Thinking the phenomenon of image through the poetics of contemporary expanded painting

The history of the painted image has involved various metamorphoses from cave, to architecture, to easel and most recently the radical hybridisation of expanded multimedia forms. Through each age the shedding of one aspect of the image; ritual, spirituality, portability, has resulted in a shift from sacred static images towards profane ephemeral events. This transformation has intensified over the last century where the repeated announcement of the death of painting has seen painting reborn as a mode of radical self-questioning. This paper takes an overview of painting's morphology by way of Martin Heidegger's discussion of picturing and representation in his essay “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). By focusing on the history of picturing, an understanding of “original aesthetics” and its apprehensions can be developed, for comparison with contemporary art in its “post-medium condition”. The new ontological paradigm of contemporary art therefore demands another discourse, a “post-aesthetics” that over...

The history of the painted image has involved various metamorphoses from cave, to architecture, to easel and most recently the radical hybridisation of expanded multimedia forms. Through each age the shedding of one aspect of the image; ritual, spirituality, portability, has resulted in a shift from sacred static images towards profane ephemeral events. This transformation has intensified over the last century where the repeated announcement of the death of painting has seen painting reborn as a mode of radical self-questioning. This paper takes an overview of painting's morphology by way of Martin Heidegger's discussion of picturing and representation in his essay "The Age of the World Picture" (1938). By focusing on the history of picturing, an understanding of "original aesthetics" and its apprehensions can be developed, for comparison with contemporary art in its "post-medium condition". The new ontological paradigm of contemporary art therefore demands another discourse, a "post-aesthetics" that overcomes the subjective bias of modern philosophical aesthetics in favour of a primary relationship to things and their mode of presence in the world. As a result, contemporary expanded painting is shown to be a radical revision of art, a moment of ontological "presencing" favouring spatial environments and temporal events that reveal "what is" and "what matters" in a contemporary techno-scientific age. As a result ontological aesthetics could indicate what is good at the boundary between people, communities, technology and the earth, in short, a politics of being. In the politics of being, which is most appropriate to the expanded work of art, politics is linked to the polis, the place where culture emerges into a world, and where things unfold according to the sense of possibility that a world grants. Art is intimately involved in an alternative politics of being when it poses another way of dealing with beings, people, objects, and things, that result in new economies and temporalities indicating the possibility of something beyond our habitual understanding of the world. Expanded painting as the exemplar of contemporary art is an ontological cut in our understanding of art and the world. It slices through the contemporary understanding of presence and delivers a monstrous thickness, no longer supported by a surface as substrate, but instead compelled by the phenomenal experiences of the world, and is thereby multiplied exponentially and existentially.

Introduction
How are we to make sense of contemporary painting when paint, brush, canvas and image seem to be almost completely absent? When we enter a gallery and we cannot find painting do we assume it has gotten lost somewhere or simply gone away? How are we to say painting is still there in its strange state of distance and absence? As Stephen Melville puts it, there is a double barrelled problem to be discharged, namely "the struggle to define both an object and an account of our access to it" (Melville 1990: 5).

The object
In the place of painting we find "expanded painting", a term loosely used and misused, that still awaits proof of its own existence, and is yet to justify its peculiar, perhaps temporary name. The term has been evoked in exhibitions such as the Prague Biennale, Art Basel Miami Beach, the Castellon Expanded Painting Prize and various sources that do not yet amount to a sighting on the radar of theoretical categories or movements.
Nevertheless it is possible with a certain detective-like attitude to uncover a drive to get beyond painting towards another kind of painting from the first decades of the 20th century. At that time avant-garde artists become as concerned with the form of the work as they are with its contents, taking their exclusive attention away from what is happening inside the frame of the painting and considering the nature of framing itself. Similarly imagery and aspects of representation that might have been confined to the flatness of an illusionary surface are detached as general principles and applied to concrete materials and situations. By challenging frame, image and surface, the whole edifice of easel painting is dismantled, reaching a peak in the 1960s during the time of conceptual art where a new form of post-studio practice is established. In the 1980s when artists returned to the studio they came armed with the institutional critiques of conceptual art, producing neo-conceptual work that received the catchall title of "installation art". Installation art grew out of a dialectic between skills crafted in the painting studio and the political critique of art world structures particularly the "white cube" exhibition space. Contemporary expanded painting takes its coordinates from installation art since installation art is the very broad formal term that indicates an historical evolution away from the easel to contemporary expanded forms.

