The End Of Painting
Furthermore, Crimp claims the invention of photography is another cause to the hindrance of painting’s influences. During 1960-70, the emergence of photography had a tremendous impact on painting as a dying form of art. Painting’s task before photography was representation – capturing images from nature for documentation and decoration. However, with the invention of photography, painting was liberated from its documentary role, as now the task of capturing ‘visual truth’ could be done more quickly and cheaply by photography.
In Crimp’s essay, Crimp confronts Frank Stella’s monochromatic series black paintings of 1959, in particular, “Point of Pines, 1959”, as an example that articulates Stella’s new agreement between painting as image and as an object. Crimp reads Stella’s work as a “tantrum and shrieking”, mentioning Stella’s irony by pointing out that an “object which may well represent a painting but certainly can no legitimately be a painting”. In Crimp’s mind, he recognises Stella was moving towards the minimalist movement. “Point of Pines” is comprised of parallel V-shapes containing black stripes separated by thin lined of unpainted canvas. The repeated geometric pattern, with the work’s lack of expressive brushwork, encourages the viewer’s recognition of it as a flat surface covered with paint, rather than a depiction of something else. The striped pattern serves as a regulating system that, in Stella's words, forced 'illusionistic space out of the painting at a constant rate.' This device was intended to emphasize the flatness of the canvas and prompt the viewer's awareness of painting as a two-dimensional surface covered with paint - thereby overturning the notion of painting as a window onto three-dimensional space. Crimp sees Stella’s work in a similar manner on how photography deprives on painting, from their uniqueness trait through its adoption of a representational approach and propagation of copies.
Thus, painters had no way out but to be inclined towards the other artistic media and this was against the lean formalist approaches of the modernist era. In this respect, Crimp announced the present era as the termination period of painting for such reason that the postmodernist photographers avoided making records of the reality of the subjects. Instead, utilise the photography’s potentials to induce the audience to make and remake an artwork. As Crimp acknowledge “painting’s terminal condition” which has finally arrived, from Stella’s “sheer desperation” to be seen as a painting.
