Running on Empty

Here are some questions that arose while walking through the Whitney Museum of American Art’s mid-career retrospective of the Italianborn, New York artist Rudolf Stingel: Have the Whitney, its curators, and its favored contemporary artists literally run out of ideas? Or, having built an institution and multiple careers around the death of art and painting, are they now so stuck in the cliché, so afraid to do anything that may suggest that contemporary art is not dead, that they are actually willing to ride that cliché for another five decades just to save face?And isn’t it interesting that whenever a painter emerges who has made a career out of debunking the possibilities of painting he reduces the entire language of painting down to a couple of childish syllables? It seems to me that when a painter who loves painting can paint, he paints, and even when a painter who loves painting can’t paint all that well, he still paints; but when an artist has no feeling for or understanding of painting can’t paint, he chooses to use painting to dispute and demystify painting.Thank God the architects and engineers who build our skyscrapers and bridges — no matter how aesthetically weak they may be — actually understand and believe in, rather than choose to undermine, the respective languages of their professions. Granted, no one has to drive a car across one of Mr. Stingel’s canvases, but, aesthetically speaking, his pictures could not stand up to the force of a summer breeze.Who cares, right? Art no longer has to look good — so the argument goes — it just has to challenge assumptions; it just has to blur the line between this mode and that mode. This is Mr. Stingel’s angle. He is questioning what painting is and where art begins and ends. Yet, the argument that Mr. Stingel is furthering the language of painting, as he actually challenges that language, comes with the claim that he can do whatever he wants in a museum because his black-and-whitestippled photorealist self-portraits have been critically judged to be equal to painting’s highest achievements.In the past, Mr. Stingel has covered gallery floors with carpet and left the walls bare. He has also published detailed instructions describing his stepby-step painting process so that his abstract paintings can be replicated. What he does at the Whitney includes mounting a dirty white rug from his studio floor on a gallery wall to question the primacy of verticality and personal expression in painting. He invites and allows viewers to add graffiti to pristine foil surfaces to question the primacy and individuality of artistic expression in the museum setting, and exhibits panels of white Styrofoam that he has walked on in boots dipped in lacquer thinner.Mr. Stingel’s brooding, photorealist self-portraits, a handful of which are on view at the Whitney, are copied from the photographic portraits of the artist taken by Sam Samore. One of the paintings has Mr. Stingel, dressed in blue jeans, in the foreshortened posture of Mantegna’s “Dead Christ.” The paintings have no form, weight, light, rhythm, or structure. They certainly have absolutely nothing to do with the paintings of Rembrandt or Vermeer (a breathless comparison made in the press when his show made its debut in Chicago). They also lack an idea, beyond that of turning paintings into mechanical, photo-based illustrative billboards.The exhibition, curated by Francesco Bonami and Chrissie Iles, has variety. I’ll give it that. One room, whose floor is covered with mirrors, includes three gold paintings that resemble Baroqueinspired wallpaper. In an adjacent gallery, similar raised wallpaper patterns cover paintings that subtly shift from black to blue to gray. Another is filled with large abstract color-field paintings in reflective silvery hues of red, yellow, and blue. And the show also includes an orange radiator, cast in polycarbonate, as well as huge pieces of pink Styrofoam that the artist has carved into ripples or concentric circles.But the most interesting gallery in the show is its silvery, chandelier-lit entrance. The exhibition began at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. There, a gallery’s walls and ceiling were covered in reflective, silver Celotex insulation board. This has been repeated at the Whitney. Museum visitors in Chicago were allowed to mark and to mar the surface of the tinfoil field. The graffiti-covered, pockmarked panels — uninterestingly inscribed mostly with scratches and names, as well as images of an elephant, a washing machine, and an ice cream sundae — have been reinstalled, about 8 feet from the floor, just off the elevators at the Whitney, where new unmarked panels cover the lower registers in the show’s entranceway. Viewers are encouraged to do whatever they want to the fresh panels, which will remain in the possession of the artist after the exhibit closes.If Mr. Stingel and the Whitney are actually allowing museumgoers complete artistic license and freedom of expression to do whatever they want to the Celotex entranceway, perhaps a visitor will decide — just as an artist might in his studio — to rip down the panels and discard them altogether. That action would truly express the museumgoer’s primacy and participation. It might also encourage Mr. Stingel to return to his studio to question where, exactly, art ends.Until October 14 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).

Running on Empty

Running on Empty

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