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Since 1975, when he stopped painting the large, repetitive decorative abstractions, often on unstretched canvas, for which he rst achieved recognition in his native California, Allan McCollum has been manufacturing generic paintings: small, anonymous, more or less identical objects, always exhibited in series and composed entirely of frame, mat and, where the image is supposed to appear, a blank. The artist describes these works as decoys: False pictures, pseudo-artifacts which beckon me into the desire to look at a picture, but which are complete in doing that, and that alone. In them, painting is reduced beyond its essentials to utter conventionality, banality. It is ironic, then, that as recently as 1979 McCollum!s work could still be cited as proof of the continuing viability of modernist abstraction1 written, Only the forgery can still satisfy our thirst for authenticity. Minimalist in their monochromism, their investigation of framing and their repetitiveness, the generic paintings employ only the vocabulary of Minimalism; for what McCollum has devised is, in fact, an effective, all-purpose strategy of esthetic inltration reminiscent in this respect of Daniel Buren!s deployment of striped fabric with which to expose the contradictions of cultural production in a market economy: the inescapable fact that, in exchange, all works of art are reduced to equivalence. Clusters of the generic paintings have been exhibited in group shows, where they have served as mirrors reecting the interchangeabilitythe indifferenceof the other works on display. More recently, for his rst solo exhibition in New York (mounted last March at Marian Goodman), McCollum doubled and then redoubled the stakes: 551 cast plaster surrogates swarmed across the gallery!s walls in a continuous, undulating band, while in a second room photographs taken directly from television depicted (found) McCollums on locationpictures in the world re-presented as generic paintings.

Each of the surrogates was derived from the same model (frame, mat and, where the image is supposed to appear, a blank). The only differences admitted were entirely marginal: insubstantial variations in size, proportion and the color of the frame (mostly within a narrow range of golds and browns). While the specic combination of these three variables seemed to constitute each surrogate as singular, the potentially endless repetition of essentially identical objects prevented us from mistaking difference for uniqueness. For although it was possible to view each work as a mirror reecting all the others, at the same time it was impossible to forget that each was merely a reection of all the others. Neither the wit nor the sheer visual beauty of the installation can be discounted; but these, too, seemed to function as decoys, as luresas if to compensate for the muteness of each individual component. For while repetition inaugurated an indenite play of substitutions, classications, as if, as Jean Baudrillard has reversals and repetitions, this textual game seemed to suspend any reference outside the series itself, as well as any subjective relation between artist and viewer. Instead, the surrogates functioned as an opaque screen interposed between the two, rendering them mutually absent one to the otheran absence described, perhaps, by the blank at the center of each work. Still, taken as a whole, McCollum!s installation did have an unmistakable external referent: the marketplace. Viewing it was less like gallerygoing and more like window shoppingor, rather, gallery-going as shopping. For what McCollum!s work ultimately reects is the recent inltration into cultural production of what political economists identify as the serial mode of production. Serialized production is both the denitive mode of late-capitalist consumer society and, since Warhol at least, the dominant model for artand not only visual art, as Jacques Attali!s diagnosis, in his book Bruits, of

the situation of contemporary music conrms: No organized society can exist without structuring a place within itself for differences. No exchange economy develops with out reducing such differences to the form of mass production or the serial . . . Music lives [this contradiction] in deafening fashion: an instrument of differentiation, it has become the very locus of repetition. It indifferentiates itself in commodities and masks itself in the star system. Music can therefore allow us to hear the essentials of the contradictions in developed societies: an anxious search for lost dif erences within a logic from which dif erence itself has been excluded. This contradiction between difference and repetition is intrinsic to the serial mode of production itselfa mode which proceeds from, but is not identical with, the mass production of commodities. For while mass production, and the social logic of homogenization which it entails work to eliminate difference (standardization), serial production reintroduces a limited gamut of differences into the mass-produced object. As Baudrillard observes in Le systme des objets (1968), no object appears on the market today in a single type, but with a range of strictly marginal differencesof color, accessory, detail which create the illusion of choice. Consequently, what we consume is the object not in its materiality, but in its differencethe object as sign. Thus, difference itself becomes an object of consumption, and the agenda of serial production becomes apparent: to carefully engineer and control the production of difference in our society. If music allows us to hear these contradictions, visual art allows us to see them. Few works of art exist today as single, isolated examples; rather, the majority appear in series, and their signicance resides primarily in the position they occupy within the series to which they belong. To cite only the most obvious example: it makes no sense to exhibit one Cindy Sherman photograph by itself (although her work is often

presented this way). To do so is to render it meaningless, for the signicance of Sherman!s work resides in the artist!s permutations of identity from one photo to the next. Thus, Sherman has borrowed from the media not only a stock of feminine stereotypes, but also its serialized format. In fact, serial production does not recognize the ne art/mass culture distinction (and is partially responsible for its dissolution). So that when McCollum exhibits his own series of black-and-white photographs of interiors, themselves taken from TV series, he moves us out of the gallery and into mass culture, demonstrating the pervasiveness of serial production. In McCollum!s photographs of everyday life as represented in the mass media, framed pictures in the background become illegiblethese are, thereby transformed into McCollumsframe, mat and, where the image is supposed to appear, a blank. Collectively captioned Paintings on locationincidental to the action, these photographs reinsert McCollum!s work back into the culture at large, where its greatest subversive potential resides. If McCollum represents the advent of a repetitive cultureboth within the art gallery and withouta culture in which difference is articially recreated by means of the repetition of quasi-identical objects (Attali), still, we cannot immediately assimilate him to that tradition of melancholic artists, from Duchamp to Sherrie Levine, who insist upon the diminished possibilities for creativity in an image-saturated world (or For the automatic, mechanical repetition that characterizes consumption is only one--the most supercialtype of so it has been claimed). repetition. Art invokes other, more profound typesthose of memory and ultimately (following Freud!s formulation of a compulsion to repeat) of death. The signicance of McCollum!s work resides in its superimposition of all three types, a superimposition which restores to repeti-

tion its criticaleven revolutionarypower.

