”Painting in the expanded field” is a tautology. Especially in an age when painting, an uploaded digital survivor that dodged the bullet of its theoretical death (you wish you were a zombie, Painting!), has become more physically truncated, compressed & objectified on our smartphones than ever before. Painting is the artworld’s commodity fetish par excellence. Painters sell-out or framers die. Julian Schnabel is proud. Christie’s is preparing its walls for paintings we will never get to see IRL. Painting exists by proxy — the real thing being a duller, uglier, bigger hick cousin of its digitally incandescent standin. No matter how white & polished those white walls, floors & patent shoes get in the expanded field of the gallery & the art market setting, painting is ugly AF IRL. Here, online, painting is perfect. So perfect that I think painting did die back then. It stripped off its decomposing skin & uploaded itself into the backlit & botoxed fantastic. It’s just that no one noticed when painting transitioned from real to unreal, ugly to beautiful, paint to png. The same way art criticism transitioned to lullaby art writing…Zzz. Painting online is prettier, pocket size & glossy; painting IRL is a ravaged dinner plate with spilt gravy flooding the edges. Who wants to look at that! Back in the dishwasher! Painting doesn’t exist anymore; it doesn’t need to. It always existed elsewhere anyway — in books, on Instagram. That’s okay; for the better. Its physical substitute, what Lacan named the “objet petit a” (object cause of & obstacle to desire) has taken its place. Painters are in a much happier place in the truncated thoroughfare of the glassy-eyed expanded fantasy of reality, where tumbleweeds tumble & painters mumble: “I paint therefore I am?” We can tout Laura Owens as the exemplar of painting today in the expanded field, the same way Jessica Stockholder was “Unbound” in my art school days, but it’s just words standing in for reality. Painting was physically more alive when it was theoretically dead. The threat of pluralism & Warhol & installation art was not a threat because painting wanted to be popular all along. And today it is, but as a simulation.

📸Christopher Williams, ErratumAGFA Color (oversaturated), 2000, Chromogenic print, 66 x 76.2 cm