The Guilty Pleasures of Paint

This paper analyses the status of painting in the contemporary cultural field. It claims that painting has become the ‘bad object’ of contemporary art; something considered no longer worthy for serious critical inquiry, a medium attracting feelings of guilty pleasure from both artist practitioners and critics alike, but which retains a certain sticky persistency and/or vitality.

To develop this idea, the paper will unravel the tendency in recent discourse to describe new approaches to painting as ‘zombified’. The so-called ‘zombie formalism’ of the early and middle 2010s and ‘zombie figuration’ of the late 2010s and early 2020s is of particular interest here. Both have attracted pejorative critiques, which appear indebted to censures of the neo-expressionist revival of painting in the 1980s, by writers including Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, and Craig Owens, where painting was felt inherently lacking as medium capable of apprehending the technologized late capitalist world.

For these thinkers, the pleasure of painting was a guilty pleasure: obsolescent, escapist, gimmicky, and given over to the commodity form. Is it fair to criticise painting on these terms? Must painting remain a guilty pleasure? Is there anything in its feelings of pleasure or guilt that might produce affective encounters that exceed this frame of interpretation? In order to address this, the paper will historicise our so-called ‘zombie’ painting as a symptom of a wider ennui on the critical potential of art today, but that, like the cliché zombie figure, staggers on regardless, retaining some sort of – albeit stunted - agency.