October 1981.

Twenty years ago this month, artist and critic Thomas Lawson filed his survey-cum-manifesto "Last Exit: Painting." For the second installment of this new regular column, editor JACK BANKOWSKY revisits a curious episode in the "painting wars" of the '80s.

"PETULANT SELF-ADVERTISEMENT in the name of a reactionary expressionism" in these pages; "swingeing jeremiads" from the editors at October, condemning any art not wholly indebted to the Minimalists and Conceptualists they "lionize as the true guardians of the faith." If you were anywhere near SoHo in 1981 (the year, it so happens, I made my first forays into Manhattan as an art student), these few broad strokes from Thomas Lawson's pen are enough to bring the period chattering back to life: from one side, the histrionic apologies for "pseudo-expressionist" pastiche (Rene Ricard on Julian Schnabel); from the other, the high-toned reprises of played-out vanguard strategies (Douglas Crimp's "The End of Painting" in October)--not to mention all the back-to-the-easel chest thumping (Barbara Rose's 1979 survey show "American Painting: The Eighties" was only the most desperate appeal). So raged the painting wars of the '80s, at least in Lawson's contentious view, and today his account of the moment's skirmishes stan ds out as an unusually vivid piece of frontline reporting.

"Radical artists now are faced with a choice," he declared--"despair, or the last Exit: painting." If painting was back in the pages of then-new-editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy's Artforum, what Lawson had in mind with his "return" was something more particular-and conditional-than the standard-issue apologia. Indeed, his essay owed a good deal more to the carefully parsed lineage of vanguard negation associated with a Crimp than to the pro-painting paeans of a Rose or a Ricard. Setting aside a certain Ramones-meet-Gramsci period flavor (the essay is sprinkled with diversely authored epigrams) that would assuredly have raised eyebrows at October, Lawson's brief history of engaged negations ends up more or less where Crimp's seminal 1977 show "Pictures" did. If Lawson rejected the by then merely "elegant" endgaming of a Daniel Buren (the protagonist of Crimp's "End of Painting"), the self-conscious photographic efforts of the artists Crimp assembled-from Jack Goldstein to Sherrie Levine (Cindy Sherman was added i n a later revision of the "Pictures" essay)-loom large. For Lawson, the photograph "is the modern world," and to his thinking any viable contemporary art must engage the ubiquity of the technology and the primacy of its mediations. The obvious vehicle for an art that "plumbs the dark secrets of the photographic"? The photograph. Work that addresses the camera via the camera is, for Lawson, however, "too straightforwardly declarative" in its critical intent. An artist as well as a critic, he was looking to make a move, and he staked his claim on the ancient art, the "least suitable vehicle available."

Painting, as Lawson saw it, was the "perfect camouflage. . . allow[ing] one to place critical esthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it can cause the most trouble." He surveyed the contemporary field-all the Neos, Transes, and Neues, plus Crimp's "Pictures" gang, of course-and refigured. it in his own image. From the "Pictures" group he kept Troy Brauntuch and Goldstein, both of whom were, at the time, making painted photographs, and added Walter Robinson-plus himself ("several of the artists illustrated here exhibit with the same gallery as Mr. Lawson," an editorial addendum acknowledged). Trafficking in "infiltration and sabotage, using established conventions against themselves," David Salle was the enabling link.

By current accounting, history has, of course, been kinder to both Crimp's reflexive photographers and Ricard's pasticheurs than to Lawson's self-styled School of Salle. Yet while Rose's unprophetic prophesying goes down in the annals as one of the art world's few unrewarded acts of hubris, an exercise in escapist bad faith, Lawson's statement reads today as a vivid time capsule of the concerns that greeted any artist entering the cultural conversation circa 1980. And who knows? Jack Goldstein, after a decade missing in action, has landed on this issue's cover. "Poised for a revival" was one critic's assessment of the refound artist's art in our discussion of the recent rehanging of the epochal Crimp show (see "'80s Redux: 'Pictures' Refrained," pp. 130-34). Today the '80s sit on the cusp between art history and the contested present (young scholars staking a claim these days look to the '60s or '70s), so it remains to be seen how pressingly the urgencies Lawson identified (and the way he divided them) at the beginning of the then-fresh decade play in the long view. As Joey Ramone (or was it Adorno?) had it: "It's the end, the end of the '70s / It's the end, the end of the century."

In this ongoing series, Artforum looks back on an essay of note from our pages ten, twenty, or thirty years ago to the month. Visit artforum.com to review the table of contents and a selected article from each issue.