CATALOGUE ESSAYS

An Ardent, Burning Neutrality: Albert Oehlen’s Gray Paintings

By Raphael Rubinstein

 Abstraction and Its Others 

Since embracing abstraction in the late 1980s, Albert Oehlen has largely refrained from painting in a figurative mode (apart from a few one-offs such as the 2006 painting Self-portrait as Spring). He has been harshly dismissive of his early figurative work: “I wanted to be an abstract painter. I never took figurative work seriously, even when I did it. I thought it was bullshit. The early self-portraits are highly ironic.” Curiously, however, one body of work has escaped the general ban on figuration: the Grauen Bilder (Gray Paintings). Nowhere else in his post-1990 work do we find motifs such as the big-eared creature in the middle of Smoker (1999), the bulbous head in Chemical Schmutzli (2004), the bust-length portrait in C.C., or the woman seen in profile in Bath. And it’s not only in the human or humanoid figures that we encounter figurative mode: floating throughout the Gray Paintings are weird objects rendered, albeit with some deliberately casual brushwork, with the illusionistic techniques of representational painting. 

As anyone familiar with Oehlen’s work knows, there is no shortage of recognizable images in his paintings—think of all the human figures, consumer products, and architectural fragments in the advertising poster paintings. It’s just that they usually aren’t painted images. Why, we have to ask, is it only in the Gray Paintings that Oehlen has retained figuration? Is there something about grisaille that makes it particularly accommodating to figuration? Or did a continuing desire to paint figures lead Oehlen to launch this body of work, as a preserve in which he could, if he wanted, indulge in representation? It’s almost as if the Gray Paintings have been granted a special dispensation, as if they create for the artist a “safe space” where the stricture against figuration doesn’t extend. 

 

Baffling the Paradigm

In The Neutral, his 1978 lecture course at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes takes aim at what he calls “the paradigm.” During the first session he offers a capsule description of his subject: “I define the Neutral as that which outplays (déjoue) the paradigm, or rather I call the Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. . . . The paradigm, what is that? It’s the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning.” Barthes then gives a few examples of paradigms from linguistics, while clarifying to his audience that for him the Neutral does not signify indifference or neutrality: “The Neutral—my Neutral—can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. ‘To outplay the paradigm’ is an ardent, burning activity.”

For Barthes, paradigms need to be outplayed—or outwitted or thwarted (other senses of déjouer)—because they rely too much on binary structures: those stark oppositions that encompass such pairings as male/female or high/low culture, and all too frequently depend on a relationship of dominance and invisible privilege. Crucially, the binary structures that the Neutral seeks to undermine are intimately bound with the production of meaning. The question of meaning is significant because for nearly all of his writing life, Barthes dreamed of, as he once phrased it, “a world which would be exempt from meaning (as one is from military service).” Ultimately what Barthes wishes to thwart is the coerciveness of language itself, its instrumentalization.

What, you might wonder, is the connection between Oehlen’s Gray Paintings and a nearly 40-year-old lecture course by Barthes. The answer is (at least) twofold: First, there are ways in which Oehlen’s work, like Barthes’s, is fundamentally opposed to binary thinking; and second Oehlen shares with Barthes a certain resistance to the mechanism of meaning.

First fold: A hyper-condensed history of painting since 1945. In the first phase there was an obligation to choose between figuration and abstraction. The second phase allowed artists the option to make abstract or figurative paintings, though only as separate bodies of work (e.g., Gerhard Richter). By phase three, artists no longer cared about this particular opposition. In this history, Oehlen is a protagonist of phase three, which coincides with the dissolution of political and cultural binary structures such as high/low and East/West. Thus, Oehlen—who helped render the abstraction/figuration paradigm obsolete—can be thought of, in Barthian terms, as a “neutral,” “postbinary,” or “nonparadigmatic” painter. As he remarked in 1994, “The question ‘abstract or not abstract,’ for example, is irrelevant to me.”

Second fold. In his March 11^th 1978 lecture, Barthes broached the subject of color. More specifically, he looked at the use of grisaille painting in Flemish altarpieces, especially Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1500). As was often the case with altarpieces, the side panels of The Garden of Earthly Delights were designed so that when they were closed, a monochrome painting would conceal the vividly colored triptych on the inside. In the case of Bosch’s painting, the concealing panels depict the world on the third day of Biblical Creation. As Barthes contemplates the grisaille wings of the triptych, he has a revelation:

Model of the paradigm: the opposition of primary contrasted colors (blue/red): it’s the opposition par excellence, the very motor of meaning (phonology). Now, the monochrome (the Neutral) substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slight difference, of the onset, of the effort toward difference, in other words, of nuance.

