The painting of Jacqueline Humphries1 unfolds between two imperatives. First, the death of painting, forecasted on both coasts of the United States toward the end of the 1970s. Her practice originates within this context, “this old narrative [that] has followed [her] around forever: of continuing painting in the face of opposition in a time when serious artists eschewed it as corrupt and moribund.”2 A context from which, in appearance at least, she continues to draw, never having settled her critical debt to a disapproving environment which still calls her to produce “last paintings”3—works that would lead the medium to its end, its logical conclusion, its final punctuation, summing it up once and for all. To paint under such conceptual pressure may be to paint as Kazimir Malevich did, in an ultra-modernist way; but to paint as Humphries does—with systems of meaning forced into insoluble coexistence on the same canvas, some (such as the expressionist drip) belonging to a handmade past, others (emojis, emoticons, CAPTCHAs) belonging to a disembodied present—amounts to squaring modernism, driving it to its limits by maneuvering its lessons. A postmodern enterprise, if ever there was one; the work of a gravedigger.
And yet, Humphries exempts herself from this cynicism, for there is in her practice more than the critical reversal of one time upon another, this other time with which postmodernism is tragically, melancholically at times, bound. A second imperative lifts her beyond it: even with the decommissioned signifiers of Abstract Expressionism and the elusive signals of our technologized language, what Humphries organizes are not sentences but incompatibilities. Like a worm in the apple, she generates a kind of inconclusiveness of signification within the pictorial medium—an insufficiency close to that already debated in the 1980s, but here made positive, transfigured. It is a “perhaps” echoing the proposition “painting is dead” that, from her beginnings, Humphries has kept stretching. She says it well: “In truth at that time I agreed with much in the theoretical arguments against painting, which were profoundly formative for me. And I laughed at the jokes about painters being stupid as much as anyone.”4 This “perhaps” is then sly, and celebratory, although Humphries’ painting negotiates its existence with all the world’s screens—Peter Halley knows this too. In response, and contrary to Halley’s loops and short-circuits, what one is tempted to call an unclosure of the work is staged: an interminable corrida of meaning, for meaning there is, in the face of digital images rendered outrageously digestible. Humphries’s painting thus achieves another aim than a comfortable, soothing consumption: it forces us to look, and in that gaze holds us, exhausts us. We neither cling to meaning nor follow it—we find its traces and, barely, induce it. From beginning to end, that is to say, between these two imperatives or in the course of the conversion from one to the other, from a death to a survivance, three coordinates emerge.
Landscape
The landscape does not always appear immediately in Jacqueline Humphries’ paintings. Some titles refer to it explicitly—Sunset (Yellow) and Sunset (Blue), painted in 1996, as well as High Noon (2001) and Untitled (Sunset Orange) (2001), Against Day (2005), and Sunset (Rose), painted in 2000. In other cases, such as Black Sheep (1999), the impression of water advancing in the darkness of night is almost undeniable. Even in these cases, it is not just a question of a natural landscape, and looking at Humphries’ painting as a whole, it is more broadly a semantic landscape that she explores, which constellates three major modalities of contemporary meaning in painting.
