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[6a] Charles Harrison, ‘The Moment of Depiction’, Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 2, Fundació Antoni Tŕpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 197-216.

The work of Art & Language might be thought of as a continuing game played against the idea of historical development on the one hand, and the idea of aesthetic judgement or taste on the other. Consider the large wall-display mounted at the Fundació Antoni Tŕpies as like a board on which this game has been conducted, or like a schematic representation of such a board – an index of past moves and counter-moves, of ground gained and lost to one idea or the other. From any given position, how might one deduce the state of the game, or reconstruct the strategy at work?

1.Regarding the unregarded

It is the normal tendency of art history and art criticism to represent artistic careers in terms of rational and continuous narratives – accounts of  stylistic ‘development’, in which often unexamined assumptions about the flow of culture in general serve to align culminating achievements with the present historical moment. It is no doubt true that representation in its broadest sense is anchored at a deep level to some widely-shared cognitive and material conditions. But it does not follow that such conditions will be most tellingly revealed in those works which can be readily assimilated into narratives of apparent and continuous development, or even in those which are most appealing to an aesthetic regard. It is often through works unassimilated, uncompleted and abandoned that the practice of art reveals its involuntary and thus realistic engagement with the problems of representation in general. The rate of survival of such works will normally be low, however. Notwithstanding the longstanding and largely literary cult of the ‘unconscious’ remainder and the fragment, the typical fate of the unassimilated enterprise is be consigned to oblivion by its would-be producer. Indeed, the more the professional self-image of the artist depends upon the apparent development of a consistent style or the satisfaction of given aesthetic expectations, the more complete the destruction is likely to be.

A certain mythologising approval tends to be accorded to the artist who thus purifies his oeuvre (and ‘his’ it usually is). Yet it should be clear that an exceptionally high rate of survival of the unassimilated is not necessarily indicative of a failure of self-criticism or of taste. It might rather follow from well-grounded uncertainty about principles of consistency or about the appropriateness of aesthetic expectations in particular or in general. Under such conditions, difficulty in deciding between the terminal and the developmental, the failed and the successful, the complete and the incomplete, might well be an index of realism in the practice concerned.

Such conditions are most likely to obtain during artistic periods conceived of as transitional –a description widely applied to the period from the mid-1960s to the present, when the ‘modern’ is supposed to have given way to that which we can still only conceive of as ‘post’. In a practice in process, aesthetic principles are no longer encountered as given. They may have to be discovered ad hoc and applied provisionally. It is symptomatic of a transitional or experimental circumstance that the relations between evaluation and definition tend to become strangely transitive. Indeed, where work in the arts is concerned, it may be through the problems this transitivity generates that a transitional circumstance initially defines itself as such. Where previously an object might have needed to be conceived as a painting (for example) in order to be sensibly judged good (or not) as a painting, it now appears that the consequences of some object’s being seen as good may be to change what can count as a painting. This is how it must have been, for example, for those artists working in the second decade of the century – I think particularly of Mondrian and Malevich – who cannot have been sure at the time which if any of their experimental abstract works should be allowed to count as ‘paintings’. That this question turned out in the end to be inseparable from the question of whether the works at issue were any good may be taken as demonstration – as adequate a demonstration as we are ever likely to be availed of – that the changes they effected in the understanding of what a painting could be were driven by some actual material conditions, and were in that sense realistic and irreversible. This is the test that will at some point have to be faced by any artistic practice claiming transitional status if that claim is to be taken seriously in historical terms. (In face of the current fascination with Duchamp it might be thought that the concept of the ‘readymade’ must be lurking at the back of  my argument. But the readymade enters an already open category: that of the ‘art object’. It does so without risk to its own status. An incomplete or abandoned readymade would after all be a literally inconsiderable thing, behind which the vanity of the artist-author could remain unimpaired. Painting, on the other hand, is normally conceived of as a closed category. The dilemma as to whether some object can or cannot count as a painting is a matter of potential practical and critical moment.)

If it is indeed true that some underlying problems of representation are there to be read from uncompleted and abandoned works, we may improve our understanding of the present grounds of both change and continuity in artistic traditions if we allow some such uncanonised productions from the past few decades a degree of consideration they rarely receive. By this means we may at least be able to accumulate some practical evidence against an egregious misconception: the belief that problems of representation change according to those short-term agendas that are the typical currency of Cultural Studies (and of Art History, to the extent that Art History has lately become virtually indistinguishable from Cultural Studies).

There are those who would have it that traditional critical distinctions between canonical and non-canonical forms of art were anyway damaged past sensible recovery by the Conceptual Art movement of the later 1960s and early 1970s, or that they simply became irrelevant in face of the coming of a postmodern culture of which Conceptual Art was the artistic harbinger. In the conventional wisdom of a self-consciously progressive Art History, an intentional merging or confusion of ‘texts’ with ‘artworks’ was one of the identifying strategies of the movement as a whole; by such means the traditional genres were supposedly seen off, along with their baggage of timeless values, while the artist was set free in a post-historical but somehow still political space.

