On Painting in Times of Crisis
For most of our lives, we painted in secret, burdened by a feeling we eventually identified as shame. Our hesitation stemmed from disgust at painting’s prominent role in the art market—that shameless engine of villainy, perfectly reflecting a deprived culture. By narrating and embellishing their victories, the market appeases, caters to, and legitimizes a spiritually bankrupt ruling class by selling them idealized portraits and triumph arches. Painting is the primary media for this, accounting for the highest share of sales, real estate, and thus attention throughout the system. Millions of square meters of paintings are produced and sold yearly, credulously embodying a hegemonic path towards the glorious extinguishment of the last sparks of reason where our species will languish in darkness for a time before final extinction.
Under these conditions, we felt ashamed to participate, even secretly, in our own ceremonial burial. For years, we grappled with what it meant to memorialize our anonymous annihilation. Should we capitulate for crumbs like everyone else, or futilely attempt to claw back dignity lost? It is completely illogical to continue to paint, surrounded by a hostile environment. In our despair, we combed through art history for clues on how to proceed.
Art movements of the 1960s sought to dematerialize the art object, recognizing the market’s corrosion of humanism and humanity. But their solution was to abandon the physical art forms that have defined human creativity for millennia—to forsake the archive of the human hand. Focused on the post-conceptual and the iconoclastic, political gestures could avoid the dissonance of a compromised medium like painting. While this stance felt correct, reality proved complicated. We watched our glorious institutions, and their well-paid apologists, stand upright, defying, it seemed, the laws of physics. Why, then, produce art that conforms to their standards? With action commodified as the experience economy, and post-conceptual art morphing into the tortured spectacle of the biennial circus, the reputational economy generated clouds of obfuscation over quotidian villains. If materialist art holds value like suitcases of cash, dematerialized art has become the perfect vessel for virtue laundering—a society of the spectacle with a flashier interface. With all but the most isolated examples, conceptual art devolved into the luxury branding of the Art Basel concept store presided over by the managerial class.
The Tang poet Li Bai wrote:
The wealth and distinction were such—
What is the point of striving and striving?
Our discontent growing, we did not abandon near-daily painting, feeling that it is the right action anyhow. We were not alone in this feeling. We found artists who navigated collapse, translating anxiety, horror, and disempowerment into their work: painting (and art in general) as a material witness of times of crisis.
Su Shi
On the Birth of a Son:
Families, when a child is born,
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Have wrecked my whole life.
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he'll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.
Xu Wei (徐渭) and Zhu Da (朱耷) also navigated the darkness of societal collapse with wit and acid insight. We feel we know them, commiserating miserable circumstances. We feel inspired by their struggles: their work survived and shaped an annotation of dissent. While they could not defeat the monsters of political decay, their work entered the permanent record as critical evidence of refusal and nonconformity that the elite cannot control everything and everyone.
Their powerful landscapes join subjectivity with observed reality. This method accepts a complex truth: we are subjects with hopes and fears, yet we are atomized specs within the grand unfolding. Their work echoes the Chinese ideal that privileges idea and emotion over obsessive or spectacular technique, an early conceptual art that still offers an individual hand.
Consider Zhu Da’s cold, anguished, inky silence, produced during the Ming-Qing transition period. His status as a Ming noble complicates his story but does not strip his observations of their edge. In his Two Eagles (1702), we marvel at the spirited yet precise brushstrokes, the proud eyes of the birds looking down upon a chaotic world. In Birds in a Lotus Pond (1690), splashes of ink form birds with disconcertingly alert expressions—protagonists poised on the edge of reaction, a looming strike gathering in the darkness above. Zhu Da filters through emotion, creating a surreal blend of concise reflection and intense feeling, made poignant by the personality he imbues in the non-human. The immediacy of thought is preserved in ink, transfixing us centuries later.
In Zhu Da’s Landscape Album (1699), landscape itself seems to dissolve in melted, foggy ink. The decades-long Ming-Qing transition was marked by rebellion, war, poverty, and epidemic; historians estimate up to 25 million deaths. In his landscapes, a forlorn, half-hidden structure asks: Is civilization eclipsed by barbarism, or merely waiting to emerge after the storm? His ink landscapes are not bucolic. He hid dissent in veiled images, even writing the character for “dumb” (哑) on his door and refusing to speak.
Zhu Da’s controlled chaos finds precedent in Xu Wei, the scholar-poet-painter whose turbulent mind (likely bipolar disorder) reflected the slow devolution of the Ming. Through personal failure and collective strife, Xu Wei painted flowers, bamboo, and fruits—traditional symbols of harmony. Yet he imbued them with conflict and anguish, a rejection of rigid Confucian norms that only partly explains his torment. His animated calligraphy-poems parallel the paintings:
Busy with affairs, I laugh at this illusory world of bubbles and froth;
Casually smearing flowers and rocks, I manage the passing seasons.
Flower faces, year after year, grow old by the third month;
Rocks often earn a hundred pieces of gold.
Here I just unleash my natural inclination—emptiness and form;
Who’d bother to ask if people see resemblances or not?
Individual and social health overlap and a sick society diminishes all life. We do not admire Xu Wei, but we feel his anguish. His work calls through time, implicating a failed society.
Not long after Zhu Da, Francisco Goya lived through Spain’s collapse. He famously said of his flight to France, “If your house is on fire, you get out.” Beginning as an ambitious court painter, by the end of his life Goya painted the depravity of his era with an unflinching, pitiless gaze. His works record that the worst hell is here on earth, constructed by people. Folkloric follies—superstition, greed, gluttony—are overlaid with elite pastimes: war, religion, and ruthless hunger for power.
Surrounded by Goya’s Black Paintings in Madrid’s Prado, we are suddenly filled with an unexpected sense of hope for art and thus humanity. This is not the usual response to Goya’s images of horror. Unlike his credulous portraits of royalty, the Black Paintings were private, painted directly onto his house walls. Nearing life’s end, he responded uncensored to the living hell he witnessed. He could not know they would enter the canon of Spanish art, standing as a desperate individual’s warning for the future. The hope they inspire lies in their role as evidence—a record of what not to do. This is utterly unlike airbrushed false positivity—the propaganda of power—which normalizes and rationalizes horror as the inevitable path to glory. The violent despair of Saturn Devouring His Son is not acquiescence. It is an old man painting by candlelight, screaming to himself, “¡Así no vale! ¡Así no vivimos!” (“This is not right! This is no way to live!”).
What we face in the professional art world is the unambiguous acquiescence of self-serving overachievers who game the system, decorating and legitimizing the powerful and turning away from the horrors of our collapse. If we are to achieve something else, then we must paint quietly by candlelight.
Bergman and Salinas
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