BROOKLYN TO GANGNAM MAGAZINE

Issue 2 Digital Issue

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ON AND AROUND THE ENDLESS LINE

by Jeffrey Stuker and Jan Tumlir

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Jeffrey Stuker interviews Jan Tumlir on his forthcoming book The Endless Line, a study of gesture and painting, which will be published by Inventory Press in Spring, 2026.

JS: This metaphor of “the endless line,” in the title of your book, is evocative for a number of reasons. One of which is that it expands the scope of what we tend to call art history and various accounts of aesthetic production. You are extending this concept of aesthetic production well beyond the lifetime of an individual artist and the confines of their epoch, into something like an evolutionary horizon, or the deep time of pre-human activities. We can think of primates, or even other animals, as somehow included in, and therefore continuous with, your concept of gesture. Could you talk a little bit about that expanded scope?

JT: Yes, so that title, The Endless Line, suggests that there’s just one line, and we add to it, and keep it going. That allows me to look at the works of artists as, in a sense, perpetually unfinished. And it allows me to look at something like a painting—something we like to consider a completed object—as a document or an artifact of process. And, as you said, this is a process that reaches beyond the individual artist, or their particular epoch, and connects with something potentially primordial, while also pushing into the future, because other artists, later, will pick up that gesture, and will continue to develop it in some way, according to their own spacetime coordinates. This book features lot of “great” artists and works, but I want to discuss them as links in a chain. So, while this is not exactly a radical proposal, it is a way to shift our perspective away from the idea of art as a singular and rarefied occupation. I want to treat it as something more fundamental, and I also want to embed it more firmly into the communicative processes of everyday life.

JS: The expanded scope of aesthetic production that you describe, has it placed pressure on the way that you have gone about writing this book? Before we started recording this interview, you said something quite suggestive about how this modality of writing leaves you feeling some ambivalence. Was this perhaps necessitated by the subject of gesture?

JT: This ambivalence has to do with a literary tendency I make out in my writing. Literary writing is something that's plotted, and it’s plotted differently from the way that a theoretical essay is plotted. I don't even think we should talk about plots in regard to theoretical essays, because what you’re expected to do there is to deliver information somewhat more directly. You have a thesis. You mount an argument. In a theoretical essay, you're never intentionally withholding anything; you're getting to the point. But in the case of this book, and more generally in my writing, I sometimes feel like I'm foreshadowing something, and therefore withholding that thing. And then I’m waiting for the right moment to bring it in, and then developing it still further, later on. So, there's a certain amount of manipulation, I feel, of the reader that's going on this writing. But, in a sense, I’m also manipulating myself, because often I don’t really know what I want to say until I write it down. I enjoy surprising myself and, over the years, I’ve learned how to “set up” the surprises, if I can put it this way. I suppose that it has to do with a desire to somehow dramatize the encounter with ideas. I'm always on the fence about it. I'm not sure if it's working, I'm not sure that it's even something that one should be doing. But in a sense, I can't help myself.

JS: I’d like to follow up this question about your mode of writing, your voice, to ask about the genealogy of historical writings on gesture that your book traces. Your references span from Kant and Hegel to authors of the ancient world. Of course, we also have Brecht and Benjamin here, and we have a more contemporary art history—that is to say, from the postwar period. But this book, and this history, goes back into what we might even call deep time, into evolutionary time, or natural history. Can you speak to this long arc that connects the ancient conceptions of gesture to the contemporary ones? But maybe first: what is a gesture?

JT: There's the general question of what is a gesture. And then there's the question of what is a gesture relative to artistic production, and particularly, in the case of his book, to painting. Gestures are typically defined as actions, intentional actions that communicate something. Obviously, in art and particularly in painting, we come upon these actions once they've already been completed, set down as a mark of some sort. But a central thesis of this book is that gestures actually are points of transfer between bodies and non-bodies, inorganic things like mark-making tools and surfaces of inscription in the case of painting. Gestures thus are completed on a canvas, but not completely. We can say that they are stored there as a form of latent energy to be reactivated in the viewer. This might well be another painter, who will literally reactivate that gesture in their own studio.

