»Form« and »finish« in modern painting 
Charles Harrison 
This paper is concerned with a group of paintings made earlier this year by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, the artists whose work is issued 
under the name of Art & Language. Each is approximately 180 cm high by 120 
cm wide. The paintings belong to a sub-series within the longer series which 
Art & Language have called Hostages. Since December 1989, all the paintings 
given this title have been based on a simple and consistent landscape motif.1 
An uneven row of poplar trees is seen within a relatively featureless field, 
receding diagonally or running parallel to the picture plane according to the 
variations of a simple perspectival scheme. The horizon line is marked with 
indefinite, painterly traces which casually signify a hedge. The paintings are 
individuated by effects of light and weather, though the pictorial atmosphere 
thus established appears rather as a conventional aspect quoted than as a 
natural property directly expressed. These are the token materials of landscape 
as an alienated genre - a genre abandoned by the critical interests of 
Modernism and rendered bathetic by the conditions of modernity. To those 
familiar with his paintings of the 1890s, the motif of the poplar tree 
inescapably evokes the work of Monet, and thus refers, albeit laconically, to 
the last moment in western art when the identification of intentional human 
content could be made consonant with a comfortable concept of nature. 
In the works with which I'm primarily concerned, each painting is divided 
vertically. The landscape motif occupies only a certain proportion of each 
canvas. The remainder is painted in a single flat colour. As components of the 
initial design, these vertical areas may be seen as wholly decorative and 
non-naturalistic, as forms of reference to those types of (principally 
American) abstract painting which have been conventionally associated with 
metaphysical profundity, or as figurative devices of a sort familiar from the 
works of Degas and Matisse, where they serve to qualify the spectator's 
psychological experience by framing a scene or by distancing an imaginary 
viewpoint. In the Hostages it is not clear whether it is landscape or painted 
band that is practically and conceptually basic. Are the vertical bands to be 
read figuratively, or are they to be read as abstract incursions into basically 
1. Hostages XXIV-XXXV were exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, from 
6-31 March 1990. The present sub-series commences with Hostage XXXVI. Hostages 
XXXVI-XLV were shown at the Basel Art Fair in June 1990, by the Lisson Gallery, 
London. 
50 Charles Harrison 
figurative paintings, or are the Hostages basically abstract paintings in which 
landscape motifs appear as forms of ironic quotation? 
The nearest surface of each painting is comprised of a sheet of glass. The glass 
ends just short of the unframed edges of the canvas and is fixed by screws 
driven through the canvas into the support beneath. Over large areas of each 
painting the glass adheres directly to the paint-surface; or rather the paint is 
pressed up against the glass and spread out by pressure from behind the canvas 
to provide an intermediate layer between canvas and glass. 
Various forms of evidence thus mesh to establish the appearance of the recent 
Hostages: what remains legible of the token landscape and of the evacuated 
illusionistic world it proposes; the literal surface of paint with its decorative 
incident and its own cultural and artistic associations; and the spectator's own 
phenomenal environment, reduced to a pattern of half-reflected highlights and 
shadows, for it is a further effect of the procedure here employed by Art & 
Language that the glass is made practically and conceptually inseparable from 
the canvas, so that not only its immanent properties of hardness and 
transparency but also its content of reflections become part of what each 
painting connotes. It seems that the possibility of the aesthetic is almost 
cancelled out by the visual noise of the circumstantial. 
To view these paintings is to be caught between levels of representation in a 
world of conflicting descriptions. They are evocative as illusionistic and richly 
decorative paintings may be. But they are also literally slab-like and weighty. 
They are broadly figurative but their figurative components merge without 
significant transition into areas which read as literally flat. The discriminating 
tones and colours of referential detail blur into seemingly accidental pattern. 
The fictive and pictorial depth of the perspective schemes extends uneasily in 
face of the very different kinds of spatial disjunction established between the 
landscapes and the areas of flat colour, and in turn between these and the 
literal planes of paint, canvas and glass. We might sum up our experience of 
these paintings by saying that their literal aspects and their figurative aspects 
tend to converge and to coincide. To put it crudely, to see them as pictures -
and thus as potentially open to all the complexities of the pictorial - is not to 
rule-out or to suspend the possibility of their being seen as slab-like objects, 
inviting associations with the »three dimensional objects« of the American 
Minimalists at one extreme and with the polished surfaces of commercial décor 
at the other. On the other hand, that a given surface is seen as a literal surface 
of glass and paint does not rule out the possibility of its also being seen as 
representational - a point to which I shall return later. 
