‘The Living End’ at Chicago’s MCA Celebrates the Relevance and Irrelevance of Painting

In John Baldessari’s 1977 video Six Colorful Inside Jobs, a camera is positioned in the ceiling of a room, looking down at a man painting a small room over the course of six days, Monday through Saturday. The man paints the room red, then orange, then green, then purple. The footage is sped up, so the job becomes a manic quasi-industrialized process, an exercise in fast-forward, repetitive, pointless labor. The great master tradition of painting, from Rembrandt to Pollock, is robbed of its skill, genius and personal oomph.