David,

I always suspected that this debate would eventually lead to a discussion of the post-modern and I have been trying to avoid it for as long as possible.

You are correct in renaming the problem as 'The Death of Autonomous Art'. I focused on painting because painting has the biggest problem or the most acute problem.

I can not agree that painting was a victim of a post-modern conspiracy and I will try to explain why. First, I think you are wrong to equate the post-modern with post WW2. You are a little early here. Post-modern theory was developed in the timeframe between the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Practice, of course, precedes theory but even so, it is difficult to place the post-modern later than the final two or three years of the 1960's. Generally, I am not so fussy about the dates for this and the dates for that but in this case, it makes a difference. POP Art was a fruit of the modernist tree albeit a criticism of modernism itself.

As modernist theory came under increasing criticism (from itself), it began a revisionist, introspection of its own works. Western culture changed, it became younger. It was more vibrant certainly but also more than just a little naïve and inexperienced. This was the 60's. It is my contention that modernism and popular culture became 'joined at the hip' and that modernism exists today in advertising billboards, music videos and every aspect of over ground, underground and ground level mass (western) culture. It was co-opted. It met international capitalism head on and sold itself out but it could not take painting with it. Painting, as an art form, can never respond quickly or cheaply enough to the vagaries of commercial fashion.

Painting was discouraged. A new generation of painters could not or would not contend with the complexities of the collapse of modernist theory. Those artists still involved in painting insisted on viewing the modernist period as the creation of a visual toolkit. Their task, as they saw it, to take the toolkit and use it to synthesize a new vision. This came about because we no longer have the taste for random originality. We have lost or distrust the urge to originality that constituted so much of the modernist motivation. The result was a barren landscape in painting.

It is against this background that post-modern theory evolved and, because painting was increasingly irrelevant, post-modern theorists had nothing to say about visual aesthetics. Now, I am not saying that they did not enjoy 'putting the boot in' but I do not think they went out of their way to do so.

I am not familiar with Enwezor's comments on painting but his description of painting as an 'epistemological machine' sounds like a perfectly good summation of the current state of affairs. Post-modern painting or, rather, painting in the post-modern period is in a complete mess. Whether or not it can recover - well, that is the question. As for the current hegemony of socio-political text, I offer the following:

"The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that culture weaves around itself. What varies is the precise nature of the weave, the relation of warp and woof. The history of culture is in part the story of protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a 'nature' to which only it has access." This is quote from Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology by W. J .T. Mitchell 1986.

My own view on post-modern theory is that it is essentially a fraud - an artificially constructed intellectualism by a bunch of guys who had too much time on their hands and nothing else to write about. The whole of post-modern theory is directional and they picked the wrong direction.

I certainly do not regard myself as a post-modern painter and I doubt if such a beast is possible unless we are talking about a group of painters sitting in a pub waiting for a passing 'ism'.

As far as I can remember, yours is the first response to offer an answer to my final question 'should we mourn its passing?' and the first time someone has given me a real reason to view the future with some measure of hope. Perhaps it is within us to answer these questions.

Finally, although I have much more to say, there is a good reason why the synthesis of 'ideal/formal with material content' remains unresolved. The main problem is that the ideal and the material change from age to age. There is a good chance that the only synthesis possible is formulaic in construction, perhaps even machine programmable. Then we are really in trouble.

All the best,

abvg