In fact, however, what had formerly been an intentionally irresponsible or avant-garde confusion had by the early 1970s been widely adopted as a principle of consistency in the entirely conventional definition of artistic careers. By the middle of the decade, dealers and curators were already beginning to anthologise ‘classic’ textual artworks and canonical artists’ books. The dealers needed to commodify the works for their own purposes, while the curators needed the accompanying reification in order to stay in business updating the canon. Some artists maintained an organic and incestuous relationship with those doing the commodifying, glad to have the process taken out of their own hands and thus to evade the internal contradictions which reification necessarily entails. While the traditions of art may have acquired a new and ‘generic’ genre – art as idea about what ‘art’ is – the relations of artist-author to work of art were stabilised in the process, with the consequence that the concept of artistic career as rational and progressive narrative was simply reinforced. The very avoidance of such unstylish things as paintings and sculptures had become a measure of purity. The work done by Art & Language and others to shame the modernist spectator into the society of both competent and irresponsible readers was inconsistent in spirit with this process of stabilisation – or was irrelevant to it. The spectator-as-reader upon whom an idea and a concept of development are simply imposed is a person left alone with the supposed authority of the work in question, whether that authority be invested in the purported originality of the idea or in the supposed authenticity of the artist. This spectator simply knows what the relevant move has been. She is left with nothing to talk about which is not a rehearsal of the accompanying rationale, and therefore no one to talk to who is not alone in the same sense. The artist who seeks a rational career on the basis of such impositions must hope for an audience of those who either do not know that they are alone or who know but do not mind. The experience of ‘aloneness’ evoked here should be understood not as a form of self-sufficiency, but as the negation of any sense of imaginative possibility or of autonomy in the individual response. The art-work for which such an experience is a successful outcome is a mere avant-garde model of the totally administered society.

2. The end(s) of Conceptual Art

With the benefit of hindsight it becomes increasingly clear that the Conceptual Art movement was fragmented from the start. Of more abiding interest than the intentional confusion of ‘artworks’ with ‘texts’ was a deep and involuntary uncertainty about the grounds on which representations were in general singled out, accorded a measure of autonomy, valued and interpreted – an uncertainty, in fact, about the grounds upon which the origination of any representation was to be distinguished from its use. What followed from this was that the established division of labour between ‘originators’ and ‘readers’ or ‘spectators’ could only be maintained in artistic practices unresponsive or indifferent to those historical conditions that were actually driving the changes in question – conditions that may be related to the as-yet-unfulfilled social and political processes of enlightenment and to the continuing critique of capital.

In a retrospective view it is possible to identify two different forms of response to this problem, both of which were represented among those variously associated with the name of Art & Language in England and New York between 1974 and 1976. (While the differences in question may be readable from some earlier actions of the individuals involved, during the years 1972-3 Art & Language’s Indexing project had served – just – to represent a common interest in the transitivity of author-artists and reader-spectators.) The first response was to hang on to the image of a transitional practice in overtly technical terms – as it were to represent transition through the evolution of novel genres or through the reanimation of marginal genres from former transitional episodes. In so far as a spectator was envisaged for the resulting works, it was one who would not notice or would not mind the underlying conservatism of the relations involved – one upon whom a representation of art could be imposed. Among the second and subsequent generations of Conceptual artists there was an increasing tendency for the reactionary character of this imposition to be concealed beneath a dressing of progressive political attitudes, conveyed through the medium of photographic imagery, or as slogans, or through some combination of the two. That this tactic tended to coincide with complacent announcements of the failure of the Enlightenment project was an irony that went largely unremarked.

The second response was to engage in a practical re-consideration of relevant traditions – as it were to work back through the longer history of modern artistic genres (from seventeenth-century political broadsheets to late-Modernist abstract paintings) in order to recover from them whatever might be used to inform and to reinvigorate the critical aspects of a continuing practice. The advantage of adherence to the concept of genre was that the critique of the relations of ‘originator’ and ‘user’ could be pursued within the meaning-giving constraints of a recognisable and shared set of conventions. The point was not to appropriate a range of still-exploitable stylistic models. The search of the genres was conducted in pursuit not of novel techniques or of pictures but of spectators: cathected models of critical and conversational companionship as these had been imaginatively presupposed by forms of pictorial composition in the past – a search, in other words, for the means to reaffirm the social basis of art in a world of imaginatively active persons. I do not mean to suggest that this search was in all cases consciously motivated or self-consciously conducted. The point is rather that there was no other way for a practice to go on as a practice of art if it was to avoid becoming a mere agency for the proliferation of claims to avant-garde stylistic property and for the administration of appropriate rationales. I have argued elsewhere, in support of responses of this second type, that the establishment of illusion – of an imaginative game proposed by the artist and joined by the spectator – is the primordial social act of the practice of art (1) Conceived on this basis, the proposal that a text might stand somehow in the place of a painting – that it might possibly qualify to be seen as a painting – was other than a mere avant-garde gambit designed to establish a new genre of art. In the long-term view it may have been necessary to the continuation of some practice of art as a cognitively adequate and open social project.

