There are many apologies for the work of Richard Wright. Too many, perhaps. His work might read like a compendium of the strategies that have supported the notions of newly radical painting for the last decade, a textbook compilation of the pleas for relevance that protect the medium of painting from the threats of formalism or obsolescence (or both).

As a painter, he escapes the obvious limitations of canvas formats by working in the larger space, directly on walls. Yet, as a wall-painter, he manages to escape as well - to escape the expectations of decorative or topical permanence by allowing his painstaking handiwork to be painted over as soon as an exhibition period has come to an end. Working with situations rather than with objects, he seems to whirl up a lot yet leaves nothing behind. Except, perhaps, the memory of a trace, a touch, or a flourish that, for a short moment, served to highlight the essentially circumstantial character of a place marked by paint, in fact of any place marked by paint.

An aficionado of the surprising angle, the forgotten corner, the hidden structure, Richard Wright is adept at using painterly means to displace the meaning and orientation not only of image-spaces in the more restricted sense, but of the actual three-dimensional rooms and buildings in which he works, orchestrating ever-new site-specific encounters between architecture and audience. Reproductions will never do his work justice: you simply have to be there. Neither figurative nor exactly abstract, what is painted on those walls most closely evoke notions of ornament or decoration, but decoration gone AWOL. The works fragment space and promote a sense of spatial virtuality rather than simply shaping, underscoring or conforming to the givens of an existing architectural order. They might, in short, read as another beautifully and coherently argued chapter in the ongoing story about painting that does not want to be 'painting', told through a series of gestures that set off a perpetual displacement of the sense of place and propriety that serves to support the very identity of the medium itself. It is another testimony to 'painting in the expanded field' or 'painting at the edge of the world', to quote the titles of two influential exhibitions on the subject.

The personal take on the story, conveyed repeatedly through a small body of interviews, seems to mirror these preoccupations with some exactitude. A reluctant or ambivalent painter, in love with various aspects of the traditions of painting but unable to find a proper place in that tradition; a loner who shuns the art world and who prefers night-time or the endless stretch of undivided immersion in artistic work to the routine bits and pieces of a workaday week. A painter at the edge of the world, on edge in his relation to the world and - as if by logical extension - a punk fan. Enter Exhibit A: the 13 letters of the title of a song by Black Flag, 'Bastard in Love', carefully rendered in gold paint and dispersed on the walls of the Kunstverein Düsseldorf in a way that makes reading next to impossible. Surely that must account for something.

Bastard in love, there's no turning back
Punish your lover, and then just turn your back
Punish your future, to spite your past
Love turns to hate, with every spell you cast
You keep waiting for the love that you want to feel
But you'd never believe it when they tell you that love is real,
You keep wishing

But what exactly it would account for is uncertain. The punk reference keeps popping up in the discussion of the works, but mainly as a surplus detail, a little rhetorical touch or bit of colouring that somehow just adds to the implicit edginess of this particular approach to painting. For compared to the very unapologetic passion, noise and excess that this musical reference might potentially evoke, general conclusions about Wright's work tend to come across as a bit limp, as if too carefully cut to the demands of a rather bleak notion of relevance. In one (not atypical) account, Wright is said to exert 'a particularly sly version of institutional critique', a critique that does not simply play off the authority of the 'white cube' but manages to 'bring out the narratives of historical identity lurking beneath the matt emulsion of a given space'.¹ Which may of course be absolutely to the point, except for the small problem that this somehow also seems to present itself as the final point, the ne plus ultra of the work's effects. One is left wondering what is really at stake in this case ... wondering about the subjectivity for whom these particular identity narratives would be definitive, revelatory, provocative, painful, exhilarating.

A deliberately dumb question perhaps, but prompted by the fact that, in the case of Richard Wright, speculation on such issues tends to be disturbed by the appeal of a type of visual bravado and display that seems to retain you at the surface level of sheer fascination. It is simply not all that easy to see his beautiful and elaborate ornamental patterns as the type of context-sensitive, self-effacing mechanisms that would set about a critique of the everyday. And his rapid and apparently unmotivated jumps from patterns with respectively gothic, rococo or modernist inflections hardly come across as an archeological approach to a historical body of styles. Instead each single element hits you like a particular accent ... loved, chosen and placed just so.

