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The Ends of Art

The contemporary condition of painting casts it within a vastly expanded field, one in which it has begun to free itself from its relationship with the notion of a fixed purity of form, thus casting aspersions upon discussions around its imminent and recurrent, or recurrently imminent, demise aside for the time being. Yet, I would argue that this still maintains a particular type of practice, at least a form for painting, which is rigorously defined within the medium itself. Painting has sought to internally destabilise its formal arrangement or organisation as an object, but in many ways is still left dealing with a ‘Greenbergian’ ghost or spectre, which has become a perennial thorn in its own side. These notions allude to (medium-) specificity and singularity, material dependency and definitive structural boundaries, creating and structuring division rather than integration, which creates a form of resistance, a form embedded though its dependence upon this very notion of resistance. In order for painting to persist it must seek external possibilities, which can force new forms to be considered, spatially, temporally and architecturally, structured through multiplicitous connections, rather than focusing upon the singular internal machinations of a medium specific practice. Persistence here might be defined as the potential for painting to continue to move forwards through different obstacles and objections, though, or whilst, often conjuring conjectural and divided opinion. The installation proposed for The End of Art (As We Know It), presents painting as a persistently subversive, and indisciplined tool for negotiating the complex territorial distributions of alternative media. The work breaks down formal divisions in order to reconsider and reorganise the constraints imposed upon painting as a practice. The installation consists of moving liquids, exposed transparent tubing and video projection, constructing a cacophonous hybridised form, stretching through the space of the gallery.