I claim no originality for the observation that pictorial illusion is a thoroughly 
dispensable condition of representation. On the other hand, there is no 
cognitively significant representation in visual art without some form of 
»Form« and » finish« in modern painting 51 
reference to pictorial representation. What I wish to emphasize is the apparent 
importance to the effect of these specific paintings both of their literal and 
obdurate physical presence and of their figurative and unsettled pictorial 
properties. Prompted by these works of Art & Language, I suggest that some 
significant aspect of the modern in painting may be discovered in the 
relationship between literal objecthood on the one hand and suspension of 
finish on the other. What's required for this to be the case is that the operative 
conditions of both objecthood and finish should have some critical bearing 
upon the ways in which we are accustomed to represent - or to picture - the 
world to ourselves. I believe there is a category of paintings of which it might 
be said that some significant lack of finish - some intentional refusal of 
customary modes of termination of both technical and psychological activities 
- is a significant condition of their formal integrity and their qualitative 
presence. »Category« is perhaps too strong a term. What I have in mind is 
rather an aspect discoverable in many notable paintings of the modern period, 
though to differing degrees, barely noticable in some, inescapable and crucial 
in others. 
If I am right, that Art & Language's recent paintings bring the literal and the 
figurative into a critical coincidence is not so much a mark of their originality, 
as a testimony to the painters' engagement with conditions which have been 
pervasive and persistent. In art as elsewhere, the conditions of both making 
and seeing are historical and ideological. In fact, I suggest that the generation 
of tension and paradox in the relationship between literal form and figurative 
form - form which is the form of some pictorial illusion - has been the 
defining evidence of self-critical activity in painting for at least the past 
century and a quarter.Not, of course, in all painting. To identify self-criticism 
in these terms is to impose a form of evaluative qualification. I am talking of 
modern painting, or, more specifically still, of that tendency within nineteenth 
and twentieth-century western painting which is identified as modern in 
Modernist theory and criticism. I'll rephrase the generalization accordingly: 
what tends to define self-critical activity in painting as specifically Modernist 
self-criticism is that it leads to some unaccustomed tension or paradox in the 
relationship between literal form and figurative form.2 This is to say that 
while there may be many other factors determining upon the relative quality 
2. I have in mind here Michael Fried's essay, »Shape as Form: Frank Stella's New Paintings«, 
first published in Artforum, New York, vol. 5 no. 3, November 1966. In this important 
statement of late-Modernist aesthetic principles, Fried considers the relationship between 
literal shape and pictorial form as a crucial issue for the preservation of quality in modern 
painting. For Fried, as for all critics in the mainstream Modernist tradition, the sine qua non 
of aesthetic achievement is the victory of the noumenally »present« over the physically 
»literal«. In considering form as both a more practical and a more provisional concept than 
Fried allows it to be, I mean to modify the terms of his argument and rather to suggest that it 
is the persistence of a dialectic between the (meanings of the) figurative and the (meanings 
of the) literal that secures the continuing possibility of painting as a form of art. 
52 Charles Harrison 
of a modern painting, no painting can be entirely sucessful as a modern 
painting if some such tension is not sucessfully established - and established in 
terms of the psychological experience of competent spectators. (We may note 
that such a qualification will tend to relegate those fashionable forms of 
post-Duchampian post-Modernism in which modes of aestheticization of mere 
commodities are treated as forms of psychological or cultural game.) 
So far we are on familiar ground: the ground of Clement Greenberg's 
»Modernist Painting«,3 for example, or of Richard Wollheim's »The Work of 
Art as Object«4 - essays now 30 and 20 years old respectively. Lately, such 
canonical statements of Modernist aesthetics have been reconnected to some 
of their own forgotten or suppressed antecedents in the literary theory of the 
earlier twentieth century - to the work, for example, of Shklovsky, Bakhtin 
and Benjamin - and given a new if cloistered lease of life in a fashionable 
form of Art History. The New Art Historian now effortlessly acknowledges 
the status of art as device, the social and material character of the sign, and the 
role of the artist as producer. He is also alert - formally at least - to the 
persistent presence of the contingent within the black heart of the universal. 