First, the technological developments of language in their relationship to the image, which are directly referenced by paintings employing emojis and emoticons (😟 🙂, 2017), CAPTCHA formulas (jHΩI 🙂, 2018), and ASCII computer language (which Humphries encountered “in grammar school, probably on some field trip to NASA or some such entity”5), linking the grayscale values of a given image with keyboard characters (?????h%, 2018 or MMNddy+, 2020, as well as jHΩI 🙂, “A magic trick for young minds, that you could make a picture with a typewriter and then instantly send it to faraway places”6). These technological languages—which include vectorization, at the root, for example, of one of the pixelated backgrounds of 😣 (2020)—are sometimes used together, or even layered on top of one another; this is the case for jHΩI 🙂 and for ~?j.h% (2018). For instance, ~?j.h% features in its background the transcription of an image into ASCII language. This textuality disappears when the work is photographed with a phone, the lines of text becoming mere swarms, the grid of letters thus returning to its formal origin, to its being-image. Towards the foreground, apparently uncontrolled streaks of red paint mingle with others in black, a combination that reenacts the bichromy of the background in another mode—this one expressionist in orientation, verging on abstract calligraphy. This pictorial language of spontaneity is subverted by its chromatic affinity with the abstract seriality of the background, collapsing, stripped of its historiographical significance, further constrained, it seems, by the frame running along the edges of the painting. This frame, partially left blank within the ASCII grid, shares its nature with a dispersed series of marks forming a paradoxical Braille on the surface of the painting, entangling its depths, creating bulges as it pierces it, appearing as absence. No signified is attributed to this sometimes covered, sometimes covering signifier; one wouldn’t seek a word or phrase behind these marks. One engages with its haptic significance, and it is indeed with the body, navigating a space, that one reads it; the exact opposite of the very background by which this semblance of language is sometimes crossed. Semantic regimes falsify one another. Their coexistence yields nothing discursive; there is diction, but nothing is said beyond the coexistence of semantic pathways without a common destination, without intersection. Ineffective precisely because it is dictions without discourse, ~?j.h% is barely a matrix; its only outcome is disaster, its only conclusion wreckage—and a visual pleasure.
The haptic significance of ~?j.h% relates to a second mode of meaning: the viewer’s mobile and situated position in front of a painting. The Silver Paintings (begun in the mid-2000s), which reflect the viewer’s image amid highly pictorial marks, each mutually sparsening the other, openly draw on this mode. More implicitly, other works use situating processes such as horizontality in the likeness of a horizon (Horizontal #5, 1997) and vertical separation in the likeness of duplication (Oo, 2022). In other cases, the antecedence of an original state, of which the works are the negative or reflection, extends the geographical dependence to paintings that may be absent, elsewhere. This is the case, for example, with 31/13 (2013), of which sysysyo/ produced a version in ASCII language in 2017 (four years later). The work thus becomes the highly variable argument of an equation that is not only spatial but also temporal—the third major direction of meaning in Humphries’ work, which this delay in causality, when a consequence occurs several years after its cause, already approaches. This direction is amplified by the links that many works maintain jointly with a certain formal history and a certain self-reflexivity. Narcissus (2010), Note to Self (2005), and Hit or Miss (1993), a very likely reference to Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tirs, explicitly stand at this crossroads.
Thus, amid the tortuous staging of the dual, divided, and necessarily polysemic conditions of painting as it seeks to acquire its contemporaneity in the 21st century—there is indeed landscape, sum—Humphries’ painting takes on the semantic vertigo of the being-other, that is, being remade, being made after, by means of, in the midst of, with, from, in relation to, in mirror image to, despite, so many versions of a sliding inseparable from their meaning. In this way, a practice with both clear and ambitious intentions is carried out: “Be able to make works that I felt really are getting at what it is like to be alive right now, with some of the less comfortable feelings that that produces in many of us, or certainly in a society way.”7 On the same occasion, Humphries also states: “We’ve undergone this really radical shift in our lives, how we relate to things we do in our daily lives, each other, […] and I’m trying very hard to get that into art somehow and create a recognition effect because I think in a sense we’re alone with that reality. We’re all in it, but it’s very hard to relate to each other about it. Art can address that in some way, I hope.”8 It therefore seems that Humphries seeks to use her painting to respond to what has become of such a fundamentally human concept as solitude. Being-alone that has become unrecognizable, yet seems to find a counterpoint in her painting: the event, emergence of contrariness in the semantic economy of the work.
Event
For example, the nature of 😟 🙂 (2017) changes when we look at its background for what it is: the probable reformulation of a painting from the 1990s in the style of Horizontal #5 (1997). The emojis and emoticons that we recognize in the foreground, themselves supposedly transparent transcriptions of well-known states (which are not immune to interpretation, quite the contrary), thus occupy only a fractional and undefined part of the linguistic environment established by the work, an environment that is all the more obscured as its background, dependent as it is on a missing source, opacifies. Is there communion, a connection between these paths of meaning? jHΩI 🙂 (2018), when its background becomes for the viewer the ASCII translation of an image (but which one?), experiences a similarly tangled fate, amplified by the presence, in a supposedly random CAPTCHA language, of the artist’s initials (jH) and a joint reference—by the Greek letter omega followed by the number 1—to the end and the beginning. All these events, contrasting reliefs of meaning within the now troubled unity of the work, make the gaze inseparable from an investigation, whose task is to hold together several unmixable languages, discussing differently a subject (but only one?) whose mystery remains complete—a chipped semantic situation, digital slang going, as with ~?j.h%, straight only to its ruin.
