Painting vs. Installation

I read a curatorial comment, I forget where, that installations were "easier" than painting. The notion, as I understood, was that the artist does not need to dedicate as much time and effort struggling with and understanding his/her material.

There are things that I cannot yet get paint to do, and I do not have the same "feel" for paint that I have with some other materials and media. So, at first, the comment rings true. Until I step back and think further about whether the statement is really a fair criticism. There are things I cannot get the materials that make up installations to do, either. Paint, in many ways, is more malleable and flexible than materials that sometimes make up an installation. Paint also carries, for better or worse, the power and density of its history. The challenge of understanding the essential qualities of any material and leveraging, pushing or defying those qualities is an impetus for not working specifically or solely with paint.

Working extremely well with paint demands technical know that arranging found objects, for example, may not. However, arrangements of any material, found or otherwise, that work require compositional virtuosity, which comes out of drawing, painting and sculpting. There can be poor, shallow, uninteresting paintings as easily as there can be poor, shallow, uninteresting installations. It's all to easy to create one line work.