What are the Gray Paintings, if not exercises in slight differences— n nuance? And, what is Oehlen’s rejection of binary oppositions, if not an unease with “the motor of meaning”? (See subsequent discussion of “Meaning”)  Although few artists are as thoroughly postbinary as Oehlen, he has plenty of company when it comes to pursuing Barthian Neutrality via nuanced gray paintings: Jack Whitten, Jacqueline Humphries, and Christopher Wool (a close friend of Oehlen’s) come immediately to mind as contemporary masters of grisaille abstraction.

 

Bodies of Work

Niels Olsen: You explained this to me so well once: you start by creating one group of work, and the longer you work on it, the uglier you make it, so the collectors will feel sorry that they didn’t buy earlier.

Albert Oehlen: Yeah, something like that. Or maybe it’s that every group of work has to be distinctly worse than the last one, so people will buy the last one.

Oehlen’s comment about wanting to make each successive body of work “distinctly worse than the last” reminds us of his origins as a purveyor of insolent paintings, such as Self-Portrait with Shitty Underpants and Blue Mauritius (1984), but it also reveals how important artistic change is to him.

Is there any other contemporary painter who has produced so many distinctive bodies of work: any other artist who has been as restless, as constantly ready to try a new approach, or who seems incapable or repeating himself and unwilling to rest on his laurels? Perhaps only the late Sigmar Polke (who not coincidently was Oehlen’s teacher in Hamburg in the 1970s) comes close. Of course, sustaining such a trajectory over many decades depends on having enough great ideas, as well as sufficient curiosity and courage to pursue them, which are qualities that Oehlen evidently possesses.

Oehlen is aware of just how unusual his variousness is (I am purposely avoiding the word “eclecticism,” because I don’t think that’s what is at play here). He has contrasted this with a tendency he sees in US artists: “I don’t want to throw all American artists into the same bag, but in general you can say that they tend to work on one approach, to develop a trademark.” In the same interview, he goes on to explain that he resists having a signature style because he wants to “produce an autonomy of the painting, so that each work no longer needs that kind of legitimizing framework.” It is almost shocking for a painter to forgo any “legitimizing framework” in a period when artists are increasingly trained to package their own work in theoretical discourse, and curators happily press art into the service of thematic agendas.

While the Gray Paintings are clearly a distinct body of work, they are different from Oehlen’s other painting groups in that they are not limited to a single period in time. Instead, they were made in two phases: the first in the late 1990s and the second between 2003 and 2005. They are anomalous in another way as they are one of Oehlen’s few bodies of work that rely solely on traditional painting methods and materials: brush, oil paint, canvas.

Constraints

Bill Powers: I heard you once made a rule that on half of a canvas you would use only expensive paint and on the other half very cheap paint.

Albert Oehlen: Yeah, I did these kinds of experiments a lot. It has an impact on your work. It makes things slower and you come to impossible results. You might put your paint in alphabetical order and say, “I’m only using A through K today.” It makes no sense, but you wonder what will happen on the canvas.

Oehlen has made no secret of the fact that he gives himself rules in the studio. Sometimes, as in the instance just cited of a canvas divided in half by the cost of the paint used, the rule is only applied to a single work, but more often it is sustained through an entire series. Recognizing what the rules are isn’t always easy, and the artist isn’t always forthcoming about them: “I don’t really want to put it on the table—what those rules were, one by one—because why should I explain everything?” he told an interviewer in 2015. One aspect that distinguishes the Gray Paintings is that their constraint—no color—is perfectly evident. Even without being told, we can see that the artist has imposed specific limits on the work, denying himself everything on the color spectrum except for the gray scale. (Actually, this isn’t exactly true: some of the Gray Paintings, most notably Cows By the Water (1999) and Chemical Schmutzli, include subtle touches of color, usually in the form of a dirty, rustlike yellow. But this is probably a painting medium such as linseed oil, rather than actual pigment.) But we don’t immediately register this limitation as a “rule.” Instead, we are more likely to attribute it to the realm of genre or style. “These are grisaille paintings,” we tell ourselves, “and grisaille is a traditional painting method. Oehlen has made a stylistic choice to paint in gray.” We might then add, “Gerhard Richter has made many gray paintings—maybe Oehlen is ‘in dialogue’ with Richter.”

All of these things are true: grisaille is a traditional method, available to any painter; to employ it is a stylistic choice; and it’s impossible to ignore Richter when looking at Oehlen’s Gray Paintings. So, what is the difference, if any, between a choice and a rule? The imposition of a rule is a self-conscious decision, while a choice can be (though not always) an intuitive action. It might be helpful here to compare Oehlen’s approach with the use of literary constraints by Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, and other writers associated with the Paris-based Oulipo group. Originally conceived in opposition to the Surrealist doctrine that poetry should involve unfettered access to the writer’s subconscious, Oulipo holds that all writing is bound by constraints, and that rather than pretend they don’t exist, writers should consciously embrace the inescapable conditions of their medium. Strictly materialist and fiercely anti-romantic, Oulipo nonetheless delivered some of the best storytelling of the late 20th century. Similarly (thanks to his reliance on rules?), Oehlen has given us some of the best painterly paintings of the past 30 years. As Perec once observed, “I give myself rules in order to be totally free.”

