The discursive array: Towards a politics of painting as time–space production

Modernist articulations of time in painting – based on phenomenological approaches – are not viable today: human perception is no longer adequate to technological temporalities. Painting ought now to approach time in registers other than the perceptual. Rejecting the terms of MoMA’s ‘The Forever Now’ exhibition, the argument turns to Buren’s idea of the in situ as a valuable attempt to re-think painting as time–space production. But Buren ends up supplying architectural decoration for urban redevelopment that is a far cry from his youthful ambitions. The text then considers conflations of in situ with discursive production in Gillick and Bourriaud. Joselit’s ‘Painting beside itself’ essay and artworks by Carpenter, Koether and McKenzie are examined. McKenzie’s recent work devises fruitful tactics for interweaving affective opacities and discursive frames. McKenzie plays with rhetorics of in situ production without succumbing to reductive understandings of site and authenticity, and without conflating time–space production with discursive production. Such a discursive array can elaborate the dissonances between the discursive and the affective.