Stephen Posen: Painting in the Age of the Photographic Imaginary

Essay by Alex Bacon

In the mid-twentieth century the photograph was a physical entity. Starting life in the camera as an impression on a strip of film, the photograph became formalized in the darkroom as a print on paper, executed at a certain size, through the application of particular techniques. Today it is largely digital, existing immaterially as data, and adapting to the malleable, scaleless parameters of the screen space in which it is most often conceived and displayed, as well as the digital networks in which it is stored and through which it is circulated, moving from one screen to another, ad infinitum.

Decades earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s, Stephen Posen had intuited, via his painting practice, this shift in the conception of space as it is evoked in the similarly shifting roles and forms of the photograph: from one where space was envisioned as concrete and singular, to our current conception of it as flexible, virtual, and networked. Photographs are now most often looked at in precisely the kind of abstracted, yet concrete space that appeared in Posen’s paintings fifty years ago. What in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a conceptual juxtaposition of two modes—the painterly and the photographic, as well as the actual and the depicted—has not been resolved, rather that coexistence has been normalized as it has become an everyday reality. As such there is a whole new set of lessons to learn today from Posen’s early paintings regarding the aspects of the history of perception over the past fifty or so years that they illuminate.

In 1966 Stephen Posen settled in New York City after a two-year postgraduate Fulbright sojourn in Italy. While in graduate school at Yale, he had been making gestural Abstract Expressionist canvases. In Italy, he began to shape these, and started to envision, and in a few cases build, elaborate Pop-inflected sculptures. Upon his return to New York, Posen made Susan’s Wardrobe (1966, illustrated on pages 18-19), which proved to be the initial sign of a decisive turn in his work that would be fully realized in the following years.

Susan’s Wardrobe depicts a group of clothes hanging over a clothesline, a deceptively banal subject with little, if any, referential resonance. But there are other layers to this work. The pieces of cloth are painted on a piece of shaped novaply particle board, the contours of which are an abstraction. Indeed, the panel’s physical presence evaporates when Posen paints on it. In a sort of perverse formalism, the silhouette of the garments determines that of their support. While the fabrics, as lifelike as they at first appear to be, are a virtuosic display of painterly illusionism, the rope on which the painted panel is hung—just as the clothes would be—is real.

In the late 1960s, at the moment Posen moved to New York, the medium of painting was itself seen by many as being superseded by new, implicitly more advanced art forms, from earthworks to installations, to dematerialized conceptual artworks with their reliance on the new technologies of postwar capitalist bureaucracy: from Xerox copies, to typewritten pages, to computerized aggregates of data. This moment also saw the rise of photography as a legitimated art form, especially in its more objective, neutral, documentary-oriented guises. The medium’s rise made clear both photography’s relative supremacy to painting in handling representational content, and also the more direct, anti-expressive possibilities it suggested for doing so. These would have been further accentuated in the late 1960s by the emphasis Minimalist objects placed on concrete presence in actual space, by the reliance of Pop Art—the most advanced representational painting of the period—on photography for source material, and by the medium’s prominent role in Conceptual Art.

This led a number of Posen’s peers—searching for alternatives to the Minimalism and Conceptual Art then dominant, while sharing those artists’ distaste for more traditional forms of figuration—to what came to be called Photorealism. Posen was sometimes associated with this movement, due not only to his use of what appeared to be a hyperrealist style but also to his representation by Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery, which was known for showing such work. From the start, however, Posen distinguished himself from the Photorealists. Above all, he did not rely on photographs for source material, like his friend and classmate Chuck Close did. Instead, Posen constructed a world that bridged abstraction and representation. In making shaped cut-out paintings and the later “cloth” paintings, Posen constructed wall-mounted still lifes out of fabric. His concern was with less with photorealistic exactitude than with drawing: mapping where each modulation of the cloth gave rise to a linear network. When Posen painted from these vertical still lifes, he took care to render everything exactly as it was in his sculptural arrangement, and to scale. This way of working held constant for the next decade or so. One could say that much of the creativity and intuition in Posen’s work resides in this part of his process, in the act of composing with real materials. In other words, Posen was making a three-dimensional drawing out of cloth and the painting process was essentially a transfer of that on to canvas.

Examining Posen’s work, we do not feel as if we are looking at a photograph; if anything we feel that we are in the presence of the things depicted. That sensation quickly dissipates when we get up close to the painting, where brushstrokes and other signs of painterly execution become visible, separating Posen from the precise surfaces of the Photorealists. This also distinguishes Posen from both art historical modes of representation and the era’s more conventional variants. We sense at first that his cloth might be real because the image appears to be in the space that we occupy, arranged in front of us, rather than placed within a fictional space established by the artist through paint on canvas. Our perception is enhanced by the palpable dimensionality of the painted cloth, which aligns Posen with Minimalist painting and sculpture, as well as the work of Jasper Johns (e.g., the metaphysics of his Savarin can) and Rauschenberg’s combines, wherein both paint and objects are positioned in actual, rather than imagined, space.

