[Un?] Pure [Reasoned] Painting and [Repercussions for?] Foundationalism

In one way postmodernism is marked by antifoundationalism, as in the thought of Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, or at least by the recognition that if there are to be foundations, they must be consistent with an art world as unstructured as Hans Belting has found ours to be. “Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations,” Greenberg wrote in 1960. “But it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so.”

Greenberg sees “this self-critical tendency” as beginning with Kant, whom he somewhat archly classes as “the first real modernist” because he was the first “to criticize the means itself of criticism.” And he sees the “essence of modernism” to lie “in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline.” This is internal criticism, and it in effect means, in the case of art, that art under the modernist sprit, at every point, is self-questioning: and this in turn means that art is its own subject and, in the case of painting, which was essentially Greenberg’s concern, the subject of painting was painting. Modernism was a kind of collective inquiry from within by painting into painting in the effort to exhibit what painting itself is.

What makes Heidegger a “modernist” philosopher is that he takes ancient questions of Being, and, rather than confront it head on, he asks what kind of being it is for whom the question arises, so that in effect his inquiry is about itself. What makes Modernist painting modern is, on Greenberg’s account, its taking upon itself the task of determining “through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself.” This essence of art coincided, Greenberg thought, “with all that was unique in the nature of the medium.” To be true to its essence each modernist work was obliged to “eliminate…any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.” In consequence, each art, under self-criticism, would be rendered “pure,” a concept perhaps Greenberg really did borrow from Kant’s notion of pure reason. Kant called a mode of knowledge pure when “there is no admixture of anything empirical,” that is, when it was pure a priori knowledge. And pure reason is the source of the “principles whereby we know we know anything absolutely a priori. Each modernist painting, in Greenberg’s view, would then be a critique of pure painting: painting from which one should be able to deduce the principles peculiar to painting as painting.

Greenberg notoriously identifies the essence of painting with flatness: “It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained…more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under modernism.” While emphasizing flatness did not exclude representation from painting, it did exclude illusion, which requires the use of three-dimensional space, itself a borrowing from another art and hence a contaminant of painting construed as pure… Painting had a developmental and progressive history only by usurping the prerogatives of sculpture.