The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020
MCA Chicago, 9 November 2024 – 23 March 2025
‘Stupid like a painter,’ was Marcel Duchamp’s snooty opinion of artists who daubed paint on canvas without stopping to think too much about what they were doing. But this didn’t stop Duchamp from turning out his own archly ironic and theoretically self-aware paintings, and, by doing so, arguably turned painting into a much more conceptual endeavour ever since, in which painters have grappled with what kind of ‘technology’ – or what kind of image-making practice – painting might still be. MCA Chicago’s rangy group show takes on how artists since the 1970s have rethought painting even when the rise of mechanical image-making was supposed to have meant the ‘death of painting’. As it turned out, painting was both something you could blow up beyond its old boundaries (look out for Carolee Scheemann’s performance-installation 1971 Up to and Including Her Limits, where the artist dangled on a harness reaching out to mark canvases almost out of her reach, while mocking the macho gesturing of the earlier abstract expressionists); or a way to reflect on the status of screen-based mass culture, while absorbing its new technologies into painting – see Miriam Shapiro using early 3D rendering computing as the basis for her hard-edged geometries, or Warhol’s often overlooked mid-80s Amiga digital paintbox screen-monitor ‘paintings’. After all, who really needs brushes, when the all-encompassing ubiquity of digital culture means that younger artists are now effortlessly incorporating digital processes into the making of paintings? Take Petra Cortright’s Photoshopped concoctions of painterly motifs, printed direct to aluminum, or Avery K Singer’s sketch-up rendered airbrush canvases of CGI painter-avatars hard at work in the studio. Old ideas about touch, mark-making and self-expression may be long dead, but as The Living End seeks to show, painters have found there’s a lot more for pigment on canvas still to do.