If the subject will talk, there’s no need for torture—it’s
when the subject won’t yield that torture begins. Somewhere after World
War II, painting stopped talking, or at least talking sense. It still
made noise, but even the artists didn’t pretend to know what it was
saying: Jackson Pollock’s storms of drips expressed expression, which
is like yelling that you’re yelling. Painting was trapped, and what
happened next was an extended, exquisite torture scene—the
torture of painting by a mob of muscular young artists between roughly
1950 and 1980—that forced painting to talk again.
On the fourth floor of the Seattle Art Museum this summer is a
tantalizing reenactment of the stabbing, the cutting, the pissing on,
the burying alive, the burning, the beating, the shooting, the running
over by locomotive, the dunce-capping, the erasing, the stomping on,
and the mockery that painting endured at the hands of artists in
Europe, Asia, North America, and South America. Target Practice:
Painting Under Attack 1949–78 is an exhibition of 82 artworks
and photo documentations mostly on loan from museums, collectors, and
foundations around the world, but also shrewdly mobilizing SAM’s
permanent collection in a strategic play to build up its holdings in
postwar antiheroism.
If the installation feels oddly both formulaic and scattershot in
parts, the selection of works, by SAM’s modern and contemporary curator
Michael Darling, is creative and energetic. Darling is not restating a
canon, he’s refining it, bringing together artists from several
continents and pairing lesser-knowns with household names. The arch
sensibility of Pop, the communalism and performance of Brazilian art of
the period, the sunny California renegades, the anarchic Viennese
Actionists, Japanese postatomic hysteria and despair, the quotational
impulse of the pre-Pictures generation, hippie-style madness, the
chilly conceptualists, the early feminists, highly codified and
organized German pain—all these come together in a grouping
that’s different from the classic (and overly cerebral) New
York–centric story of minimalism-and-after. This version of the
story is deliberately visceral.
The introduction to the exhibition is a Jasper Johns target painting
lined up in front of the elevator on the far wall of the opening
gallery, but it’s the wrong introduction: too dry. The real welcome to
the show should be the nearby video of the young French artist Niki de
Saint Phalle walking on screen in skirt and heels, setting down a
purse, and taking out of it a rifle, a handgun, and a cannon. She’s an
expert in painting S&M. She loads the plaster-packed canvases with
bags of liquid paint, and they explode as she shoots.
De Saint Phalle made her shooting paintings in the early 1960s, more
than a decade after the earliest pieces in the show—torn and
stabbed works by Italian artist Lucio Fontana and Japanese artist Shozo
Shimamoto. The two artists were working without knowledge of each
other, but both were tearing apart in a last-ditch attempt to create
anew after the terrible decade of the 1940s. Shimamoto leaves raw,
unsuturable, bomb-sized holes in his skinlike painted surfaces; Fontana
leaves something more cosmic, creating punctures and cuts that provide
a patterned view through the two-dimensional surface. In four
photographs by Ugo Mulas, Fontana takes to the canvas with the weapon
he eventually preferred, the X-Acto knife, acting as an existential
warrior. War and its aftermath are referenced also in the sad-sack
burlap work by Italian abstractionist Alberto Burri, from SAM’s
collection, and in Austrian artist (and certified weirdo) Otto Muehl’s
destruction of a sackcloth canvas, which resembles feces in a
straitjacket. Photographs of the Japanese Gutai artists punching
canvases with paint-loaded gloves and furiously throwing glass bottles
of paint at canvases are over-the-top, yes, but also bursting with
agony. They make the American Pollock’s gestures at the canvas look
academic.
Not everything is so serious. Not at all. A found thrift-store
painting of a tree turned on its side and given cartoonish facial
features by Asger Jorn, the Danish-born member of the Parisian
situationists, is pure slapstick. Yoko Ono’s Painting to Be Stepped
On (a scrap of canvas lying on the gallery floor—when I was
there, it had not only footprints but wheelchair tracks on it) and
Painting to Hammer a Nail (a canvas on the wall, a hammer, a box
of nails, and permission to do it) have a dark side, but they’re also
just amusing. German artist Guenther Uecker’s storm of nails hammered
into a board has dark overtones, but it is an irresistible proto-Op
eyepopper, too. Arman’s expended paint tubes are sad-funny little
after-erections. Richard Pettibone provides a detailed forensic report
on a tube of yellow cadmium paint run over by a train. Brazilian artist
Lygia Pape’s video of smiling children sticking their heads through a
giant canvas with holes in it on a sunny day is simply exuberant. Like
Yayoi Kusama’s intense 1967 video Self-Obliteration (which makes
Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy look like a schoolgirl frolic),
Pape’s video is a little bit of a stretch for the exhibition’s theme,
but you barely notice because it’s so good to see it.
