Seattle Art Museum's "Target Practice" is a fascinating attack on painting

The ambitious exhibition currently at The Seattle Art Museum reminds me of those slow motion scenes in gangster movies, where some poor guy gets riddled with bullets, his body gyrating and lurching with the impact of each hit. The medium of film and the artificial tempo can make such gruesome scenes exciting and perversely enjoyable to watch. "Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-1978," organized by SAM's Michael Darling, is an intense and pleasurable show; the body of painting — its history, form, materials, methods and concepts — is hit over and over again by an army of immensely talented and innovative artists. While the highly focused theme is a bit relentless, many of the individual hits are spectacular to behold.

Darling has really achieved something here. He has gracefully pulled off an impressive organizational feat, bringing together an international roster of artists and works of art, both iconic and obscure. The premise of the show doesn't add anything radically new to the history of art, but Darling's concentration on the "interrogation of painting" slices across various histories and movements.

Contemporary art fans will be thrilled to see some of the works on view. For example, in a now-classic, but initially-mischievous critique of the idea that self-expression is embedded in a stroke of paint or drawing gesture, Robert Rauschenberg created "Erased de Kooning Drawing," eliminating each line of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, one of the iconic abstract expressionist artists.

Visitors less familiar with contemporary art should find the premise easily engaging and, if nothing else, everyone should be entertained by some of the vicious and witty assaults on painting. Paintings are shredded, burned, unzipped, turned backward and pushed beyond recognition.

Yoko Ono's 1961 piece "Painting to Hammer a Nail" not only plays with notions of what a painting is, but also with what constitutes a creative act and a work of art. Beginning as a blank canvas on the wall, hung next to a hammer and a box of nails, Ono's "painting" invites museum goers to hammer nails into the canvas, thereby constructing, augmenting, or destroying the canvas throughout the exhibition. Ono is sidestepping the concept of the artist as the sole creator and questioning the importance of permanent, physical properties of a work of art; prior to the exhibition, the work of art existed as a concept, not as a tangible thing — Darling simply asked Ono for permission to present it.

Hanging out with well-known works by Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol are works of art by lesser known artists from the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America. Reflecting the angst and uncertainty of post-World War II Europe, Argentine artist Lucio Fontana, working in Italy, relentlessly pierced pieces of paper and mounted them on canvas for his "Spatial Concept" series.

Darling has grouped works of art according to artistic and philosophical strategies, creating sections such as "Physical Abuse," "Critiques of Composition and Spontaneity" and "Last Rites." This smart, thematic approach to the show removes the works of art from their usual categorical boxes — conceptual art, arte povera and Fluxus, for example — thereby highlighting the artists' individual struggles with the heavy history of painting and the massive, mythical presence of the painter as expressive genius.

During this period, according to Darling, "painting was not killed off so much as tortured." This interrogation and punishment broke modernism apart and resulted in countless new directions for art, which are demonstrated in the sheer variety and originality of approaches in "Target." As Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica put it, "The challenge, of course, is not the actual destruction of the painting itself, but rather its transformation into something else."