These two forms of response were to prove practically irreconcileable. By 1976 the name of Art & Language could no longer be plausibly used to represent the different priorities and commitments of those who had gathered around it. Overt strife led to exclusions and departures of one kind or another. It was under these conditions, and without any immediate means to theorise the consequences, that those in England who were actually to continue the long project of Art & Language turned explicitly to pictures, and subsequently to painting. What follows is an attempt to represent some of the lessons that have been learned as a consequence in the course of the last twenty years. I write as a witness to the resulting work and as a participant in and beneficiary of the conversation that both sustains and accompanies it. From that position I see the course followed in the name of Art & Language since 1976 as a critically significant outcome of the work of the preceding decade. It has not been the only outcome. Various forms of practice have been pursued by individuals formerly associated with the name. Some of these have been and are pursued as explicitly artistic practices, and it is to those alone that the retrospective view here offered may be seen properly to apply. Others have sought to continue a ‘counter-cultural’ ethos associated with Conceptual Art into the spheres of education or cultural journalism, to critical effect where that association has been better than merely nostalgic. Each form of practice is no doubt sustained by its own retrospect. But to paraphrase my earlier point about the work of Mondrian and Malevich, whatever self-representation may be generated from within a practice somehow conceived as transitional, there is one condition that practice must in the end meet if it is to be of interest as an artistic practice: that the question of how some relevant work is to be characterised and explained becomes inseparable from the question of whether it is any good. A further and continuing condition is implied: so long as these two questions remain transitive and inseparable there will be no sleeping the professional’s sleep.

3. Picturing and portraiture

In view of the preceding remarks, it should be said that Art & Language’s return to picturing in 1977-8 was not directed by any desire to reestablish aesthetic principles. The first pictorial works produced in the collaboration between Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden were derived from materials to be discovered in the outer margins of artistic traditions: political broadsheets and caricatures from the seventeenth century, agit-prop posters from the early twentieth, documentary photographs from the World Wars – crumbs from the table at which history normally dines off art. For the most part the execution of these works was something of a formality once a project had been established, which is to say that while design considerations might be relevant to their production, significant aesthetic discriminations were not. They had this in common with Art & Language’s earlier works in Conceptual Art modes. In the following three years, however, Michael and Mel did find themselves involuntarily but inescapably applying aesthetic judgements to their own productions. It was an unforeseen condition of their first substantial series of paintings – images formed, or rather reformed, from Portraits of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock – that some were better than others, whatever strategies or conscious intentions may variously have dictated their composition. The artists were thus faced with the need to confront their own preferences and prejudices – those personal factors which both attend upon and compromise judgements of taste, and which the strategies of Conceptual Art had served deliberately to marginalise. This was not an outcome they had foreseen, nor was it easily faced. It could perhaps have been anticipated that if Art & Language’s artistic objects were now such as to be made, rather than merely thought up or found, they could be made more or less well according to a demonstrable standard. But it transpired that failure of some significant kind was also liable to follow the application of preferences and standards of finish, while on the other hand the practically contingent or uncompleted work might come to resonate with some project unimagined at the moment of its attempted execution. It seemed, in other words, that the practice was answering to some conditions that were only graspable at the time in terms of the aesthetic success or failure of its productions, and that these conditions were decisive. One way to describe this circumstance would be to say that the work had come to have a decorative aspect, and that this aspect was such that its other aspects were in the last resort reduced to contingencies.

Ten years earlier it might have been possible to continue in a spirit of militant agnosticism – to claim clean hands or indifference in respect of what appeared to be matters of ‘ungovernable taste’. But to do so now would have been to pretend a kind of disingenuousness in face of the unpredictable properties the work itself had come to possess. A form of psychological and moral complication had re-entered the problem-field of the practice, and it would shadow the activity and conversation of the studio from now on like the memory of the modern tradition itself – as though high culture’s bad conscience had been bequeathed as a condition of aesthetic virtue. To a great extent, of course, the legacy in question comes in the form of pictures.

Among the numerous graphic productions associated with the name of Art & Language since the late 1970s there have been many which have remained without empirically recognisable issue in any public body of work, and which have therefore passed without comment. Yet it has been a distinctive feature of the practice over the past twenty years that many of its seemingly marginal and contingent productions have been allowed to survive both physically and in the conversation of the studio, that these have been revisited in the course of subsequent projects, and that the transmission of their genetic materials has thus been wittingly or unwittingly assured. One such work appeared in reproduction on the cover of Art-Language volume 5 number 1 in October 1982: a pencil drawing, based on a photograph, of Mel Ramsden wearing a large flat cap and an anxious expression, with one side of his mouth pulled out of its natural shape, as though by injury or disease. Among the published works of Art & Language there are few which are so apparently disconnected from the avant-garde legacy of Conceptual Art, and even fewer which are both so securely if insouciantly connected to a conventional genre – in this instance the single portrait head – and so clearly dependent upon conventional techniques of depiction. At the time of its production the drawing appeared – to me at least – as a symptom of distraction in the practice. It is significant, however, that the issue of Art-Language for which this image served as a cover was one concerned with theories of expression and with a revisitation of Walter Benjamin’s paper on the Author as Producer (2) – a paper in which it was argued that it is the position of artists in the relations of production, and not the success of their work according to prevailing aesthetic principles, that decides the power of that work to turn spectators into collaborators. It is not my aim now to dignify this relatively slight and almost forgotten drawing, but rather to explore the intuition which brought it back to mind in the present context: an intuition – running counter to the empirical evidence of stylistic developments – that the achievement of portraiture, of a sort, and depiction, of a sort, has been and remains a measure of aesthetic worth by which the practice of Art & Language has been involuntarily determined over a considerable period.

