It is great fun to complain about the art market and the promotional machine, especially the gnawing fear that the exaltation and trauma of aesthetic experience is irrelevant to that machine. But if we nobodies can offer any resistance, it is only by continuing the conversation at the level of irrelevancy. There is a lot of painting out there, and some of it is very good, but there is also anxiety about the discourse around painting, and a fear that we rarely advance past a scorecard of stylistic referents. This might be the price we pay for the permissiveness that comes with a lack of centrality.

At the 2007 College Art Association conference, Lane Relyea chaired a panel on abstract painting and the thickness of paint. This was in partial response to a question that emerged in Artforum’s 2002 roundtable on death-of-painting theory and its aftermath. Robert Storr complained about a crisp, graphic quality to some paintings, noting that it seemed as if the painter wanted to get the material aspect out of the way in order to focus on the image, which is usually borrowed from the broader media. The following remarks are adapted from my contribution to that panel.

I would not presume to claim for any artist that facture is unimportant. Paintings have material qualities, and the visibility of these qualities seems to vary according to climate. For example, the viscous tactility of Gerhard Richter’s 1960s black and white photo-based paintings is always striking. At the time, these were aggressively antagonistic to the craft of painting, but now they are positively luxurious. This is not just because we read them through the lens of Richter’s own sentimental turn, because in a book, they are just as polemical as was the younger Richter’s rhetoric. Their tactility is still almost invisible in reproduction.

Reproduction remains a key issue for painting today. While Richter took reproduction on as intellectual and plastic subject matter, problematizing both photography and painting, some painters today vault over reproduction as a given, producing work that appears made for reproduction, or already having been reproduced. Again, I will not say that a painting by Sarah Morris is without tactility, but her mode of pictorial organization is easily translatable into other formats, as is evident in her installation at Lever House. Nothing essential to Morris’ work is lost in this project, because, as a trafficker in images, she is concerned with the significance communicated by her crisscrossing lines and colored facets.

Part of Morris’s subject matter is arguably Modernism’s formal language as refracted through the mechanical and digital image stream. Her work contains the memory of Mondrian, but Mondrian in reproduction. This earlier artist’s facture is imbued with an awkwardness and urgency that might come from the belief that he was making a difference. It would be a mistake to attempt to rekindle the utopian ambitions of 20th century Modernism, just as it would be a mistake to take too seriously the either/or dialectic that seems to be set up by the preceding comparison. For the purposes of a discussion of facture I do not propose that we should divide painters into thick vs thin and then assign concepts like authenticity or cynicism accordingly. Rather, we should note that while the materiality of paint and surface is not a major issue for some, paint still speaks more than one language for the others. In other words, painters rely on tactility for different reasons. Thick paint can be deployed as part of an existent code, or it can be integrated with the surface of the painting in a way that intimates the ongoing process. The latter mode often uses less actual paint, but relies on the materials as having-been-worked, instead of as part of a pictorial code. A brief consideration of the work of Jonathan Lasker and Robert Ryman will clarify this opposition.