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Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It's a Good Idea Jan Verwoert What continues to give an edge to any discussion about the current status of painting as a medium is that this particular debate raises tbs following fundamental question: which forms of artistic production can court as contemporary and which should be rejected as irrelevant? There are today, quite simply, a multitude of interesting positions in painting each in its own way doubtlessly relevant to our times. Nevertheless, painting still has to fend off the latent reproach of being reactionary, not least because populist apologists for the medium often use reactionary arguments in its support Any consideration of painting in isolation tends to be reactionary, because the dismissal of Modernism!s dogmatic restriction of artistic practice to a particular medium must be understood as the most signicant progress in art in recent decades. The enormous potential of what art can do as art only emerges where art deals with the laws, limits and history of a specic medium. The semantic depth of a painterly formulation can only be adequately appreciated if it is understood as the result of a process of dialogue with the medium. By proving that art can only exist as a concept and must be evaluated in terms of its conceptual performance alone, Conceptual Art in fact could be understood to have irrevocably severed the connection between art and its medium After Conceptual Art, the practical basis and the historical horizon for production of all art is set by the "post medium condition! Only a form of art that through conceptual gestures articulates a critical position with regard to the institution of art is capable of resisting the historical devaluation of artistic media and the subjugation of production to the laws of the art system Modernism still permitted artists to produce revolutions through continuous work in their own medium From the postmodern point of view conceptual gestures reect the history and conditions of art by producing situations that show art in a light that is constantly new and changing. Painting is essentially conceptual when it self-referentially and self-critically addresses its material qualities as well as the symbolic grammar of its own formal language. The medium-specic approach to painting is still possible in artistic practice and in critique.

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Design For Living C. Wood Paulina Olowska Painted beyond the canvas Destabilizing perception of the world more brodily Painted the world as she would like it to be Style ranches from gestural brush strokes to photorealistic style Heavy Duty 2001 Olowska stands as though painting at an easel, poised with brush in hand, while her collaborator lounges on the oor wearing a leotard Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie. They pose as artists, but also deliber- ately as women whose mode is, according to Olowska, feminine as much as feminist. This photograph is typi- cal of Olowskas frequent dramatization of the act of painting itself, which she relates to her own body in sensual and physical terms in painting, i jump from large-scale to small, just be- cause it takes you away from stretching your body into a hunched-back position with a tiny brush. i love using my body in painting and physicality in paintingtreating the canvas like it is made of clay or almost as in cooking, smear- ing, spraying, washing the paint. For her 2011 exhi- bition The Revenge of the Wise-Woman, at Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, Olowska placed Suzy Lakes A NATURAL WAy TO DRAW (1975) alongside her own paintings. The video shows a womans face in close-up, covered in white makeup. As a male narrator reads aloud from a drawing manual by Nicolaides, the woman rst draws black lines onto her face, then proceeds to shade and texture it with black pencil. She subsequently applies mascara to her eyelashes, focusing the viewers attention on the par- allel between the making of a drawing and the social implication of makeup Such experiments, by women artists who had learned conventional paint- ing skills at art school, erased the mediums associa- tions with an essentially masculine, heroic tradition and shifted it toward a reinvention of an age-old feminine practice. By invoking the idea of makeup, and specically the construction of femininity that Olowska frequently parades, these works simulta- neously connect painting and paintedness Helena Almeidas series of painted photographs from the 1970s, each titled PINTURA HABITADA (In- habited Paintings), Almeidas experiments with literally wearing the canvas as a dress in certain of these works and staging her own portraitwhich she appears to paint from within the depicted space onto the surface of the photograph, which in turn appears to imprison her within it Painting for me is a manifesto, the artist explains. I would like it to be read like a manifesto: both a manifesto of womens independence but also a manifesto of fashion and utopian optimism, as a way of surviving the mediocrity of things. painting opens up a so- ciable space, a collective situation that proposes cer- tain modes of aesthetic living that bring aspects of the past back to life within the present. Paintings ceremonial quality lends the possibility of a special order of experience, one that is otherwise logically dismissed. it is a form of falsehood that manages to change its context to suit itself: an inverse chameleon. In Olowskas hands, painting is explored not only as a craft but as a pro- ductive and extendable mode of living.

 PauLina oLowSKa, attention la Peinture, 2008, installation view / installationsansicht, Galerie Buchholz, cologne. (Photo: Lothar SchnePF) Attention la Peinture included in one space a series ! of! photorealistic ! renderings! of! extraordinar y dress designs by Schiaparelli and others in exuberant shapes and colors; the other room featured a series of large-scale canvases painted with dress patterns in black lines and blocks of color From these latter can- vases, the delineated material shapes had been cut and placed in proximity as freestanding dress-sculp- tures that showed off the drips and elds of paint- erly abstraction. In these works, Olowskas own bodily presence is alluded to and enunciated in a sort of latent per- formatively rather than being literally activated

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