The Postmodern, it has been discovered, is not Modernism's cultural successor, 
but rather its intellectual sibling, if not its virtual parent. 
Let's return, then, to the origins of the Modern in the already Postmodern: to 
Manet's Olympia, say, and to the establishment of that difference vis-à-vis its 
evident comparatives - such as Cabanel's near-contemporary Birth of Venus -
which identifies Olympia as a modern work. This is a painting which was seen 
at the time of its first exhibition both as flat and as unfinished. It was 
derogated as a sketch, an ébauche. We might say that Manet did enough to 
secure reference to the form of such paintings as Cabanel's, and to the range 
of forms to which such paintings themselves referred, but not so much as to 
deliver up what such paintings were supposed to deliver in the way of 
opportunities for unreflective enjoyment - which is to say not enough for the 
imaginative and realistic activity of looking to be entirely overwhelmed by the 
distractions of a figuratively-enabled fantasy. In the eyes of the normal 
contemporary spectator Manet stopped before he had finished - before the 
barrier of the literal surface had been sufficiently penetrated by the plastic 
effects of figurative form to permit a confusion of figuration with fantasy. 
Significantly, the view that the painting was unfinished tended to coincide 
with the judgement that the woman was both deformed and immoral. That's to 
3. First published in Arts Yearbook IV, New York, 1961; reprint in C. Harrison and F. 
Frascina eds. Modern Art and Modernism, Harper and Row, New York and London, 1982. 
4. First published in Studio International, London, vol. 180, no. 928, December 1970; second 
version included in R. Wollheim, On art and the Mind, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 
Mass. 1973; edited version included in C. Harrison and F. Orton eds, Modernism, Criticism, 
Realism, Harper and Row, 1984. 
»Form« and » finish« in modern painting 53 
say, an ethical judgement on the means of representing was mapped more-or-
-less directly onto the represented. In the unrequited gropings of fantasy the 
woman was damned as grotesque. To put it another way, if Manet's painting 
could be seen as incompetent - if its stylistic features could be seen as 
accidental - then the represented woman could also be dismissed as a kind of 
accident. Olympia - or rather Victorine - was thus dispossessed of critical 
intention and of imaginary agency, and reduced to the status of a person for 
sale. She was an image to be refused.5 
Of course, Manet is now seen as vindicated. We accept Victorine as a model of 
the modern woman - an appropriate subject for feminist biography - while 
those kinds of technical abbreviation which the nineteenth-century spectator 
took as evidence of involuntary incompetence we now accredit as the means of 
expression of an intentional and critical regard. The painting is an image of 
refusal. Indeed, by the turn of the century, avant-garde observers were already 
identifying the technical signs of this refusal as the very conditions of form in 
its modern guise. In that Modernist critical tradition, Cézanne's notorious 
doubt - his compulsive staving-off of the moment of figurative individuation 
and completion of his formal motifs - has been seen as a measure of ethical 
virtue and a guarantee of aesthetic interest and merit.6 
The history of modern painting abounds in examples of the kind of tension I 
have in mind. In the works of Degas and Matisse, for example, moments of 
apparently casual suspension of modelling typically occur just where our 
attention is otherwise most thoroughly absorbed by passages of painterly 
mimesis, of pictorial narrative and of figurative embodiment. Measured against 
the conservative standard of an absolute iconic correspondence, these are 
moments of disruption, discontinuity and distortion. But it is by means of such 
devices that the painter recalls us to the worked surface in all its manifest 
facticity, inviting the engagement of our imaginative capacities and powers of 
discrimination with the painting as an intentional object, and disqualifying 
those tendencies to unreflective fantasy and self-projection which are licensed 
by the business-as-normal of modern culture. 
These are not just the tricks of the modern painter's trade. I believe that a 
powerful form of necessity attaches to the deployment of such devices. Indeed, 
they are the typical marks of that qualitative distinction which we intend in 
designating works as »modern« rather than merely »contemporary«. They 
5. The view of Manet's Olympia as a form of refusal derives from the work of TJ. Clark and 
has been elaborated in the discussion which that work has generated. See Clark, 
»Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865«, Screen, London, Spring 1980 
(edited reprint in Frascina and Harrison 1982); P. Wollen, »Manet, Modernism and the 
Avant-Garde«, Screen, Summer 1980; M. Baldwin, C. Harrison and M. Ramsden, »Manet's 
Olympia and Contradiction«, Block, No. 5, Middlesex, 1981; Clark, »Olympia's Choice«, in 
The Painting of Modern Life, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985. 
