We live in the age of the image. But don’t ask me to define the word: its very elusiveness is of the essence. We talk about image when we want to indicate an appearance that seems somehow detachable from its material support. This is most obvious when we speak of a photographic image: it’s the same image whether it’s presented as a small snapshot or blown up as a big cibachrome, glowing on the monitor of my computer or mechanically reproduced in the pages of a magazine.

It has often been said that the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century changed the nature of painting by withdrawing from it the task of representation that had so long been at its core, thereby enabling the emergence, in the early twentieth century, of a fully abstract art. The initial plausibility of this story, however, should not disguise its falseness. Any mediocre painter of the nineteenth century could depict a person, object or landscape with greater accuracy and vividness than a photograph. (If nothing else, the painter could show the colour of things, hardly a negligible dimension of visual experience.) The real attraction of the photograph –beyond simple economics: a photographic portrait cost a lot less than one in oils- lay not in its capacity for iconic representation but rather in what has been called its indexical quality, that is, the apparent causal connection between an object and its image. The image comes from what it shows, a sort of relic.

Far from irrational, there may be an important truth lurking in this notion of the image as a detachable constituent of the reality it pictures. In any case, it finds an echo not only in the transformation of art since the advent of photography but even in philosophy. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant taught that we can know, not things in themselves, but rather phenomena, appearances. The ‘thing in itself’ is something whose existence can only be intellectually deduced. The perceiving mind, in this view, is something like an idea of a portrait painter. The subject of the portrait, the sitter, is over there; the painter with his brushes , palette an easel is over here. There is not direct contact between the two of them. Instead, the painter constructs a set of appearances on the canvas that somehow corresponds to the features of the sitter. At the end of the nineteenth century, after the invention of the camera a different idea of perception became plausible. Henri Bergson declared that we are acquainted with the world not thought mere appearances that are somehow different in kind from things in themselves, but thought what he called, precisely, ‘images’, which are part and parcel of the real. The mind, for Bergson, is less like a painter than it is like a camera, its sampled images not fundamentally other but simply quantitatively more limited than the ‘aggregate of “images”’ that is reality. Our perceptual apparatus is, one might say, touched by the things it perceives as the photographic plate or film is touched by the light that comes from the object.

Abstract painting developed under the spell of a philosophy not unlike Kant’s: that the ultimate reality was not the one indicated by the senses, but something intellectually deducible. This was the era of Malevich and Mondrian. And for a long time it seemed misguided to think of modern or contemporary painting primarily in term of the images it might bear. The most famous and most concrete formulation of this view was, of course, Clement Greenberg’s: ‘Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a modernist picture as a picture first.’ (Subsequently, one began to signal adherence to this dictum simply by adjuring the word ‘picture’, preferring ‘painting’, a usage still in force today.) To look at a painting for its image could only be loose sight of the painting’s material, physical existence, leading to the absurdities eloquently denounced by Yve-Alain Bois in his well known essay “painting as model”, where he lashes into critics who ‘would make Malevich’s black square a solar eclipse, Rothko late work stylized versions of the pieta and deposition, or Mondrian Broadway bogey-woogey an interpretation of the New York subway map’. In this view, to think of painting in relation to image was to see it as a form of representation, however veiled, whereas the great abstractionists had shown that painting could have quite other functions.

Of course, images never left painting, not even in the work of sometimes abstractionsts like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. In the early eighties, image-based paintings took the art world by storm. Yet the renown of the neo-expressionists (as that generation of painters was called whether the term suited them or not) was much resented and short-lived. Their work has never had the disinterested critical assessment that, perhaps, may now be possible. It was really a decade later that a new generation of painters began to emerge, more slowly and steadily than the neo-expressionists, and gathering real force only late in the nineties –painters like Peter Doig, Cecily Brown, Thomas Scheibitz, or many others whose fascination with images was clearly central to their work. They were really up to something other than a simple revision to the dogmas of the pre-modernist academies. In fact, many of them may have been as much influenced by the work of non-painters like Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley or Jeff Koons as by anything in the history of painting, both Old Masters and modern which they explore freely. Their sometimes earnest, sometimes slackerish technique –at the times academic, at others approaching the simplicity of the Sunday painter or the extreme stylisation of the decorator- often seems to recklessly evoke everything that had been off-limits to serious painting. In some of this work one can see parallels in the once despised late work of artist like de Chirico and Picabia.

