PX

"PX: Thoughts on Painting presents two very different approaches to thinking about painting. PX began life as a two-part exhibition project curated by Jan Bryant and Leonhard Emmerling that was intended to produce a palpable, yet dissimilar sensibility. This book considers in much more detail the individual practices involved and how they respond to a contemporary demand for complexity and openness. Bryant and Emmerling's essays pay particular attention to the legacies of conceptualism and the diverse relations that contemporary painting holds with various art-historical, philosophical and political discourses. Fusing [Immanuel] Kant's definition of art as 'purposeless' with [Theodor] Adorno's notion of the autonomous work of art as the only one with utopian potential, Emmerling's text consider's painting's complete uselessness as the basis of its unalienability. Bryant adapts Jean Paulhan's ideas on cliché and terror and attempts to delineate a certain genealogy that might account for aspects of contemporary painting practice that can;t be folded neatly into dominant art-historical discourses, even when a dialogue with art history is being carried out"--Back cover.