The particular saboteur who seems most to have captured Rose's attention in this case is Daniel Buren, whose work for MOMA consisted of his familiar striped panels, cut to conform to the windows facing the garden, and affixed to the corridor wall facing those windows, and again to the garden wall, with leftover fragments displaced to a billboard and a gallery entrance in SoHo. Impressed though she is by the cogency of Buren's arguments about the ideology imposed by the museum, Rose is nevertheless perplexed that Buren would want his work to appear in one, which seems to ''her like having his cake and eating it too. For illumination on this question, she turns to an interview with William Rubin, director of MOMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture. In the interview, published in a 1974 issue of Artforum, Rubin explains that museums are essentially compromise institutions invented by bourgeois democracies to reconcile the larger public with art conceived within the compass of elite private patronage. This situation, Rubin suggests, might be coming to an end, making the museum irrelevant to the practices of contemporary art.

 

Perhaps, looking back 10, 15, 30 years from now, it will appear that the modernist tradition really did come to an end within the last few years, as some critics suggest. If so, historians a century from now—whatever name they will give to the period we now call modernism—will see it beginning shortly after the middle of the 19th century and ending in the 1960s. I'm not ruling this out; it may be the case, but I don't think so. Perhaps the dividing line will be seen as between those works which essentially continue an easel painting concept and that grew up associated with bourgeois democratic life and was involved with the development of private collections as well as the museum concept—between this and, let us say, Earthworks, Conceptual works and related endeavors, which want another environment (or should want it) and, perhaps, another public.

 

Rose assumes that Buren is one of those artists whose work wants (or should want) another environment. After all, his text "Function of the Museum," which she quotes, is a polemic against the confinement of artworks in the museum. But if Buren's work had not appeared in the museum, if it had not taken the museum as its point of departure and as its referent, the very issues Rose ponders in her essay would not have arisen. It is fundamental to Buren's work that it function in complicity with those very institutions it seeks to make visible as the necessary condition of the artwork's intelligibiljty. This is the reason that his work not only appears in museums and galleries but also poses as painting. It is only thereby possible for his work to ask, What makes it possible to see a painting? What makes it possible to see a painting as a painting? And, under such conditions of its presentation, to what end painting?

      But Bliren's work runs a great risk by posing as painting, the risk of invisibility. Since everything to which Buren's work points as being cultural, historical, is so easily taken to be natural, many people look at Buren's paintings the way they look at all paintings, vainly asking them to render up their meanings about themselves.

And since they categorically refuse to do so, since they have, by design, no internal meaning, they simply disappear. Thus, Rose, for example, sees Buren's work at the Museum of Modern Art only as "vaguely resembling Stella's stripe paintings. 5 But if Rose is myopic on matters of painting, blind to those questions about painting that Buren's work poses, this is because she, like most people,

still believes in painting.

 

One must really be engaged in order to be a painter. Once obsessed by it, one eventually gets to the point where one thinks that humanity could be changed by painting. But when that passion deserts you, there is nothing else left to do. Then it is better to stop altogether. Because basically painting is pure idiocy.

 

         Gerhard Richter, in conversation with lrmeline Lebeer

 

As testimony to her faith in painting, Rose organized her own exhibition of contemporary art five years after the MOMA show. American Painting: The Eighties (the title is oracular: her show was mounted in the fall of 1979) expressly intended to demonstrate that throughout that grim period of. the 1960s and the 1970s, when art seemed to her so bent on self-destruction, intent as it was on those extra-art concerns gathered together under the rubric politics—that throughout that period there had been "a generation of holdouts" against "disintegrating morality, social demoralization, and lack of conviction in the authority of tradition. 6 These noble survivors, painters all, were "maintaining a conviction in quality and values, a belief in art as a mode oftranscendence, a worldly incarnation of the ideal."

 

         As it happens, Rose's evidence of this keeping of the faith was extremely unconvincing, and her exhibition became an easy target for hostile critics. Biased as her selection was toward hackneyed recapitulations of late modernist abstraction, the show had the unmistakable look of Tenth Street art, twenty years later. Given the thousands of artists currently practicing the art of painting, Rose's selection was indeed parochial; certainly there is a lot of painting around that looks more original. Furthermore, favoring such a narrow range of painting at a time when pluralism was the critical byword, Rose virtually invited an unfavorable response. And so, as was to be expected, she was taken to task by various art journalists for whomever of their favorites she failed to include. Hilton Kramcr's review asked, Where are the figurative painters? John Perreault's asked, Where are the pattern painters? And Roberta Smith's asked, Where is Jennifer Bartlett? But the crucial point is that no one asked, Why painting? To what end painting, now, at the threshold of the 1980s? And to that extent, Rose's show was a resounding success. It proved that faith in painting had indeed been fully restored. For, however much easel painting may have been in question in 1974 when Rubin was interviewed by Artforum and his museum exhibited Eight Contemporary Artists, by 1979 the question clearly had been withdrawn.

 

       The rhetoric that accompanies this resurrection of painting is almost entirely reactionary: it reacts specifically against all those art practices of the 1960s and the 1970s that abandoned painting and worked to reveal the ideological supports of painting, as well as the ideology that painting, in turn, supports. And so, whereas almost no one agreed with the choices Rose made to demonstrate painting's renascence, almost everyone agreed with the substance, if not the details, other rhetoric. Rose's catalogue text for American Painting: The Eighties is a dazzling collection of received ideas about the art of painting, and I want to suggest that painting knows only such ideas today. Here are a number of excerpts from Rose's essay, which I think we may take as provisional answers to the question, To what end painting in the 1980s?

 

For more details email me with the subject of " The End of Painting "

aasharifi2002@yahoo.com