6. See M. Merleau-Ponty, »Le Doute de Cézanne«, 1945, in Sens et non-sens, Paris, 1966. 
54 Charles Harrison 
function like metaphors of cognitive alertness, rousing us from the state of 
»aesthetic impotence and insensibility«7 which is our normal condition, and 
instigating those complex forms of mental process through which critically 
pertinent aspects of our conscious existence are made actual in our experience 
as spectators. 
Let us be clear. What we are concerned with here are the technical effects of 
art - the effects and their ethical implications. We are asking not simply how 
it is that paintings work upon the viewer,but also why it is that their working 
in this specific way seems to be - or to have become - indissolubly associated 
with qualitative presence. This is to ask how form contingently becomes 
meaning, which includes both the question of what it is that pictorial form is 
made of and refers to and the question of how pictorial style and finish are 
perceived. 
Answers to such questions have normally been pursued within the social 
history of art, but the social history of art has proved itself relatively 
insensitive to the complexities of pictorial effects. It may be more fruitful to 
look for answers in the conversation and conduct of the studio, where 
critically to consider the form of a painting is both to consider its success in 
referring to what it is figuratively and conceptually made of and also to 
consider the conditions of its being finished. These questions are addressed by 
the painter in practice and empirically, in front of the thing being made and in 
exploration of its manifest or latent effects. 
For the purposes of argument I distinguish two different modes of self-critical 
assessment, which go to two different ways of understanding the concepts of 
effect and of effectiveness. In the first, the artist scrutinises the painting for 
confirmation that an intended and envisaged effect has been achieved - and 
that the painting is therefore finished. In the second, what the artist hopes to 
discover in the possibly completed painting is something that he or she did not 
already know. What he requires of the work is that it should be that which he 
could not have envisaged; that its effect be other than what he could have 
intended. And he will only know that he must stop when he sees that he does 
not understand how to go on. 
In practice, these two forms of self-criticism will rarely be distinct. In 
reviewing his work the artist looks for a match with intention, anxiety or 
whatever. He may not recognise it when the match is achieved. He may 
believe he has achieved it when he hasn't. But the latter form of self-criticism 
is the one which has been associated with the development of modernist art -
or, at least, with the prevailing idealisation of that development. One thinks of 
7. The phrase is taken from J.N. Findlay. See his »The Perspicuous and the Poignant«, in The 
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 7 no 1, January 1967; reprint in H. Osborne ed., 
Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, 1972. 
»Form« and » finish« in modern painting 55 
the priority which Picasso accorded to »finding« rather than »searching«,8 or 
of Pollock's view of the emerging painting as a being with a life of its own.9 
On the other hand, in the long-standing dialectic between Modernism and 
Realism, Realism has traditionally been associated with a purposive grasp on 
the world, with knowing what one was seeing and doing and with there being 
an examinable end to which that seeing and doing was directed. From the 
perspective of Realism thus defined, the apparently restless iconoclasm of the 
Modernist has been seen as individualistic, asocial and elitist. From the 
perspective of Modernism, on the other hand, the ethical commitment of the 
soi-disant Realist masks the moral complacency of the propagandist, for whom 
pictorial imagery and form must always be transparent, effective, and properly 
finished. Though the propagandist's work may partake of the apparently 
unfinished style of an ébauche, say, or of an informal montage, that style will 
always turn out to have been standard cultural currency. What Modernism has 
shown is that there can be no Realism deserving of the name without a 
critique of the immanent logic of iconography and of conventions of imagery; 
that the possibility of going-on and of learning entails a continual and vigilant 
unfixing of the grounds of descriptiveness and correspondence in pictures, and 
a continual scepticism and resistance in the face of demands for effectiveness. 