The viewer’s first impression of Posen’s cloth as actual or real is complicated by his visible brushwork as well as—in certain cases—the use of actual materials, such as ropes or the real plastic that wraps a slab of painted steak in Chops (1968, illustrated above). We reach for the term “photographic” to describe what is depicted in order to try to make sense of the conceptual disjuncture in what is before us. We use the term in an attempt to bridge the experiential and intellectual gap between the actual and the painted. For by the mid-twentieth century what evokes surrogate or simulated reality more than the photograph?

In this simple operation of language we encounter how painting has been replaced by photography as the prime analogue of everyday perception and experience. That Posen paints in a manner analogous to the camera in certain respects—in his meticulous, unbiased recording of what is seen, and in the corresponding “photographic” way that we read it—is a deliberate and powerful acknowledgment of the task of painting in a photographic age.

By the mid-twentieth century the photograph had become the primary mode, not only of representation but also, by virtue of accessibly-priced cameras newly available to the general public, an extension of an individual’s sense of their identity. The ever-proliferating world of images, both those presented, say, in magazines and on television, but also increasingly those taken by people to document their daily activities and what they saw around themselves, demonstrated that photographs were not merely a means of documentation but were the very kind of image though which people envisioned themselves. When people lay down to dream, they do not picture themselves as if in a painting, but rather as if in a film. Our imaginary had become a photographic one, and an artist had to work in relation to this, as Posen implicitly acknowledges.

This is why Posen, after having set up his way of working, did not need to concern himself too much with the photographic per se: it was already embedded in his work, not as content or as model, but in his approach to rendering what he saw, and thus in the kind of looking that Posen inevitably exercised over what he saw. The intelligence of his work lies in part in how Posen does not simply revel in the ubiquity of the photographic image and its various tricks, but rather stages an uncomfortable coexistence of the painterly and the photographic.

Posen continued to grapple with these issues in his next series, the work for which he is best known: painstaking renderings of abstract, wall-mounted constructions of cloth articulated by cardboard boxes underneath. This was a determined decision to move the work away from a somewhat Pop idiom in favor of a more non-referential, painterly one. A painting like Untitled (1970, illustrated on page 45) confronts us with stacked blocks of bright color, not unlike a Rothko or an Ellsworth Kelly. However, the boxes that distend the planes of color in Posen’s work quickly make it clear that these are swathes of fabric. Indeed, the artist has worked with fabrics so often because of how they relate to gravity, the effects of which he displays as drapes, creases, and folds, not dissimilarly from how Richard Serra, another Yale classmate of Posen’s, manipulated lead in contemporaneous works by throwing it, folding it, propping it, etc. The effects of gravity also offered a metaphor for what Posen perceived as the historical weight of his time vis-à-vis Vietnam, assassinations, riots, and other manifestations of sociopolitical turmoil and disillusionment.

In paintings like Untitled, Posen introduces another layer of experiential complication. By selecting subject matter that is abstract, at least at first glance, he leads us to see his work as abstract, an effect further accentuated by the reintroduction of the conventional rectangular canvas container that seems to assert his works as paintings with an external frame and internal composition. Eventually we realize that this composition is actually fashioned out of cloth, which we then interpret as actual, much like we did in work from the preceding series. It is only after moving beyond this perception that we deduce what we are actually looking at: a careful rendering of cloth that has been arranged into an abstract composition.

We are able to look at such a painting both formally—to see shapes and colors in relationship to one another—and also as a sculptural arrangement of fabric and boxes. As for the photographic, what is also interesting in these works is that, as much as we might reach for the term just as readily as we did in speaking of earlier works, it has in fact been challenged. What Posen has executed on canvas is more in keeping with the kind of depiction possible in the flat two-dimensions of painting, than in the projected illusionistic depth of the photograph.

To paint works like Untitled, Posen employed an electric forklift, on which he placed a chair so that he could raise and lower himself to slowly scan his vertical still life and translate the three-dimensional construct in front of him into paint on a flat surface. This technique enabled him to paint every inch of the canvas from a straight-on point of view and to present his objects in multiple perspectives in shallow depth, similar to how, today, Google Earth scans topography and stitches together a coherent image.

The camera relies on the premise of linear perspective to render space, which is an approximation rather than a pure translation of how we experience it. It is this kind of fictive space that Posen, like his Minimalist peers, banishes as much as possible from his canvas, leaving only the shallow depth of stacking and layering that was already physically present in his still life construction. More importantly, this kind of shallow space is of the same kind present in painting, especially abstract painting, much more so than the telescoping deep space of photography and film.

Today, when we look at an image on a screen, the deep space of the photograph is juxtaposed with the shallow space of the screen itself, not unlike the objects in a Posen paintings. This makes it a particularly apt moment to reconsider Posen’s early works, which presage, and even predict, this kind of spatial complexity. Terms like “stacked,” “layered,” and “tessellated” can describe not only the positioning of objects in a Posen painting like Untitled, but also the kind of space we perceive on a computer or smartphone screen where objects have a sense of volume but not so much a position in an extended space. The formal means by which advanced photography and painting in the middle of the twentieth century dismantled spatial hierarchies have now become hallmarks of the world of stacked windows and applications on our digital devices.