In 1997 I wrote an article for the first 'condition of painting' edition of Contemporary Visual Art magazine entitled 'Painting As Vigilance' (1). In the interim painting has found itself in a world that was unimaginable from the vantage point of 1997. It does, however, find itself to be still very much in business and thriving. Maybe the reasons for this are entirely pragmatic and remote from the rhetoric of death and finality that have, for so long, surrounded discussions about painting. In economic recession and down turns, when the public purses are tightened the market invariably turns to painting. It is always flexible, polyvalent, perfectly adapted to phases of down sizing. The eighties saw a similar situation, economic uncertainty, a republican in the White House and painting everywhere. Or perhaps, in a less Darwinian sense, the death knell so often ritually pronounced around painting throughout the eighties and nineties was effective in recasting it in a kind of after life, less in terms of an incipient rebirth, more as a chimera haunting the wider culture, or perhaps as the after glow of some spent radioactive substance. Such an awry perspective could make painting an appropriate signifying practice for such apocalyptic times.

Painting's not only evident survival but embedded position as a contemporary visual art practice(2) must be in part due to the fact that the diverse modernizing strategies that painters have applied in response to the demands of 'post conceptual' protocols of practice, can result in the realised work being identifiable, as a specific medium and more or less as painting (3). An example of this has been a recontextualisation of painting in terms of the logic of the 'expanded field' that was formerly applied to a context of sculpture, and through its relationship to minimalism, was pitched against painting. Here painting is not limited to being wall bound, questions of surface and support lead to questions of volume and its status as an object (4). This strategy formally involves an idea of painting being in excess of itself which in turn depends upon the categorical regime of medium specificity. In short, the possibility that painting can be somehow said to be 'itself'. Other high modernist debating points such as shape and pictoriality are arguably as important here as they were in the nineteen sixties. However the cogent aspect here is more to do with juxtaposing painting with questions of exhibition and presentation, questions that bring painting into line with a 'post conceptual' concern for context (5).

If such a strategy can be broadly thought of as presentation or exhibition its twin terms are invariably those of the studio and production. The last decade or so has found productivist attitudes to be popular with painters. Likening the studio to the factory, distancing the artist from the point of production is familiar at least since Warhol. However the tiredness of such strategies has been noticeable with artists like Bernard Frize. The questioning of 'authorship' and 'expressivity' by employing teams of assistants armed with 'instructions' to make the paintings has become to feel almost charming and anachronistic (especially in its seemingly nostalgic relationship to an implied Fordism). Alongside this has, for some, been the dizzy sense of how fast some syntactical forms of abstraction have come to feel outmoded and quaint (6). Their relationship to 'technology' seems to have been the reason for this. Skating upon on such slippery surfaces, making hopelessly optimistic bids at prefiguring, the then, emerging technological sensorium. It is tempting to attribute some of the success of Neo Raush to his referencing of productivist painting in relationship to the laboratory and the factory as a kind of cheap 'B' movie slapstick(7).

This cursory résumé of the relative success of painting to survive and thrive in a broadly post-conceptual situation is made to point to a more pressing and present situation where key questions of context are being brought to bare upon painting as well as upon 'art in general'. For, at least in Paris, the collapsing of the spaces of production and exhibition of works of art into a single space has been, at least symbolically, an institutional objective. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which is not an exhibition space so much as a 'site of contemporary creation', has sought the logical outcome of a post conceptual objective; to fold art into life and eliminate the aesthetic object as a mediating factor of social relations. This has been ritually viewed as either hopelessly utopian or as a smart management ruse in down-sizing cultural production, redefining the artist as a cultural mediator or worker within a broadly social space. One can imagine such a model of a visual art institution will prove irresistible in the future, where questions of funding and the political capital of cultural initiatives that promise tangible social outcomes are at a premium. Such an institution, that foregrounds the context of cultural work, militating for the utter dematerialisation of the art object and displacing the autonomous art object will surely put further pressures upon practices like painting to confront issues of context arising from 'art in general'(8).

The rhetorical background to much of what is at work at present is worth noting in relation to future 'calls to context' in terms of painting. Hysterical allusions made throughout the eighties and the nineties to a baroque, free fall, renaissance in painting have become to seem tawdry, perhaps in the light of recent seismic global events. If such historical allusions must be made maybe a neo-rococo in painting more accurately typifies a general state of affairs (an allusion that can be equally applied to 'art in general'). Likening a 'realist' tendency of art in general to a pastoral rhetoric (9) is perhaps a useful trope for a future recontextualisation of painting. Its relationship to the framing conditions of representation invariably stand it apart from any utopian 'art into life' project as either its feisty opponent or the colourful lame duck.

Never-the-less questions of context in regard to painting are as numerous as ever. Perhaps the most positive challenge of esthétique relationnelle and the Palais de Tokyo has been to buck the automatic presumption that painting should be shown, as finished, fait accompli, objects in the brightly lit and visually intense environment of the gallery space. The environment of the studio for so many painters working today has become a darkened space where an image or motif is transcribed upon a surface from an image whose origin is remote from the studio. Painting and its many prostheses seems to be an important and live question of current painting practices. It implies an interesting alternative to the strategy of an 'expanded field' of painting. The prostheses of painting implies a relationship to image, imaging technologies and transcription processes (10). Alongside this the position of 'image' within the dynamic of abstraction that is so materially and historically akin to painting has become arguably more pressing an issue now than it has ever been (11). The global situation, at least since nine-eleven and also the recent iraq war, arguably spells out a need for a revision of the former view that the modernist project signified hegemonic power. It would seem now that minimalist and conceptual art, with their taste for totalising structures and a tendency toward creating 'situations' seem to be clearly the appropriate tropes with which to characterise and understand the emerging hegemonic order within a field of representation (12). Within such a field, fetishised objects, such as paintings are potentially at least an antidote (and maybe at best a riposte) to larger insidious forces (13). Perhaps here the real issue is not one of endless recontextualisations of painting in the name of modernization but instead the bringing to processes of reification a context through which scrutiny becomes possibile.