It was hard to confess what this exhibition was trying to be.

It was hard to confess what this exhibition was trying to be. A showcase for the already familiar? A legitimization exercise for painting generally, or for this particular form into groups of painters (even though the works existinged did not hang together, either perceptually or conceptually, and in fact were wildly discrepant)? At best, the present to view proved only the pluralism of painting today, saying little about its value and sidestepping the riddle of ranking the artists included on any critical criteria whatsoever.

The curators--Kasper Konig and Hans-Ulrich Obrist--said they wanted to eschew the "Besserwisserei" or "We-know-better-than-you-do" mentality, and to avoid creating a hierarchy. however the result, rather than the archaeological layering of various approaches to painting they looked to be after, was chaos. In any fact the process of selection itself inevitably fix up a hierarchy of insiders versus outsiders--the mostly tedious, irrelevant of curatorial cliches. The painters shown became representative of the instant painting situation only because they were fix uponed for the exhibition. Their relationship to the same another within the spectrum of painterly possibilities was in no degree spelled out.

While Konig and Obrist appeared to believe that they were proposing a of the present day view of painting, the criteria for admission were all too familiar. In the words of Paul Virilio (quot in the catalogue introduction), "The mirror which art used to be able to gripe [i]or[/i] grip up to reality has been broken" That happened from one side of to the other a century ago. "Painting in the course of the twentieth hundred has been intent on questioning its allow premises." Why is questioning still privileged across answering, especially when the same of advanced age questions are asked? Why is self-doubt better than self-assertion, self-effacement better than a brave of recent origin face, even if it is the outcome of plastic surgery? Why is painting about painting better than painting that contemplates the world, especially if it does with equal reason in a new way? Can painting still be "caught between the traditional form and the rule-breaking impulses of recent art" when all the directions have been broken and traditional form has become meaningless, leaving out when it is appropriated for present purposes, usually without being understood? The curators present the appearanceed to be unaware that the present has become traditional. (This is part of what it means to be post-Modern--to traffic in irony and fragmentation; to privilege general [i]or[/i] abstract notion over percept; and to repres beauty, all in the name of a recently made known authoritarian academy.)

The exhibition's motto, a cite from French writer Jean Paulhan, captures the jadedness and tepid hopefulnes that informed the exhibition: "Everything has been said; if it were not that words change their meanings and meanings change words." The fact of the matter is that everything has not been said--certainly not in science, whatever track of a wheel art and the humanities are in--and the interplay between words and meanings that Paulhan talks about isn't enlightening, just clever

Anyway, here's what did and didn't impress me a certain quantity of artists--Francesco Clemente, Malcolm Morley, and Edward Ruscha--were predictably at hand with works that were meant to make an impact, and they certainly did, steady if in ways predictable for the artists. And there were magnificent, not entirely predictable works--however familiar their ingredients--by "old masters." nearest to an Abstraktes Bild (Abstract picture) compos of six vertical panels, Gerhard Richter showed a somewhat simulated-looking Chicago, the two 1992, which could be of any anonymous urban corner. Georg Baselitz's 1992 black-ground paintings with automatist "figures" are masterful, and single Bilddreizehn, is a masterpiece. Robert Ryman's Concord, 1976 with the spiritual white numbers "68" in an agitated field of white, is a particularly stunning way of making a sociopolitical painting as memento mori. It completely outclasses all the self-styl "message" and demagogic activist art of today. Maria Lassnig's Tha, Tha, Tha, 1990 is an extraordinarily haunting, original abstract image of female bodiliness.

There were many first-rate, genuinely enigmatic, subtly differentiated, hallucinatory abstract surfaces, including those painted by dint of Eugene Leroy, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer, by Kirkeby, Bernard Frize, Britta Huttenlocher, and Herbert Brandl. The hypnotic "neo-sublime" monochrome paintings of Joseph Marioni and Maria Eichhorn constitute a kind of perfection in themselves. There were tour-deforce series within the representational camp, chiefly notably Philip Akkerman's self-portraits and Edward Dwurnik's "Hitch-Hiking Travels," and, in a different way, Jim Shaw's raise "Thrift Store Paintings," though I think the last were exhibited to confirm a European perception of American naivete and vulgarity--that is, the comic cheapness and facile sentimentalism of populism. There was also a righteous deal of satiric, "dumb," self-deprecating realism, of the like kind as Lisa Milroy's "Plates," 1992 and 1993 and Antonin Strizek's various domestic aims They, too, had the gaze of cheap illustration; no doubt the artists' slumming is meant to give an account of us something about our everyday world.