Painting is Dead; Long Live Painting

When BritArt went up in flames three weeks ago, there were those who hoped it would never rise from the ashes. Among them were a group of painters showing in London’s Jerwood Space, who claim to be leading the fightback against conceptual art. Figurative painting is dismissed as archaic, they complain, while art world fashionistas favour the headline-grabbing unmade beds and pickled sharks of Emin and Hirst.

Figurative painting is the easier of the two to define. It’s not abstract; it depicts people, places or things that are recognisable, and it’s often in oil on a rectangular canvas. It ranges from Giotto to Freud and encompasses a vast range of styles, but comes with so much art historical baggage that many contemporary artists prefer to avoid it completely.

Conceptual art is harder to pin down. Most people agree that it started on the day in 1917 that Marcel Duchamp placed an ordinary urinal in a gallery and called it art. It wasn’t until the 1970s that it really took off, largely as a reaction against the commercialisation of the artworld. Ideas are much harder to buy than paintings, although the market managed to catch up, as the BritArt phenomenon has proved.

Is conceptual art a has-been? Is figurative painting once again a wannabe? If these questions give you a sense of déja vu, it’s because we have actually been here before. Twenty years ago a group of young Glasgow School of Art graduates (Ken Currie, Peter Howson et al) shot to fame with their vigorous brand of figurative painting, and became known worldwide as The New Glasgow Boys.

So is it happening again? With the Glasgow School of Art degree shows around the corner, it’s a good time to check the pulse of painting. First stop, Francis McKee, tutor on the prestigious Master of Fine Art course. Painting is gradually reclaiming its place in the hearts of young artists, he thinks, but he’s not keen to relive the painting boom of the 1980s.

“There was something happening in the 1980s,” says McKee. “That kind of figurative expressionist painting with lots of mysterious men standing around in the moonlight; a lot of that was very poor work. Nothing was happening in it. It looked very nice and people liked it because they saw people in the paintings. There’s nostalgia for painting, and there’s nostalgia for people standing around in paintings, which you also get in Jack Vetrianno. You can see that he doesn’t paint beyond the 1930s. It’s pure chocolate box nostalgia.”

“The whole ‘painting is dead’ argument knocked the wind out of students for a while,” he admits. “A lot of people felt that it wasn’t the way to go, and there was a point where everyone seemed to be making videos. That has rectified itself and people have become confident that painting is worth sticking with.”

That said, painters are still in a minority on the Glasgow course. Hideko Inoue came to Scotland five years ago from Japan, where she studied painting as an undergraduate. Her degree show work consists of finely-worked canvases copied from her grandfather’s collection of snapshots. In contrast to her experience of Japan, Hideko is the only artist on the MFA who uses oil paint to create recognisable images on canvas. “There are two more painters,” she explains, “but one is abstract and the other has more of a conceptual, minimalist attitude.”

Hideko is baffled by the status she is accorded as a contemporary artist simply by being on the MFA. Otherwise, she suspects, she’d be dismissed as a purely decorative artist along with painters of landscapes sold in Glasgow’s smaller commercial galleries. “That dividing line I find quite strange,” she says.

“I’m quite interested in what kind of feedback I’m going to get after the degree show,” she laughs, “because I look quite traditional amongst the weird sculptures and weird sound pieces.”

Amongst the weirder of these sculptures is a 14-foot yacht, wrapped entirely in white plastic and balancing high up on stilts. Its name is Drawings from Antarctica, and its creator is Ruth Barker. While the stilts and plastic involved a lot of work for Barker, the boat is not her own creation. This puts the artist somewhere between conceptual art and sculpture, although it’s a risky business trying to slot contemporary artists into neat categories.

“I’m primarily a sculptor,” argues Barker, “and I make collections of objects, but I suppose they’re all traditionally well-made… The work that I make is not very fashionable in Glasgow at the moment because it’s so labour-intensive.”

