ART 315 LECTURE 14 Richard Aldrich, Untitled, 2009 Richard Aldrich, Slide Painting no. 3 (looking origin), 2010 Joe Bradley, Superman, 2008 Joe Bradley, On the Cross, 2008 Matt Connors, What is the Third Question, 2013 Nicole Eisenman, Breakup, 2011 Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Circus No. 1 Face 44.18), 2012 Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop “Dutchman”, 2013 Julie Mehretu, Heavier than Air (written form), 2014 Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2009 Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2011 Oscar Murillo, Matt painting (yoga), 2013 Laura Owens, Untitled, 2013 Amy Sillman, Still Life 1, 2013-14 Josh Smith, Untitled, 2007 Mary Weatherford, The Light in Lancaster, 2014 Matt Kleberg, Do What Say Do II, 2016 Matt Kleberg, The Turkey, 2016 The Miami Rail http://miamirail.org Zombie Paintings at MoMA Painting seems to have returned from the dead, again. The frequent pronouncement that painting is dead, followed by the declaration of its eventual resurrection, is an important, but often overlooked part of the modern (and postmodern) artistic tradition. Since the late nineteenth century, with the advent of other imaging technologies (such as photography) and the desire to make works of art that can participate in and connect to the shifting social conditions and new emotional complexities of modern life, artists and critics have fought either to justify painting’s existence in a changing world or to kill it off once and for all. And so some of the most inflated rhetoric about painting as well as the most insightful and profound critical commentary in the twentieth century has been a response to the abiding fear that, compared to other artistic and creative cultural practices like photography, film, digital imagery, installation, and performance, painting is irrelevant to our daily emotional and imaginative lives. To drag a brush loaded with smelly pigments across a scrap of canvas is indeed a vulnerable, fragile, and even absurd cultural practice—absurd not only for its maker but for one who stands before its finished product. A painting’s value as a highly sought-after and collectible luxury item does very little to alleviate the need for artists and critics to justify its existence beyond the auction houses and art fairs. Thus, what lies just barely below the surface for both is Gerhard Richter’s observation that “painting is pure idiocy.” 1 Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, on view at the Museum of 1 / 6 The Miami Rail http://miamirail.org Modern Art (MoMA) through April 5, proclaims once again that painting has returned from the dead. But this time, something is different. It should come as no surprise that, since its founding in 1929, MoMA has been the site of many (if not most) claims of painting’s resurrection. But it is also the case that many of its exhibitions have, in turn, served to pronounce its demise, at least implicitly. Even the most c ...

1. ART 315 LECTURE 14
Richard Aldrich, Untitled, 2009
Richard Aldrich, Slide Painting no. 3
(looking origin), 2010
Joe Bradley, Superman, 2008
Joe Bradley, On the Cross, 2008
Matt Connors, What is the Third Question,
2013
Nicole Eisenman, Breakup, 2011

2. Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Circus No. 1 Face
44.18), 2012
Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop
“Dutchman”, 2013
Julie Mehretu, Heavier than Air (written form), 2014
Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2009
Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2011
Oscar Murillo, Matt painting
(yoga), 2013
Laura Owens, Untitled, 2013
Amy Sillman, Still Life 1, 2013-14
Josh Smith, Untitled, 2007

3. Mary Weatherford, The Light in
Lancaster, 2014
Matt Kleberg, Do What Say Do II, 2016
Matt Kleberg, The Turkey, 2016
The Miami Rail
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Zombie Paintings at MoMA
Painting seems to have returned from the dead, again. The
frequent pronouncement that painting is dead,
followed by the declaration of its eventual resurrection, is an
important, but often overlooked part of the
modern (and postmodern) artistic tradition. Since the late
nineteenth century, with the advent of other
imaging technologies (such as photography) and the desire to
make works of art that can participate in
and connect to the shifting social conditions and new emotional
complexities of modern life, artists and
critics have fought either to justify painting’s existence in a
changing world or to kill it off once and for
all. And so some of the most inflated rhetoric about painting as

4. well as the most insightful and profound
critical commentary in the twentieth century has been a
response to the abiding fear that, compared to
other artistic and creative cultural practices like photography,
film, digital imagery, installation, and
performance, painting is irrelevant to our daily emotional and
imaginative lives.
To drag a brush loaded with smelly pigments across a scrap of
canvas is indeed a vulnerable, fragile, and
even absurd cultural practice—absurd not only for its maker but
for one who stands before its finished
product. A painting’s value as a highly sought-after and
collectible luxury item does very little to
alleviate the need for artists and critics to justify its existence
beyond the auction houses and art fairs.
Thus, what lies just barely below the surface for both is Gerhard
Richter’s observation that “painting is
pure idiocy.” 1 Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an
Atemporal World, on view at the Museum of
1 / 6
The Miami Rail
http://miamirail.org
Modern Art (MoMA) through April 5, proclaims once again that
painting has returned from the dead.
But this time, something is different. It should come as no
surprise that, since its founding in 1929,
MoMA has been the site of many (if not most) claims of
painting’s resurrection. But it is also the case