This technological yet dysfunctional expression, with no clear destination or origin, is counterbalanced by the imperfectly reflective surface of the Silver Paintings. Their imperfections—cracks, scratches, gashes, almost wounds—undermine their claim to pure superficiality, to the simple reflection of surrounding appearances, and formulate the problem of the destination and origin of meaning in more geographical terms, here involving the interior and exterior, physical translations of source and destination. These breaches engulf the viewer in what becomes, behind the activity of the surface that he witnesses and whose expressions are modified by movement, the belly of the painting; we then assume it to be immutable, substantial. This situation amplifies that produced by Untitled (Sunset Orange), painted in 2001. The three areas of color separated by two semblances of horizon that cross this work, measuring nearly 2.30 meters by almost 2.60 meters, already displace the viewer according to the horizon that he stabilizes, a status coextensive with that of the image he perceives: sometimes topped by a fringe of sky superimposed on an incandescent sea, sometimes by a bar framing this same incandescence, now assimilable to the sky. The meaning of this work, incessantly relative, thus emerges through exchanges, mutations, and transpositions, through correspondences between one of its states and another; the Silver Paintings entangle these states, producing them almost simultaneously.
In 1946HJ (2022), Humphries produces an intermediate semantic state. Writing “JH6491,” the title of the work backwards, is to write it from a supposed interior of the work, whose appearance would be the membrane ensuring its communication with the outside world; it is to materialize its interstitial nature, to inscribe in it a reversibility, an in-between. The belly of the painting exists but remains hidden, inaccessible, almost impossible to locate, even though it is envisaged, just below the surface. Writing the title of the work backwards in the work itself produces a two-sided density, with the viewer having access only to something that is both superficial and translucent. Again, it leads the unity of the work to its death, driving the unidirectional meaning to its loss: what to retain, where to situate oneself? The cognitive act of holding together such separate pieces of the work is only made possible by the unaltered unity of the flat quadrangle that is the painting—we know that this is not the case in the visually torn surfaces of the Silver Paintings. A link has been established between the likely expressionist stain on 1946HJ and the vandalism of the protesters towards the works of art.9 The integrity of its functioning has indeed been compromised, but the core of the painting remains untouched, since the stain only appears on its visible surface, at the tip of the iceberg. The small hand at the bottom fringe of the work—is it the left hand placed on it, or the right hand placed from it?—reiterates this: we are, in the visible, between the reality of the fact and the nullity of the imagined, on an inauthentic, flawed, dubious path, and it is only in the dereliction of the stable that we form our view—not our verdict, but something of the order of the moving, the perspective.
About the Silver Paintings: David Joselit describes their “back-and-forth rhythm–whereby viewers are alternately thrown out of a painting and drawn back in–[as] a twenty-first-century analogue of Cézanne’s doubt,”10 Cézanne’s doubt being, in his view, “the painstaking process of transposing sensation into form.”11 He thus comes to the conclusion that “the painting no longer need be one; it can be a multitude hosted by the same rectangle of canvas.”12 This multitude—that is, painting as a semantic organ welcoming a variety of languages, signifying among their incompatibility formally, that is, physically, and therefore to be thought of in a space, but also to be considered in the histories that are the temporal developments of the medium, of itself and of the self—is masterfully orchestrated by Neiman Marcus (2021).