It is certainly true that vigilance of this order is inconsistent with an elitist 
indifference to the mechanisms and tendencies of the broader culture. It is also 
true - and particularly so since the emergence of abstract painting - that 
Modernist art has been tarred with the brush of unpopularity, which is to say 
with failure to conform to predominant conventions of visual identification 
and individuation. Modern art has not been popular - of that there can be no 
doubt. It would be a serious mistake, however, to assume that that tendency to 
formal autonomy and to abstraction which is celebrated in Modernist theory 
entails a disengagement from the culture at large. On the contrary, what is 
evident from the actual paintings of Malevich and Mondrian, of Pollock and 
Rothko, even of Stella and Noland (through it is not generally evident from 
reproductions of those paintings), is that the critical tension between figurative 
form and literal form is tuned to a high pitch in the best abstract art. The 
abstract painting is nothing if it is not also a virtual object, which resonates in 
the world of other objects, other surfaces. For the pioneers of abstract art, the 
critique of the figurative connections between paintings and the world - the 
8. »In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing ... When I paint my 
object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for ...« P. Picasso, from an 
interview with Marius de Zayas, published as »Picasso Speaks«, The Arts, New York, May 
1923. 
9 . »When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of »get 
acquainted« period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, 
destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come 
through...« J. Pollock, statement in R. Motherwell and H. Rosenberg eds., Possibilities, New 
York, Winter 1947/8. 
56 Charles Harrison 
critique, we might say, of a trivial realism-as-correspondence - was a 
necessary condition of art's actual realism. This strengthening of the 
connection between paintings and other things renders the achievement of 
aesthetic distinctness and quality all the more poignant. But the poignancy does 
not lie in the achievement of the aesthetic as a value independent of the social. 
On the contrary, given the nature of the artist as producer, it is precisely as the 
representative of the moral and social culture at large that the canonical 
abstract painter is revealed in his work. He is revealed, that is to say, as 
troubled by the appearance of the human world, by his own implication in that 
world of appearances, and by the forms of significance which forms of 
appearance may be made to reveal. 
With the emergence of abstract art, the question of finish came to occupy not 
simply an important but a central position in the business of practical 
self-criticism in painting. Or rather we might say there was an increasing 
tendency to equate practical self-criticism with keeping the figurative at bay 
on the one hand and with preserving the possibility of aesthetic life on the 
other. For Malevich and Mondrian the question »Is this painting finished?« 
must often at the beginning of abstract art have been of such moment as to 
absorb not only the self-critical question »Is this good enough?«, but also the 
ontological question, »Is this a work of art?« For any of these questions to be 
answered in the affirmative it was not enough that the painting appear well 
designed and balanced. On the contrary, the condition of the emergent abstract 
work's being accorded the status of a work of art was that it should be 
unforeseeable and inexhaustible in experience as painting may be but as design 
is not. Barnett Newman is supposed to have deliberated for some eight months 
in 1948 over his Onement I, presumably waiting to be sure in his own mind 
that no further work was required to transform what he had made into a 
painting.10 I don't mean to overdramatise or to overdignify the matter of the 
artist's deliberations upon his work. The neurotic demand for self-reassurance 
no doubt plays as large a part in the painter's practice as in anyone else's. On 
the other hand, I don't think that Newman was waiting to be satisfied that 
Onement I was finished. On the contrary, only the impossibility of its 
termination could have assured him that it was a work of art he had produced 
and not simply a well-designed object. 
As for Pollock, in his last years it seems that he often had to do damage to his 
own work, as it were to Mfinish it, in the attempt to retrieve it from the world 
of the already recognisable, the finality of established taste. In the years from 
1952 to 56 his frequent failures to redeem his own work read as the signs of a 
tragic disenablement or defeat. Since Pollock, painting which presents itself 
too securely as complete has either tended to look bureaucratic and 
10. As reported by T. Hess in Barnett Newman, catalogue of an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 
London, June 1972. 
»Form« and » finish« in modern painting 57 
self-important or to disappear without aesthetic remainder into the world of 
mere design. 
Though Modernist theory has not generally addressed the question of form and 
finish in quite the term I have used, it has made much of the requirement of 
newness rather than mere novelty, of the »challenge to taste« associated with 
this newness, and of the importance to both of the factitious painted surface. 