I have already referred to the Portraits of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock that formed Art & Language’s first substantial series of paintings in the years 1979-80. In 1996 Art & Language did make a series of small box-like constructions out of wood, canvas and glass, conceived of as kinds of watching ‘heads’, some of which bore veiled pictures of Baldwin and Ramsden. In those works which were grouped by series during the ensuing two decades, however, there are few others that are so explicitly framed as portraits. But I suggest that the majority of works even in apparently unrelated genres may be seen as portrait-like by virtue of some relevant expressive or psychological content. What I mean by this is that there is a persistent tendency in these works to presuppose an imagined spectator who responds in a manner comparable to the way in which the spectator of a portrait responds to the imagined psychological presence of another person. The qualification that needs to be made here is that the form of presence involved in Art & Language’s paintings is not necessarily – or is rarely – represented iconically. In short, my proposal is this: the works in question are all pictures of some kind; what they picture is not necessarily some person or persons; but the response they call for in the imagined spectator is in some significant and non-accidental sense like the types of response traditionally associated with exceptional pictures which are portraits or self-portraits of a kind.

The Portraits of V. I. Lenin were followed by a series of large paintings of the Artists’ Studio in which the practice of Art & Language and its actual and imaginary personnel were in fact both literally pictured and symbolically represented. It is significant, however, that the truth-values of both style and imagery were strategically compromised. The apparently spontaneous expressive character of the paintings in question was a consequence of their being laboriously drawn and painted by mouth. In the process, a great deal of figurative detail was distorted beyond recognition, or obscured or overlaid. It was not as though the legacy of Conceptual Art could be forgotten, nor as though the clock of modern art could be put back to a time when authentic emotional states were supposed to issue in original artistic styles. It is no coincidence that one of the most compelling consequences of the revisitation of modern genres had been a readmission of that critical self-consciousness which had been explicitly introduced into painting by Manet – and rarely so unsparingly examined thereafter. Since Manet’s day any attempt to instil painting with a sense of psychological reflection had apparently been doomed to sentimentality, unless it implicated the literal aspects of facture; unless, that is to say, that reflection were recoverable as a process in the painting’s own life, in which the decorative integrity of its surface – or, at a later stage, its entire physical construction – was put seriously at stake. (3)

Various modes of picturing of the practice itself occupied Art & Language during the 1980s. Following the Studios a series of Incidents in a Museum figured some thirty moments in an ironic narrative of the practice as these might be perceived by an imagined and uncomfortably solitary visitor in an uncongenial institution. This characterisation of the imagined spectator as unwillingly alone serves to exemplify an important point about the apparent determinations on painting since the time of Manet. It seems to have been a persistent condition of critical alertness that a given painting conjure up some culturally normative point of reference – a sense of the stipulative picture of the world, a misleadingly iconic reading of itself, an apparently ingratiating decorativeness, a spectator alone with the authenticity of his response – so as to establish the critical and emotional difference of its own project. The more effectively this conjuring is done, however, the greater the risk that the difference will not be perceived and that what is actually a form of figurative oratio obliqua will be taken for fully intentional utterance. Thus Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergčre must evoke a spectator who actually regards the barmaid as a consumable object, at the risk that no one will look over his shoulder and notice her discomfiture; Degas’ pastels of nude bathers must put the voyeur imaginatively in place at the risk that the resulting representation will be dismissed as merely voyeuristic; Matisse’s interiors in Nice must offer an appearance of unreflecting hedonism at the risk of altogether obscuring their self-critical intellectual structures; Rothko’s abstract paintings must evoke the atmospheric sunsets they are decidedly not pictures of, at risk of being taken for kitsch, and so on. (4) There is also, of course, a matching risk that the differences in question will be too persuasive, too easily grasped  – a risk that complacent spectators will fail to feel the force of their own implication in the ordinarily pictured world.

Following the Incidents in a Museum, Art & Language’s first series of  Hostages (I-XVI) served to gather indexical remains and traces of work in the studio into decorative quasi-abstract configurations – pictures of used palettes interrupted by other fragments of pictorial texture. In the long series of landscapes that followed (Hostages XVII-LXXVI), the actual spectator was both psychologically engaged as the imagined viewer of the pictured scene and literally represented as an image reflected from the covering sheet of glass. And in the strange and still perplexing series of paintings in the series Now They Are, a clearly depicted female torso, though literally masked behind a protective screen of paint, remained both subliminally present and as it were audible, possessed of a form of ‘voice’ with which to address the spectator who approached too close. In some of the recent series of works represented in the current exhibition, small coloured panels containing pictures of open books serve to merge the preoccupations of Art & Language as artist/author with evocations of the presence of a spectator/reader. These panels have mostly been used in variegated batches to compose larger two- and three-dimensional forms of display. But to look at any one of them in isolation is to be suspended between two forms of imaginative identification: on the one hand as the actual or potential reader of a text, on the other as the viewer of a decorative image which, being narrowly contained within the figurative space of a picture, seems itself possessed of a reflective outward look.

