Painting as commitment

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre opens What is Literature? with the comment: 'No, we do not want to "commit" painting, sculpture, and music "too", or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to?'. Sartre's idea of the committed writer was a dominant and evocative account of intellectuals of the Left in the immediate postwar period, but was superseded with the arrival of 'theory' from Althusser onwards; and with post-structuralist notions fully decentering the subject. What might this mean for the painter? Taking an existential account of painting as its starting point, the article offers a reappraisal of the anti-aesthetic and postmodern debates of the 1980s, and suggests the need to re-situate painting as commitment in itself. Rather than simply the need to place painting within wider social networks, it is the inherent appeal to freedom that remains significant about the medium.

Baggage reclaim: Some thoughts on feminism and painting

“…As Hilary Robinson has pointed out, late modernism's characterization of painting as a repository of feeling, transferred and embedded by the artist in the work's facture, has led to feminist analyses that are more at home discussing image than 'engag [ing] with the materiality of the work' (Robinson 2006: 111). For a generation of women painters the shadow of Abstract Expressionism loomed large over initial attempts to explore painting from a feminist (or indeed any critical) perspective, and discussion of materiality tended to centre on the gestural mark or, what Frederic Jameson calls, the 'distinctive, individual brush stroke' (Manghani 2017: NB reference to article in same issue). Margaret Iversen points out the challenge to the dominance of the gesture as it occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the need to 'clear the air of metaphysical cant which surrounded Abstract Expressionism, especially the importance attached to the unique individuality of the expressionist gesture' (Iversen 1986: 91).…”

On situating painting: An interview with Karin Kneffel

“…The critic David Joselit, in 'Painting Besides Itself' (2009), has remarked upon what it means to place paintings in 'networks' (prompted in part by the ubiquity of digital networks). I have been critical of his account (Manghani, 2016), but I wonder if perhaps your paintings seen through the glass of the pavilion get a little a closer to the idea of transitivity he raises -and specifically because the very aesthetic you are engaged in is further replicated by situating the paintings through the glass, which in turn makes the work available to a 'network' of public viewing, (no doubt to be carried away by a further replication of screens as people photograph the site through their mobile phones).…”