Despite its apparent disparagement of the idea of an integral self, quoting is an art mode in which the artist’s intentions are brought into unusual prominence. Allusion, for example, always involves awareness of the artist’s intentions to allude, rather than to plagiarize. Irony, also, which must be an ingredient in most works of this type, involves a judgment about the artist’s intentions. The old feeling of the leap of the artist’s insight is not gone, but considerably altered in range and relevance: that leap is now a meta-leap, made up of the ruins of past leaps. Quotational painting is addressed as much to the mind as to the eye. The idea that intelligence should be in an antagonistic relationship to the senses is an abomination, like all Manichaean-type dualisms. The dualisms of form and content, spirit and matter, mind and body, are all really the same dualism, one which arose in part as an archaic propaganda system to support an unchanging form of the state. As a second-generation form of conceptual art, this recent painting cannot be regarded as painting pure and simple in the old sense. If this is understood, Duchamp’s phrase “stupid as a painter” will not apply; alternately, if the work lacks the kind of intelligence appropriate to it, it will be student work, or primitive work, or spurious. Further, since wit functions by a substitution of expectations, by a simultaneous invoking and denying of conditioned responses, it is potentially a means of locating or defining the present, that is, oneself. When an artist quotes a familiar icon from the past in a clearly contemporary work, we sense, semiotically the difference between the Then and the Now of the work and at the same time the relationship between them. That relation locates our present stance with a sometimes uncanny precision, which yields a subtle strangeness and an actual pleasure in the mind’s tasting and appreciating of it. We sense the refoldings and redefinings of the vast image bank of all cultures and its creators. To this degree it is our own aesthetic habits that are held up as objects of contemplation in these ideograms of the history of taste.

Thomas McEvilley