4. In defence of pictures

I appreciate that this abbreviated catalogue of works can at best do no more than establish the persistence of forms of picturing and the relevance of forms of portraiture in the more public work of Art & Language over the past twenty years. (In fact, it has often been in the interstices and at the margins of these projects that portrait-like presences have been most clearly evoked.) It remains to be argued that the reasons for this persistence are of some general critical interest as regards the present conditions and problems of modern art. Certainly, there would be little to be gained from the attempt to trace Art & Language’s engagement with problems of representation unless the resulting work were itself representative in some edifying sense; unless, that is to say, it were representative of that which is to be learned, thought, felt, intuited about some actual and substantial conditions; unless, in fine, it were of some original significance as art.

In fact, my own conviction of that significance is such that I sometimes find it hard to understand why it is not more widely shared; why, in other words, the sustained work of two decades has attracted so little criticism that tests that work against the high levels of expectation to which it necessarily submits. A part of the explanation is no doubt to be found in a general failure of courage in criticism, a failure widely misrepresented as the successful pursuit of cultural virtue. Ironically, the confusion of cultural criticism with aesthetic production is one to which the wider Conceptual Art movement itself substantially contributed, and which its soi-disant heirs have for the most part enthusiastically entrenched. But I do not underestimate the long-term damage to the general credibility of artistic forms of picturing that was done in three separate historical stages, by the rise of photography during the later nineteenth century, by the development of abstract art in the early twentieth and indeed by the Conceptual Art movement and its various outcomes and revivals from the later 1960s to the present. Given that loss of credibility there is perhaps a predictable risk that claims for the continuing significance of picturing and portraiture will be regarded as inescapably conservative: that the present paper, for example, will be reduced in thought to an argument, mounted on behalf of a practice which has renegued on the avant-garde commitments of the late 1960s, to the effect that a real art based in the picturing of real and recognisable subjects ought to be restored to the foreground of culture.

I therefore anticipate objections to my claims on Art & Language’s behalf from three sources in particular: from the surviving devotees of Modernist abstract art, for whom a reconnection of painting to picturing can at best result in the revival of the minor genres; from Conceptual Art’s ageing purists, for whom any practical interest in painting as picturing represents a form of backsliding in face of the now inescapable genericness of ‘art’; and from those academic theorists of the postmodern who will allow no picture to be of critical interest that does not avow the unoriginality of all cultural signs by wearing its photographic origin on its sleeve.

No one should allow themselves to be persuaded of the value of Art & Language’s work unless in the end they discover that value for themselves – and discover it as stimulating to open inquiry. But it may at least be possible to address some of the pervasive misconceptions that tend to stand in the way of an open critical response, and in the process to establish a more adequate and more relevant sense both of how it is that pictures function and of where relevant materials of comparison are to be found. I accordingly suggest that such objections as might fall under the categories proffered above are unwarranted to the extent that they rest on either of two false assumptions. The first assumption is that those functions of any procedure of picturing that are productive of critical reflection are in the last resort relative to the achievement of some life-like icon – an achievement which is in any case now unremarkable given that modern techniques enable such icons to be automatically produced at will. The second assumption is that intellectual processes and interests march in step with technical developments and cultural slogans. The first assumption is not so much invalid as inadequate. If the critical functions of picturing were exhausted by the need to match pictures empirically against their ostensive subjects, to argue for the priority of picturing would indeed be to reinvest with a spurious credibility precisely those supposedly veridical connections between works of art and the apparent world that were justly dissolved by Modernist scepticism. But those functions are not thus easily exhausted, as I hope to show. If the second assumption were valid it might indeed be true that picturing is a redundant activity so far as concerns the ends of a critically alert modern art. But it is only at the shallowest levels that intellectual processes are decided by short-term cultural or technological developments. Those very short-term developments may be among the normative points of reference that the critically alert work of art must conjure into place, but only in order the better to establish that difference of trajectory through which its aesthetic properties are conveyed.

My argument on behalf of the work of Art & Language is based on a contrary understanding of the functions of picturing, at least so far as these may be conceived of as functions of art. A process of picturing is an artistic process, I suggest, if and only if it leads to the establishment of some critically significant relationship between a) the achieved coherence of the resulting representation and b) the imaginative activities engaged in by those who put that representation to relevant cognitive use – in other words, by competent spectators. The form of competence at issue is such that, while it may be relative to reading skills of one kind or another, and while it is certainly testable against some relevant description of the appearance of the work of art, it is not relative to changes in the artistic currency of graphic – or photographic – media. (This is not to say that graphic and photographic media do not in themeslves involve significant cognitive competences.) As to works of abstract art, if they are not forms of picture in this sense, then as art they have no significance. The ‘high’ abstract art of the twentieth century certainly effected an inescapable complication in the inherited tradition of pictorial art in general, such that any subsequent artistic form of picture which fails to measure up to its implications is automatically relegated to the status of kitsch – as those forms of cultural production which were once dismissed as kitsch may not be. But it seems a stronger response to that circumstance that one confront the added critical demand than that one greet it as an excuse for termination of the tradition –  in the manner of the largely American end-game art of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

The concept of imaginative activity is clearly crucial to an understanding of the functions of pictures. I employ it here to refer to a form of attention motivated by the representation itself, and to distinguish such attention from the ordinary processes of recognition of whatever a given picture may resemble in so far as it is an icon. The distinction is required to the extent that the latter processes are always liable to be motivated at least as strongly by an interest in the thing pictured as by the representation itself. The point is not to disparage these processes of recognition, which may be necessary conditions of response to the work of art in question. But it needs to be emphasized that those forms of reference which ground artistic representations, however necessary they may be to realism in those representations, are still only the limiting conditions of the achievement of autonomy and coherence. Such references are necessary, in so far as an art without significant limiting conditions can be of no immediate historical or psychological interest, but they are not and have never been sufficient conditions either of realism or of coherence in art. Thus, as regards Art & Language’s Portraits of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, the ability both to ‘see’ Lenin and to recognise the style of Pollock may have been relevant and necessary competences in the reading of the respective compositions, but these competences were by no means sufficient to assure that the spectator would successfully imagine what the paintings represented.

