginning towardthe thinking-through of this problematic and atprecisely the conjunction between Aristotle andMarx was made by Georg Lukcs in his finalwork, The Ontology of Social Being. Throughlabour, a teleological positing is realized withinmaterial being, as the rise of a new objectivity.The first consequence of this is that labourbecomes the model for anysocial practice, for in such socialpractice no matter how rami-fied its mediations teleologicalpositings are always realized, andultimately realized materially.17

radical painting

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notes

1 The movement was formally baptized in thepublic eye by a special issue of KunstforumInternational (Mar.Apr. 1987), edited by AmioneHaase, that focused on Radikale Malerei. Amongthe pieces included in this issue are my JosephMarioni: Malerei Jenseits Narrativitt and articleson Umberg and other German radical painterswho have continued to figure significantly: UllrichWellman, Ingo Meller, and Peter Tollens.

2 See the essay on Umberg by HanneloreKersting, Painting as Articulated Paint, in thecatalogue to the exhibition Gunter Umberg,Stdelsches Kunstinstitut Frankfurt, 1985.

3 Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp(Cambridge: MIT P, 1996). All citations of DeDuve refer to this volume.

4 All citations of Greenberg are to ClementGreenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,Modernism with a Vengeance (Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1993).

5 Painting and picture are normally synonymous inart-critical talk, and I wont object to this usage.However, the idea that there can be an unpaintedpicture seems to me to dissimulate an absurditythat is patent in the phrase unpainted painting.This absurdity that Greenberg created is exploitedat great length by De Duve, who buys into itbecause it serves his purposes admirably.

6 Stedelijk Museum Catalog, 1975; quoted bySauer in Christel Sauer and Urs Rausmller (eds.),Robert Ryman, catalog for Ryman exhibition in theEspace dArt Contemporain, 1991, 31.

7 Joseph Marioni and Gnther Umberg, Outside theCartouche: Zur Frage des Betrachters in der RadikalenMalerei. English and German; German trans.Nikolaus Hoffmann and Rolf Taschen (Munich:Neue Kunst, 1986). Umbergs work in the 1990stook new directions; in this essay I refer only tothe period of his collaboration with Marioni.

8 Aristotle remarks in the Poetics, chapter 10, thatin a painting the most beautiful pigments smearedon at random will not give as much pleasure as ablack-and-white outline picture. Aristotle, Poetics,trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P)28. And Kant comments in the Third Critique thatdelineation is the essential thing in all the forma-tive arts (61), and painting is the foremost ofthese arts because as the art of delineation it lies

at the root of all the others (175). Kant, Critiqueof Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York:Hafner, 1951).

9 Behind this belief of Greenbergs, once again wemight discern Kant, for whom express rulescannot be the basis on which an art is transmitted.For Kant, there is no middle term between thepure originating power, granted by nature, of thegenius, on the one hand, and the explicit rules thatthe schools derive from the geniuss originalworks of art in order to train subordinate, unorig-inal talents to trudge in his footsteps. An art devel-ops historically by the immediate communicationof the inspiring force of nature from one genius toanother, without the mediation of rules. Kantthinks of the tekhne of an art only in this sense ofexpress rules; he has no concept of the mediumin the modern or modernist sense not as asystem of explicit rules but as an ensemble of tech-niques in dialectical interaction with the material-ity of a specific material (words, tones, colors,stone, etc.). Third Critique, sects. 4550.

10 Despite the impression De Duve creates of asudden choice in favor of quality in 1962, thisdistinction had been consistently maintained byGreenberg. The remark from 1959 is worth quot-ing in full: I still know of nothing in abstract paint-ing, aside perhaps from some of the near-abstractCubist works that Picasso, Braque, and Legerexecuted between 1910 and 1914, which matchesthe highest achievements of the old masters.Abstract painting may be a purer, more quintes-sential form of pictorial art than the representa-tional kind, but this does not of itself confer qualityon an abstract picture. The ratio of bad abstractpainting to good is actually much higher than theratio of bad to good representational painting.The Case for Abstract Art 82. And in AfterAbstract Expressionism itself, Greenberg refersto his 1948 refusal of the dogmatism that heldthat one species of art must in a given period bebetter than any other species, and then assertsthat Pollocks and Gorkys pictures stayedfurther behind their frames than Mondrians orPicassos post-1913 pictures did, but that goingbackwards in terms of the evolution of style wasat that time almost the only way to go forward interms of major quality (124). The simple state-ment in 1964 that form as such is a neutralelement as far as quality is concerned (180) thusreaffirms Greenbergs consistent view. Cf. Fried,who agrees that Greenberg is right to say that he

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never presented flatness and the inclosing of flat-ness as criteria of quality (66).

11 The conclusion that a painting must be painted,obvious from the ordinary persons standpoint,and which I am thus slightly embarrassed to draw,has to be argued in the face of De Duves argu-ment, which keeps alive Greenbergs suggestionthat a painting (or picture) need not be painted(see n. 5 above).

12 See Graham Chester, Baudelaire and the Poeticsof Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

13 I say almost helpless because Kant doeschoose the primacy of rules over mere undisci-plined genius.

14 Yet another, deconstruction-based, develop-ment of the logic of specificity is that by RosalindKrauss, who in her reading of Marcel Broodthaersargues that the specificity of mediums, evenmodernist ones, must be understood as differen-tial, self-differing, and thus as a layering of conven-tions never simply collapsed into the physicality oftheir support. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art inthe Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York:Thames, 1999) 53. Although the artist shediscusses, and the theory she elaborates, are verydistant from Radical Painting, her essay, like mine,rejects the vulgar idea of the medium as a layer-ing of conventions simply collapsed into thephysicality of their support.

15 A Voyage on the North Sea 56.

16 The earliest stimulus to the interpretationof Radical Painting, and the following reflectionson praxis, that I present here was a fascinatingessay by Lothar Romain on Analytical Painting,a movement which I interpret as a precursorof Radical Painting. See Lothar Romain, TheArtistic Truth of Things that Exist: ReflectionsPertaining to (the Theory of) Analytical Painting,trans. Antony de Nardini and Paul Angusin A Proposito della Pittura/Bettrefende HetSchilderen/Concerning Painting, catalogue MuseumVan BommelVan Dam Venlo/Stedelijk MuseumSchiedam/Hedenaagse Kunst Utrecht 197576,2732.

17 Georg Lukcs, The Ontology of Social Being:Labour (London: Merlin, 1980) 3. This volume is atranslation of the first chapter of Part Two of thelarger work.

radical painting

Henry StatenDepartment of EnglishUniversity of WashingtonBox 35436Seattle, WA 98195USAE-mail: hstaten@u.washington.edu

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He jotted down this thought, if it can be called that, on a loose sheet of paper, hoping to use it later,perhaps in some pondered statement about the mystery of writing which will probably culminate, fol-lowing the definitive lessons of the poet, in the precise and sober declaration that the mystery of writ-ing lies in the absence of any mystery whatsoever, which if accepted, might lead us to the conclusionthat if there is no mystery about writing, neither can there be any mystery about the writer.

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ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/010089-01 2002 John X. Berger

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