Barker is concerned that the strong network of grass roots galleries in Glasgow is showing only a very specific brand of conceptualism, and neglecting the rest. She describes it as “low-fi, small scale, conceptual art, in the sense that it uses an art language which you have to be another artist to understand. It’s not very accessible, and it’s art that could be accused of not engaging with the real world very much.”

Peter Howson, whose brutish figures of the 1980s were a hit with the Scottish public and with investors as exotic as Madonna, has similar concerns. He disapproves of art which communicates only with an expert minority. “Marcel Duchamp opened up a Pandora’s Box,” he says. “There don’t seem to be any rules at the moment so we get this polarisation between Sunday painters painting oils, and doing them pretty badly most of the time, and conceptual artists doing things that only a fraction of people seem to understand.”

Ironically, the popular style which Barker describes can be seen as a sign that Glasgow’s avant garde is ready to return – if only very tentatively – to drawing and painting. After a few years of glossy digital imagery and video technology, artists are rediscovering the human touch, taking pleasure in making marks on paper all over again.

The difficulty a lot of people have with this new style is its apparent lack of finish – although some see the felt-penned doodles as a return to the basic principles of drawing and painting, others argue that they’re devoid of craftsmanship. Attitudes towards drawing and painting have changed substantially since the advent of conceptual art. Found objects and scribbled ideas have become just as acceptable as carefully-honed images, and many people find that hard to accept.

“It’s something that painters have to be very careful about, is banging on about craft,” warns Ken Currie, whose paintings of Scotland’s labour history won widespread acclaim in the 1980s.

“Some of the most powerful paintings I have ever seen are absolutely ham-fisted and craftless,” Currie continues. “I’m thinking specifically of Edvard Munch. His paintings look as though he painted them on his way to work while he was riding a horse! They’re just a couple of lines but they’re incredibly powerful… I don’t care how it’s produced. It doesn’t bother me whether it’s technically brilliant or technically appalling, so long as the image is compelling and powerful.”

Currie is sceptical about claims of a resurgence for painting. “People have been talking about it for 25 years,” he says. “What people are going to have to finally, finally realise is that painting isn’t going to go away. It’s not going to die and then be resurrected. It doesn’t work like that. Painting is just going to exist forever, simple as that.”

“Painting’s always in crisis,” Currie argues. “It’s been in crisis ever since they started painting 40,000 years ago. And the reason it’s in crisis is because of this permanent desire to reinvent itself all the time. Rather than die, painting simply reinvents itself for the time that we’re living in.”

Francis McKee agrees. “Painting has always been fascinating,” he points out, “but it’s refused to accept the stereotypes of what painting should be. And that annoys people – it really annoys people! And they blame conceptualists. They see someone putting a glass of water on a shelf and saying it’s an oak tree and they go ‘you killed painting’! but painters don’t want to get their old role back. You could wipe out all the conceptualists, refuse to exhibit them, and painters are still going to disappoint you by doing new stuff; they’re not going to be stuck with this old role that people want from them.”

Howson has a more black and white vision of the situation. “I’ve always believed that conceptual art has been taken on at the expense of painting,” he claims, “especially by the museum curators and the Turner judges”. For Currie, McKee, Barker and Hideko, there is no opposition between different types of art; the problem is purely one of politics in the media and in the art world.

“Recently we’re seeing these ridiculous stand-offs,” says Currie. “Particularly we’ve got this horrible Jack Vetrianno situation in Scotland. It’s Jack Vetrianno versus Damien Hirst. I think they’re two sides of the same coin, both of them. They’re both businessmen, both self-publicists, both give the public what the public want.”

There is a consensus among artists that there is no real war going on between conceptual art and figurative painting. All good painting involves concepts. Much of conceptual art is figurative. Above all, the art world today is dominated by no one medium. Instead it’s a healthy mix of painting, video, sculpture, installation, sound, carpet fluff and bananas. If it’s hard to understand it’s often branded as conceptual, and let’s face it, that’s the stuff everybody loves to hate.

GSA fine art degree show June 19-26, Renfrew street campus
Hiscox MFA degree show June 17-27, Tramway

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 13.06.04