Unlike the social history of art, Modernist criticism has been remarkably 
successful in drawing attention to works of interest, and in putting spectators 
on their mettle before them. It has furnished relevant discussion of significant 
technical characteristics, and by one means or another it has maintained a 
continuing agenda of moral uncertainty. The problem with this theory and 
criticism, however, is that it has tended to autonomise the developments it has 
observed, speaking of what painting has had to do and not of the conditions 
under which agents have had to act, nor indeed of the contingent 
determinations upon the act of looking. »Why«, we ask, »does painting get 
flatter, form less plastic, finish less securely defined?« And Greenberg replies 
(with some justice), »Because otherwise the art will not be good enough«.11 
But if we ask why this flatness, this formlessness, this indefiniteness should be 
or have been necessary accompaniments to the achievement of aesthetic 
quality, such answers as we get refer us back not to the historical conditions of 
our experience as subjects, but to the specialised and supposedly objective 
competences of painting itself. We are in need of some theory of change and 
development in art which speaks not only of what artists do and have done, 
but also of how that doing is determined in a world which is also the world of 
the spectator. 
It's time to return to the paintings of Art & Language. I wish to reexamine the 
strange dual character of the Hostages and in the process to suggest how the 
tendencies we've been observing might be reconnected to some actualities of 
social existence and thus in part explained. In particular, I want to concentrate 
on the implications and effects of the bizarre technical procedure by which the 
production of these paintings is distinguished. 
There are three principal stages to the making of the recent Hostages. Firstly 
the basic composition of landscape and vertical plane is transferred from a 
preparatory drawing onto canvas. Certain areas are marked out on the 
drawings by configurations of black lines. These are composed by graphic 
deformations of the letters S-U-R-F, signifying »surface«.12 In the process of 
11. See, for instance, T. Evans ed., »A Conversation with Clement Greenberg«, Art Monthly, 
London, (three parts) Feb, March, April 1984. 
12. This convention was first employed by Art & Language in a series of works of 1974-5 
exhibited under the title »Dialectical Materialism«. See C. Harrison, »The Condition of 
Problems« in Essays on Art <£• Language, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991; »In the first panel of 
a typical work from the series, a number of indices signifying points of depth is mapped onto 
a configuration taken from a sample of Constructivist graphics. Certain areas of the same 
58 Charles Harrison 
enlargement onto canvas these areas are covered with masking tape. At a 
second stage, this tape is removed and the composition is continued and 
completed, but now using much thicker paint over the previously masked-out 
sections. The third stage occurs while this thick paint is still wet. The glass is 
applied over the painting and screwed down into the wooden support. The 
canvas is then loosened from the stretcher, a steel bar is inserted between the 
canvas and its plywood backing, and the wet paint is spread out behind the 
glass, forming runs and patterns which are relatively controlled but also 
relatively unpredictable. By this process an apparently complete or finished 
figurative scene is apparently blotted and smeared. Across much of the picture 
surface the material components of the illusion - the patches of coloured paint 
- are rendered literal and flat. 
Or flat, at least, from the standpoint of that sophisticated culture within which 
the illusion of the poplar trees is perceived and its referential character 
understood. In fact, as their illusionistic surfaces are smeared and spoiled, the 
paintings also invoke a different culture, a differently positioned viewer. This 
is a viewer for whom the very smearing and spoiling establish representation. 
In the culture which this second viewer represents, illusion and reference are 
familiar properties of synthetic surfaces. They are to be found in the slippery 
effects of kitsch abstract art, in the laminated decor of up-market boutiques, 
or in the hygienic surfaces of expensive bathrooms. This is a viewer for whom 
decorativeness is a value at odds with the culture of high art. From his 
imaginary point of view, it is those few remnants of the original figurative 
scheme which remain undisturbed - the touches of paint which still signify 
branches, ground and sky - that read as literal, factitious and unfinished. 
These paintings do not address or accommodate themselves to one viewer or 
the other, nor do they avail any moral grounds on which to distinguish 
between them. What they establish is that forms of conflict attend inexorably 
upon the aesthetic. If this is contingently true in the world we know, it is 
probably also true of any world we can now sensibly envisage. This is the 
intuition which is set in play as these paintings are worked over, changed and 
unfinished. By this process of unfinishing, Art & Language draws into the play 
configuration are designated as 'surface' and are marked out as such by reiterations of the 
abbreviation 'Surf'«. The second panel displays a printed text. This addresses the nature of 
Art & Language work and dialogue, questions of ideology, learning and language. The 
separate sections of text are variously marked with those indices which appear on the 
graphic panel alongside. The suggestion made in this work is that there is a possible 'reading', 
of the dialogical text which is a kind of picture; i.e. which amounts to a mapping of its surface 
and depth upon one synchronous surface. The work will also sustain the corollary that there 
is a possible 'viewing' of the graphic image which quantifies its formal ingredients by 
reference to a linguistic text.« In the recent Hostages, the configurations to which the letters 
S-U-R-F are made to conform are taken from canonical examples of abstract art, from the 
graphic idealizations of town-planners, from the ground-plans of would-be Postmodernist 
museums and from such-like attempts to give modernity a proper shape. 
