"Being an artist" in the words of Joseph Kosuth "means questioning the nature of art. If you make paintings, you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art"
I think there is some truth in that but it is not the whole truth. I think that there is also some truth in that the other means used to question the nature of art are losing their legitimacy and scope in much the same way that painting did. The point being that painting ran out of room to go anywhere new and this will effect or has already come to pass in other forms of art. It is of course more complex than this with issues of autonomy, authenticity, spirituality, aesthetics, culture, beliefs and corporate ownership all should be brought into the discussion if time permitted it.
Accepting that the history of art as a narrative has come to an end does not mean the end of creativity or meaningful work. Artist's have reflected on the past using irony and parody but this has quickly become exhausted. It seems more interesting to celebrate the story of painting, The fact that it is over in itself creates a challenge and by using it so it becomes a natural and part of the process in the course of the painting. The story of art is in itself a subject of which can express the question of art. I love Arthur C. Danto's idea of a museum of monochrome work each work profoundly different but all of them looking exactly alike.
" The bare idea of such a museum is of immense philosophical value, as the museum itself would be, were it to exist. To experience the collection, from 1915 to the present, would be to learn a great deal about how to experience art and , in particular, the complex interrelationship between the visual arts and visual experience. But it would beyond that, demonstrate that the monochrome has little to do with the internal exhaustion of the possibilities of painting, and that the existence of white squares, red squares, blaack squares-or pink triangles, or yellow circles, green pentagons- tells us nothing about the death of painting or, for that matter, the end of art. Each monochrome painting has to be adressed on its own terms, and counted as success or failutre in terms of the adequacy with which it embodies its intended meaning."
Arthur C. Danto's - After the End of Art
Part Two is a reaction against Postmodernism which has revelled in the banal, the anti-aesthetic, in cleverness over creativity and the decline of the unconscious power of art. It developes relationships between painting and text and art and language.
Part Three and Four develope themes of the relationships between painting and music, painting and nature. in larger paintings and the traditional double square dimension relating to landscapes. It revels in the freedom of doubt and difficulty. There are no new styles to discover no new forms to covet and exploit. The joy of creating still comes through the medium, the smell of paint, the body sweat, the heat and excretion of struggle. The idaea of art forming connections and relationships seems a more feminine wayforward than the male dominated ego of Modernism.
The freedom is that any style, form, expression is available to express the singular demands the particular painting has. Each painting becomes its own particular question.
Part Five was meant to tie off the exhibition as a summary but somehow seems to taken of somewhere else so perhaps not an end after all.
"The real reason a painter paints is to have something to look at" Barnett Newman