Pre-history of post-painting
The first important works by Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp effectively punched a hole through the imaginary screen constituted by the canvas support surface of painting. As a result a repressed tension between virtuality and actuality, image and object is released with uncertain results for both painting and sculpture.
Despite being pronounced dead many times, painting in an easel based form returned to the studio repertoire of artists across the globe in the early 1980s. After two decades of withering conceptual critique, it quickly and unexpectedly became a premium commodity in a booming global art market (Reiss 1999: 178), and even more surprising, generated new writing at a serious theoretical level. As Donald Kuspit noted: "In the 1980s the two major artistic positions were Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Conceptualism" (Kuspit 1991: 134).
The pinnacle of neo-expressionism exemplified in Julian Schnabel's famous plate paintings, featured oil paint and broken crockery that were so large that they had to be executed on a tennis court. They were sold at prices similarly vast. Neoconceptualism was the counter-movement to neo-expressionism and involved a complete sublimation of painting according to the terms of conceptual critique developed in the 1960s and 1970s. "In neo-conceptualist art the status of the object, including the art object is at issue <...> (neo-conceptualist art) presents commodities as art objects <...> in what Marcel Duchamp called 'assisted form'" (Kuspit 1991: 134).
Kuspit refers here to Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach who in the 1980s presented store bought commodities such as vacuum cleaners, basketballs, gym shoes and utensils, displayed in Perspex vitrines and on formica shelves. The major references for this kind of work are Duchamp's readymades and Donald Judd's specific objects, works dedicated to an escape from painting.
Koons and Steinbach together with an entire generation of painters withdrew from their "craft" training for the sake of a new kind of practice that eventually became known as installation art. Installation art was originally a marginal practice, occurring outside the mainstream disciplines and institutions, critiquing market based commodities and the structured forms of painting and sculpture. Site specificity was an important element of installation art since it demanded a consideration of the physical and political aspects of the place of exhibition. This was contrasted to traditional easel painting which could be hung in any "white cube" gallery regardless of its geographical location or political persuasion. Site specificity was a form of institutional critique that exposed an apparent bias of galleries and museums in favour of portable quietistic works. Site poses the concrete materiality of place against the ephemeral virtuality of the painted image.
The shift from virtuality and the siteless picture plane to materiality and the density of place had been dramatised a generation before in the work of Allan Kaprow. Kaprow, while moving away from painting, named his work "action collage", signifying a link with experimental traditions of painting and a concern for action and doing, above and beyond refined static images. Anything that the artist could reach out and hold was potentially part of the work. As Kaprow explains, "The action collages became bigger and I introduced flashing lights and thicker hunks of matter. These parts projected further and further from the wall into the room and included more and more audible elements: sounds of ringing buzzers, bells, toys, etc." (UbuWeb... 2008). Rejecting pictoriality in favour of "hunks of matter", the works began to occupy more and more space, becoming expansive and environmental. In fact the new word Kaprow coined to describe this work was "Environments". Only later when the inter-active participation of the viewers became important did Kaprow change the name to "Happenings". As Julie H. Reiss has shown, the term "environment" persisted as a generic description of room sized multimedia work until 1988, when it was replaced in leading art reference texts and journals by "installation art" (Reiss 1999: xii). Ever since, installation art has been understood as an enveloping environment in which an entire exhibition space is occupied with objects and media that require a viewer to activate their skills of navigation and interpretation (Bishop 2005: 6-13).