»Form« and » finish« in modern painting 59 
of artistic genres and effects the dangerous and transforming substance of a 
culture with no regard for art. The apparent damage gone to the figurative 
schemes - the atmospheric landscapes - is not simply a matter of avant-garde 
cancellation or iconoclasm, though it is significant that a tradition of artistic 
iconoclasm has persisted within the margins of the Modernist mainstream. 
Rather, what is involved is a purposeful refusal to the spectator of the 
possibility of certain normally accredited modes of experience and 
understanding. The semantic hiatus leaves us with work to do. To recognise 
the painting for what it is - to be able to represent it to ourselves - is to look 
not simply through the iconic conventions of artistic culture, but rather to look 
in the face of those conventions into an unaesthetic world, or rather into a 
world unamenable to aesthetic ratification and control. This world is evoked in 
Art & Language's Hostages by both the literal and the figurative components 
of their surfaces. It is also present as a form of visitation in those reflections of 
the viewer's actual situation which are visually indissoluble from the artistic 
materials. 
There is of course a risk that no aesthetic remainder will be left by the process 
of unfinishing, or that none will be recoverable through the welter of 
reflections. But I think this is a kind of risk which has to be taken if art is to 
survive as a critical presence in our culture. It is a realistic requirement of 
modernism that the substance of the aesthetic be found and worked in face of 
the unaesthetic. If paintings do not establish their meaning by reference to 
something other than other paintings - texts by reference to something other 
than other texts - if there are not some actual materials being worked upon in 
culture, then there can be no non-arbitrary and non-aesthetic criteria of 
success and failure, nor any dialectic of form and finish. That we experience 
the relations between the figurative and the literal as problematic is a 
testimony to our cognitive vitality in face of the world. In the end, this is why 
painting matters. 
To paraphrase Greenberg - though to conclusions other than his - I speak 
here not of commitments or of programmes, but of the apparent mechanisms 
shaping art's modern development as these are noticeable in a retrospective 
view. The evidence suggests that any dominant modern order will attempt to 
represent and to administer the aesthetic as a kind of bureaucratic certainty -
to stabilise the relations between the figurative and the literal, between form 
and finish, and thus to regulate opportunities for cognitive adventure. The 
evidence also suggests that it is a condition of the possibility of cognitive 
alertness that we dare to be both prodigal and ironic in face of any political 
culture which seeks the regulation of the aesthetic - prodigal with its scarce 
imaginative materials and ironic about its spurious certainties. 
It cannot quite be true, but for some while now it has seemed as if this scarcity 
and spuriousness are all we have left to work on. In one version of the 
60 Charles Harrison 
Postmodern, art's reduction to the synthetic has been celebrated as a wilful 
form of modernité. We should be alert to the emptiness of such rejoicings. For 
this is Postmodernism as the fulfilment of that petit-bourgeois dream which 
Modernism has always opposed, and which has always been the condition of 
the defeat of the aesthetic. However radically disguised, it is the world of 
absolute utility and value for money, the world in which morality is made of 
the logic of the market. In another version of the Postmodern, it is proposed 
that taste heals all wounds. The literal detritus of the petit-bourgeois 
consumer's world is subject to a form of aesthetic recuperation in the 
picturesque tableaux of Tony Cragg. The optimism is unjustified, however. 
Picturesque tableaux are the signs of a dead theatre, an already enchanted 
audience. 
In fact, if there is little left for art to be made of, it is because the materials of 
celebration have been so rapidly exhausted. It is from the unaesthetic processes 
of exhaustion themselves that Art & Language's Hostages have been made. 
Whatever capital has reached out to enclose, the artist has had to undo; 
whatever capital has sought to represent as essential and universal, the artist 
has had to ruin with the evidence of its own contingency; whatever forms 
capital has learned to use for its own designs, the artist has been driven to 
unfinish. In the language of hinsight these imperatives tend to read as if 
impetted by a politics. This reading is a form of misrepresentation. In the 
experience of the studio, the imperatives are aesthetic.