At this point apologies for his works come less easy. Rather, the works expose you to a tremendous ambivalence within art discourse - an ambivalence in its relation to a rock aesthetic mired in a romantic thought-pattern that is generally said to have been relegated to the dustbin of critical ideas. Whereas rock formulates a cult of pure participation, art culture may idealise certain notions of participation but tends to understand itself as a space of judgement and critique. Robert Pattison understands the connection between rock and romanticism in terms of the dual concepts of vulgarity and pantheism. The force of his argument is grounded in his refusal to see the endless differentiation between the countless genres and sub-genres of rock as anything more than minor variations within a structure that straddles all from swamp primitivism to techno-romance, in addition to a number of cultural phenomena not usually associated with rock aesthetics (such as, for instance, Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean philosophies).² Vulgarity here does not indicate 'bad taste', but rather no taste at all, a form of blankness that is above all a refusal to recognise any of the hierarchies of values or distinctions that give meaning to all notions of tradition or history. Translated to rock's own terms, vulgarity becomes the practical application of the principle of immediacy, an upfront celebration of a subject that is nothing but an effect of momentary, fleeting passions and sensations - coupled with an equally upfront and explicit rejection of all transcendental principles that would threaten to fixate those sensations in a schema of logic or reason.

...But my love is real
My love is real
My love is real
My love is real
Bastard in love
They push, you shove

Rock then easily stands accused of both narcissism and solipsism. Its many voices seem utterly incapable of looking at the world beyond the confines of a subjective perception. Such solipsism is, however, connected to the larger life-world through the principles of pantheism, emphasising process, flow and the endless transformation of one thing into another. In this scheme the highly profiled identities foregrounded by rock are not fixed but simply momentary twists or folds in the stream of phenomena in which (to quote The Fugees's Lauryn Hill) 'everything is everything'.³ It does not take a lot of argument to point to the many connections between this general scheme and various defining moments of late 20th-century art - from John Cage's systematic and highly theorised accessing of process and change to Michael Fried's dictum that 'presentness is grace', to Robert Smithson's very tangible deconstruction of the mental and linguistic barriers that separate concepts from matter. To art culture, rock aesthetics is at once fascinatingly familiar and too close for comfort - if the predilection for critique is to be retained, that is. T.J. Clark, for instance, senses the completely unironic quest for blankness or the great nothing in some of the abstract expressionist painters he admires the most, and describes it, with dead precision, in terms of the concept of vulgarity. But in order to protect these painters from possible accusations of cultish celebration or bad immediacy, vulgarity has to be transcribed to the terms of alienation and class contradiction. Blankness, or the luxurious option to refuse signification, says Clark, is primarily the symbolic form of the aristocracy. The great pathos of the paintings of Pollock et al. is then, first and foremost, the pathos of their own impossible and untimely class aspirations, the essential vulgarity of the middle-class wannabe aristocrat. Their paintings are simply hauntingly honest indexes of their own self-conscious pathos or (in Hegel's terms) the unhappy consciousness of the self that sees itself as a doubled and contradictory being.⁴ This may or may not be true, but the attraction of this argument is not really grounded in a convincing demonstration of the class traumas of the American middle class c.1940. If Clark sounds convincing it has probably more to do with the way in which his beautiful grasp of the visual effects of the pathos of nothingness hits a more general cultural nerve. One could then just as plausibly claim that T.J. Clark's carefully measured critical writing is a quite honest index of his own fear of pantheism. In rock, self-conscious pathos of course comes in unending supply, but my suspicion is that it derives less from the traumas inflicted by a greater historical scenario on a few choice individuals than from a liberal/democratic culture that both permits and celebrates highly evolved forms of auto-eroticism, to the point of elevating them to major ritual forms.

The fear of pantheism is shared by many. And perhaps the touchy-feely approach to the punk reference in discussions of the work of Richard Wright, its status as a marginal yet never forgotten detail, above all testifies to its absolute centrality in his production as well as in the responses it triggers. Perhaps time has come for an unapologetic, all-stops-out, heart-wrenching reinterpretation of these works in terms of a rock aesthetic: if for nothing else then at least for the fun of it, so as to be able to say, naively, that these are great works, up there with the best of them where unasked-for virtuosity and minor inventiveness is concerned, and to hell with relevance. So as to be able to say that I love the cheerleader-like red bands that twist and twirl and spread outwards into several rooms from a central ring, and the overly delicate and intricate red rococo patterns that turn blue at one edge for no apparent reason, and even the too-obvious silver-coloured flame pattern placed on a black wall as was only to be expected, and, of course, the discrete, almost disappearing tracing of the same type of pattern on a dirty concrete wall, like a barely audible whispered voice... So as to be able to speak like a fan, that is, as someone who simply tries to communicate a certain excitement, knowing full well that words are beside the point since justification is neither needed nor asked for. Perhaps the force of these works derives from their ability to structure their audience as fans. Perhaps it is only from the fans' perspective that it is possible to appreciate the brilliant sacrificial pathos of the tremendous effort in execution combined with the complete pointlessness in effect that mark both the choice and placement of the ornaments. As they linger quasi-coyly at edges or in corners, as they climb high up on the wall or squeeze in between doors and windows orchestrating encounters or withdrawing from attention, these works are stagy, or theatrical, in both the best and worst sense of the word. There is only a kind of thereness that will be gone in a few moments - but by then we will all be on to something else, anyway. (And later on it will probably become the subject of nostalgia, the only form of historical consciousness available to the true solipsist.) The relative scarcity of 'real' rock moments (in any genre) should testify to the sincerity and significance of this kind of praise - as anyone sensitive to the mountains of failed attempts that clog sound channels all over the world can tell. For its broad popularity and 'anyone-can-do-it' rhetoric does not mean that the aesthetics of rock support easy and generally accessible formats. The rhetoric only indicates the form of a desire, shaped in the image of a certain lack of constraints, is notoriously hard to come by.