De-installing painting
By the early 1990s artists such as Guillaume Bijl, Ilya Kabakov ( Fig. 1), Jannis Kounellis, Wolfgang Laib, Meg Cranston, Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, Ange Leccia, Sherrie Levine, Mike Kelley, Cady Noland, Jessica Stockholder ( Fig. 2) and Hany Armanious were producing work that was object based, environmental, time based, multimedia, interactive, or participatory. All of these elements, that are not yet a definition of installation art, are posed negatively in relation to the formal aspects of painting, namely static, flat, image based, timeless, silent and a one way form of communication.  , 1968-1996 The irony for installation art is that it has gone so far beyond any kind of formal or conceptual constraint that it has come to contradict its original status as a critical practice. Site specificity, concerns for the geopolitics of place, and environmentality were reactions against, and critiques of museum and gallery practice epitomised by the white cube. Yet by 1992 Roberta Smith noted that installation art, "is present in unprecedented quantities in museums, the very places it was supposed to render obsolete" (Reiss 1999: 180). Clare Bishop affirms this, claiming that installation art has become "the institutionally approved art form par excellance" (Bishop 2005: 8). Installation art, once considered uncommodifiable and uncollectible has now become the centre piece of museum blockbuster shows and a major feather in a museum's collection. Along with the capitulation of installation art to the museum comes its undecidability as a medium. It has become such a vast mode of practice, so all inclusive and non specific as to be ineffective and empty. As Bishop puts it: "Almost any arrangement of objects in a given space can now be referred to as installation art <...>. It has become the catch-all description that draws attention to its staging and as a result its almost totally meaningless" (Bishop 2008 for and what it stands against. As a result the formal distinction between installation art and the installation of any work of art in a gallery is obscured. Installation art enters a limbo induced by its own infinitude, a total saturation in limitlessness that devours specific debate and subjective activation just as readily as it does any other notion of form or content. Since most of the antecedents of installation art were based on the dialectical tension between the image and object nature of painting, and since most of the practitioners of installation art have been painters facing the impossibility of painting, the term "installation art" simply functions as a red herring or misnomer. Consequently nominal "installation" art artificially separates multimodal outcomes from painterly origins. Installation art, like conceptual art and the readymade, are constructed out of a negative relation with painting, opposing physical form, flatness, pictoriality, with what Rosalind E. Krauss terms a "post-medium condition" (Krauss 1999: 32). In the postmedium condition art is no longer confined by "the material properties of a merely physical object like support" (Krauss 1999: 27). Thus installation art attains a post-medium condition as an inverse logic structured on the ontological absence of painting.
In the current decade artists enter the professional field of painting where "not painting" is their starting point. Whatever is done from there is determined by relational movements away from painting. However in such an orbit, "not painting" is still centripetally driven by the gravitational centre of painting itself.
Consequently artists who abandon painting for a rainbow alliance of media and skills, ultimately move along the same path, away from concerns for a flat image towards object based practices. Wave upon wave of abandonments have nevertheless left painting as the preferred starting point in art schools and commercial galleries. As painters make their leap into a new practice, where they land defines a new boundary, and a new sense of possibility for painting in an expanded state.

The discourse
So far I have discussed the art history of expanded painting, what is known about it in an historical sense, but I want to know more, how expanded painting is, its nature, what kind of thing it is, how it sits in this cultural environment. To go a bit deeper than art history I need to ask philosophical, aesthetic questions. Now that I have identified something that might be called expanded painting I am looking to access the discourse appropriate to it.
Traditional aesthetic discourse from the time of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten through Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thinks in terms of subjects and objects. Subjects produce objects as works of art, and objects produce affective states in subjects. The project of aesthetics was to define which objects were works of art and which affective states were aesthetic. Aesthetics becomes a social construction in which all human feelings are subject to reason and judgement and forms of production are justified as producing objects for interpretative matrices. Aesthetics as a discipline, art as a category of practice and the independence of the human subject all come into being at the same time since each reflects and co-defines the other.
The world view thus created is of a subject who experiences the world, and objects that make up a world. The object stands opposed to the subject and becomes a kind of opponent to be subdued by will, by systems of representation, and by the knowing dissection of science.
From what we have seen expanded painting is a radical revision of the visual aspect of painting in favour of a different kind of presence or "presencing". Is the discipline of aesthetics capable of showing how expanded painting is?

Picturing worlds
When Heidegger turned his attention to art in the 1930s he reacted against the "sheer aesthetic mindedness" of modern living by seeking out those parts of art thinking and art making that aesthetics had not been able to reach or articulate. In "The Age of the World Picture" (Heidegger 1977), he argues that one of the key phenomena of the modern period is "the event of art's moving into the purview of aesthetics. That means that the artwork becomes the object of mere subjective experience" (Heidegger 1977: 116). Representations of the world established by scientific experimentation and visual art systems become a way of grasping the world as something certifiably present and rationally explicable, in short, object like. Modern man becomes the relational centre and from that vantage point a picture of the world is established, not as a representation of the world, but as a system out of which everything can be prepared for representation, visually, conceptually, scientifically. Thus "to be is to be represented" (Inwood 2004: 185). For the sake of representation, for the sake of knowledge and stable subjectivity, the world is brought to a standstill, it is made static and constant so that things can be grasped as producible and explainable.
Heidegger opposes modern "representing" with pre-modern "apprehending". Modern people look upon the things of the world and represents them as way of understanding them. By contrast, pre-modern people stood in the exact reverse situation, they were looked upon by the things of the world and they apprehended that very experience: "That which is, does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception. Rather man is the one who is looked at by that which is, he is the one who is gathered towards presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, (is) to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord" (Heidegger 1977: 131). Representing establishes a system for measuring and guiding, calculating everything that is. "Man as representing subject <...> pictures forth, whatever is, as the objective, into the world as picture" (Heidegger 1977: 147). In contrast, "apprehending" makes the manner of coming to presence of both subject and object problematic. Subjects rather than moulding objects into aesthetic shape or dissecting them for scientific certitude are raw material themselves constituted by the primary opening of being itself. Rather than mapping a world according to a predetermined structure, apprehending is finitely indeterminate.