Asked about his use of rules (or “parameters” as the interviewer calls them), Oehlen explained: 

I have done that since the beginning. It stems from being a student of Polke: that was our world. I decided to make painting, but I wasn’t coming from painting in the sense of needing to hold a brush and smear paint. Rather, it was a decision, as part of a chain of reactions: How do I set it up? Do I need a style? No. What do I do with color? I didn’t know, so I found a vehicle to get rid of that problem, which was a couple of rules. It made my concerns obvious. You could tell that if I cared about colors I would have acted differently. That was the beginning; then came different systems for using colors, like three primary colors on a brown ground. I did that for a year or two and it presented different problems, different challenges. Then I went on to the next thing.

This reliance on rules might seem surprising for an artist whose oeuvre is so varied and, what’s more, was known early in his career as a freewheeling provocateur. It seems likely that one of the reasons Oehlen turned to rules was to set his art apart from the neo-expressionist or Neue Wilde painters, who were popular in Germany and elsewhere when he was beginning his career. It’s also connected to his wish to demystify painting. As he told Diedrich Diederichsen in 1994, “I come to painting out of the ’70s interest in democratizing high art. That lets me view painting with a certain disdain, or at least a lack of respect.” It’s precisely this foundational disdain that saved Oehlen, and Kippenberger, from enlisting in any “return to painting” campaign, just as Oehlen’s artistic restlessness has complicated attempts to conscript him into such narratives.

Yet, Oehlen is no strict conceptualist. While his process includes rules and constraints, it also leaves plenty of room for the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the unleashing of riotous energy. His ultimate model, he says, comes from nature: “I see the tree as a program for my work, not just as a motif. . . . I concluded that my task as an artist was to make all kinds of crazy shit with my lines—essentially, the same thing a tree does. You become a tree yourself and let your branches grow.”

Erasure

What is missing from the Gray Paintings is not only color, but also one of the most characteristic features of Oehlen’s paintings: overpainting. From the Fabric Paintings and Computer Paintings to the Finger Paintings Oehlen has repeatedly produced bodies of work that involve painting by hand over an underlying image or surface that is usually the result of a mechanical process (e.g., an advertising poster, printed fabric, or printout of a computer drawing). He has even experimented with what might be called “overprojection,” as when he uses one of his paintings as a screen on which to project a film. 

So, in the Gray Paintings there is no overpainting and no collage, just old-fashioned paint, which means that Oehlen must have started with a blank canvas.. But maybe we need to expand the definition of overpainting. To some degree, every painting is an overpainting—all the more so when the painter is using the brush to obliterate what he has previously done, as Picasso fiendishly demonstrates in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film Le mystère Picasso. This is the kind of overpainting we find in the Gray Paintings, where, working wet-into-wet, the artist seems to have painted over, painted out, and placed under painterly erasure, all kinds of underlying gestures and images. Like so many of Oehlen’s other works, the Gray Paintings are pushed to the point of being “overworked,” not with the transparent veiling and layering that is one of Oehlen’s trademarks, but with opacity and matière. 

Meaning

We try to determine what Oehlen’s paintings are about, but the artist disclaims any concern with this pursuit: “I’m not really interested in what the paintings mean. People can interpret them how they want, but, for me, painting is about trying to get as far away from meaning as possible, which is perhaps the most difficult thing of all.” He even goes so far in one interview to say, apropos of painted portraits, “I don’t think you can communicate something about an experience or a situation.”

Why would an artist, or anyone for that matter, deny the possibility of communication? Out of some kind of nihilism? Out of a distaste for the crassness of signification or for those binary oppositions, those complementary colors, or that absence of nuance? Maybe he doesn’t care about meaning, ignoring it as an unavoidable nuisance. Or maybe it’s because he cares too much, and bracketing out the question of meaning allows him to live with the failure of every painting he makes (failure because his standards are high, failure because that’s the way things always go, failure because failure seems to hold more promise than success). I connect Oehlen’s rejection of meaning with Samuel Beckett’s rejection of “relation.” In his great September 3, 1949, letter to Georges Duthuit, Beckett explains that he values Bram van Velde’s painting, “because it is the first to repudiate relation in all these forms” (meaning in relation to the visible world as well as to some inner state). “We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes of intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world.” 

