Why are painters thinking again? Because they think it's a good joke.
“Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again?
Because They Think It’s a Good Idea.”
Last week a painter friend shared a link to an Instagram post by blackbird_rook. “Blackbird Rook” (aka Greg Rook) is an art advisor, who provides advice & services to individuals & institutions for collecting art by both emerging & established artists, ranging in price from the thousands to the millions. In other words, a transient art dealer, best personified by his Substack newsletter “The Diary of an Art Advisor” & latest post named “Journeys Through the Meatspace.”
Redirecting to the original Instagram post by Blackbird Rook, it advertises the paintings of Stuart Cumberland in a new online exhibition (“viewing room” on Artsy) with the curious caption that rhetorically repatriates the artwork by its still living maker under the fantasy totem of an “estate”.*
“Blackbird Rook presents,
The “Estate’ of Stuart Cumberland
30th July - 29th October 2024
In 2016, following a one-person show at the Approach gallery in London, Stuart Cumberland put a collection of his own paintings into storage and stopped work as an artist. In making his motivations certain he then completed a PhD addressing the question, what is post-conceptual painting? Reaching conclusions (in short, post-conceptual painting is fake painting) that verified his three decades of practice, he hit a target - a landmark providing solid ground and a stepping off point. He currently trains in Lacanian psychoanalysis. With such an unusual mid-life shift, from artist to shrink, (the living) Cumberland now holds responsibility for his own artist’s estate.”
Stuart Cumberland was represented by the Approach Gallery up to 2016, with four solo exhibitions at the London gallery. Approach represents such artists as Phillip Allen, Magali Reus & John Stezaker. As the Instagram post outlines, following the one-person show at Approach, Cumberland put “a collection of his paintings into storage & stopped work as an artist” to pursue a PhD that self-reflexively questioned the merits of “post-conceptual painting”, a term that places a point of no return for the painter, as the painter falls into language following the lexical tenets of the Conceptual Artists of the 1960s.
On first glance, Cumberland’s Duchampian move is more pawn than checkmate. It seems tentative. Especially where it has ended up eight years later, Blackbird Rook, a website that links from what amounts to an empty placeholder website analogous to window display, to an Artsy viewing room. Curiosity turned to rabbit-hole regret when I learn that Cumberland’s PhD thesis would also be available to read as part of the “exhibition”.
And yet, there is a lot to unpack with this curious gesture, one that exists somewhere between slapstick & desperation, especially what the Instagram post describes disavowedly as a “mid-life crisis” (sorry “mid-life shift”) from painting into training in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Merlin Carpenter, TATE CAFÉ 3, 2011, acrylic on linen
In a less provincial sense, this move by Cumberland reminds me of Merlin Carpenter, the German artist who takes up provocative positions in relation to painting (what he calls a “cover story” because painting pays the bills) & more conceptual motivations to radicalise painting by killing it off in performative parody. Blackbird Rook however is a far cry & forever echo from the cool & collected networks of Sternberg Press, Texte zur Kunst or Reena Spaulings Gallery New York, where Merlin Carpenter disseminates his brand of marketplace criticality.
The Blackbird Rook Instagram post piqued my curiosity at a time when I myself have been questioning what Milton Resnick called the “soul-beating” of the painter, defined as the difficulty to change painting style, especially in mid-life (see most recent text linked below). Soul-beating becomes more interesting with age & responsibility. Cumberland was 46 when he drew up his self-named estate & stopped painting for psychoanalysis & a PhD. Christopher Wool, whom Cumberland mentions as an influence, stopped painting his blue-chip words in mid-life, not to mention the most famous of all soul-beaters, Phillip Guston.
The Blackbird Rook post also came on the foot of another Instagram post by Irish curator, Eamonn Maxwell, who, in the facilitation of a workshop for artists on “Pricing your artwork”, crosses the divide (if there is a divide) between curation & capital. Filtered through Instagram, these commercially driven ventures crystallise art into a capitalist endgame without irony or criticality. The cover story of painting is uncovered without any aesthetic or conceptual risk in the speculative game of monetary reward in the marketplace. Money helps the artist to live, but it only helps to domesticate their art.
Stuart Cumberland was interviewed online by Jake Hawkey (a close friend of the artist) for Queen's University Belfast in 2022. What amounts to a fascinating discussion helped along by Hawkey’s surgical reading of Cumberland’s PhD, Cumberland reveals a distrust of romanticism with respect to the painter’s biography, even though he mines myths from the biographies of Picasso in the same conversation. This is in keeping with his detached methodology in his use of stencils & rollers. To paint with a paintbrush is to give away a signature. The motive behind Cumberland’s methodology is to give away nothing, especially a subject who feels or emotes. Cumberland’s “pictures” are objects that think, not feel.
