Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting

Abstract

expressionism before Rauschenberg and Manzoni-the two essential instances in modern art when the production process of painting was radically questioned for its claim to orgainc unity, aura, and presence, and replaced by heterogeneity, mechanical procedures, and seriality. The contemporary regressions of postmodernist painting and architecture are similar in their iconic eclecticism to the neoclassicism of Picasso, Carra, and others. A variety of production procedures and categories, as well as the perceptual conventions that generated them, are now wrested from their original historical contexts and reassembled into a spectacle of availability. They postulate an experience of history as private property; their function is that of decorum. The gaudy frivolity with which these works underscore their awareness of the ephemeral function they perform cannot conceal the material and ideological interests they serve; nor can their aggressivity and bravura disguise the exhaustion of the cultural practices they try to maintain. The works of the contemporary Italians explicitly revive, through quotation, historical production processes, iconographic references, and categories. Their techniques range from fresco painting (Clemente) to casting sculpture in bronze (Chia), from highly stylized primitivist drawing to gestural abstraction. Iconographic references range from representations of saints (Salvo) to modish quotations from Russian constructivism (Chia). With equal versatility they orchestrate a program of dysfunctional plastic categories, often integrated into a scenario of surplus: freestanding figurative sculpture combined with an installation of aquatint etchings, architectural murals with small-scale easel paintings, relief constructions with iconic objects. The German neoexpressionists are equally protean in their unearthing of atavistic production modes, including even primitivist hewn wood polychrome sculpture, paraphrasing the expressionist paraphrase of primitive art (Immendorff). The rediscovery of ancient teutonic graphic techniques such as woodcuts and linocuts flourishes (Baselitz, Kiefer), as does their iconography: the nude, the still life, the landscape, and what these artists conceive of as allegory. Concomitant with the fetishization of painting in the cult of peinture is a fetishization of the perceptual experience of the work as auratic. The contrivance of is crucial for these works in order that they fulfill their function as the luxury products of a fictitious high culture. In the tangibility of the auratic, figured through crafted surface textures, and commodity coalesce. Only such synthetic uniqueness can satisfy the contempt that bourgeois character holds for the vulgarities of social existence; and only this aura can generate aesthetic 59 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.14 on Mon, 02 Jan 2017 17:53:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms