Judo House Part 4 (Golden Mud)
Over the course of two articles in Art in America critic Raphael Rubinstein has developed a series of terms to define a feature of recent painting he calls provisionality. According to Rubinstein, provisional paintings look ‘casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling’ and, using the look of a painting as an index of painterly ambition, he suggests provisional painters embrace the ‘lure of the unfinished’ in order to exploit ‘the uses of doubt’. Christopher Wool, Martin Kippenberger, Francis Picabia and Richard Tuttle mark the higher ground of provisionality in Rubinstein’s genealogy, although he acknowledges its source may lie deeper, in the ‘foundational skepticism’ of painterly Modernism. (Think here perhaps of Cezanne’s doubt.)
On the face of it Rubinstein’s argument seems a little stretched. Failure has never been a career option for very many painters in as much as few deliberately choose it. Too many achieve it by default. How many painters would embrace fully the provisional tag, knowing that any turning away from ‘strong’ painting, as Rubinstein puts it, risks ‘inconsequence’? And, if failure is knowing, is it failure? Is Rubinstein’s model of provisionality a register of failure of ambition or a refusal of ambition? Rubinstein would never mistake grunge for slacker, but when he writes of Albert Oehlen, a painter of ‘bad’ Neo-Expressionism who committed himself to large-scale abstraction in the late 1980s because he wanted to be taken seriously, the distinction gets fuzzy. Perhaps provisionality simply registers a different kind of painterly ambition.
It is possible to see Rubinstein’s scheme degenerating into a list as to who is and isn’t really self-cancelling and who is simply failing despite themselves, but this would trivialise his frames of reference which are