Cumberland speaks of the mechanical & the slapstick, or how the slapstick comes out of the mechanical act. The artist confesses that when he realised he was making paintings that twinned what Walther Robinson coined “zombie formalism”, he had to change technical tact. This is a strange admission with respect to a post-conceptual artist. Especially considering Robinson uses the metaphor of the “joke” — something that Cumberland also mentions as a motive — in his definition of zombie formalism:
“With their simple & direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, & can be said to say something basic about what painting is—about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings.”
Cumberland’s “estate” is an exit strategy, where the door is signed PULL but the painter pushes: slapstick! The idea is somehow formalised by really not existing at all. It's just there, the idea, hanging over the work. Like the artist statement, which Jake Hawkey spends a lot of time extolling in terms of Cumberland’s predilection for literary analogy, such as the studio as a wet room where the artist pisses & has sex.
Stuart Cumberland, Five Shapes, 2012, Oil on linen, 130 × 97 cm
In psychoanalytic terminology, which Cumberland is drawing from here, the libidinal & the desirous are always elsewhere. This is especially the case with the fetish. The fetish being a kind of distraction or coping object or process that breaks down or shatters the whole into cropped parts, like a foot. The fetishist desires or depends on the part not the whole to cope with desire, fear or loss. Beyond sex, even though sex is made explicit in Cumberland’s wet room analogy, the artist statement or the “Stuart Cumberland estate” becomes the fetish. If you turn your eyes away from the painting to the artist statement or artist’s estate, the painting becomes more desirous because it's attached to this remote thing outside of the object of desire. The libidinal is not within the painting as such; it is what frames it. If we put it in more grounded terminology, it is the context, the setting.
Cumberland is a painter interested in the setting. He talks about how psychoanalysis is about becoming more aware of your unconscious. He outlines this definition in relation to social settings, where passive & reactionary speech acts take place. He infers that the psychoanalytically trained individual makes great efforts to subdue the voice of the unconscious. They are not too eager to react in conversational settings. They sit back, as the psychoanalyst does in the clinical setting, & wait. They wait their turn or await the babel of voices to quieten. Then they respond with all that information rather than emotion. Yet Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s definition of the psychoanalytic process has less potential of control or escape (or PUSH/PULL exits): “The psychoanalyst's objective is to convince the unconscious, not to convince you.”
Philippe Thomas, readymades belong to everyone®, advertising, advertising, 1988
black & white photograph, framed, 157 x 123 cm
There's something interesting here in relation to Cumberland, psychoanalysis, the marketplace, & the positioning of painting within that Venn diagram. As an artist from that generation, as a young postmodern, & having hangovers from all the pluralism that erupted in the 1970s through ‘80s, from the pseudo-expressionist Julian Schnabel to The Pictures Generation organised by Douglas Crimp who called time on painting, Cumberland, with his disavowal of the depressive artist, is swimming in a shallow pond of mimicry & history. To name your paintings “pictures” not paintings is a language game that lacks depth. A deeper conceptual gesture was made by Italian conceptual artist Philippe Thomas, who transferred his title of author onto his collectors. And by doing so, becoming visible while also disappearing, like the fetish.
There's a kind of manipulation or a magic trick at play in these conceptual gestures that hinge on a lie, negation or disappearance. In the language & aftermath of Conceptual Art & Rosalind Krauss’ post-medium condition, painting, as an idea not trauma, always struggles to sustain itself in the painter. Objectivity is a shallow stream. Today we are in a social media space that presents painting as a commodity & nothing more, domesticated by workshops for pricing your artwork, or ultimately empty gestures like Cumberland’s meta estate.
Screenshot from Art Space article on “The Pictures Generation”
Jacques Rancière, whom Jake Hawkey cites from Cumberland’s PhD thesis, adamantly claims in one lecture that aesthetics was borne upon politics before it was commandeered by the visual arts. Cumberland wants to level the playing field between painting & its conception, between the sensible & the sign. Yet Rancière’s aesthetics is the moment when the worker in the field notices the sunset &, for a split moment, stops toiling to become aware of their position in the world. The aesthetic here creates a temporary rupture in routine, in habit, in society & culture. The aesthetic creates the potential for soul-beating that can be rhetorical or revolutionary. Most artists choose rhetoric. —James Merrigan
*Stuart Cumberland made a body of obituary-inspired paintings named after still living people (eg: Leslie Nielsen & Steve Jobs), paintings that became complete when the “named” passed away.
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