Cavepainting

Where Owens’ work was clearly earmarked because of its dissimilarity to its immediate forebears, Peter Doig‘s is dyed-in-the-wool 1980s bad painting, having been exhibited as early as 1982 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The thought that Doig’s painting may also have improved is a frightening one, as the works for which he has become known over the last decade resemble atrocities abandoned in the stacks of undergraduate painting studios every spring -- dank, lumpy translations of projected photographs, compositionally retarded and indifferently painted, with the bottom of the canvas invariably left dangling in a washy void. He might as well cut the lower third clean off -- at least his paintings would have an interesting shape. Unlike Owens, who may well not be able to discern the difference, Doig is clearly engaged in the same willful incompetence that motivated so many ‘80s painters. But while Doig may be goaded by a generational animosity toward the institutionalized international style of post-painterly transcendentalism that gave ’80s Bad its frisson of urgency, his work has made it to the Santa Monica Museum thanks to the same enforced aesthetic that has landed Owens teaching jobs. This is another discontinuity in the marketing and reception of recent bad painting -- between the historical edge attributed to these slight, stale cartoons and the fact that the instructors under whose gaze they were painted (not to mention the collectors, writers and curators at whom they were directed) are already a generation removed from the disdained Modernist cosmology. Far from usurping any current preconceptions about painting, ‘90s Bad children played fawning court jesters to the entrenched authorities, ridiculing the previous regime -- their aesthetic grandparents, whose work they knew only in the form of a condescending shorthand.

Chris Ofili’s work at least is obviously sincere. It resembles nothing so much as the obsessive psychedoodlings of generations of high school pothead artists, which is fine -- reveling in optical reverie is certainly a more valid excuse for making art than some self-loathing in-joke. The art world hasn‘t allowed entry to a lot of this kind of work, except through the authorially ambiguous quotation of artists like Jim Shaw, so it’s nice that Ofili gets to show so much. Nevertheless, the upper-middle-class hedonism of his work combined with the conspicuous borrowings from indigenous African art makes his inclusion in the Saatchi juggernaut reek of calculated tokenism. Less cold-blooded but perhaps more exploitative is his elevation as First Amendment martyr at the hands of former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose crusade against the Brooklyn Museum over Ofili‘s elephant-poop-’n‘-BVM painting in the “Sensation” show was almost as crass and stupid as his attempt to use the 911 tragedy as a springboard for a third term. But Ofili, out of the “Cavepainting” lot, is clearly having the best time. In the sock-puppet e-mail roundtable he responds to Relyea’s self-important prattling with inscrutable aphorisms and chipper affirmations, and nobody makes paintings like his to try to get famous. Of the three, his work has the potential of rising to the hype, because he‘s actually doing what he wants.

With the recent, shall we say, “dip” in the art market, perpetually moribund painting will undoubtedly be relegated to the catacombs once again. Peter Doig will fit right in. For Laura Owens, it could be a blessing, as the riot grrrl art brat thing wears a little thin after 30, and the tenability of poorly executed Modernist painting as a comment on anything has been stretched too far to snap back another time. Painting’s next resuscitation will have to be more substantially engaged with the contemporary visual landscape, and some time out of the poisonous premature limelight could do a lot of artists good.