Contributed by Sharon Butler / What happened to all the conceptual painters? I’m thinking of artists, like On Kawara, who were more interested in ideas and process than in developing traditional painterly chops, for whom painting was about more than basic human emotion and formalist exploration of color, line, and shape. By the 1990s, many of the painting-thinkers had stopped painting and moved into other disciplines – relational aesthetics, screen-based work, photography, and installation projects. For the relatively few who continued to paint, the starting point remained a proposition rather than a vague if compelling exploration of the subconscious. Walter Robinson, though disguised as a figurative painter, is one.
Like several painters I admire, Robinson is also a noted art writer and editor, having been news editor of Art in America and founding editor of Artnet, so it was a twofold pleasure to visit him this past week in his LIC studio. Over the past sixty years, desire has been his subject and he thinks a lot about classic distillations of that impulse, rendering images from the covers of dime-store romance novels, cigarette packs, whiskey bottles (though he’s been sober for years), cheeseburgers, teenage bathing-suit models from mail-order catalogs, images from sex-worker ads, and more. The lurid, 1950s pulp-fiction style manages to be both self-conscious and self-mocking.
With decades at the canvas under his belt, his painting skill is estimable. Whether in large-scale paintings or small studies on paper, his work has a lively, effortless quality. He’s deft and easy with a brush and correspondingly prolific – his studio is full of new stuff. One of his key criteria for choosing imagery is simply whether it’s funny, which yields an abundant and improbable mix of people, objects, and art historical references. For the past two years, he has been composing prompts for AI to generate images. Some he paints, some he prints straight to canvas via inkjet, and others he sends overseas to be hand-painted by Chinese artists.
To a writer, starting with a written prompt seems perfectly rational. Lately, I’ve seen artists’ statements that they used AI to write, and my first thought was, why not feed it back into AI to make an image and see if it resembles their paintings. In a recent New Yorker article titled “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art,” Ted Chiang makes a case that AI couldn’t produce art because it could never have the experience of being a unique human being with a set of experiences unique to them. Robinson disagrees. Most people have no idea precisely what goes into making a painting, but it is clear that conceptualization is involved in the process – and writing a prompt for AI is certainly a conceptual undertaking. Think of Sol Lewitt’s enormous wall paintings, based on short written directions licensed by organizations that are then allowed to hire artists approved by the Lewitt Estate to make temporary murals under their supervision. Robinson concedes that AI has crude practical utility insofar as it saves time. But for him it also generates unexpected metaphors and uncanny image combinations.
Circling back to the notion of desire, Robinson, as an under-recognized Pictures Generation artist, may have once used a nostalgic style to lampoon (rather than explore) yearning itself. But currently he seems to be thinking a bit more earnestly not about yearning, but about what other people want. This strikes me as a novel direction for a conceptual artist. Except, of course, for “People’s Choice,” in which Russian-born American conceptualist artists Komar and Melamid created paintings based on public opinion polls, conceptual artists have been famously indifferent to sentimentality, nostalgia, or traditional forms of beauty deployed to seduce audiences. Over the years, popular ideas of beauty and desire have shifted as viewers and artists alike have found it in basic materials like rusted steel and knotty plywood and processes like pouring and burning. For Robinson, this flux makes the subject all the more alluring.
He is particularly interested in desire as it relates to painters as commercial actors and, in turn, their collectors. He no longer contributes regularly to art magazines or online journals, but he does indulge – and is known for – pithy squibs about art that he publishes on Instagram. At the end of each short blast, he lists the prices of the work under consideration. This practice runs counter to an old taboo in the art world: back in the day, no one talked about money or making work that people wanted to buy. But, as Robinson recognizes, attitudes have changed, with money now unabashedly front-and-center. From his standpoint, that is not necessarily bad, for it is an economist’s truism that sale prices signal the degree of desire that buyers have felt toward the artists’ work in the past. They also provide rich fodder for Robinson’s ongoing effort to probe the phenomenon as it has evolved among artists and their audiences.
He currently has several bodies of work under way at once. The most intriguing to me is a series of portraits of artists in their studios. We have all seen this type of image, usually in the form of professionally produced photographs posted by galleries on Instagram for artists’ exhibitions or perhaps their birthdays. They embed a heartbreakingly ambivalent cliché. Some of Robinson’s AI-derived images feature sexy babes holding brushes in weird, unlikely ways. They are uncomplicatedly funny and, on a deeper level, socially telling. Two of the larger paintings feature AI images of old white male artists, with white hair and long beards, wearing painting-spattered clothes, one in front of a wall full of smaller portraits, the other in front of salad paintings that resemble work Robinson himself has made. These are more straightforward, using a vernacular style lacking the dramatic light of the overtly pulpy images, but they still flirt with notions of faux authenticity, stereotypes, expectations, and role playing.
As we looked through piles of paintings on paper, I fell for a small one of a woman who was painting blobs, and whose shirt was covered with blobs as well. I asked Robinson how much it cost, and he wouldn’t tell me, which was sort of curious for someone who posts everyone else’s prices. I suppose the mere fact that I wanted to buy it might have been enough – he could add that data point to his mental record.
Just before I left the studio, I asked him if he was going to the art fairs this week. He said, yes, that he’d been given tickets.
“Maybe I’ll be able to crack the great mystery of the art world,” he said, chuckling.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The secret of success.”
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
So glad I happened to run into this painter hanging out at an opening. He looked just like his portraits.
Enjoyed this.
A visual, cultural commentator! Thanks for this insightful piece.
A favorite artist. And art writer.
Excellent, very enjoyable studio visit with a particularly prickly and wonderful painter! You are both much appreciated commentators on the scene we are all wallowing in. Loved reading this! Love you both!
I don’t understand why he hasn’t been signed by a major gallery at this point. I have a left-field theory as to why not, but I don’t have an insider’s knowledge of how the NY art world works.
Let’s hear the left-field theory
outstanding, thank you Sharon, Walter, and two coats of paint!
Fantastic writer, artist and person. Loved reading this, getting a peak into Walter’s studio and his latest ingenious thoughts and work. New York needs to give him a Solo exhibition asap so I can go and be in awe.
So much interesting work in studios. So much bad work in galleries. Thanks for covering this.
Talented AND handsome af.
Loved this essay and it’s ideas of painting; it feels right for this current time.
Fascinating exploration of desire and commercialism in art. Robinson’s blend of AI and traditional painting challenges the boundaries of creation and consumption. A must-read for anyone interested in the evolving art world.
Walter… Great artist and thinker
will be missed
Great article exploring Walter Robinson’s fascinating conceptual approach to painting! His blend of AI technology with traditional techniques creates thought-provoking work.\n\nI particularly appreciate how Robinson challenges traditional notions of artistic authenticity. His use of AI-generated images as source material raises important questions about authorship in contemporary art. The comparison to Sol Lewitt’s conceptual instructions is especially insightful – both demonstrate how ideas can transcend physical execution. His humorous take on artistic stereotypes also cleverly critiques the art world’s mythology.