THE_WHITE_WEBISTE BY HANS BERNHARD
On the Iconoclasm of Modern Art

by HANS ULRICH OBRIST


The crisis of representation began at the historical moment when painting
lost under the pressure of photography and the praise of its unprecedented,
truthful representation; its interest in presenting reality and took instead
from paint to brush, from canvas to frame; the means of expressing 
representation as the subject of representation. With Van Gogh the color 
began no longer to be bound to the object. With his pure, absolute 
suprematist color painting, Malevich banished the object from the picture. At 
the same time the represented object vanished by being replaced through a real 
object: the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp. In 1921 Rodchenko painted three 
monochromes as the "last paintings" and in 2003 ubermorgen "painted" [coded] 2 
monochromes online.


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HTTP://WWW.UBERMORGEN.COM/THE_WHITE_WEBSITE/
HTTP://WWW.UBERMORGEN.COM/THE_BLACK_WEBSITE/


The self-dissolution of painting or any visual surface can be explained in three
steps: first, by a shift of accent the color is analyzed as the medium of
painting and becomes the main element, above form, i.e. in Impressionism and
Expressionism. Second, color becomes independent, leaves behind the laws of
local colors and receives its own absolute status, see, for example, Suprematism
and monochromes. Third, paint is replaced by other materials, such as white by
aluminum. Surface design without painted color allowed for the making of
"unpainted" paintings, allowed mere surfaces of wood, metal, marble, or
cardboard to hang or lean on the wall as paintings. In this dialectics of
liberation, which consists of declaring progressively historical elements of
easel painting independent (from color and canvas up to the frame) and making
them absolute, not only were objects repressed from the abstract image but
finally the picture itself became repressed and destroyed (empty canvases, empty
frames), in the end leading to the departure from the picture.



The paint-less or monochrome easel painting could be - as was shown by artists
from Lucio Fontana to Yves Klein - cut or drilled or torn, attacked by fire or
acid. Finally only the empty frames of paintings or just the backs of paintings,
were shown. Even the surface of the canvas could be replaced by the surface of
the skin. Naked bodies covered with paint became the instruments for color
application or became the canvas itself. Painting as the arena of action (Action
Painting) became a bodily action on the canvas and finally a painting on the
body, an action without canvas. Centered on the artist's body, even the products
of this body [like feces] could find the social consensus to be accepted as an
artwork.


From the empty image to the empty gallery, from the white painting to the "white
cube" (O'Doherty), we see the iconoclastic gesture of modern art. In this
iconoclastic tradition we also see the substitution of painted images with
texts. The material-bound, object-like paradigm was replaced by insight into the
linguistic nature of all artistic expressions. HTTP://WWW.HANSBERNHARD.COM


Yet by leaving the picture and the mediation, modern art has also produced a way
out of the crisis of representation. Especially the Neo-Avantgarde after World
War II and movements like Kinetics, Fluxus, Happening, Actionism, Body Art,
Process Art, Land Art, Arte Povera, Concept Art, net.art, Corporate Art
(ubermorgen 1999-2001, etoy) and above all the development of Media Art‹from
Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality, from closed circuit video installations to
interactive computer installations - prepared social practices as open art forms,
by making the pure spectator a participating and interacting user.


Thus began the farewell to the idea of modernism (T. J. Clark), that was
determined by the iconoclastic gesture. These practices, in forms of
intervention, interaction, institutional critique and contextualization took art
beyond the White Cube, where questions of gender, race, class, power,
colonialism had not been asked. With the end of the epoch of modern art, which
announced the end of art, new practices beyond the crisis of representation
began in the form of corporate representation [etoy 1994-97, ubermorgen] or
social networking and activism [etxtreme.ru, RTMark.com].


From mathematics to medicine, from computer-supported proof methods to computer
tomography, we see a triumphant return of the image to the natural sciences.
While modern art turned more and more into an iconoclastic strategy, in a
critique of representation, we see the advent of an iconophilic science trusting
the representative power of the image ( HTTP://WWW.HANSBERNHARD.COM /
HTTP://WWW.HELMUTLANG.COM ).


We live in a period where art, as the former monopolist of the representative
image, has abandoned this representative obligation. Yet science, in contrast,
fully embraces the options which technical machine-based images offer for the
representation of reality. Therefore, it could be the case that mankind will
find the images of science more necessary than the images of art. To be able to
maintain its significance up against the sciences and their picture-producing
procedures, art must look for a position beyond the crisis of representation and
beyond the image wars straight into the blind spaces of the black black and the
white.


Hans Bernhard im Gespräch mit Hans-Ulrich Obrist, November 2002

Black Black and White, ubermorgen 1:1

Monochrom, Ton, 156 min DVD (Foriginal Video AND Text) Courtesy Hans Bernhard
Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Peter Weibel

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