There's no point in asking, you'll never know why
You run and don't listen, I sit home and cry
My heart sinks further with each of your lies
You keep waiting for the love that you want to feel
But you'd never believe it when they tell you that love is real,
You keep wishing

For a critic with one foot in art culture and the other in rock culture, this kind of naiveté will feel at once exhilarating and slightly forced, an invitation to cultivate a kind of active forgetting, so as to be able to join the chorus ('...but my love is real. My love is real. My love is real. My love is real'). The other, not so forgetful alternative is to point to the fact that the critical actuality of these questions presents itself not simply because of an inherent complicity between art and rock culture (as in the case of Pollock or Smithson), but because this very complicity, as well as the ambivalence which surrounds it, is dramatised in the work of a number of contemporary artists. Here, the rock/art encounter is neither assumed nor suppressed, but staged in a way that introduces a potential re-evaluation of all the terms involved in the equation. The highly explicit rock-world references in the work of artists as different as Tom Burr, Jim Lambie or Jacob Kolding (to mention a few) may play with the terms of fan-like participation and fascination, but they do more than just this. Through more-or-less subtle displacements of materials, media, contexts and discourses, the rock/art encounter becomes similar to an image seen in a distorting mirror, an image in which possibilities for immersion and distancing go hand in hand.

What is most interesting in this context is the way questions of style, design or ornament seem to present themselves as the strategic points of departure in the work of all of these artists. The focus on ornament is hardly an innocent or neutral choice. In fact, the ornamental constitutes a singularly significant ground for the rock/art equation. Its significance has to do with the way in which the ornamental or the decorative may provide a particularly fruitful point of departure for a flight from the binds of a historical consciousness as well as from regulative notions of order and predictability. The abstraction/figuration debate and the concomitant issues of representation that were so central to the construction of art-historical logic in the 20th century have at times tended to obscure the fact that the notion of the historical continuity of 'art' in modern art history is founded in large parts on studies of pattern and ornamentation. For Alois Riegl, it was notably the hypotheses of the transfer and development of ornamental forms from one context and culture to another that provided the basis for a theory of the essential continuity of the history of art (as well as the continuity of the history of human societies). The historicism of his scheme was only kept in check by his positive attention to the particularity and difference of the visual cultures he studied, based on a belief in the essentially collective basis of stylistic expressions.⁵ Additionally, in the perceptualist studies of Ernst Gombrich, the centrality of ornament to art history derives from the way it provides a model for understanding the human sense of order. For someone concerned with the way in which human beings make sense of the world visually, pattern, ornament and decoration create horizons of continuity and expectation that protect against surprise events or novelty. (Similar identifications can be found in both Meyer Shapiro's equation between style and communicability and Jacques Derrida's reading of the ambivalence of Nietzsche's style.)

However, Riegl's emphasis on historical continuity, collective consciousness and contextual particularity may actually have its roots in an experience of ambivalence and chaos. For if decorative or ornamental 'style' presented itself as a 'question' at the end of the 19th century it was perhaps because there was good reason to be confused by the apparent arbitrariness of styles in architecture, design and art. In symbolism, the decorative was understood as the very principle of painting: realism could then be swept aside by means of various displaced forms of exotic patterning. For a short moment, the ornamental seemed impervious to any demands of contextual relevance. In addition, the notion of style itself was individualised (i.e. read as the trace of a particular subjectivity), as expressed by the influential dictum 'style is the man'. Not many years later, ornament was rendered irrelevant or superfluous - at least for a modernism that based its belief on the transcendental value of form and a clearly voiced scepticism towards the superficial and inconsequential mobility of the decorative.

