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Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given

John Hunt Publishing Ltd

Andrew Montalban: A Death Retold (1984)

When Andrew Montalban made his first sequence of paintings, on what he called 'absent disclosure', in 1979, he had long thought that 'abstraction' was a poor concept for anything that painting might want to do after late modernism and its retinue of formal constraints. In this respect he bristles at the idea that if painting is to recover a future for itself it has to revive a relationship with 'abstractedness', as if 'abstractedness' was what painters needed in order to reclaim their historic vitality; or at least get out of bed in the morning. Abstraction, he says, encourages either the "hysteric or the depressive." But, then, he also recognizes that abstraction at least cleared up an abiding problem in painting after modernism: you either fill up the space, or you don't fill up the space; you either rough up the surface or you don't rough up the surface. Either is good; there is no maximum or minimum level of expressive detail that secures 'painterly interest' or what he calls "painterly exactitude." This is why Vladimir Malevich's entropic break with all the descriptive machinery of naturalism and realism, and with the bio-forms of early twentieth-century 'half-figuration', was so overwhelmingly liberating, he declares. Painting finally got rid of all that overburdened expressive zeal and humanist claustrophobia. But there is a downside, one that the current postmodernists deny or ignore in the hope that filling things up again, in tumbling, florid, sumptuous (non-sumptuary) ways, will make things better or less historically burdensome: after Malevich, filling things up and stripping things out of painting lives out a kind of wretchedness and self-disgrace. Gerhard Richter is one of the few painters of the moment who embraces this wretchedness and self-disgrace with any alacrity; and Montalban acknowledges this as a strength in the painter, quite separate from the painter's appeal to the contemporary debate on simulation and the critique of authorship. But at the same time, Montalban mistrusts the high cultural élan of Richter's work, its self-evident adjustment to museum and painterly spectacle. Indeed, it is hard not to see Richter as using the historical degradation of painting to mount a concerted revival of a precious, fin de siècle melancholia. Formally, lying somewhere between a disordering vision of 'Germania' (each painting stands as a historical death-head) and the reification of painting-as-good-design under the aegis of the Werkbund, the reflux-deluxe 'history painting' of Richter is openly operatic and Wagnerian. "Richter is the master of opulent negation; my paintings, are kind of scraggy and workaday by comparison."

As such, Montalban knows he's not a classical modernist trying to redeem the fallen, heroic past, but neither does he find any appeal in the present range of postmodern displacements and catch-alls. In fact, he doesn't think painting needs 'revivifying', 'revitalizing', 'rehistoricizing' at all; painting can only replenish itself through the patient recognition and constant reassimilation and foregrounding of its own death. And this is why there is no metaphoric ambiguity on this matter for Montalban. Painting, without doubt, he insists, has died; the reality of this is unambiguous, indefatigable. Hence painting has not passed away in name – as the postmodernists believe – to be thereafter revived in spirit; it is historically and culturally overthrown. There is absolutely no mistake about this: "this is not anti-art rhetoric or a nihilistic bluff." But this is precisely what makes it potentially interesting as an end-state condition, he adds; and why 'black' as the historic and philosophic colour of its death and mourning for its past is for Montalban what gives painting, paradoxically, its possible 'lightness' as an activity. For, in its insistent entropic blackness, it makes no show of anything but painting's own intractability, foreclosure and repose. In this respect painting-as-blackness, in its suspended telos, is a relentless a-rhythmic recall and reinscription of painting's demise.

In Darkened Interiors: Belize (1980), a sequence of four black-on-black-on-black-on-black canvases (63cm × 108cm), speckled in various places with tiny, almost-invisible clusters of silver and white dots, Malevich's original black-on-black is re-haunted through Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black; that is, the overlapping of black-on-black-on-black-on-black is not a pastiche of both artists' work, but, in its a-rhythmic recall, an asymmetrical assimilation of their negations in continuity. This is why Montalban's painting operates as a philosophical extension of Malevich and Reinhardt's prior end-moves; a 'holding to' the claims of these negations as a reinvention of the enlightened horizon of the death of painting. The strategy of black-on-black, therefore, is the creative negative substance of painting's historical continuity, and not the nihilistic emptying of its history. One of his favourite quotes is from Daniel Buren's 'It Rains, It Snows, It Paints' from Five Essays (1973):

"Art-and-anti-art" now constitute a single unit, defining limits within which art is continually bounced back and forth. What finally happens is that the notions of art and anti-art cancel each other out, and all our cherished beliefs: art as affirmation, art as protest, art as the expression of individuality, art as interpretation, art as aestheticism (art for art's sake), art as humanism, are stripped of significance. The artist task is no longer to find a new form of art or counter art with a new anti-form; either pursuit is henceforth totally pointless.

