Confronting a work by Mark Harrington does not evoke a creeping feeling of looking at something we mistook by chance for a painting; we are not even in doubt that we are facing a work of art. The challenge posed by Harrington is not to decide if the object in question is art or a nervous breakdown, a dustbin or a radiator smeared with paint. Recognized as art the work adheres to the practices of a particular kind of art; painting as an art, an artform based on the distinction between art and everything else. Looked upon in such a manner, this is a kind of art: an art which confirms conceptions of what painting as art can be. One such conception is that a work of art is not an arbitrary artifact, but the materialization of an ambition to be revealed, through the test of time, as a masterpiece.
In the aftermath of post modernism, the intention of making a masterpiece is a radical decision on behalf of painting as an art, connecting the actual work of art to concepts of, and ideas about art that most members of the art community are turning away from. This is an art that declares itself to belong to the family of classic painting and high modernism - not considered as oppositions- but as branches of the same family tree.
A Place To Locate Art
The first distinction we are confronted with is the surface of the painting as an object versus the surroundings. The way Harrington is handling this surface is to mark the picture plane as a place of aesthetic choices. The individual painting presents a place for locating art. The painting becomes a statement about art: art is not the white wall, but the marked surface of a particular type of object on the wall.
But Harrington goes further, stating that what makes this marked surface art is not the decision to baptize it as art, but the way the marks have been brought into place. The individual painting becomes meaningful as art, as a marked location inside the total field that sums up the history of painting as art.
Inside this total field of painting as art, the position of Harrington grows out of an idea of high modernism, having its high tide from the early 19th Century until the end of the 1960's and understood as the continuation of a classic tradition in European painting, distinguished by an investigating mood, where the object of investigation is the field of painting as art.