That's another reason the book is entitled The Endless Line: I'm considering the brushstroke as a line. No matter how brief it may be, even if it is just a daub of paint, it is part of a line. I'm considering many painters and paintings in this book, but the title suggests that there is just one line. Again, I feel that what I accomplish straight out the gate with this title is to detach gesture from any particular person or work. Also, I'm suggesting that there's an intrinsically dialogical quality to gestures in general and the painterly gesture specifically. There is a gestural line of exchange between works and this has something to do with quotation. The painterly gesture is an openly borrowed form of communication. And if we want to trace its genealogy, we will go way back in time, potentially back to the very first marks that were made by a pre-human figure in the intent of communicating something of their experience. So, yes, this book takes on a very broad historical scope: I want to trace the gesture in every painting back to some common point of origin, which will essentially be found in prehistory. But then I also want to project it forwards toward a moment I’m calling post-historical. Or, putting this in other terms, I propose that there is in the painterly gesture a pre-linguistic element, which, at the same time, heralds the inception of the post-linguistic. So, in this way, I'm connecting the handmade mark with, let's say, digital coding. 

What is a gesture? Again, it's something that I want to consider in the broadest possible sense. There is in it an element that cannot really be owned, ever, by anyone. It cannot be traced back to a single individual as their own unique form of expression. It contains subjective elements, of course, but these are added to something that might actually preexist any subject. At every stage in its unfolding, the gesture is the recapitulation of something that happened before. And we can trace that “before” to a “before the before,” as I put it in the book—that is, before we conceived of anything coming before anything else, or before we became historical beings. 

Precisely for that reason, there is, in every gesture, a kind of fundamental, baseline aspect against which we can measure the extent of change that constitutes our own particular moment. This relates to the thinking of Vilèm Flusser, an important source in the writing of this book. He seizes on gesture as a point of inflection in every present moment. It is something that one must witness and interpret; this is effectively where it happens; the gesture happens on the side of its reception, its interpretation as a gesture, and this means that it always happens “now.” Thus, it can reveal to us what's actually happening at that moment, in the course of our development, or evolution through time. Variations in the form of gestures, which can be quite slight, are indices of our changing circumstances.

JS: Here, we might say that, even as you've encountered the gesture as a phenomenon that reaches into prehistory, it is by no means universalized, or enlarged beyond the scope of the very social history that gestures do so much to animate. In fact, we might say that your argument is that the gesture is so thoroughly historical, that we have to look into the furthest past, into something like a prehistory of the gesture, and at the same time, paradoxically, focus on the specific histories and traces of history from our all-too present moment that are encoded in the gesture. What is this manner of thinking about the gesture as something that comes to us from so far in the past? And how does one reconcile this understanding of the gesture, as something akin to a phylogenetic inheritance, with an action that is inscribed in the social and, for that very reason, unfinished—ready to continue, propelled by its own contradictions, into the future. The gesture is there for something that we have to attend to, in the realm of the social. This seems to be one of the complexities that your attention to figures such as Benjamin and Brecht allows you to tackle in your theory of gesture.

JT: There's a quote from Brecht in the text, where he asks something along the lines of “What's the use of a model?” We know that every gesture has a model. But what's the use of the model? Certainly, for the gesture, the use of the model cannot come down to strict repetition. Simply repeating a model endlessly into time, I would argue, takes us elsewhere: we're now encountering something else, some kind of reified experience. Gesture is instead characterized by a certain malleability. That, again, is what allows it to reflect changes in our social being. 

I'm also drawn to this quote by the art historian Henri Focillon from The Life of Forms: “the artist must live all the primitive experiments over again.” I feel that the key term here is “live.” It's not a question of repeating ancient experiments. It's not an attempt to, let's say, indulge in primitivism as a stylistic mode. It's about reliving primitivism—if we want to stick with that problematic term—as a kind of existential necessity. According to Focillon, this is a process the artist undertakes today no less experimentally than the first time around. What value does the ancient have for the present, for the production of the new? In art, this question is continually in play. We need to have some point in the past from where to develop a new form. A form that is entirely new, without historical bearing, might be of no artistic consequence. 

