‘The Living End’ at Chicago’s MCA Celebrates the Relevance and Irrelevance of Painting

In John Baldessari’s 1977 video Six Colorful Inside Jobs, a camera is positioned in the ceiling of a room, looking down at a man painting a small room over the course of six days, Monday through Saturday. The man paints the room red, then orange, then green, then purple. The footage is sped up, so the job becomes a manic quasi-industrialized process, an exercise in fast-forward, repetitive, pointless labor. The great master tradition of painting, from Rembrandt to Pollock, is robbed of its skill, genius and personal oomph. Painting is just an endless, pointless exercise in grunt work, with some arbitrary godlike eye looking down to ensure you keep in the lines and don’t miss a spot.

Baldessari’s video is part of the mammoth (almost 100 works) new exhibit, “The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,” curated by Jamilah James at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In the booklet accompanying the exhibition, James frames the exhibit as a demonstration of painting’s continued vitality—“a cross-pollination of ideas, materials and forms that commingle at the cul-de-sac of painting and its long history.”

However, in an interview with Observer, James acknowledged that she “for a long time had an allergy to painting.” What she called her “oppositional” and “contrarian” attitude to the medium still informs the work here, even as she’s come to see painting as potentially more inclusive and generative. The exhibit, then, is both a celebration of the strength of the tradition and an exercise in anti-painting desecration. Organized partly by chronology and partly by theme or approach, the show is about how artists do and don’t escape from the room they’ve painted themselves into.

Part of the way Baldessari tries to get out of that room is through treating painting as performance; the finished painting, as an object, is displaced by the process of painting. That’s the case too for Carolee Schneemann’s 1973 Up To and Including Her Limits, a video in which she hung herself naked in a harness from the ceiling and then filmed herself swinging back and forth, making marks on the walls with colored crayons.

Up To and Including Her Limits is a kind of satire of AbEx and of a painting tradition in which nude women are reduced to, or turned into, visual splotches signifying artistic genius and virility. Schneeman is a painting come to life and seizes the means of production to represent itself and/or deconstruct its supposed creators.

Other artists in the exhibition think through or engage with how painting has been in competition with, or is mostly consumed through, other media. A wonderful 1996 Roy Lichtenstein piece, Landscape in Fog, shows a mountain made from his familiar Ben Day dots in the background, with a swirling Ab-Ex gestural sweep of gray paint in the foreground. The tradition of painting seems to be erupting in one last effusion before it disappears into mass production, as Lichtenstein half mocks, half mourns a more authentic representation which he is both preserving and defacing.

Lichtenstein filters painting through printing (or vice versa); Elaine Frances Sturtevant, aka Sturtevant, filters it through a mysteriously ironized photorealism. Her 1989-90 painting Stella Bethlehem’s Hospital is a meticulous reproduction of Frank Stella’s 1959 Bethlehem’s Hospital—a black canvas with white lines forming half-erased concentric boxes.

James said the piece was one of her favorites in the show because of its daring and because of the way it’s “taking this humorous approach to someone else’s work and doing it gleefully and without apology.” Sturtevant is mirroring or mimicking the photographic process, leaning into the way that paintings can now be reproduced and reimaged easily by reproducing and reimaging them with great effort and craft.

What is the point of genius—even of obscure, ominous genius like Stella’s—if it can be remade instantly by anyone? If you take a photo of a Sturtevant, how could you possibly tell it from the Stella? Sturtevant’s brilliant unoriginality makes Stella’s originality seem dour and dull rather than powerful or inevitable. If Schneemann makes painting talk back, Sturtevant makes painting lapse into a stolid huff.

Photography has now been displaced by digitization, and many artists respond to the latest innovations in representation and/or misrepresentation. For example, Jacqueline Humphries’ massive 114 x 127-inch 2023 oil on linen work, MN+//sss is created by pushing paint through stencils of ASCII symbols. From a distance, it seems like an abstract work, but when you come in closer, letters and numbers are visible, erased or smeared or blurred, creating moiré patterns and shadows. It’s like you’re watching painting being generated from or dissolving into binary code. You scan the canvas like a browser scanning for an aesthetic experience of glitch.

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In one sense, Humphries and Sturtevant are responding playfully and imaginatively to a new media and communication landscape and, by doing so, preserving painting’s relevance. In another sense, they could be seen as underlining or insisting on painting’s irrelevance. Turning painting into photography or computers or video or performance continues the tradition of painting even as it rejects that tradition. Is painting that is turning itself into not-painting still painting? Is anti-tradition an extension of the tradition or a negation of it?

The answer is, of course, both—as is wittily illustrated by another of James’ favorite pieces, Sayre Gomez’s 2018 Behind Door #8. The painting is an extremely realistic, actual-size image of convenience store doors, complete with “Pull” instructions by the handles, stickers telling you which credit cards the store takes (Visa, Mastercard and more) and reflections of palm trees and greenery.

As James told Observer, Gomez’s work is a quintessence of the painting tradition in that he’s creating a perfect “illusion” of reality through a seamless virtuosity. “His work,” she says, “does not look like everything is painstakingly painted, but it is.”

The painstakingness, though, is in the service of a very non-painterly topic. It’s not an elevated religious image and not even an iconic person or brand, as in the work of Warhol. Instead, the subject matter is aggressively mundane. When you come upon it in the gallery, it feels like Gomez is beckoning you; put your hand on that door and step from the artificial/real world of the commercial gallery/museum into the artificial/real world of commercial pharmacies and lottery tickets. Go through the painting and escape from painting. Such is the exhilaratingly disappointing, disappointingly exhilarating promise of painting, in The Living End and beyond.

“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020” is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through March 16, 2025.