The Gentle Art of Collapsing the Expanded Field

In a famous litigious episode from art history in 1877, James Abbott McNeil Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin for having cast serious doubts about whether or not a painting by the artist was a work of art. Whistler later wrote about the episode in his autobiography The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). Well over a century later, in an essay entitled, This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse (2002), Hal Foster identified the collapse of the 'expanded field', since stretched to its breaking point. Foster's claim would seem to conclude a progression initiated by Whistler's lawsuit, but the expansion still continues. Whether or not traditional categories still offer any real resistance to that broadening is a question in point. The works in this exhibition participate in this expansion and consequently engage this question by exploring what constitutes a painting. Through video, photography, threedimensional objects, and painterly supports, they explore the issue without using paint. In the works of Alexandre da Cunha, Simon Denny, and Alexander Wolff, the support of the wall and stretcher are addressed in unorthodox, visually and conceptually complex ways, while painterly issues are evoked in the highly mediated, yet nevertheless raw and poetic photographs of Tamar Halpern. Ian Pedigo enters the discussion on the floor with a rude elegance, and Alex Hubbard takes part with his optically lush videos of methodical mayhem. If these works contribute to the collapse of the expanded field, they do so seductively, with humor, wit, and even a plastic beauty. Building as much as they destroy, they wreak their havoc gently. Curated by Chris Sharp