A criticism too enamoured of the tradition of abstraction, by now threatening to become academic in turn, is ill-equipped to deal with this new manifestations of the image in painting. But so would be a criticism based on the criteria of the Old Masters. The image as we encounter it in the contemporary painting is something quite distinct from depiction or representation in European painting before Modernism. Think of all the training in perspective, the investigations on anatomy –the painter was working, in a systematic, indeed almost scientific way to reconstruct pictorially the real world before his eyes, and therefore had to understand not simply its surface but its structure. Contemporary painters, needless to say, do nothing of the sort. Bergsonians without knowing it, they work from a reality that is always already image. The impressionists were already pointing in this direction when they changed the focus from the self-subsistent object to the shimmering play of its appearances. A more urgent precedent for contemporary painting, however, is the Pop Art of the sixties: Roy Lichtenstein taking comic strips as his models, James Rosenquist mimicking billboards, or Andy Warhol with his grainy news photos. Painters who cultivated the look of the snapshots, like Gerhard Richter or Malcom Morley, were pursuing similar ends. But notice the difference between the image-consciousness of the painter who have emerged in recent years and that of these elders: taking photographs, comic’s or billboards as one’s materials –simply because they are clearly limited categories of image-material- still seems to imply that there could be a realm beyond the image that the artist might otherwise have elected to access: it implies a quasi-polemical choice of the image realm over some other reality. That’s a polemic today’s painters no longer seem to feel called upon to make. Instead, they find everything to be of the matter of images.

Painters like Doig, Marlene Dumas or Luc Tuymans –to name three of the most influential artists at work today- make work that is entirely permeated by a photographi reality, that is, a reality composed of detachable appearances; yet in contrast to Richtrer or Morley, the feel no need to represent the ‘look’ of the photograph. The painting remains painterly. To say that contemporary painters treat reality as an aggregate of images, in Bergson’s phrase, is not to say that they paint it with neutrality, or with pure aesthetics distance, or without commitment. On the contrary, their engagement with the image is precisely that, a form of engagement, and inevitably conveys an emotional stance, whether it be the piss-taking disdain typical of Tuyman’s saturnine gloom, that airy bemusement that emanates from Sophie von Hellerman’s paintings, Ian Monroe’s sense of claustrophobia, or Cecily Brown frenetic urgency. The effects are often uncomfortable. Dana Schutz’s images are images of the body, but always awkward and resistant, while Dexter Dalwood’s are spaces, plausible enough to drawn one in but too disjointed to actually inhabit. Much of this work has a sincretic quality that could not have existed without the example of modernist collage, but by folding its disjunctive effect back into paint –an actual heterogeneity of materials is exceptional here, and when it occurs, as in the work of Michael Raedecker or David Thorpe, it represents not the shock of an irruption of the real into art, as it did in different way for Cubism, Dada and Constructivism, but something more like an incursion of the homely distraction of crafts and hobbies into the artistic field.

This fascination with crafts has the same source as the more widespread attraction to painterliness, among today’s younger painters, as opposed to the seamless surface of photorealism: not an overturning of hierarchies between high and low cultures, but a more fundamental concern with a physical involvement with the image. For although it was photography that taught as the modern idea of the image, it is painting that allows us to internalise it. It’s a question of touching and being touched. The photograph may have been touched by the light of its object, but the sense of contact is entirely subsumed in the seamlessness of the photograph’s surface. Painters like Dumas and Tuymans, and so many others who freely interpret photographic imagery, are attempting neither to disguise its photographic basis in order to retain an aesthetic effect, not to reduce the appearance of the photograph in order to neutralise it. And their strategy is not essentially different from that of colleagues who may not directly use photographs in the work process but who nevertheless treat the world they paint as wholly image.

The surface of painting, then, is for current painting something that partakes neither of the homogeneity of the photographic emulsion nor the heterogeneity of collage. It is a place where both differences and similarities are consumed. In a way, Schutz’s painting face eater (2004), can be taken as a paradigmatic painting of the moment. With its evident allusions to Picasso and Bacon, it clearly signals its art –historical allegiances, but the painting wears its citations lightly- the paintings of the two modern masters, and notably those of Bacon witch are themselves based on photographic vision, are simply part of Schutz’s image-world. It is hilarious and terrifying at once. A head tries to swallow itself and in the process it does not disappear, but the senses become confused: the mouth sees by consuming the organs of vision, the eyes feast on their own imminent consumption. Is this an emblem of the artist’s solipsism? Not necessarily. The painting declares itself to be –borrowing a resonant phrase from the literary theorist Stanley Fish- a self-consuming artefact, but does consumption really take place? Not really. Instead, we are shown a commotion of the senses that seems as pleasurably seductive as it may be neurotic. To look at it is practically to feel one’s own teeth start reaching up to bite the upper lip… It’s an image about interiorising as image even oneself. And in that image, touching reality.


Barry Schwabsky is a regular contributor to Artforum, and the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003).