The history of painting has always contained the history of its end, for every transformation of a historical practice of art has always signified the end, if not the destruction of this historical position. Yet up to now, all the declarations of the death of painting have only served to prolong its existence by changing it. The history of painting is thus the history of an open end, of an end that perhaps cannot even be completed.

One possibility to demonstrate these open boundaries of painting is to stretch the spatial bounds of a panel, to expand the dimensions of the picture, and to conquer the room with colour (from the large-formatted surfaces of Colorfield Painting to wall paintings). Yet this step - the expansion of the colour - presupposed another step, namely the absolute reduction of the spatial depth of painting , the removal of its illusionary three -dimensionality . "Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition that painting shared with no other art, and for this reason, modernist painting oriented itself to flatness more than anything else." (Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1963).

Ferdinand Penker, born 1950, from 1977-87 in the USA, is one of the few true modernist painters in Austria. The liberation of the essential flatness of the picture, the reduction of the depth, and the corporeality made the aesthetic difference between painting and mere object become ever smaller and more precarious in his works. In addition to the flatness, Penker's painting fulfils a second axiom of modernist art, namely the minimalism of the surface design of the painting."The essential norms or conditions of painting are also the minimum conditions that a marked surface must fulfil in order to be experienced as a painting. Modernism discovered that these minimum conditions can be endlessly pushed back before a painting ceases to be a painting and becomes an arbitrary object; but it also discovered that these conditions, the further they were pushed back, the more explicitly they had to be kept." (Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1963).

A painting as a minimally marked surface became a trademark of Penker's very early on. He developed it in the 70s and pursued it further in the USA, against the trend of the "new fauves" in the 80s. Like Brice Marden, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman he tried to push back the marking of the surface as far as possible, i.e. to minimize the difference between the system "painting" and its environment "wall", or to replace spatial depth by a minimized relationality of the visual elements of the picture. He not only pushed forward the flatness, but, above all, also the depth of the minimal conditions. He declared the open boundary of the history of painting the infinitely movable boundary of the difference. He directed the ultimativity of the boundary, or the end at the marking, at the difference between painting and non-painting. To shift and to minimize the boundary where a picture ceases to be a picture is another form of expanding the dimensionality, not only spatially, but also constructively and formally. The infinity of the minimization of the difference, of the marking, of the boundary, corresponds to the impossibility of completing and the incompleteness of painting.

Yet the modernist reduction (of painting on flatness, of the picture on a flat object) and minimization (of the marking of the artistic surface) has created conditions that brought problems into the arena. These problems could lead to the collapse of the aesthetic difference, if all aspects of illusionism and relationality were driven out, i.e. the end of modernist painting.

Several solutions to this problem were developed; several dams were built to prevent the collapse of the aesthetic difference. The relationality of the picture, i.e. the visual relationships in the picture system itself, was strengthened in order to make the picture stand out more strongly against the environment in its autonomous visuality.

Relationality could replace illusionism. Colorfield Painting and Postpainterly Abstraction as pure painting, as a form of what is still accepted as painting, were also solutions. The conquering of space with colour is a decisive solution, in which the picture stretches over floor and wall and goes from being a wall picture to a picture wall by choosing ever-larger formats. The most famous solution is the birth of Minimal Art, namely to push the flatness of the picture so far forward that the difference between painting and mere object disappears. In this way a painting with a completely unmarked surface becomes a monochrome picture-object, a sculpture. The picture tilts towards sculpture, the painting tilts into the room. The difference between picture and object becomes a contradiction between two- and three-dimensionality. The marking of the surface of the picture becomes a marking of space. The hidden problem in modernist painting between the two-dimensional flatness of the picture and the three-dimensional object, that is, between the picture and the room, is revealed. The perceptive ecstasy of painting turns into a perceptive skepticism of minimalist sculpture in the process. The rules and the constraints of the construction of the picture were understood as conditions of perception. The aesthetic difference between picture and object becomes a problem of perception. "The parts of a form are connected to each other in such a way that they oppose the separation of perception to the maximum." (Robert Morris, Bemerkungen iiber Skulpturl/Comments on Sculpture, 1966). The room and the relationships in it become the decisive elements of the objects of Minimal Art, i.e. that direction in art that grew from, inter alias, the very art that had banned spatial depth. The whole contradiction of modernist art can be perceived precisely in the transformation of Minimal Art, which was stretched between flatness as denial of space and picture object as confirmation of space, and in minimal sculpture that lives from its relationships to space. "Quite obviously everything can take on every conceivable form in three dimensions - and have every conceivable relationship to wall, floor, ceiling, space, rooms or outside world." (Donald Judd, Spezifische Objekte/Specific Objects, 1965). Artistic surface relationality turns into sculptural space relationships.

