This Issue
"This Issue" by Richard Rhodes, Summer 2010, p. 12
One of the remarkable rebirths seen within contemporary art has been the return of painting. Despite being declared dead and buried by postmodernist argument in the 1980s, painting didn’t actually die; it simply kept to the shadows while the art world turned its attention elsewhere. There have always been too many good painters—Richter, Riley, Marden, Scully, De Keyser—for the idea of the death of painting to be taken seriously, yet for a generation of art-school graduates, painting was anathema, a path to certain irrelevance. The achievements of Luc Tuymans, John Currin, Peter Doig, Neo Rauch and Marlene Dumas over the past two decades have changed that. Painting is once again on the map. It has shown itself to be one of art’s great renewable resources—a trustworthy template for invention and unpredictability. The Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth McIntosh, whose Untitled (black dots on swatches) graces the cover of our “All about Painting” issue, has lived through this recent history of painting’s disappearance and return. In Adele Weder’s story “Done. Not Done. Might Be Done…” McIntosh expresses impatience with inherited ideas about painting. “Abstraction is a term that’s outdated,” she says. “It’s a hundred years old: what does that mean now?” The New Abstraction that McIntosh practises has set aside the rigidity and formulas of 20th-century modernism to rely on more open and newly topical terms of engagement. “My view is that the rectangle of a canvas is an indefinite expanse,” McIntosh asserts, using “indefinite” as a wholly positive term, one that registers in distinct contrast to the supposedly “pure” pursuits of modernist art. The resurgence of painting is all about art surviving those high-minded modern exclusions, all about embracing a new world of subjectivity that is decidedly less sure of fixed achievements and universal realities. Painting has come back to life with new energy, as the artists featured in this issue attest, and it has come back as a creative platform capable of registering the evolving circumstances of our new century— and the passing beauties and vulnerabilities of its pressingly indefinite future.
Contributors
ADELE WEDER writes on art, design and architecture for publications across Canada. She has contributed to several cultural anthologies and served as West Coast curator and researcher for a series of exhibitions at Montreal’s MONOPOLI and for “Clip/Stamp/ Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x–197x” at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. She is the co-author of B. C. Binning, a 2006 monograph on the West Coast painter and designer. She currently lives in Vancouver and Haida Gwaii.
DANIEL BAIRD has been a contributing writer and editor for the Brooklyn Rail and the Walrus magazine. He also writes on culture and ideas for numerous other publications, including Canadian Art, Border Crossings and the Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto.
TRISH BOON is an artist, writer and educator who lives in Toronto. She teaches visual arts and photography at Central Commerce Collegiate and is a certified yoga instructor. In contrast with the thick pools of glossy acrylic found on Dorian FitzGerald’s paintings, she sometimes feels spread thin and finds herself wishing there was more time for all of the above.
ROBERT LINSLEY is an artist currently living in Kitchener, Ontario. He has mounted solo shows of his abstract paintings in Toronto, Düsseldorf, Berlin and Barcelona, and will present a survey exhibition at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in early 2011. He has given talks at Tate Modern, Yale University, University College London, the Whitney Museum of American Art and other venues, most recently the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver and the Banff Centre.
SARAH MILROY is the former art critic of the Globe and Mail and the former editor and publisher of Canadian Art magazine. Currently, she is working on the Art Gallery of Ontario’s forthcoming catalogue and exhibition on the art of Jack Chambers. She lives in Toronto.
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