Anton Henning and the Mastery of 'Bad Painting' - Direct Art Collection

of art. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ became arbitrary categories, hence the addition of
quotation marks to the ‘bad’ in the exhibition title.
The term Bad Painting embarked upon its career with this exhibition, and
was later applied to the work of artists like Martin Kippenberger or Albert
Oehlen, as well as, retrospectively, to phases in the careers of Francis
Picabia, Asger Jorn or René Magritte. Not until thirty years later, however,
in 2008 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MuMoK) in Vienna, was the first
exhibition mounted that sought to comprehensively represent the
phenomenon of Bad Painting. [Ill.] (Anton Henning was not included in the
show, but artists like Georg Baselitz or John Currin appeared alongside the
aforementioned artists.) [Ill.]
Instead of comparing the various artists associated with the notion of Bad
Painting in shows such as the above, it is obviously expedient first to look
further back in time, as well as outside the boundaries of fine art. Building
on that, it is my intention to identify more precisely the cultural place and
the (social) function of Bad Painting.
In 1964, Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’ appeared. Much cited ever
since, her essay made a hitherto marginal term so famous that it now
appears as a heading in dictionaries. For Sontag, camp is a ‘sensibility’
about which, however, it is difficult to talk, and one which permits only a
‘tentative and nimble’ approach. For that reason, she prefers to offer brief
notes (fifty-eight in all) rather than a full-fledged essay. Note 54 states:
‘The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the
sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts
that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good
taste of bad taste. […] The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be
very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is
depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in
the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out
of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste
as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful,
where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for
the digestion.’
Just as Marcia Tucker declared Bad Painting to be liberating, so Susan
Sontag ascribes similar power to the ‘good taste of bad taste’, which is how
she paraphrases camp. If the one surmounts the upward spiral into which
art was driven by the avant-garde obsession with progress, the other
breaks with the high standards imposed by emphatically good taste and
leading to intolerance, indeed to the necessity of rejecting ever-more art as
inadequate. Both – Bad Painting and camp – thus appear to be a reaction
to one-sidedness and elitism. In either case, the prevailing ideals are
violated deliberately in order to win back openness and curiosity –
innocence.
Sontag also more closely defines camp as the ‘love of the exaggerated, the
“off”’, as a matter of ‘flamboyant mannerisms’, but does not go so far as to
discern in this an inversion of the established taste. Rather, ‘camp taste
turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement’ and
offers for art a ‘different – a supplementary – set of standards’. In Sontag’s
view, camp taste must be distinguished from the taste of champions of high
culture – for instance, educated citizens – who admire grand creative
achievements and take delight in beauty, seriousness and truth. Equally,
however, it must be viewed as distinct from that interest in exceptional
states and extremes embodied by the avant-gardist propagation of
madness, terrorism, pain or, in general, superlatives. If for Sontag the
sensibility of high culture is basically ‘moralistic’ and that of ‘extreme states
of feeling’ embroiled in a ‘tension between moral and aesthetic passion’,
then camp is ‘wholly aesthetic’. It incarnates the victory of ‘irony over