5. that many of its exhibitions have, in turn, served to pronounce
its demise, at least implicitly. Even the
most casual observer and irregular visitor to the museum is
struck by the growing disconnect between the
paintings in the permanent collection that are entombed in the
fourth- and fifth-floor galleries and the
noisy and bustling installations that are regularly on view on the
more visible floors. To be sure, tourists
continue to flock to take selfies in
front of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), Pablo
Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon (1907),
Jackson Pollock’s Number 31 (1950), and Andy Warhol’s
Campbell Soup Cans (1962), but these
paintings seem to be hanging in state, having passed away long
ago, and thus are no longer able to speak
in a meaningful way to the one who stands before them.
Laura Owens, Untitled, 2013. Flashe paint, synthetic polymer
paint, and oil stick on canvas, 349.3 x
304.8 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Curated by Laura Hoptman, Forever Now is an attempt to
confront this institutional disconnect with a
display of painting’s quantitative power by seventeen artists
(nine women and eight men). Critic Peter
Schjeldahl observed that this is the same number of artists
Alfred H. Barr Jr. included in MoMA’s
landmark exhibition The New American Painting, which
traveled across Europe in 1958–59 to show that
although modern painting may have died there during World
War II, it had been resurrected in New York
with Abstract Expressionism. 2 Forever Now is a hustling,
bustling, claustrophobic, and distracting
2 / 6

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exhibition, not only because nearly one hundred works are
crammed into the relatively small exhibition
spaces on MoMA’s sixth floor, but also because it creates the
impression that the paintings should not
(cannot?) be viewed or experienced individually, but only as a
part of a continually growing and
endlessly accumulating installation that overwhelms and dazzles
the viewer with its sheer visual volume
and diversity.
Some reviewers have criticized Hoptman’s selection of painters
as a pretty standard lineup of established
and market-safe artists, especially some of the women, like
Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, and Amy
Sillman, who have been working successfully for a number of
years. 3 But such criticism, implying that
Hoptman needed to discover new artists working in new ways,
or uncover a new collective movement
with fresh faces, is unfair. Forever Now offers an exhibition of
paintings by artists who do not believe
painting needs to be defended, either by appropriation, irony, or
as a conceptual strategy, and have been
busy about the practice of painting for many years. In her
catalogue essay, Hoptman quotes Sillman, who,
in the audience at a symposium some time ago on the “problem
of painting,” declared, “What’s the
problem? Painters don’t see any problem.” 4

7. The show is therefore also a confident and even exuberant
presentation. It is indeed refreshing to look at
artifacts produced by artists who don’t feel the need to
apologize for making paintings, who don’t make
paintings in scare quotes, with a nod and a wink, and a “we all
know what this means” look—strategies
that characterized the practices of artists working in the 1980s
and 1990s. Matt Connors’s large painted
panels, Rashid Johnson’s scrawled, looping lines on black soap
and wax, Dianna Molzan’s playful use of
stretchers and frames, and Mary Weatherford’s saturated
abstractions adorned with neon lights are just a
few examples of works that embody this freedom and
confidence.
The refreshing confidence and exuberance of many of the
Forever Now artists reveal a problematic side
to the thesis of Hoptman’s exhibition. If the quotations from the
artists that she includes in her catalogue
essay are an accurate representation, it appears that she and they
do not fully grasp painting as a
precarious and vulnerable practice, or feel the impact of the
threats to its existence that it has regularly
faced for over a century. In
other words, they understand the history of modern painting as
merely a progress succession of formal
innovations and styles. They seem unaware of the deeper
existential challenges that gave birth to such
innovations and styles in the first place.
Oscar Murillo observes, “We have everything available and we
can just use what’s there and around, but
not feel concerned by it.” 5 What this “everything” is seems
merely to be stylistic devices that signal
“modern art history.” Hoptman herself speaks for the artists and
their experience of the painting of the

