Elizabeth Ferrer Essay
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Another factor setting her work apart from so much art seen today is her passionate dedication to the craft of painting, not just as a means to an end but also as central to the message of her art. Even with the plurality of visual media that has been a defining characteristic of the so-called postmodern period, certain styles and approaches are clearly favored by the art world — that is, by the individuals (curators, critics, and major collectors) and institutions (museums, galleries, and a handful of magazines) that play the determinative role in what art gets to be seen, discussed, and preserved for the long term. If we survey the major international biennials, the leading art galleries of New York's Chelsea or of London's East End, or any other such barometers of contemporary art, it is clear that painting no longer holds the privileged position that it had for centuries, especially painting that focuses on narrative, realism, and technique — all things that matter to Julie Speed.
Instead, over the last two or three decades, new formats that represent radically different modes of creating, disseminating, and even defining art have come to the forefront. Artists, of course, have pursued new ways of doing things since the beginning, but the process accelerated exponentially in the 1910s when Picasso and other cubists began to attach bits of newspaper and other materials onto their surfaces, thus setting the stage for the transformation of the canvas from a surface depicting the illusion of space to a free ground for limitless two- and three-dimensional experimentation. Around the same time, artists associated with the dada movement rejected what they saw as bourgeois aesthetic standards in favor of the irrational, the irreverent, and the nihilistic.
More recently, the rapid embrace of new electronic technologies, reflected in artists' experimentation with the Internet and digital media to produce and circulate web-based art works, has called into question the very basic notion of a work of art as a physical object. In between, artists staged happenings and performances, worked with sound and video, and, in short, made it possible for succeeding generations of artists to pursue successful careers even if possessing little talent for the traditional skills of painting, drawing, or sculpting.
The old declaration that painting is dead is, well, very old. That statement supposedly was made over 150 years ago by a French academic painter awe-struck by the invention of photography. Nevertheless, it points to what is now a long history of new media effectively undermining the once-privileged positions held by painting and drawing. Painting, of course, remains alive and well, currently taking myriad forms, from ironic exercises in minimalist abstraction to compositions inspired by digitally produced imagery that raise postmodern referentiality to new heights.