Painting is out of vogue as conceptualism rules

LOS ANGELES — There's little interesting art today — including painting — that hasn't been informed by Conceptualism, but painting per se remains an institutional whipping boy. (Alluding to the lingering queasiness about the medium in institutional art circles, artist John Baldessari groans and says, "If I see one more refrigerator door that's meant to be considered as a painting, I think I'll scream.") The Project exhibition betrayed an almost pathological fear of paint. So do the big national and international surveys, such as last spring's paintings-poor Whitney Biennial and Germany's recently closed Documenta 11.

Documenta dismayed Baldessari, who found little to admire. His favorite work was an enormous still-life painting by Luc Tuymans. The Belgian artist's moody paintings of the mysteriously slain, post-colonial Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba made a big impact at the 2001 Venice Biennale. He was one of only three painters invited to Documenta, where most of the 113 other artists employed documentary methods of political art.

"He might have done it perversely," Baldessari said of Tuymans' huge still-life. "But you know the reason he was chosen for (Documenta) is not because he's a painter, but because of his (earlier political) subject matter. Me, I couldn't care less about the content, I like his painting. I know there's suffering in the world. I read the newspapers every day. I don't have to be told that by art.

"Metaphorically, it's like Christ nailed to the cross: I don't want to see the nails in the hands, I want to see the ascension — all the joy and the glory. Which I didn't see at Documenta."

Baldessari's embrace of artistic pluralism is plainly not in sync with today's dominant international state of affairs, where fourth-generation Conceptual art still rules, and picto-phobia is rife. Thirty-five years after "Wrong," it seems Baldessari is still wrong.