So, we're always oscillating between a model and, to return to Brecht, its adaptation. The idea of adaptation, in a sense, sums up Brecht’s entire approach to theater. All theater involves adaptation, which means bringing something that was written down, sometimes very long ago, into the present, reactivating it somehow. What’s the use of a model? You can make Antigone, for instance, bear on the social realities of life in the time of the Nazis, or in the postwar era, or under Communism, or whatever the social circumstance might be. Brecht’s idea of adaptation is something that I want to relate to the work of painting. There's an attempt to move quite fluidly between these two arenas, which are typically set apart. One is the arena of visual art where we confront a done-deal object; the other is live performance. So, we're talking about the static arts versus the temporal, durational arts. But I want to establish some kind of connection between these two poles. I want to think about the static work of painting as undergoing adaptation in the Brechtian sense, where, again, there's always a model and it has to be interpreted historically and then reinterpreted in the light of the present. 

We're always going to trace a painting back to some other earlier painting—this is art history 101. But we don't typically do this through the framework of theatrical adaptation. And so, this allows me to discuss the finished work that is painting as a kind of event in which we participate as viewers. I would say further that gesture is, for me, a figure of participation. Its function is fundamentally phatic. It is the function of acknowledging the context we're in and the interpersonal nature of our communication. That can appear as well in a painting and, I would again argue, in a way that can be related to what happens on the theatrical stage. An actor, becoming attuned to stirrings in the audience, might well adapt, from moment to moment, their performance to what's going on in the room. Of course, it's not exactly the same thing with a painting, because here we're dealing with a delayed time experience. All the decisions have already been made. But on the viewer’s part, a similar dynamic can come into play, because we're also making the painting happen. The painting happens as an event for us. It's not a done deal. It happens when we walk into the gallery. We see it; we move back and forth before it; we align it with the other paintings in the space. And yes, I'd like to consider this event through a theatrical perspective.

JS: One way of following up this set of connections that you've just elaborated is to think about some of the examples that you presented in a shorter text on gesture that was published in Effects. It addresses the public sphere, the Salons of Paris of the 19th century, as well as the world of wrestling—or, in French, catche. And here, you draw a number of canny connections. Of course, we have the connection to Baudelaire as the author of the epigraph in Barthes’ famous essay on wrestling from Mythologies. Central to your text are the gestures that comprise a painting by Delacroix, The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, as described by Baudelaire. Here, the staging of history borrows from the techniques of theater. This is not just a matter of modifying an existing iconography so much as it is an accumulation of the means by which those iconographic elements would have been achieved. Here, then, we have a series of gestures, not just painted depictions of people gesturing but gestural figurations. So, we have something that's mediated and thus not present, but that's enlivened or made present to us by means of a series of gestures that are continuous between what is depicted and the act of depiction itself. Can you speak more about this gestural aspect of painting as a means of registering the dimension of the historical?

JT: Baudelaire is an author who is deeply attuned to the gestural aspect of painting. In a certain way, his poems also come down to a gesture. This gesture is one that is always equating, to put it in his own terms, what is most lasting and essential in art with what is most contingent and fleeting. I’m paraphrasing that language from his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” which mainly concerns Constantin Guys. But that's also what Baudelaire does in his poetry. To equate the eternal and the transient strikes me as a classic gestural move. 

Again, the content of a gesture is quoted, which is to say that its iconography is always to some extent given. It comes with the model; it is pre-established as a kind of grammar. In the book, I argue that the gesture actually is more on the side of syntax. What gestures do, then, is syntactically bend that grammar to the particular contingencies of the moment. But then, as you've said, it's not just the grammar that's being reworked; it's also the whole accumulation of syntactical moves on that grammar, which get repurposed in some way through gestures. In the Crusaders painting, I suggest, Delacroix is reworking his own prior painting, Liberty Leading the People, which deals with the events of the French Revolution—a more recent history for him. So, in this case, the artist is actually reworking his own gesture, to signal potentially another shift in perspective on a historical event. That's one way that time gets encoded in the gesture: between the paintings of an individual painter. But further, it gets encoded between the paintings of that painter and the paintings of other painters that precede him, and then so on, all the way down the line. Delacroix, after all, makes “history paintings.” At the same time, the minute that temporal perspective has been reconsidered and gesturally reformulated in paint, it is now anticipating further elaboration.