8. past: “yup, that happened. . .now there’s this.” 6 The virtue of
the appropriation strategies, irony,
“theory,” and even embarrassment
with painting that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s was that
at least painting was recognized as
having something epistemologically at stake, that it had to be
fought for intellectually, that painting’s
“pure idiocy” had to be dealt with. Although Hoptman’s artists
claim an unrestricted freedom and
agency, they reveal a lack of self-consciousness, both emotional
and intellectual, that infects the
exhibition. For Hoptman, freedom and agency amount to
voracious consumption and production of
artifacts, not self-reflection and a deepened consciousness.
3 / 6
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Enid A. Haupt Fund; Joe Bradley, Abelmuth, 2008. Grease
pencil on canvas, 101.6 x 152.4 cm. The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Adam Kimmel.
Photos: Jonathan Muzikar
To make a claim for the resurrection of painting is not an
empirical observation. It is rather an interpretive
act that requires belief in painting. One of the reasons painting
is forever on the edge is how difficult it is
to talk about why it exists, not to mention its importance. It is
one thing to stand before a painting. It is
quite another to say something about its effect on you to a
friend over coffee. Many of the most insightful

9. commentators on modern painting have been painfully aware
that what they say about paintings runs the
risk of being even more fragile, absurd, and idiotic than the
paintings themselves. Overstating painting’s
significance and importance is always a temptation for the
modern critic. But it is this continual threat of
painting’s “death”—its conceptual, existential irrelevance to the
emotional and imaginative life of the
person who stands before it—that has energized not only studio
practice but critics well. Painting needs
justification, and the history of modern art is the history of
critics, in the face of its irrelevance, offering
creative justifications.
And so Forever Now must be understood in this context as
offering another interpretive justification for
the continued viability of painting. How does Hoptman justify
painting’s resurrection? Prove that it is
once again alive? Well, she doesn’t. Painting isn’t really alive
for Hoptman. It’s just undead.
The cultural context and situation that Hoptman identifies as the
justification for painting’s continued
relevance is “atemporality,” a term that she takes from the
science fiction writer William Gibson, by
which “all eras seem to exist at once.” Hoptman continues: “The
atemporal song, story, or painting
contains elements of history but isn’t historical; it is innovative
but not novel, pertinent rather than
prescient,” neither “critical nor ironic, not even nostalgic.” 7
Hoptman connects atemporality to Saint
Augustine’s notion of the “eternal present,” drawn from
the fourth-century theologian’s autobiographical Confessions,
which she claims describes a “temporal
state in which. . .the past and the future have been made
available simultaneously.” 8 But Hoptman’s

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“eternal present” differs from Augustine in a significant way,
and one that bears directly on Forever Now
and the practice of painting. For the African theologian, this
moment is possible only through an act of
self-reflection that
does not eliminate the temporal or disintegrate the historical,
but fulfills the precarious present and
endows it with meaning as the embodiment of the past and
future.
What Hoptman’s notion of atemporality and her interpretation
of these seventeen artists included in
Forever Now
misses is the important roles that consciousness, self-reflection,
and even vulnerability play in the practice
and experience of painting. There are some exceptions. Joe
Bradley’s large, but stripped down, grease-
penciled, and childlike images, including a cross and a stick
figure; Michaela Eichwald’s dark and crusty
compositions; and Mehretu’s smoky, monochrome markings
seem sober and measured in a manner that
invites a deeper relationship with them than do some of the
other works in the exhibition.
Given her lack of attention to this precarious existential and

11. experiential dimension of painting, it is not
surprising, then, that Hoptman finds the zombie to be an
appropriate metaphor for contemporary painting:
“the undead are the perfect embodiments of the atemporal.” 9
She continues: “[the zombie] evokes the
voracious hunger for ideas and images from the past that, in
some paintings today, are consumed,
digested, and re-presented in guises that resemble their original
forms, but are somehow changed.” 10 But
this voracious zombie-like hunger is profoundly unreflective,
unselfconscious, and unable to experience
the precariousness of human existence, much less the
precariousness of devoting a life to caring about pigments
smeared on paper or canvas.
For Hoptman, painting will never completely die. And so
contemporary painters simply shuffle along.
But because they are unable to experience the “death” or even
the “problem” of painting, these painters
are also unable to experience this fragile medium as “alive,” as
life-giving, life-affirming, experience it as
a creative means by which they can possibly achieve more
clarity about themselves and the world. But
Forever Now also suggests that the zombie state of
contemporary painting is as much an interpretive
problem as it is a creative one. Contemporary painting deserves
a critical framework that risks believing
that painting is more than merely undead, but alive, and that the
source of its life for the one who stands
before it is generated precisely by its fragility and absurdity.
That is a “pure idiocy” that I want to believe
in.
DANIEL A. SIEDELL, PhD, teaches art history at The King’s
College in New York and theology at
Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale.

12. 1 Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring
1981), 86.
2 Peter Schjeldahl, “Take Your Time,” New Yorker, Jan. 5,
2015.
3 Roberta Smith, “The Paintbrush in the Digital Era,” New York
Times, Dec. 12, 2014), C27.
4 Laura Hoptman, Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an
Atemporal World (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2014), 23.
5 Ibid., 15.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 14.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 24.
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10 Ibid.
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