During the course of the development of his modernist painting Penker himself used some of these solutions, and created several new, personal solutions to these problems. He first turned towards the all-over-principle of American postwar painting with the background over-lapped by the picture edge. In the process the colour becomes the picture-object. Layers of painting on top of one another evoke three-dimensionality; The structuring produced by the brushstroke constitutes the marking in the picture. "Background, Structure, Sign and Colour" (Arnulf Rohsmann, 1990) are the essential factors of this picture system. Whereas at least two colours are often introduced to differentiate the background from the sign level in the works from the 70s, there is an obvious turn towards monochromism in the 80s. Penetrating into the plastic sphere, in this way Penker also forms volumina that are reminiscent of architectonic settings in their form.

In the work "Site Specific" for the stairway of the Neue Galerie (picture page 71), Penker's preoccupation of several years with modernist art develops a richly orchestrated climax regarding both its motifs and its problems. Philip Carl Laubmann's ceiling fresco from the year 1756 is a prime example of that traditional task of art to create the illusion of spatial depth. The architecture by Josef Hueber (ca. 1755) and the lavish figures of the lantern carriers by Veit Ktiniger (1756) extend the perspective sham architecture of the ceiling painting. Penker sets his flat and monochrome work, which negates the space illusion and almost resembles an object due to its minimal marking of the surface, against this space-illusion painting that conforms to the architecture. The enormous wall picture becomes a single picture wall. The colour conquers the room. The picture itself, despite its flatness, acts like a "specific object" and enters into every conceivable relationship with wall, stairway, ceiling, space and walls. For this reason a (sculptural) part can be removed from the whole (of the picture), because the separation of the parts is difficult enough as it is for the perception, and leant against the picture wall as an object, as a three dimensional brush(stroke). This ' learning against' is a sculptural act, not a sculpture. The abstracted brush that is leant against the picture wall intensifies the act of painting. This serves to stress the process-type character of art as "work in situ" (Daniel Buren). The monochrome brushstrokes as minimal markings of the surface of the painting suddenly change into spatial markings. The marking of the picture becomes a spatial marking. The three-dimensional brush(stroke), which leans against the painting as a leftover in the middle of the process of painting, serves as a witness to an open boundary, a non-completion. The spatial marking confirms, and therefore paradoxically intensifies, the impossibility of completing and the incompleteness of modernist art. The contrast between the baroque richness of the figures and of the illusionist picture space on the one hand, and the monochrome, ascetic flatness of Penker's wall picture on the other hand, experiences both intensification and mitigation by two mirror glasses that are fastened to the wall opposite the painting. According to the perspective they reflect either the modernist reduction or the baroque richness. This gliding transition from the reduction of the spatial illusion in Penker's painting to the triumph of the spatial illusion in the painting of Laubmann and to the change of the 'three-dimensionality' in the mirror, which creates a real illusion of space, refers in particular to the hidden spatiality and perceptive skepticism of Minimal Art. The hidden and repressed three-dimensionality of modernist art is additionally repeated and stressed by the painted vertical beams, index for an architectonic pillar without significance as for a paintbrush as part of the painting. "An upright standing beam is not equal to the same beam lying down." (Robert Morris, Bemerkungen ijber Skulptur/Comments on Sculpture, 1966). This shaded and gradual transition from baroque painting to modernist painting, from surface-markings to space markings, not only sheds light on the problems of the one artistic practice, but also on the problems of the other artistic practice. Penker develops new types of threedimensionality, but within the discourse of painting. Via the painted beam Penker gives space back to painting, but without becoming a slave to illusionism. The mirrors have the same function. They refer to the spatial illusion of the baroque painting, but are themselves unpainted, flat, monochrome objects. The artistic relationality, the screwed-down marking of the surface, is intensified by the wall picture, just as, at the same time, the variety of the sculptural spatial relationships of the picture is. Painting tilts into the room in such an urgent and literal way that a beam has to be leant against it. In this way a balance between spatial and picture relationships is created. In the process the paradox of an autonomous visuality in the context of site specification grows, a reconciliation of minimalist sculpture and painting takes place, in the mirror gallery of baroque painting of all places 'Site Specific' therefore, is concerned with the aesthetic control of the overall situation by means of a modernist artistic intervention.