About to embark on interpretations of the iconography in Oehlen’s Gray Paintings, I know that any reading I might offer would be a betrayal of the artist’s intentions, and a gross diminution of what the painting actually does. No doubt this constitutes a perfect abdication of critical responsibility. It’s indefensible. But still leaves plenty to be said.

 

Mourning

So much has been written about the relationship between Oehlen and Kippenberger. In an earlier text, I suggested that Kippenberger’s painting benefited from Oehlen’s greater engagement with the medium and its history (“There is a world of difference between the stylistic blandness of early Kippenberger paintings such as the 1976–77 series ‘Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze’ and the kind of canvases he was producing at the height of his association with Oehlen”) and that: “as long as Oehlen was so closely linked to Kippenberger, there was no chance of his being sucked into the deadly orbit of neo-expressionist hacks, of settling for petty ambitions. Instead, he could stake out a zone for paintings that resisted stylistic pigeonholing, just as they defied assimilation into polite discourse.” Recalling the fashion circa 1980 for painters who were “aggressive,” “wild,” and “spontaneous,” Oehlen noted that for him and Kippenberger, “embarrassment, wretchedness, [and] failure were more to our taste.” For his part, Kippenberger acknowledged his friend’s achievement as a painter. At the very end of Jutta Koether’s very long interview with Kippenberger, he sings Oehlen’s praises as someone who “can paint real paintings,” who demonstrates “that painting is not yet finished.” 

Thinking about Oehlen and Kippenberger in the context of Oehlen’s Gray Paintings, it’s impossible not to notice that the year of the first Gray Painting—1997—also happens to be the year of Kippenberger’s death (from liver cancer at the age of forty-four). 

One should always hesitate before turning to biography to explain changes in an artist’s work, if only because artworks are always overdetermined (affected by multiple things) or underdetermined (they just happen, for no particular reason, though try telling that to an art historian). Nonetheless, the coincidence of Kippenberger’s death and the initiation of Oehlen’s Gray Paintings can’t be ignored.

Near the end of his life, Kippenberger painted a series of canvases based on photographs of Picasso’s wife Jacqueline Roque that were taken in Picasso’s studio after the artist’s death. He titled the series “Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore” (1996). Does it make sense to think about Oehlen’s Gray Paintings as “The Paintings Martin Couldn’t Paint Anymore”? As far as I know, Oehlen has never connected them to his friend’s death. Instead, he has explained them in technical terms: “I wanted to paint even more powerfully colored pictures and prescribed the gray ones for myself as therapy so as to artificially heighten the craving for color.” This is doubtless true, but it doesn’t tell us why Oehlen picked that particular moment to launch a series of grisaille paintings.

The connection between grisaille painting and mourning isn’t lacking in historical precedent. In late 18th- and early 19th-century England, “mourning broaches,” or pieces of jewelry featuring grisaille miniatures of dead loved ones, were in fashion. In German, grisaille paintings are sometimes called totmalerei, literally “dead paintings,” or totfarben, meaning “dead colors.”

Further strengthening the connection to Kippenberger, some of the early Gray Paintings include elements that resemble details in paintings by Kippenberger. I’m thinking, for instance, of the clump of geometric shapes in the upper right corner of Interior (1998), which recalls Kippenberger’s famous With the Best Will in the World I Can’t See a Swastika (1984), or the linear shapes and general composition of Woods Near Oele (1999) that evoke aspects of Kippenberger’s untitled 1988 work depicting the underwear-clad artist confronting an eccentric metal structure; Oehlen’s Interior is reminiscent of Kippenberger’s  Anyone Facing the Abyss Shouldn’t Be Surprised if He Can Fly (1983), while Descending Hot Rays (2003) has structural similarities with works in Kippenberger’s 1985 Frankfurt exhibition Eight Mountains of Yielded Income and Three Designs for Resorts for Recuperating Mothers. The use of grisaille might also be connected with Kippenberger’s early, all-gray series Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of You. A German in Florence, 1976–77).

All of the Kippenberger paintings just mentioned were made during the years he was close to Oehlen, and one (the 1988 underpants painting) while they shared quarters in Spain. It could be argued that any resemblances between the artists’ works are simply the result of mutual influence and don’t constitute any memorializing effect, conscious or unconscious, on Oehlen’s part. But it could equally be argued that the Gray Paintings are, at least at the start, elegies for a vanished friend and colleague. Perhaps, Oehlen was engaged in an act of hauntology; he was mourning for a future that never arrived, a world in which both he and Kippenberger (who was born one year before Oehlen) would have continued to exist, continued to make art, and continued to inspire and goad each other on. It may not be possible to prove these are paintings of mourning, but since when is looking at paintings a question of proving anything: isn’t standing in front of a painting, rather, an occasion for faith, for puzzlement, for conjecture, and for the fine irrelevancy of pleasure?