Frame of Reference
A monumental work (measuring nearly 2.50 meters by almost 12, divided into five panels), it reflects the very contemporary demise of the Neiman Marcus brand: “Covid lockdown in New York was pretty harsh. There was a feeling very much of being suspended in the present […]. There was a brand-new Neiman Marcus store that had opened just before Covid which went bankrupt soon after lockdown. Somehow the logo of that store became the subject of the painting(s). It’s really five paintings which make up one work.”13 The elegant, handwritten logo is painted along the five paintings in varying degrees of readability, rendered in a spectral state against a nebulous background, also of varying density—a pixelated image of mysterious origin, of which Humphries also paints the missing pixels. Between this logo, gently slipping into a bygone visual culture, a symbol of another time, and “the painting’s fractal white noise and shifting mists of color”14 that form the background, a place where even absence has a pictorial body, it is “the unfolding time of looking”15 that Neiman Marcus produces. Displayed in front of the window of the New York gallery Greene Naftali, it is only fully visible from the street, effectively placing the work in front of the city and its viewers. “The structure of the work itself” allows us to “recognize the cruel dimensions of our contemporary world”16: a world in which the embodied being is held and to which it does not actually belong, in which it does not completely dissolve, where its presence is pronounced in contrast to complete transparency, producing relief, a reef or resistance to the flowing rhythms of its streets, stopped in front of Neiman Marcus. Even if “the culminating moments of [her] practice occur in the studio,”17 something “pretty unique”18 happens here: her three semantic directions—plurality of languages and varying levels of their legibility, seized corporeality of vision, marked temporality of the work—together contravene a unified situation of being and work, a fracture that is doubled by the separation of the window. The being, constituting itself as an event, thus finds itself grappling with a frame of reference that, from the street, it experiences visually and corporally, in its usual and terrifying invisibility.
Interpreting a work by Humphries would come down to measuring the impact of a particular pictorial event—which either multiplies coexisting languages, blurs the incorporated situation of the gaze, or heralds the antecedence of a virtually absent source—on what remains an apparently stable frame of reference, a unified horizon of rules and expectations, a conceptual framework within which to construct an interpretive truth, producer of coherence, and whose overall relevance does not disappear nonetheless. Thus, through the impasse of a contradiction posed on considerable and interlocking scales, Jacqueline Humphries’ painting produces, in particular, a crisis in the theatrical model of landscape, which establishes a “spectacle — that is, a discourse offered to the eye”19 dependent on a “staging, involving actors who capture the viewer’s interest and a frame that focuses their vision.”20 In the words of Patricia Falguières, it is clear that “it is not an excess of presence (to oneself, to the audience) that the artist [Humphries in this case] grappling with the theatricality of art requires, but rather an awareness of the multiple operations of ‘framing’ that establish the process of meaning. […]. In short, it is the multiplication (assumed as such) of the possibilities of play.”21
The original model of the theatrical landscape, presiding over an “ideal landscape of the classical era [which] could be compared to a musical chord, a consonance that harmoniously brings together a place, a time, and an action,”22 becomes dissonance in Humphries’ work. Her work, which includes the physical coordinates of the lived and the visible in the possibilities of pictorial meaning, is indeed the “framework of a virtual action”23 that links presence and time, “scenography” and “temporality.”24 However, the relationship between the event, which carries the action, and its setting brings the pictorial situation to an insoluble drama, the same one that has been called the endless corrida of meaning, not happening but unfolding: a drama that is sometimes without a valid outcome, producing as it unfolds the non-existence of its ending and the receding of its origin, since if it really began, it began elsewhere, and sometimes with an invalidating outcome, since it reverses some of the conditions of the work that could have ensured its semantic coherence25; off-beating or wrong-footing. These are paradoxical outcomes in light of a theatrical model that necessarily calls for a conclusion, but they conversely have the merit of capturing the semantic landscape that Humphries has made her main subject in all its amplitude. An amplitude that John Kelsey detects in the conclusion of his essay on Neiman Marcus: “It’s impossible to say where the painting’s content ends and its non-context begins.”26 Through this or that event, Humphries’ painting imperiously posits the meaning of the work in relation to a framework that is at once internalized and subjectivized, plural and total; a living framework. What, then, is to be done within this framework or before it, before the work, in the world? Look infinitely.