The crucial question then, is not how it is that representations are connected to what they picture, or by what techniques that connection is achieved, but rather how it is that conditions of autonomy and coherence in representation are intentionally connected to the imaginative capacities of envisaged users. My understanding of the centrality of picturing and portraiture to the practice of Art & Language is not grounded in the frequency of occurrence of figurative references in general and likenesses of persons in particular. These occurrences are no doubt symptomatic at some level, but they are not sufficient evidence of the form of engagement I have in mind. The more telling point is that Art & Language’s painted works have consistently over the past twenty years served to conjure into place an imagined spectator – a spectator whose presence is only to be explained by reference to a tradition of pictures and portraits, since it is from the genetic legacy of their imagined and imaginative spectators that her troubled identity is largely composed.

5. The critical spectator

It is a lesson readily learnable from the considerable painters of the past – from Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet – that a picture which is a portrait is not simply a picture of someone. It may be of greater critical moment to its status as representation that it is a picture for someone. In case the point needs to be made, this was not an issue that ceased to be of relevance with the coming of abstract art. Indeed, it could be said that the problem of how to make an abstract painting that was for someone was the substantive critical and self-critical project driving the art of Rothko – the last abstract painter whose work invites serious comparison with the paintings of those just mentioned.

It might be thought that a picture is or always should be for a public of some kind. But a public is never more than an imaginary body: at one extreme a mass fashioned according to the economic or political or psychological needs of some patronising agent; at the other the endlessly duplicated figure of the artist’s boon companion, whether that companion be conceived on the model of a fellow antiquary or of a fellow revolutionary. In view of such considerations we can isolate two well-rehearsed ways in which to address the question of who it is that a picture is for, each grounded in a slightly different sense of the relevant preposition. (The following discussion departs from, and seeks to amend, Richard Wollheim’s concept of the ‘spectator in the picture’. (5))

1) A picture is for its patron or for some actual or imagined purchaser or agent. Typically, he or she commissioned it or is its envisaged proprietor by virtue of some appropriate form of  transaction. In a patriarchal culture, a portrait of a man’s beautiful wife is in this sense for him. He is its primordial spectator. To the extent that the picture caters to other spectators, it caters to those qualified in imagination to be the rightful recipients of the woman’s submissive (or etc.) regard. The meaning of the painting coincides with a full description of the set of social and economic relations obtaining between the artist, the patron or purchaser, and the person who is the picture’s subject.

2) A picture is for the artist who painted it. It was the artist’s critical regard that the picture was required to answer to and to satisfy during the process of its composition. The artist is in this sense the primordial spectator. To the extent that the picture caters to other spectators, it caters to those able and willing to stand in imagination where the artist must have stood. The meaning of the painting coincides with a full description of the artist’s (conscious and unconscious) intention – supposing such a description were possible without falling into the intentional fallacy.

These approaches need be neither mutually exclusive nor intransitive. For example, it might be a significant aspect of the artist’s intentional strategy that he imaginatively impersonates the disposition of the patron in order to paint a picture of the patron’s wife looking submissive, and thus to earn his fee. But there may be a price to be paid for such convergence. Let us say that the wife is not submissive, that the artist can see that she is not, and that the husband desires to have her painted as though she were. In the normal conventions of criticism, the artist who in this circumstance suppresses his own perception in order to satisfy the patron’s desire is prostituting his talent and compromising his aesthetic integrity. Might it not be possible, though, for the artist intentionally to paint a picture of the woman appearing to be submissive when she is not? (Sufficient approximations to such a picture may be found among the works of Goya or Manet or Renoir to render this a practical rather than a merely philosophical case.) To ask who such a picture might be for is to question the qualification of the patron to stand as primordial spectator, since it is a condition of the success of the painting that he be deceived. He may simply function as representative of that normative culture from which the painting needs to establish its distance. In this case, in so far as the artist stands in for some imagined spectator, it is someone other than the patron, where the measure of this ‘otherness’ is some psychological capacity lacking in the patron, in which sympathetic perception and self-critical capacity are combined. If such a picture can be said to be for the artist, this is not because the artist consciously controls its content. Indeed, the picture may significantly evade the artist’s powers of reflection. It may more appropriately be conceived of as for that other imagined spectator: the sometimes barely thinkable representative of a culture-to-be; the interlocutor in a conversation yet to be had, whose relevant competence is the possession of an ethically distinguishable disposition.