During the early years of modernism, ornament and decoration are precariously suspended between historical continuity and temporal rupture, between definitions of order and experiences of the arbitrary, between high relevance and complete irrelevance. More and more ornament appears like a classic limit case, an undecidable factor that may play this way or that, but never stabilises or guarantees any relations.

This may, in turn, explain part of the tremendous affinities between rock and various tendencies in early modernism. If ornament attests at once to a historical consciousness and the hierarchies of tradition and order, as well as to a potentially chaotic space that differentiates itself from all such concerns, it may be the perfect ambivalent medium to play host to rock's desire to place itself in the pantheistic flow of events while denouncing all transcendental orders. Ornament simply works as an efficient vehicle for emphatic differentiation. The meeting of symbolism and rock on the level of the musical metaphor is of course well known. Paul Verlaine's desire to translate everything to the terms of music ('de la musique avant toute chose') is perfectly reciprocated by rock's continual homage to the Rimbaud/Verlaine poetry team. Less attention has been paid to the connection between the visual stylistics of rock and symbolist imagery. For rock is, in fact, a format where ornament and decoration rules supreme, where a radical desire to transform oneself into an object of pure style, to expose one's subjectivity as little more than an effect of a radical patterning process, has led to the development of a small body of surprisingly regular ornamental codes. Quite a few of these codes can be traced to symbolist imagery: collage-like constellations of heterogeneous decorative elements; use of ornament to obscure or transform the 'natural' form of bodies; unnaturalistic uses of colour; stark graphic contrasts; and, perhaps most of all, the love for strong undulating snake-like lines, expressed through a predilection for long chaotic hair, preferably fiery red or black. Traditionally, both goth and heavy metal have played up these allegiances, but lately black metal has renewed this connection with unsurpassed force and eloquence. This particular (and particularly stigmatised) renewal has opened a new space for an interrogation of the art/rock equation.

The staging of the rock/art encounter in the ornamental work of Richard Wright does not take place in this particular register, even if he repeats some of its favourite effects. In his work the encounter is staged as ornament or wall painting and is made to play up the unmotivated element in all decoration to the nth degree. Through this strategy, Wright undermines the expectation that ornaments will reinforce or accentuate spatial coordinates so as to ease immersion in the space in question. But if Wright disrupts immersion at one level, he facilitates it at another - notably on the level of situational flow and velocity where his use of pattern is no longer experienced as fragmentary. This is a level where mere accent, attack, pose or placement is all there is. While I hesitate to align his work with the booty-shaking tedium of most contemporary MTV, some comparisons can still be made with the velocity and flow of a visual rock aesthetics that has rid itself of most of its dime-store surrealism and now seems to subsist in large parts on clipped, criss-crossed and compressed dance patterns.

If the rock/art encounter could be understood as having been staged (rather than being simply enacted) it could also be understood to argue for more radically differentiated models for understanding the critical or discursive functions within art practices. The ambivalence of the rock reference does not only derive from a fear of pantheism, but also - more specifically - from a resistance towards ending up with merely ritual participation in one of the major symbolic forms of capitalist culture. It simply feels at odds with art's self-image as a privileged space for critique and contestation. Lately a term such as 'research' has been a productive metaphor for this type of perspective on artistic practice, and there is no doubt that many of the most interesting artists today deploy research-oriented strategies in ways that lie beyond the scope of traditional academic forms. But, as in the work of Sean Snyder, this typically raises questions about the eventual lack of aesthetic 'surplus'.⁶ The presentation of otherwise unpresentable materials or discourses might have been seen as surplus good enough - but the question is perhaps mainly a mark of a desire that somehow has not been fully accounted for. The staging of the rock/art encounter not only suggests a cooler look at the unspoken desires of the art field, but, most of all, it alerts us to the existence of radically different spaces of interlocution within contemporary art practices - spaces whose functions and appeals should not be confused with each other. The blank, solipsist space of rock aesthetics does not mark a lack of interlocutionary potential. On the contrary, the fleeting, shifting voices of rock indicate a space for endless imaginary identification, projection and transition. It is simply a space for a particular brand of performative and non-narrative fiction in the midst of predominantly documentary art practices. Richard Wright's work is a plea for the liminality of that space.

Bastard in love, I can't help what I feel
And what I feel, I'll feel to the end
There may be no right, and there may be no wrong
But there is pain, and it always lasts too long
You keep waiting for the love that you want to feel
But you'd never believe it when they tell you that love is real,
You keep wishing...⁷

— Ina Blom