The axis on which ‘The Living End’ turns is there in its subscript: ‘Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020’. Painting is positioned not at odds with new apparatuses, but as a technology itself – one of many systems used to make sense of the visual world. As technologies go, however, it’s a porous one, absorbing emergent mechanisms and methods as it advances. ‘The Living End’ explores the ways in which nascent replicative technologies necessitated that artists not just make paintings but also perform the making of a painting. As the exhibition leads viewers from the mid-1960s to the present, a throughline emerges wherein artists harness technologies in service of documenting the performance of painting itself – as a means of both asserting themselves as painters and destabilizing this very stance.
Several artists move the traditionally private act of applying paint to substrate into the public sphere. Midway through the show’s trajectory is Henrik Gaard and Allan Tannenbaum’s photographic documentation of Carolee Schneemann performing Up to and Including Her Limits (1976), in which a nude Schneemann – suspended above her canvas by a rope cradle – creates wild, sweeping marks that ape the gestural strokes of action painting. Schneemann’s use of performance to challenge the art-historical canon is echoed by Janine Antoni in the latter artist’s 1993 performance Loving Care, here presented as a video. With her hair, the black-clad artist ‘mops’ the floor with Loving Care dye, progressively pushing her audience out of the room.
While for these artists the camera was a means to document and exhibit performances, other works were intended to go ‘straight to video’. John Baldessari’s 32-minute, 16mm film Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977) employs an overhead camera to film a performer in a white jumpsuit progressively painting all four walls of a white room – first red, then additional vibrant colours in succession. By emphasizing that the artist is not actually doing the physical labour of painting, Baldessari troubles the line of authenticity at a moment in which outside fabrication was still somewhat kept under wraps, several decades before our current panic over AI and authorship. Elsewhere, in Stella Bethlehem’s Hospital (1989–90), Sturtevant demonstrates a more overt disregard for the notion of artistic ownership, by exactly replicating Frank Stella’s titular 1959 minimalist canvas. Sturtevant’s painting says out loud what Baldessari’s work whispered: that, by the time the paint had dried on Stella’s original canvas, 20th-century advances in reproduction had already made the notion of a discrete, singular artwork obsolete.
One of the show’s newer video works demonstrates how technological advances have provided avenues to push past critique to imagine new possibilities for painting. Jacolby Satterwhites’s video Country Ball 1989–2012 (2012) embeds archival footage from a childhood cookout within animations featuring neon dancers amid revolving funhouse/dance-club armatures. A phantasmagoria of queer Black joy, Country Ball crystalizes a moment in which home videotapes existed, before the exhausting glut of digital self-portraiture that we have now. And, in the show’s final chapter, painter Cynthia Daignault flips the camera’s lens once more. Training her gaze and camera on a picturesque scene of the Pacific Northwest Cascades reflected in an alpine lake – so picturesque, in fact, that it is considered the most photographed landscape in the United States – she collapses the circuit of self-reflexive painting. The 24 miniature oil paintings that comprise At Picture Lake (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky) (2017) suggest that, when even the non-sentient have fallen prey to ‘over-exposure’, the painter is freed up to consider what, rather than wherein, a painting is.
‘The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020’ is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago until 16 March