JS: Here, again, we find an example of the dual temporality of the gesture. The gesture is the condition of possibility of methexis, being co-present as viewers before the work of artists. It’s the condition of possibility for having an audience at all, for the painter. It's the condition of possibility for the audience to have an encounter with the painting.

JT: This is the key point: the gesture is that which addresses the audience. It could be addressing an audience in the deep past and, equally, it could be addressing an audience closer to the present and even the future. But it is that phatic element that addresses. It's like a handshake, or a hand that goes up to hail the viewer.

JS: What makes this this argument exciting is that you don't leave it there. You're not simply addressing the mere phenomenology of the mode of address of the artwork, you're connecting it to the potential of that artwork to become other in the scope of time. Because the gesture allows you to address its futurity in this way, does it also allow us to consider its politicization?

JT: Two things come up here. The element of theatricality in the gesture can also be described as an element of artifice. So, yes, one is being addressed, but one is being addressed in a very artificial way. The address is something that is very deliberately and obviously set up; it has to be understood as such to qualify as a gesture. It's not an everyday hand that's going up here, spontaneously. This hand subscribes to a certain set of conventions and traditions, a set of stylistic parameters, and also breaks with these. It openly acknowledges the fact that it is produced for the occasion. And this is what, to me, syncs up with Brecht’s thoughts on theater. As Benjamin notes, Brecht’s whole stock in trade is “to make gestures quotable.” So, we want to make sure that we're not considering gesture as something that is simply happening as a consequence of an event, as a reaction; it’s actively producing the event. And, in order to do so, it has to somehow evidence its own manufacturing process. We have to be able to recognize the fact that this thing was specifically produced to bring about this occasion. You’re right: this takes us into the realm of politics.

JS: To take a half-step forward, from Brecht into Barthes, might we say, following this concept of the gesture and its potential artifice, that to shut down, to no longer look at, or to ossify this gestural process by which the work addresses us, is to de-politicize, to de-historicize. Ultimately, as Barthes says, it is to reduce human-made phenomena into something like myth—that which is inalterable, that which is mere nature, etc. This makes me think that this double work of delving into the past and, at the same time, addressing the contemporary modalities of gestures is a way of, as I said before, insisting upon their historicity in the near timeframe, right? This seems also to be an ethical political project, insofar as you're not attempting to eternalize the gesture within the artwork, even as you describe it as an endless line. To eternalize would be simply to reduce something which has been made, and that has specific agencies within our society at this moment, into something which we can no longer talk about, because it simply is.

JT: Yes. So, that which is simply repeated—and, let's say, repeated with fidelity, with an emphasis on accuracy in representation—will tend to move into some other area where it can no longer really be qualified as a gesture. Because then it becomes an expression of power. This is what I think you're suggesting: the rote reiteration of certain stock postures and expressions—in paintings just like political life—can produce an effect of unchangeability in the order of our experience. This is always done in service to an ideology. And it is the openly theatrical and artificial nature of gesture that allows it to escape the fate of what might be termed an authoritarian form of repetition. So, yes, I agree that there's something inherently political about the gesture inasmuch as it allows us some kind of leeway in the face of what we experience, often crushingly, as everyday reality. And that leeway is precisely what appears through the quality of its constructed-ness. It suggests that anything that is made, and is recognized as such, could always be made otherwise. So, again, there is the repetition of a model, but that repetition must always be seen as provisional. We're repeating the model in order to have it repeated further and with further changes and nuances added to it. To be clear, the politics we are discussing here do not belong on the side of the content. Gestures are formal constructs. I am interested in resuscitating the discourse of formalism through gesture, which is where form becomes, we might say, immanently political.

JS: Here, we might find ourselves, given your method, with an inversion of Barthes’ theory of myth, or the reduction of history to nature. You've looked as far back into human history as you can, into something close to nature, a kind of pre-human or prehistorical moment, in order to find still some social agency. You're looking to nature to find the historicity as far back as it can reach.

JT: There's a tendency within cultural anthropology to see gestures as preceding language, or coming before speech, certainly coming before writing per se, and hence as connecting to a more “natural” part of ourselves. And this is certainly something that I want to push back against in the book. Because the same tendency still haunts our interpretation of, let's say, Abstract Expressionist painting. There is often an attempt to connect such work to something more essentially human or true, which is not in itself wrongheaded. But I would add that what is essentially true about humans is precisely the artifice of humanity. The minute we start to reflect on our experience, and in some way to manifest that reflection as some kind of a mark, some kind of imagistic or linguistic construct, we are fundamentally exempting ourselves from the natural order. That artificiality is essentially the birthplace of the human, so to speak, and I want to place the gesture in that context.

JS: This makes me think of a quotation we're both fond of from Minima Moralia, a book published right around the same postwar timeframe we’ve been discussing with Barthes, namely: “that which does not wish to wither must take upon itself the stigma of the inauthentic.” Somehow, connection to, if not life itself, then lifelikeness requires a binding relation to artifice, to the constructed, and to that which does not merely exist, but somehow exists in a kind of luxurious state, surplus to requirements. Maybe this is a way of thinking about that endless line, as well. To talk about the gesture as the endless line is also to imply a skepticism about certain temporalities that assume that something dies or is done with— the limited shelf life of a certain type of aesthetic activity. We know and we've seen, multiple times, the announcement of the death of painting, or the end of this or that mode of aesthetic production, only, a few years later, for that to be the most fashionable thing that ever happened, with all the customary claims about its enduring vitality. I know that your methodology for researching this book—which has something to do with the voice that emerges from it—has to do with this skepticism about the possibility of an artistic modality ever being over and done with.

JT: What this suggests is that there is no improvement in art, which I believe to be true. Moreover, we could say that the urge to improve, to perfect, actually constitutes a threat to the form. So, there are certain foundational texts in this writing. As already mentioned, some of them come from Brecht and Benjamin, particularly that kind of writing that they were producing, pretty much in tandem, in the 1920s and 1930s. And then there's also Flusser’s book on gesture and Agamben’s many essays on gesture. And in the course of reading and rereading all these texts, something became very apparent—because it's a shared concern of all these authors—and this is that there's really two main dangers that face every gesture. One is the danger of withering. As I put it in the book, the gesture is always undergoing a “slow fade.” At some point, it could disappear forever. So, that's the first danger; the second, which we've already touched on, is the danger of reification. In first case, the gesture disappears, and in the second case, by staying too stubbornly put, it becomes something else, no longer a gesture. So, the emphasis on the endless line is simply an emphasis on what actually has survived up to this point—and has survived precisely as the result of its adaptation and mutation through time.

JS: This brings up the question of the relationship between technology and gestures. Technologies as technology, singular—the “logos of technē,” as you put it in the book—is one way that we might think of a specific horizon of historicity for the gesture, or the way that the gesture gets historically encoded. And we might say, also, by means of a dialectic, our understanding of which is aided by turn of the century French anthropology, especially Marcel Mauss' work, that the gesture is already a technology, a “technique of the body,” as he calls it. Could you speak to some of the ways in which gesture might serve as a proto-technology of Homo sapiens? How does this happen? And how does it become reconfigured—which is to say, made strange to itself—through technologies of visuality and other technologies that we hear so much about today in the news?

JT: Well, my book opens with this meditation on a recent attempt to program a robot to paint like Jackson Pollock. So, that's really the opening gambit of the book. Thereafter, I go on to furnish an origin story for the painterly gesture. The middle section of the book returns to Pollock, who marks a point where painting becomes all and only gesture. Pollock’s gesture, as we know, reaches back to some primordial source. Later, it will be encoded and introduced into the technological life of our cybernetic moment. In the book’s final section, I delve more deeply into what this process entails. But what I wanted to do by opening the whole discussion in this way is to suggest, as you've already noted, that the gesture is from the first moment something technical. 

There's a long passage on finger pointing where I attempt to connect the first pointing finger, as performed by our ancient ancestors, with current processes of digitization. In the light of the operations we perform daily on our touchscreens, this most basic human act takes on a technological glow. So, this technical link between archaism and futurity is a recurring theme, a kind of leitmotif of the book. Maybe the best way to start thinking about this relation of gesture and technology in reference to painting is to downplay the role of the creator. Technical inventions, as we know, are for the most part collective productions. Painting, too, is technical: we are here dealing with a set of tools and materials and techniques. To produce a painting, we first had to produce the implement to make that painting with. The production of the implement—the stylus, pencil, or paintbrush—is something we would typically relegate to a sphere outside aesthetics. Yet I want to argue that it is absolutely imbricated in the aesthetic sphere from the get-go. At their point of origin, the realms of aesthetics and technics are inextricably linked—this thesis is derived from Heidegger, who also figures prominently in the book. So, we are devising tools and modes of expression simultaneously. And if we take that thinking back to the origins of the human, this functions to, let's say, lessen the shock of an Abstract Expressionist robot. Because, right from the outset, we can think of painting as a kind of machine, one that involves all the processes of extension, externalization, and feedback that constitute our technological life. I'm suggesting that this is what happens with the first pointing finger: the whole apparatus of our digital moment appears on the horizon. Pointing becomes refined with the production of a tool that will then inscribe what was pointed out onto some kind of surface or substrate, and bring it into the sphere of a shareable memory. Thereafter, we can imagine all the devices that follow as an evolution, as a succession, rather than a series of breaks taking us further and further away from what we once were. In fact, there's the possibility that, at the furthest point of this development, we discover what we have always been.

JS: So once again, we find ourselves up against this paradox of the ancient and the modern, in which the most recent, supposedly the most technologically advanced moment, refers us back to an original condition, if there is such a thing.

JT: Yes, and this comes back to another fundamental Heideggerian insight, frequently returned to in the writing of the book, that technologies are fundamentally tools of self-revelation. They perform all kinds of tasks. Yes, they are pragmatic, they are functional. But behind all the work that we perform with them is this continual process of revealing what we are essentially. It would seem that we are building these technologies to understand ourselves. And so, here again, we have to consider the reverse perspective offered up by our many technical devices as that within which the human has existed from the first moment.

JS: We've talked about alternating modernity and archaism, about a theory of the gesture that your writing is uncovering. Wrapping up the conversation—at least temporarily—I want to ask: how might we see the future of this ancient gesture in painting and other acts of aesthetic production, as you're encountering them today? You are not the type of thinker who turns his head away in horror from the contemporary world. You're as interested in it as an array of symptoms, and as a realm of radical possibilities, as you are the ancient past and canonical thought. If anything, we might see this book as a departure from your absolute contemporaneity as a writer. So now I wonder, do you feel empowered to think about some of these much more longue durée concepts in the present moment, not just here in Los Angeles, but in relation to what we're seeing in terms of the transformations of the visual realm, in terms of technical imaging, and the interconnectedness of various computational regimes?

JT: Yes, this book took me outside my “comfort zone.” When you write about contemporary artists, which is what I mostly do, you basically attribute every thought you might have about their work to them. You’re masking yourself in their person. But this is something else. I anticipate that some readers may find the thoughts presented here somewhat far-fetched. Perhaps a problem, but this also is how I have signed them with my own name. 

On the question of the longue durée, I will say that a good part of this book is taken up with technical matters, which cannot be confined to the present. I was interested to explore the point of inception of a condition, that we're now fully immersed in, by somehow returning to earlier points, when something new is introduced, when we're still gauging our relationship to it. I feel it is very useful as a method of sussing out what exactly it is that we're dealing with now. The writers who experienced first contact with the new remain entirely valid, even as it turns old. This goes back to your point about historicism, I suppose.

Certainly, there is something historical about this work. I have thought of a follow-up book, possibly series of interviews with contemporary painters, and specifically painters that, in one way or another, are contending with this realm of automated creativity that we're living in today. And I suppose that the point of connection between this book and that one, should I write it, would be this notion that, again, what is particular and unusual about painting is that it's ancient. It is pretty much the same thing that it was at the beginning. So, speaking about having a kind of baseline from which to gauge changes in our experience, this is, in a way, the ultimate medium. Its whole purpose, at present, seems to hinge on the fact that it has lasted for so long. Every painter that comes to this given assortment of materials, tools, and techniques is making contact with painting in general. And at the same time, I want to use this notion of painting-in-general to think about, well, what is painting today? What can painting still do? What can it still tell us about life that all these other more contemporary means cannot, because they are so new, because they’re constantly appearing, from day to day, in unfamiliar forms that we're clumsily trying to get a grip on. We are living in an era of permanent change. We are constantly trying to re-up on our programs, to get a handle on how to work the latest version of our phone, for example. So, painting actually is the place where every novelty we're dealing with—even if barely, or unsuccessfully—can be very sensitively negotiated. And this is precisely because the ground of the painting has lasted so long. Anything you put there is going to be measured against something much older, and this establishes the baseline from which we can gauge what exactly it is that is changing in the order of our so-called reality.

JS: We’ve talked about the ancient qualities of the gesture. And in some ways, just knowing how you think, it does seem that there's a double work that's always happening, that you're also thinking of the future possibility of the gesture. I'm thinking that one of the ways your book helps to orient us toward the present is to think about painting as a sensorial membrane that is recording traces, not just of human perception in some immediate sense, but also of the historical condition. Yes, when what you call the negotiation, or the reorientation, that we're experiencing in the technological world, this is something that paintings record as existential or perceptual fact, as mere phenomenology. But that’s not really what you’re talking about. This makes me think, then, perhaps of painting, of the painted gesture, as technology in the strict sense. Here I am thinking about technology, as defined by you and the antecedents you trace, as the externalization of memory. Here, painting is simultaneously technological and ancient. The ancient cave is technological in this way, as a place of preservation of those painted gestures and, of course, of the negotiation with the tool and everything else. So, I wonder if you might share with us your thoughts or reflections on this expanded field into the future of thinking about painting as a technology, and not just as sign for the persistence of what is archaic, obsolete—although it is interesting for that reason, too.

JT: Well, there's the glimmer of a thought that appeared while I was reading Bataille on prehistoric art. He’s looking at the paintings in the cave of the Trois Frères, and there noting that these are superimposed images. They don't give us one scene, they give us multiple scenes, superimposed. To return to Brecht and to theater, it is as if the painting were being performed. Each time people enter the cave, there is the idea that they're watching the painting being made, a new painting on top of the old one. Bataille was clearly pointing that perception away from the notion of a reified art object. It's very much an anti-capitalistic perception of what art is, or should be, fundamentally—i.e., that it should fundamentally come down to a process. And, moreover, we can say that this process should be considered, at least to some extent, collective. Sure, there's one person, perhaps, that's making these paintings, but they're making them in time and space, and before this human gathering. And so, it's a form of painting that, again, does not reach a conclusion. It's constantly being rethought. Now, we can say this painting that features animals and men is being considered in relationship to, you know, the hunt that's coming, or the hunt that’s already happened. We could look at it as a strategic plan for a future hunt or the commemoration of a past hunt. But all of those readings become, to some extent, impossible. When we think about the process of what's going on in the cave, we can't really think about that production from any kind of strategic, pragmatic, or nostalgic angle. It's actually a living phenomenon. And, again, it’s an event. What does that bode for contemporary painting? We've seen all these moments in postwar history—many of which I have discussed in the book—where there's attempts to activate painting as performance art. But these also have produced artifacts, which can become just as reified as the paintings that preceded them. So, this would be an attempt to think a way around these various impasses and discover a function for painting that really exceeds anything that we've experienced up to now—even if only slightly.

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Bios: Jeffrey Stuker is an artist and filmmaker based in LA. He has exhibited his work at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Biennial of Contemporary Photography at MOMuS, and the Hammer Museum. His writing has been published in Mousse, the White Review, Art Handler, and he serves as a contributing editor for Effects journal. Stuker received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and his MFA from Yale University. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in art at University of California, San Diego. Stuker is represented by Ehrlich Steinberg in LA and Ben Hunter Gallery in London.

Jan Tumlir is an author and teacher based in LA. He is a contributing editor to the journal Effects, and a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze. He has written catalog essays for such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Cyprien Gaillard, Allen Ruppersberg and James Welling. Books include: LA Artland, a survey of contemporary art in Los Angeles (Black Dog Press, 2005); Hyenas Are…, on the work of Matthew Brannon (Mousse, 2011); The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records (Onomatopee, 2015); and Conversations, with Jorge Pardo (Inventory Press, 2021). An exhaustive study on gesture and painting will be released by Inventory Press in 2026. Tumlir is an Associate Professor in the Humanities & Sciences department at Art Center College of Design, where he has taught since 1999. Since 2022, he also serves as resident art historian at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

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