Holding Out from Within: Patrick Caulfield’s Interior Paintings

Abstract

The recent resurgence of critical interest in the practice of painting has brought with it an urgent need to justify painting’s ongoing relevance as something more than a commodity form par excellence. One of the main avenues this line of enquiry has taken is the idea, as old as modernism itself, that painting can somehow shed light on the social conditions of life at any given moment and thus regain a level of criticality. In the digital age, a time in which ‘networks’ mediate our experience of the world and offer a connection to the lives of others, this has meant holding a mirror up to the mechanisms of cultural production and its systems of dissemination, propagation, and (less optimistically) misuse that may otherwise go unnoticed.1 Painting’s ability to do so, as a material thing itself made from the raw stuff of mechanised industry, has long been a sticking point. Traced back to the interrogation of painting performed in Marcel Duchamp’s 1918 canvas, Tu m’ (Fig. 1), in which a set of pictorial conceits serve to lay bare its condition as an assemblage of readymade elements (which, as always with Duchamp, take on a double meaning), this view of painting’s role as a mediator, in its attempt to visualise ‘how marks, or gestures, occupy the space between subjects and objects, or between people and things’, may well move beyond the question of ‘medium’ that has dominated its discussion since the mid-twentieth century.2 Yet it can scarcely address the narrative of painting’s inherent failure (and inevitable conclusion), as highlighted by Duchamp and furthered by many others after him, which has long underpinned this history.3 Of course, Duchamp’s contribution continues to draw conflicting interpretations, due in no small part to its deep ambivalence over almost every facet of art. (Ironically, his formative experience as a painter, however complicated, is widely agreed upon.) Nevertheless, during the 1960s the implications of Duchamp’s apparent flight from painting into the readymade were taken up and canonised by artists working in a range of different contexts, making its significance, as signalled by this work, difficult to dismiss.