Post-aesthetics
The discipline of aesthetics often includes discussions of reality, knowledge, experience and being. If reality is to be defined by a subject who captures a world in their sensual experience then aesthetics provides the language for dealing with it in terms of beauty, taste and pleasure. Ultimately "Any object can be experienced aesthetically, no object is inherently unaesthetic" (Stolnitz 1998: 83). Thus modern aesthetics is a lens through which all experience is sensed and judged. Every thing, every experience exists on an aesthetic scale. Aesthetics is no longer a theory of art but a model of how an experiencing subject engages with a world and gives it meaning and value.
New disciplines like art theory and cultural theory spring from a desire to overcome this kind of "sheer aesthetic mindedness" and get closer to cultural constructions and concrete events. In previous ages art had defined a world by setting the limits between people, communities, nature and the Gods. Modern aesthetics lessened the potentiality of art by reducing it to a private sensory experience. In post-aesthetics, subjectivity and beauty are no longer dominant terms since the subjective aestheticisation of experience is shifted in favour of the poetic revelation of material being. Postaesthetics is an aesthetic discourse appropriate to a new kind of work that generates an ontological question about how something is in "being". When painting breaks its own boundaries it also leaves behind established modes of practice and terms of discourse. It demands a new talk to match its walk, something beyond aesthetics, beyond our usual understanding of subjects and objects, something appropriate to a "postaesthetics". This "new work" might be considered "as" painting stretched beyond its own categorisation, because it is now interfaced with sculpture, installation, video, performance, new media and so on. We are compelled to ask what painting is, how it has been historically, what is secondary and what is essential about painting and then proceeds to the limits of those understandings. While Krauss coined the term "post-medium condition" as a possible response, she considers it to be a "monstrous myth" (Krauss 2010: xiv), and that "the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art" (Krauss 2010: xiii). In the face of this her current project is "to wrestle new media to the mat of specificity" (Krauss 2010: xiii). I would like to do a similar kind of wrestling match by looking at an example of recent hybrid or expanded painting, and consider it in terms of postaesthetics. Jim Lambie makes his Zobop installations by applying brightly coloured vinyl tape in geometric patterns on the floor. In doing so he transforms the neutral zone of the gallery floor into a visually activated space. The tape maps the floor so as to reveal the architectural shaping of space, while at the same time jamming the space by overwriting it with hyperactive linework and maximal sensual intensities. The colour is so strong in brightness and contrast, and the linework so hypnotic in its rhythmic differentiation that it induces a kind of vertigo.
While the work seems to deflect any generic description, the discipline of painting is invoked since the conventions of painting are both present and absent. Painting is conspicuously absent since there is no painted canvas hanging on the wall. Yet the colour of painting is all around us, unexpectedly under our feet, threatening to tip us headlong into an infinite visual sensuousness. The disappearance of painting in its traditional form is concealed by the sensationalism of colour itself. Colour is not carried by liquids exuded from a tube and applied by a brush, but by industrially manufactured vinyl strips cut into shape and affixed to the floor. Lambieʼs Zobop series, executed in various venues over several years, are all floor works. Floors are the cultural, architectural extension of the surface of the earth. As we stand on the earth everyday, it withdraws into the background of our awareness, completely taken for granted. It is the ground on which we contemplate the action taking place on a thoughtful plane somewhere at eye level. Zobop (Fig. 3) reveals the floor as the basis of an architectural space that presumes a vertical conceptual orientation. By refusing the verticality of the painted canvas, Lambie liberates colour and almost literally tips it at our feet. By colouring the floor, making it the surface of painting, the floor itself is invited out of its background presence, out of neutrality into an uncanny presence. Unexpectedly the work throws a light on how much work the floor does, how it holds me up, guides me through space, facilitates movement through a world. The artwork reveals that the floor functions by its very withdrawal, by resting outside of everyday awareness and thereby shows the experience of painting itself to be full of absences and withdrawals.

Ontological aesthetics
Work like Lambie's undoes the framework by which we have understood painting so that another painting can take place. Post-aesthetics reconfigures the framework of aesthetics so that a new thinking about art can be articulated. If aesthetics once provided a method of judging good and bad art, can we ask post-aesthetics as a kind of ontological aesthetics to make a judgement about the kind of presence an artwork establishes or reveals? A work of art could be said to be ontologically good if it makes a full disclosure, that is, that there is revealing and concealing. So, despite the tendency for presence to overcome absence, absence has been allowed to be, revealing the secret partiality of presence. A bad ontology results in the injurious neglect of things, the disappearance of things, literally the disappearance of the earth in its fullness. Art does good work when it becomes the practice that maintains things as things, in their uncanny presence, in their comingled presence / absence, or as Sheehan puts it "presabsentiality" (Sheehan 1984: 290).
If ontological aesthetics gets beyond mere presence and thinks into absence as well, then it will have an entirely different question to ask beyond guaranteeing my subjectivity, pleasing me with beautiful affects, presenting an obvious presence. The task for ontological aesthetics and art in a post-medium condition is to reveal "what is" and "what matters" in a contemporary techno-rationalist age.
In original aesthetics the good, the beautiful and the true were one and the same. In ontological aesthetics, ontological well being is established by an ethical relationship between humans, the global community, the technological complex and the capacities of the earth. According to Heidegger, this is the reverse situation of technology as metaphysics. It aggressively occludes absence, implying that there is only presence and one kind of presence that reveals everything in this world as fully calculable and manipulable. At the same time any other way of thinking is rendered irrational and mystical. I interpret Heidegger as saying that technology is a bad ontology, it is a way of revealing the world that severely diminishes the complex poetic of being.
If an ontological aesthetics could indicate what is good at the boundary between people, communities, technology and the earth then it would also be the foundation of a politics of being. In the politics of being, which is most appropriate to the expanded work of art, politics is linked to the polis, the place where culture emerges into a world, and where things unfold according to the sense of possibility that a world grants. Everyday politics, the government of nation states also rests on the politics of being but is fundamentally different from it. Without engaging in the politics of being no fundamental change of everyday politics can take place. The instrumental and anti-poetic ordering of the world is yet to be questioned by any political party. Instead politics tends to work in terms of techno-fixes which deepen a one dimensional instrumental understanding of the world. Art on the other hand is intimately involved in an alternative politics of being when it poses another way of dealing with beings, people, objects, and things, that result in new economies and temporalities indicating the possibility of something beyond our habitual understanding of the world. Expanded painting as the exemplar of contemporary art is an ontological cut in our understanding of art and the world. It slices through the contemporary understanding of presence and delivers a monstrous thickness, no longer supported by a surface as substrate, but instead compelled by the phenomenal experiences of the world, and is thereby multiplied exponentially and existentially.

Conclusions
In this article I have established an object of enquiry, expanded painting, and discovered a one hundred year drive to shift painting away from its image based history into an order of spatio-temporal events. To be able to speak to this kind of work also required a conceptual shift in language such that the nature of painting's tendency to overcome itself could be articualted. The source of this is Heidegger's attempt to overcome the language and prejudices of the philosophical discussion of art as aesthetics. By twisting free of form and content, image and representation, he established a discourse in the 1930s that is only just beginning to make sense in terms of contemporary art in this new century. The post medium condition of art, constituted by an indeterminate perturbation between presence and absence, can now be matched by a post aesthetic discouse that speaks its paradoxical nature and shows us the way to deal with all things, whether they be artworks, human relations or materials buried in the earth. Art once evoked a more accurate understanding of the world than is suggested by science and economics, and if it does that no more, it still provides a powerful tool whereby the prejudices and errors of instrumental thinking might be shown to be a kind of non-thinking, a one dimensional understanding of art and life. Expanded Painting as the representative of this new kind of art shines a light on "what is" in all its strangeness, revealing how things are in their raw presence and most importantly, "what matters", what can be taken seriously and meaningfully in a contemporary techno-scientific age.