This spectator is, in a sense, a ‘good’ spectator, which is to say that he is the contrary of the ‘bad spectator’ as characterised by Michael Podro (6). The ‘bad spectator’, Podro proposes, is someone who is alone, but who does not know that he is alone; someone prevented from responding to the attentions of others – including those others which take the form of representations – by a tendency or need to impose himself. It is of some interest that this characterisation entrains a concept of ‘bad art’ which is of some relevance to the arguments offered so far. We may be justified in calling art ‘bad’ according to Podro’s formula when, in seeking to impose itself upon its spectator, it necessarily disqualifies – is not for – those who are disposed not to be alone. It is at least worth asking whether the pursuit of a narratable consistency in the career of the professional artist might be considered a form of imposition in just this sense, tending to the production of ‘bad’ art for ‘bad’ spectators.

6. Transitional objects

We could at least say that the likelihood of such a consequence will increase under conditions which are actually transitional, and where consistency is bought at the expense of some transitivity in the relations of spectator and work of art. In the light of the discussion so far, we will call an artistic condition transitional when it involves some uncertainty about who it is that works of art are in general for, when this uncertainty is a form of involuntary response to the deeper project of emancipation, and when it is therefore both realistic and potentially generative. Podro associates the expressive power of works of art in general with their potential status as ‘transitional objects’. His sense of the term is derived from the language of psychoanalysis (specifically from the work of  D.W.Winnicott (7)), where it refers to those external forms by means of which the infant seeks to anchor some internal condition – such as attachment to the mother – yet without mistaking it for the actual object to which that condition relates (Winnicott gives the example of the blanket to which the child at the normal stage of weaning comes to accord a particular value.) The anchorage in question is achieved through an imaginative activity that serves creatively to bridge the transitional space between internal states and external objects, and which is thus the type of subsequent modes of intense experiencing. In Podro’s more specialised sense, a ‘transitional object’ is a representation possessed of an internal structure which similarly provides anchorage for psychological and emotional states. Thus, in viewing a work of art, the responsive spectator imagines what it represents, and by this means establishes a coherent value against some internal and possibly shifting ground of ideas, beliefs and feelings.

The model at play here is a model of activity – an activity which is both imaginative and social. As thus theorised, the transitional object plays a part in the psychological and emotional development of those who are disposed not to be alone. We might think of such a thing as a representation in process. By analogy, a work of art produced in a transitional culture (or an object produced contingently in the work of a transitional artistic practice) might be conceived of as a ‘transitional object’ to the extent that the perception of its representational character served to anchor the complex internal structure of a given condition, thus locating a moment of potential conversational exchange between artist and imaginative spectator. A work which was a transitional object in this sense would stand at the opposite pole from the work that imposed itself as a moment in the narrative of its own unfolding. (It should by now be clear that the category of ‘transitional object’ is potentially capable of extension, post hoc, to any work which both elicits a positive aesthetic response and is the occasion of some critical imaginative exertion. By the same token, any practice in which such an object has been produced might come up for the count as a practice in transition. The point to be emphasized here is the negative one: that any art which exhaustively anticipates and dictates the response of its audience fails in this respect at least.)

A recent work by Art & Language has the following form. A large upright canvas, set against the wall, is painted as though it were an abstract painting – specifically a painting of the type conceived by certain American painters in the late 1940s as the imaginary equivalent of another person. The painting has a frame projecting outwards around it like the sides of a shallow box. The frame is composed of small painted canvases set back to back, so that variegated rectangles of colour run along both its inward-facing and its outward-facing surfaces. Each of these smaller canvases contains the photographic image of an open book, each showing a different spread of printed text. The text in question is taken from published writings by Art & Language. Different degrees of legibility are determined by the colours and tones with which the individual canvases are painted. Placed close in front of the framed painting there are two objects in the form of chairs. These are composed of further small canvases, each also containing the image of an open book with text by Art & Language and each also painted in a single colour. The actual spectator may be properly reluctant to sit on a surface which is both the surface of a painting and the image of an open book. But the chair-like objects conjure the presence of two imaginary persons who are viewers of the abstract quasi-painting and readers of the depicted texts, or who are readers of the painting and viewers of the depicted books; or it might be that a single viewer-reader is imagined, whose isolation the empty chair would render palpable and poignant.

From the perspective of the actual spectator of the work in question, the imaginary presences thus come to be included in what it is that is represented. It is as though figures such as might be described in traditional portraiture had been relocated on this side of the picture plane and set to look back into illusionistic space, so that their dispositions, characters, thoughts and emotions ceased to be functions of what is imagined by the actual spectator on the basis of the depicted image and became instead the conditions of generation of another picture altogether, envisaged in another world or time. It is not clear, though, whether this other world is actually the simulacrum of an all-too-ordinary here-and-now, in which some reiterated form of art is endlessly imposed upon a viewer disposed to be alone, or whether it is a place of  possible conversational exchange and learning, replete with points of reference for those emotional and psychological states which await their anchorage in an external object. It is through its engagement with such questions, I think, that this work admits the psychological legacy of portraiture and self-portraiture. It is a condition of this legacy that a distinction between ‘good’  and ‘bad’ spectators applies as a matter of some critical and historical force to those experiences we call aesthetic.

Self-evidently, this work also draws upon the legacies of both abstract painting and Conceptual Art. But it is the involuntary engagement with the genre of portraiture, I think, that provides a necessary distance from both. It is through the interpretative modalities of portraiture, for instance, that the implications of the work are opened so as to demonstrate both possible outcomes of Conceptual Art – the one which goes to imposition, knowingness and isolation, and the other which goes to reflection, self-consciousness and companionship. Who, we are invited to ask – what kind of spectators, how defined and how disposed – do we imagine as sitting on the chairs? What are they ‘seeing’? What might they be talking about? Are they talking about what they are seeing or about what they are reading, or both? And, crucially, what are they imagining?