Whereas Harold Rosenberg in 1952 defined a part of modern art as an "arena in which to act", for Penker art is an "arena in which to place". What used to be separated as a problem in modernist art, namely attitude and object, intention and perception, metaphysics and aesthetics, becomes one again in Penker's works. Whereas historical art completed architecture, Penker uncompletes art. He understands the task of modernist painting as being not to complete it, and to demonstrate the impossibility of completing it, the openness and the infinity of its boundaries at the site of the picture. By developing a free relationality in the picture system, but simultaneously replacing the missing spatial depth with a monochrome coloured object or vertical picture object, i.e. not becoming a slave to the dictates of minimalist, steering clear of every form of illusionism, but still achieving an illusionist spatial depth with a real object, such as the mirror, Penker develops the infinite alphabet of painting. For years, in the successive differentiated series of hardly-marked monochrome pictures, Penker has been painting the same picture time and time again, because it is simply not possible to complete it. Simply because it is not possible to complete the picture, he has to paint a new one time and time again. Penker pursues his game and his project with the fiction of a finished picture: the non-completion of painting. By infinitely extending the boundary of the aesthetic difference and the minimum conditions, he heralds the open end or the endlessness of painting precisely in the closed spaces of a stairwell. In situ, on site, in space, Penker demonstrates the impossibility of the finished picture.

Dennis Duerden

geb. 1927; KDnstler, Autor, Kritiker. Member of Churchill College Cambridge; Publikationen u.a.: African Art, Hamlyn, London 1969; The lnvisible Present, Harper & Row, New York 19741Heinemann Educational, London f 981, African Art. An Introduction, Hamlyn London 1974; Herausgeber (mit Cosmo Pieterse) von African Writers Talking, Heinemann Educational London 1 971/1988; schreibt gegenw~rtig an African Art and Modernism (Vorabdruck im Journal of African Literatures, Ohio).

Rudolf Haller

Geb. 1929; 1967 - 1997 Ordinarius fijr Philosophische Grundlagenforschung an der Universit~t Graz. Publikationen u.a.: Studien zur iisterreichischen Philosophie. Variationen iiber ein Thema, Amsterdam 1979; Facta und Ficta. Studien zu gsthetischen Grundlagenfragen, Stuttgart 1986; Neopositivismus. Eine historische Einfijhrung in die Philosophie des Wiener Kreises, Darmstadt 1993; Herausgeber von Nach Kakanien. Ann~herungen an die Moderne, Wien/Kijln 1996.

Wolfgang Pauser

geb. 1959; Studium der Philosophie, Kunstgeschichte und Rechtswissenschaft, lebt als freiberuflicher Essayist mit den Themenschwerpunkten Bildende Kunst und Alltagskultur in Wien. Seit 1994 Kolumnist fijr DIE ZEIT. 1998 Essay-Preis der Stiftung Niedersachsen. Lehrauftrag fijr Architekturtheorie an der TU Wien. Buchtitel: Dr. Pausers WerbebewuBtsein (1996), Schiinheit des Kiirpers (1996). Dr. Pausers Autozubehiir (1999).

Arnuf Rohsmann

geb. 1952; Lehrbeauftragter an den Universit~ten Graz und Klagenfurt, Leiter der K~mtner Landesgalerie. Publikationen u.a.: Bischoffshausen. Struktur-Monochromie-Reduktion, Klagenfurt 1991; Markus Pernhart. Die Aneignung der Landschaft und Geschichte, Klagenfurt 1992. Herausgeber u.a. von Haim Steinbach, Klagenfurt 1994 und Richard Tuttle. Warm Brown, 1- 67 and Mesa Pieces, Klagenfurt 1995.

Peter Weibel

geb. 1944; Polyartist, Kunst- und Medientheoretiker, Direktor des ZKM Karlsruhe, Kurator an der Neuen Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz. Autor und Herausgeber zahlreicher Publikationen.