Journal of Contemporary Painting - Current Issue

The post-digital is a genre which, since the early 2000s, has gradually embedded itself within mainstream culture, saturating and influencing many faculties of knowledge, as a standardization of digital technologies: the aftermath of the Digital Revolution. The fine arts have borne witness to this cultural shift, readily accommodating post-digital thematics which have percolated into the field of painting and its continual expansion. The following article aims to define painting as a post-digital formalism by: chronologizing post-digital painting and its precursory technological and cultural developments to situate it within a wider historical canon; describing the translative capacity of contemporary painting (as an inherent feature of the post-digital painted gesture); and charting the shifting formal topography of painting resulting from the conflation of medium (the formal parameters of an artwork) and media (the networked, mass communicative status of an artwork). Finally, this enquiry synthesizes an expansion of characteristic post-digital formal traits termed herein as ‘Digital Factures’. Resultantly, an expanded Taxonomy of Digital Factures that maps technology’s role within contemporary painting is situated, providing a new insight as to the definition of painting’s expanding processes and trends in an age after new media.

This article seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary painting and fictioning practices, examining the implications for historicization, authenticity and authorship. Taking as a starting point the re-appearance of Walter Benjamin in 1986, I will trace the ways in which painting practice and fictioning discourse have intersected, drawing on recent interviews with the authors of these projects and ongoing research into artist novels. I will discuss Albert Oehlen’s 2021 film The Painter, which is set in Oehlen’s studio and documents the struggle to produce an abstract painting, asking why certain clichés are re-staged in fictional portrayals of artistic labour rather than re-imagined? I will develop a discussion of Oehlen’s use of parody by reading this film as a performance to camera, and will explore the ways that Oehlen plays with plausibility through the use of an actor, a semi-improvised script, and modelling the narrative on the historical precedent of Paul McCarthy’s 1995 video Painter. I will offer a case study from my recent practice-based Ph.D. research in which I worked with Bruce McLean to re-enact his 1969 artwork Underwater Watercolour to highlight the relationship of fictioning practices to archival practice and develop an understanding of fictioning as a performative form of historicization. I will situate these examples in relation to recent theory (specifically, David Burrow’s and Simon O’Sullivan’s survey of ‘Fictioning’ practices in art and philosophy and Carrie Lambert-Beaty’s concept of ‘Parafiction’), positioning my research within a broader discussion of a current trend towards fictioning practices in contemporary art.

This article considers some of the ways the cultural frameworks within which we create and dialogue are shifting in the twenty-first century, and how this might be articulated by emerging theories of ‘metamodernism’. It outlines some of the foundational issues to which metamodern theory speaks: hallmarks of postmodernism which have since become problematic within contemporary practice, exampled in approaches to painting landscape from the 1980s to 90s. The author considers the contradictions of postmodernism in relation to decolonization through aspects of critique that are both constructive and exclusionary. This leads to a broad overview of metamodern theory, outlining significant contributions to the field from a global perspective. It introduces some key ideas; simultaneity, depth, a ‘structure of feeling’ and a return to meta-narrative: characteristics of metamodernism which the article proposes as being first apparent in historical Land art. Through this lens the author articulates recent shifts in contemporary painting of/with and in landscape. Considering the resonances between Land art and painting in context of metamodern ideas, it is argued, contributes to cultivating a more embodied, non-essentialist, decolonized and outward looking approach to painting and landscape.

Sarah Kate Wilsons’s article ‘Painting’s liveness’ is written from her vantage point, as an artist/curator/researcher/collaborator/educator. Here she reveals how painting’s relationship with performance, particularly during the second part of the twentieth century, has led to painting’s liveness. This, she asserts, is apparent in paintings by Daniel Buren, Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, works by the Gutai Art Association and performances by Ei Arakawa. The inauguration of a performance programme at Bauhaus in Germany, Black Mountain College in America and the formation of the Gutai Art Association in Japan are highlighted by Wilson as important milestones. Writing by RoseLee Goldberg and Peggy Phelan on performance, J. L. Austin’s speech act theory as well as Satori, an expression from Zen Buddhism meaning enlightenment, are woven into this text. David Joselit’s declaration that the medium of painting is live and ‘On Air’ is drawn into her argument for painting’s liveness, whilst Catherine Wood’s curatorial project A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance (2012) Tate Modern, London and her own curatorial project Painting in Time (2015–16) set the stage for this text.

René Tavares’s artistic production actively engages with political themes like migration and racism, simultaneously reflecting and inviting the deconstruction of the ‘alert attentional regime’. This term refers to our digital era's characteristic heightened state of alertness and fragmented attention, which scatters our focus across multiple streams of information. Rather than simply mirroring society’s fragmented attentional state, his work fosters more mindful and intentional engagement, encouraging viewers to transcend the transient attentiveness inherent in contemporary society. Central to his practice is the concept of rhythm, symbolizing the velocity of modern life and facilitating a shift to more sustained attention. This is achieved through patterns and colours that mimic swift information cycles, inherent to our times, captivating the viewer’s attention while setting the stage for a deeper, more mindful engagement with the artwork. Tavares intertwines elements like the ‘floating mark’, representing ephemeral meanings in our digital era; ‘polyfocality’, reflecting and addressing society’s fragmented attention through multiple focal points, and ‘pictorial syncretism’, which refers to the amalgamation of different painterly registers such as stains, graphic registers, splatters, layer overlay, word insertion and scrapings, blending visual traditions to highlight the fluid cultural boundaries in our globalized world. By doing so, it potentially opens up the possibility for a redistribution of the sensible, prompting critical thinking and an inherently political understanding of our place within a broader societal context.