Excerpt from My Other Painting Is a Car* by John Kelsey

My Other Painting Is a Car*

The artist is always finding ways to test the capacity for non-specificity in this thing he's working on.  For example, he might push a painting to exchange its own powers of abstraction and mediation with those of the poster, the page, the screen, the T-shirt, or even the muscle car.  Because it's such a tough and at the same time flimsy object, the painting is still one of the better and more convenient devices for picturing the limit beyond which art threatens to forget what it is.  For so long, it has been so convinced of its own nature, and it now realizes that its act is all the more convincing when it's able to abandon it.  It's probably because the painting has so much built-in specificity to begin with that it's so good at hallucinating "the crisis of art."

Like postcards, the paintings arrive from a certain distance, and somehow packaged in their own distance, postmarked R-ville, signed Prince, but with somebody else's picture on them, somebody else's words even.  They enjoy the anonymity of postcards, of personalizing and addressing them.

And a painting is a camera, we start to realize, when it makes itself more passive than expressive, more of a receptor than a signal.  When the painting joins forces with the camera, it makes use of the photograph's automatic, passive-aggressive way of capturing and doubling the world, and repeating itself too, and its ease.  It's how the painting gets real, gets fresh, catches us out here in this state of distraction we prefer to be in anyway, and even re-distracts us.  And if it's abstract, it's in the way that a magazine page or a dollar bill is abstract, or abstracting.  It involves itself in the abstraction of the world, in all the ways it has of picturing and distancing itself.  What a painting gets from a car is more than just speed; it gets culture.

*Originally published in the Richard Prince exhibition catalogue Canaries in the Coal Mine, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2007.

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