Perhaps this is not exactly the enlightened horizon of supersession and death, in the light of Buren's institutional practice since the early 1970s, yet there is certainly a point of congruence here. Anti-art is not, in respect of the radical formal reduction of painting, an attack on or refusal of art at all. Rather it is liberation from what art history has willingly accepted as the class-bound space and destiny of human creativity. Montalban, therefore, acknowledges Buren's implicit rejection of this class-bound destiny, yet refuses to speak of the 'pointlessness of art' in the period of this oppressive interregnum. Such a position is simply the 'death of painting' as a torpid theme, a capitulation to enervation and bad faith. Hence there is an exacting content to repetition and re-inscription, and it lies, precisely, in the (asymmetrical) re-functioning of intention in the recovery of honoured antecedents. The work in its repetitive insistence on precedent is a renewed and re-articulated moment of challenge and expectation.

Thus we need to adjust our periodization of art in the twentieth century. Art's entropy in the early period of modernist negation is not a dissolution of art's energies, but, in a withdrawal from the routine of appearances, a betting on something beyond art itself, or, more precisely, beyond how it is presently conceived: an art that knows no distinction between form, life and praxis, and, accordingly, offers the negation of the negation as a living continuum, in which art and non-art co-exist. So, we need to recalibrate our capacity for imaginative construction in looking at Montalban's Darkened Interiors: Belize, and the two series he produced immediately after, Darkened Interiors: Madrid (1981) and Darkened Interiors: Malaga (1982). Black-on-black-on-black-on-black is the promise of the Absolute and not the defeated sign of 'end times'. In this respect it is easy to confuse this sequence of works with the current apocalyptic mood and ethos, where every painter of critical ambition wants to link a post-minimalist grammar in painting with metaphors of social implosion. Metaphoring enclosure and the carceral (Foucault) is not what concerns Montalban. Indeed, there is something feebly elevated and pleonastic about such moves, as if entropy needs a sugared pill to make it palatable and modern and relevant. In contrast, what concerns Montalban is that the wretchedness and self-disgrace of painting turns the viewer of the art 'outwards' or beyond its phenomenal forms to history itself. The cognitive demands of the painting derive from what the painting presupposes beyond its inert conditions. Consequently, the value of the work does not merely lie in the way the spectator adjusts to the immanent translation of black into black into black into black, but in how the density of the black – its historical density – severs the art experience from the presented object. In meeting the phenomenal non-event of the blackness, cognition and thought move out beyond the edges of the painting, of the subjectivity of the artist, of the institution, into those social spaces that blackness and entropy presuppose and invite for reflection. There is a discussion to be had, then, as much on the epistemological character of blackness (and history) as on painting.

To paint in black as if to paint as black – as a kind of blackening – is to refuse certain assurances and even civilities of making art. Art is abandoned to the expulsive – nothing discrete gets back in, so to speak. Yet, of course, such expulsion cannot secure the conditions of exclusion absolutely. For if the diurnal and the ontic are refused admittance in this kind of painting, aesthetics and the aestheticized spectator are not. No painting, however bleak, self-negating, tawdry, 'empty', blank, sans-light is free from the transcendental aesthetic move, that is, free from the place that the work initially sets out to negate in anger and dismay: the unearned pleasure generated by academic art and modernist aesthetics. Which makes the move to black-on-black a profoundly disappointing experience for the painter hoping for radical cultural transformation and the emancipation of art from bourgeois aestheticism (as Malevich and Reinhardt soon found out). In anti-art and anti-aestheticism, the non-disclosure of the ontic always creates its own distinct aesthetic pleasures – hence the self-disgrace attached to the pursuit of such forms of anti-aestheticism. The simplest and most emphatic acts of withdrawal and obduracy become, inevitably, the small change of aesthetic assimilation. But, paradoxically, this unavoidable submission to aesthetic transcendentalism in the name of anti-art is all to the good for Montalban: for, post-Malevich and post-Reinhardt, there is nothing to lose by an admission of the intractable aestheticism of the artwork. The historical achievements of Malevich and Reinhardt, for all their own artistic and political disappointments, were precisely of this order: namely, that they exposed the mystificatory nature of anti-art as a would-be antibourgeois escape from this condition. Painting cannot but produce a 'transcendental effect', even in its most abject state of wretchedness and miserliness. Therefore, the artist should treat this as the limit horizon of the painterly experience – as a given realist premise of painterly wretchedness – and therefore an opportunity for reflection on what this might provide on the other side of painting and art under bourgeois culture. This means we need some additional philosophical help from Hegel's thinking on blackness and death.

