A WORKING DEFINITION OF PAINTING

In a joint-talk given at MoMA with the painter Chuck Close, Carroll Dunham provided the following definition of painting, managing to summarize a fairly sweeping range of issues related to the discipline in the space of two consecutive compound sentences:

"Painting is a relatively recent manifestation of humanity’s ancient effort to understand and exploit pictorial space generally understood to consist of sheets of colored paste spread manually across primarily rectilinear planar supports embodying illusionistic or quasi-narrative properties, although each of the previous characteristics have been challenged and contradicted to great theoretical and expressive effect without the loss of basic categorical integrity–testimony to painting's nature as both bounded and infinite and its ability to absorb apparently conflicting attitudes on the part of its creators.

Painting operates at the nexus of intersubjective experience and consensual reality, relying on both for its subject matter while remaining stubbornly self-referential, and its content extends into the areas we call psychological, social, material (in both the philosophical and economic senses of the word), and—for the lack of a better term—spiritual, giving it unusual utility as a tool for studying the evolution of the self, of socio-cultural systems, and of the complex reciprocities between the two, strikingly manifest within the apparent disconnect within paintings dual nature as a repository of capital and a facilitator of profound contemplation, a perfect storm of the crass, the sacred and the intimately personal." [14][15]