A Painting is a Painting isn't a Painting

We don't ask ourselves why we look at paintings. We look at paintings because they are made to be looked at. For all of its self-reflexivity, painting has become more rather than less of an ideology. It's just there. Part of the air we breathe. Can a painting ultimately be about anything other than itself? If the common denominator among all paintings is that they are things made to be looked at, then just as soon as we speak of differences that make each painting unique, we could also speak of their essential sameness: a painting is a painting is a painting. Maybe recourse to painting's materiality is symptomatic–it isn't so much a recourse to materiality as much as materiality trumps whether or not we view painting.

Works by: Anthea Behm, Victoria Fu, David Haxton, Geof Oppenheimer, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Mike Rubin