Through questions of this quasi-polemical order we approach the work as a form of depiction. It is by virtue of  its being a depiction of  some kind and at some level that the imagined spectator is assured of a discursive outcome; that she is not simply a person left alone with the work’s one authoritative account of itself. Yet it should be borne in mind that depiction is itself a condition of the limits of art. It is one thing to show how such works as the quasi-painting with two chairs may be connected both to a divided legacy of Conceptual Art and to those instances of depiction that are pictures and portraits of persons. It is far harder to say how the representational character of such configurations is connected to the larger traditions of painting. In furnishing this side of its pictorial plane, for example, the work with two chairs appears to associate itself with the tradition of theatre, in which we normally conceive of persons as represented rather than depicted. This is dangerous territory for a work which seems otherwise to invoke the traditions of art. There is a risk that it will remain unassimilated to any plausible genre. It may never become ‘a painting’. The danger, in other words, is that its standing as decoration will prove impossible to establish. And it is in the end as decoration – as decoration alone, and not as polemic or as icon – that modern artistic representation has been able to sustain its critical difference. The bad conscience of modern high art derives from its submission to this very requirement. Of all the grounds on which the work of art might be defended, how can we accept without self-reproach that it must provide aesthetic exercise? There is no comfortable answer to this question. But then it is in the nature of transitional objects that guilt and danger attend upon their use – whether they be conceived as functions of psychological development or as possible moments in the development of art.



Notes



(1) See ‘On Painting and the Death of the Spectator’, in Institut für soziale Gegenwarstfragen, Freiburg and Kunstraum, Vienne, Art & Language & Luhmann, Vienna (Passagen Verlag), 1977.

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(2) Walter Bejamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, paper delivred to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, April 1934, printed in Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, London (Verso, 1993, Art-Language Vol. 5 No 1 included an essay titled ‘Author and Producer Revisited’.

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(3) I have tried elsewhere to consider the place of art history in the practice of Art & Language. See, ‘Question to Art & Languege’ in Texte zur Kunst, No. 12, November 1993. ‘Certain artists – or rather certain canonical works by certain artists – tend to become indices within the argot of Art & Language’s practice. This in not a direct consequence of their practical virtues, however; that is, it is not a consequence of the more sensible ways in which canonical status may have been earned. Rather [certain] works... become objects of attention in the first place by virtue of their status as conversation pieces in artistic or art-historical chat (which may itself be a consequence – rather than an adequate representation – of their practical virtue). In referring to these pictures, Art & Language can be referring to what it is they have been made to stand for; which is to say that Art & Language can use them to address the soul-searchings of the dominant culture at their most pretentious and scandalous. This is the first thing a modern art has to do to survive... it has to get an adequately sophisticated form of the self-imagery of the culture onto the agenda, in order to be able to specify and to establish the possible terms of ethical difference or ‘originality’.

‘But once things come to take their place among the working materials of the studio, their effects are unpredictable. Whatever may be the antecedent terms of their conceptualization in art history or cultural studies or wherever, their implications in practices – the bearing they come to have on what can be done with them – tend not to coincide with the sorts of strategy that can be thought up in advance. The facing of these implications is the second thing a modern art has to do in order to survive. There’s nothing very mysterious in this. It’s what it’s like to continue a practical tradition. This is day-to-day work – though it requires a degree of critical alertness not normally allowed to forms of day-to-day work.’

It should be understood that to speak of technical issues relevant to painting ‘since Manet’ is not to claim that it is only by painters since Manet that these issues have been confronted, or that there is some continuous and irreversible connection between Manet and yesterday’s or today’s version of ‘modernity’. It may be the tendency of art history to pick out specific forms of continuity, but continuity is not necessarily a stronger relationship than discontinuity under all intellectual or practical circumstances. In singling out painting ‘since Manet’ I mean merely to relate the understanding of certain technical issues to the theoritical and art-historical discourse of modernism. In fact it could well be the case that going-on from modernism – or sustaining some critical view of modernism (which may be the same thing) – means recognising the limits which that discourse imposes upon the possible world of its examples, and thus enlarging the sense of ‘tradition’ beyond the point at which postmodernist talk of closure, exhaustion and termination can usefully be sustained. We might even say that the ability to sustain this project of recognition and enlargement in practice is among the necessary qualifications fot an ambitious modern art.

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(4) I have pursued this argument more fully elsewhere. See ‘Disorder and Insensitivity: on the Concept of Experience in Abstract Expressionist Painting’, in D. Thistlewood ed., American Abstract Expressionism, Liverpool (Tate Gallery, Liverpool and Liverpool Unyversity Press), 1993.

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(5) See R. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, Princeton NJ (Princeton University Press), 1987, and review by Art & Language (M. Baldwin, C. Harrison, M. Ramsden) ‘Informed Spectators’, Artscribe, No 70, Summer 1988.

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(6) In dicussion following his paper on ‘Depiction and Imagination’, given to the School of Advanced Study, University of London, 30th April 1998.

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(7) See D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. XXXIV, No 2, 1953.