The death of painting, in its blackness imagined or actual (in the case of Montalban), is what Hegel saw, in his account of historical time, as the putting to work of historical limits. That which is judged to be superseded is not lost to the past, nor simply assimilated through its negations, but is in fact determinate on the outcome, direction and content of the process of supersession. In other words, that which has been subsumed or transcended acts on the conditions of possibility of the present and our understanding and critical uses of the past. We might argue therefore, in these terms, that the death of painting is the agency of a new beginning, but that this new beginning is not freely given; the new beginning is preconditioned and shaped by the continuing traction and intractabilities of the past. This is because, although dead, painting is not in fact empirically 'over' at all (as the privileged form of the art commodity), nor can it be under commodity exchange, and, therefore, its death continues to determine art's reflection on its historical condition as a delimited life-in-death – irrespective of the expansion of recent practice beyond painting, into art 'in the expanded field'. A new beginning as the same in difference, as the form of this life-in-death, is the means, therefore, by which this historical gap between transcendental aesthetic effect and hollowed out tradition is foregrounded as a continuing problem of value. But the foregrounding of this gap is not just a theoretical exercise, as if painting can now only be practiced to serve notice on its exchange value and art's market culpability: all the post-medium practices that presently have taken the place of painting are no less subject to these forces and pressures, so painting has no privileged commodity status, even if the market inflates painting's exchange value. This is why to treat painting as formally redundant – as a set of limited and repeatable formal moves to hang the critique of the commodity on – is to use repetition merely as an oxymoronic strategy of negation. That is, if painting is dead and paintings are hypostatic commodities, as the argument goes, then let us endlessly repeat painting's entropic condition, in the heightened spirit of this hypostasis as a commodified death. Rather, the recourse to repetition, to life-in-death as painting, is a way of staging what the aesthetic promises, beyond its capture by the commodity form and a dead tradition. In other words, the moment of transcendental aesthetic disclosure displayed in works such as Montalban's, (which palpably reject painterly aesthetics and painting's would-be aesthetic telos), represents the possibility of an aesthetic thinking – an aesthetics of life and praxis – beyond the tendentious elevation of certain historical forms, and not a rejection of aesthetics per se. Aesthetics, then, housed in the life-in-death tradition of black-on-black-on-black-on-black painting, is also, paradoxically, a recognition that the job of the artist is as much to defeat this oxymoronic critique of the commodity form (critique as inert repetition), as it is to take his or her distance from bourgeois aestheticism. Both positions close down the supplementary space and encounter of the transcendental aesthetic effect as a social and collective experience.

Black-on-black-on-black-on-black, then, is the enlightened, light-giving, lightened promissory act of the artist; if this is a (dark) gift that goes on giving, however, it is gift not of form per se, but of artistic practice, deliberation and strategy. Hence we should take seriously the fact that Buren quotes Maurice Blanchot in 'It Rains, It Snows, It Paints', from L'Espace Littéraire (1955). For Blanchot provides us in this book, and in particular in the essay 'Littérature et le droit a la mort' from La Part du Feu (1949), with an additional set of arguments for a materialist and Hegelian defence of the negative relations of painting and the artist as forces of 'absent disclosure'. For, Blanchot's own invitation to 'blackness' (death) in art enables us to take seriously the question of why, despite painting's loss of historical justification, there is a release of energy, of life-in-death, from the foreclosure of painting. Why, under these conditions,

does art appear for the first time to constitute a search for something essential; what counts is no longer the artist, or his feelings, or holding a mirror up to mankind, or man's labor, or any of the values on which our world is built, or those other values of which the world beyond once held a promise. Yet art is nevertheless an inquiry, precise and rigorous, that can be carried out only within a work, a work of which nothing can be said, except that it is.

In these terms Blanchot is the great Hegelian theorist of deathly beginnings that, in their confirmation of life-in-death, provide a space of action, of the deed for painting, as opposed to the solely epistemological problems of 'representation' and 'anti-representation': the deed here being the painterly act of fidelity to painting's deathly beginning, against all odds. Under the jurisdiction of these deathly beginnings, therefore – to borrow from Blanchot's thoughts on literature from 'Littérature et le droit a la mort' – the act of painting "confirms itself as it disparages itself." To make painting "becomes the exposure of this emptiness inside, to make it open up completely to its nothingness, realize its own unreality." Hence, the entropic here is the very substance of the deed, not its formal constraint and inhibitor: "Looking at the wall is also turning towards the world; one is making the wall into the world."

Yet, this turning of 'wall' into 'world' – as good a definition as any of the historical condition of painting in the twentieth century – has nothing to do with actionism and its expressionist modes, as if fidelity to this deed were a heroicized confrontation with self and the travails and limits of artistic subjectivity. (As such there is actually a residual 'expressionism' in Blanchot that is quite distinct from Montalban's post-expressivist concerns: for Blanchot art is of necessity compelled to expand and renews its powers of self-negation as a condition of its life-in-death vitality). Indeed, in these terms Montalban would be horrified to find that his own understanding of painting-as-deed had been recruited to the trite notion that painting was a sphere or arena for the existential artistic act, as if black-on-black-on-black-on-black represented a struggle over the painter's expressive identity. "I have no interest in what I express as a painter, but rather what painting means." Hence, for Montalban, the deed is the refinement of the enactment of the death of painting as a deathly beginning, and not an expressive invocation of painting as black-on-black-on-black-on-black. Nevertheless, Blanchot's own embrace of the wretchedness and self-disgrace of art, as the life-in-death of art, points to a communality of spirit that touches significantly on the historical condition of painting, as a life-in-death that endures:

[W]e have questioned this absence by which the thing is annihilated, destroyed in order to become being and idea. It is that life which supports death and maintains itself in it – death, the amazing power of the negative, or freedom, through whose work existence is detached from itself and made significant.

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Excerpted from Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given by John Roberts. Copyright © 2015 John Roberts. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
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