One of the classics of anti-painting is John Baldessari’s giant text
painting (one in a series), made by a sign painter, coyly instructing
viewers about how to look at a painting. (“Ask yourself questions when
standing in front of a well composed picture,” it suggests.) It hangs
across from one of curator Darling’s great finds: a painting that
Canadian conceptualist Iain Baxter made in 1962, when he was a student
in painting at Washington State University. Numbers strewn across the
surface reference a list of painterly terms along the side of the
painting, including “Main Area of Interest,” “Blending,” “Foreground,”
“Background,” “Mistake.” (The numbering technique brings to mind
Warhol’s paint-by-numbers works from the period, which are not included
in the exhibition.)
The gallery that contains the Baldessari and the Baxter is the
glowing, prismatic heart of the show, the place where painting most
powerfully reasserts itself under duress. A multicolored fluorescent
square—an empty-centered “painting” by Dan Flavin—bleeds
red, yellow, and green toward a giant wall slathered with juicy,
layered paint in all colors by the California artist Richard Jackson,
who has re-created an earlier work here and retitled it SAM.
Jackson’s work is made by applying paint thickly to canvases, then
turning the canvases toward the wall and smearing the paint onto the
wall in (Johnsian) arcs, finally leaving the backward-facing canvases
hanging in the midst of the glorious, swooping goop.
Darling has taken this backward-facing trope as the theme of this
entire room: Johns’s gray backward canvas mounted on a forward-facing
canvas, which is almost enough of a vortex to suck in even the
brightness of this room; Roy Lichtenstein’s benday-dot painting of the
backs of two paintings; Arte Povera artist Giulio Paolini’s three
backward-turned canvases nesting inside one another (like a reverse
version of Johns’s stacked American flags); and a marvelous Pettibone
the size of your palm—a tiny photorealistic painting of a
painting sitting on a floor and leaning against a wall, hiding its
face, called Andy Warhol, “Flowers,” 1964 (rear view) made in
1974. This is a great, distilling room.
In other rooms, the staging is not as wonderful: The first two
galleries feel crowded and awkward; the last few, plodding. By the end,
at Warhol’s sidelined Oxidation (piss) Painting and Lynda
Benglis’s poured-paint piece (did it have to be mounted on a pedestal
rather than lying on the floor?), the exhibition has run out of
energy.
So much is covered—after an apotheosis of physicality in a
small, almost unbelievably rich Robert Rauschenberg “combine” (a
painting-sculpture combination) from 1954, the material of paint itself
disappears in conceptual works by Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and
Daniel Buren—it’s inevitable that some things will be left
behind. One unfortunately undeveloped larger theme is feminism. While
Bruce Nauman’s well-traveled four-channel video of himself applying
paint to his body gets prime placement in the exhibition, projected at
enormous size, feminist artists exploring the same terrain more
pointedly—Suzy Lake, for instance, applying makeup as if it were
oil paint both to her face and to the surface of her photographic
prints—are absent. (There is one reference to the feminist
association of paint and blood: George Maciunas’s photo documentation
of Shigeko Kubota’s 1965 painting made by squatting over a surface with
a loaded brush attached to her underwear is here.) More subtly
feministic works by Howardena Pindell and Karen Carson feel
stranded.
But other historical chapters are clarified in Target
Painting. For instance, the Gutai group, often associated with
abstract expressionism, fits here instead, on the flip side of ab-ex,
in the midst of fragility, abjection, and critique.
Fragility, abjection, and critique: They turn out to be a winning
and convincing combination at this vulnerable American moment. SAM and
Darling have taken the oldest story in modern art—the death
rattle of painting—and interrogated it anew. In the process
they’ve revealed hidden segments and twists in the root system that
feeds today’s painters. They’ve also presented works from the
collection—by Johns, Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Ed Ruscha, Richard
Tuttle, Burri, and Neil Jenney—in important context. Trustees,
collectors, and donors: I hope you’re paying attention to the pitch
implicit in Target Practice. SAM and Darling have proven they
care astutely for the postwar collection; gifts are in order. 
