Experiencing the Making Paintings by Paolo Cotani, Marcia Hafif and Robert Ryman (original) (raw)

Pictures, Truths and Methods: From Function to Form in Abstract Painting

Abstract Painting Now (symposium paper), 2019

This paper takes Patrick Heron’s assertion as to the abstract nature of painting as a starting point for a phenomenological investigation into the way in which abstract works comport themselves. How do abstract paintings attain meaningfulness, and along which communicative channels is meaning attainable? Perhaps in opposition to Picasso’s denial of the possibility of abstract art, and affirmation of the vitality of figurative painting (and restatement of: ‘the power of the object’), Heron presented an alternative idea; declaring all painting to be, in effect, of the abstract. In positing an abstract primacy to one’s experience of the world in painting – Heron’s thesis, I will argue, opens more doors than it closes. In support of his hypothesis, Heron drew together the terms: ‘space’, ‘colour’ and ‘form’ – the bedrock of countless claims regarding abstraction’s truth – and invoked an: ‘abstract reality’, which painting (including that which is usually taken to be figurative painting) is seen to embody. The relationship of abstract painting to the world has proven to be a problematic one. To revisit it is to wrestle with the notion of resemblance, and therefore to speculate as to how it is that one thing is able to point to another. In this work I will examine the degree to which abstraction – as idea – is compatible with an understanding of the serviceability of pictures, and, in so doing, shed light on the extent to which pictures might operate within painting as both language and something else. Central to this is a consideration of the limits of that which is deemed communicable; the method of comprehending abstract painting’s truth(s); what it is that the spectator is able to bring to the table; and how this bringing to can be woven into a fuller conception of abstract painting’s particular operability…from which colour, form and space might be made sense of. I will position abstract painting as an involvement: a form of engagement from which the spectator might come to better understand an engagement with form.

The role of the artist's gesture in the perception of art and artistic style

2011

The perception of art is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. One obvious aspect in perceiving and appreciating a work of art is the recognition of its representational content, either figurative or non- figurative. A second and no less important aspect is the assessment of its graphic or plastic qualities. Assessing these qualities is part of our understanding of the process in which the work has been produced. Many artists testify that this process is not primarily an activity carried out by the mind, but rather “[...] a bodily activity, one that is an expression of the lived-body’s way of being in the world.” (Wentworth, 2004: 15) The perception and appreciation of works of art therefore involves the understanding of its coming into being on the basis of the artist’s gestures. In this contribution, these two related ideas are elaborated on the basis of a number of phenomenological insights. First, the Husserlian idea that in the perception of cultural objects their coming into...

Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350): Reality and Reflexivity - Intro

Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350): Reality and Reflexivity. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015

The rebirth of realistic representation in Italy around 1300 led to the materialization of a pictorial language, which dominated Western art until 1900, and it dominates global visual culture even today. Paralleling the development of mimesis, self-reflexive pictorial tendencies emerged as well. Images-within-images, visual commentaries of representations by representations, were essential to this trend. They facilitated the development of a critical pictorial attitude towards representation. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian meta-painting in the age of Giotto and sheds new light on the early modern and modern history of the phenomenon. By combining visual hermeneutics and iconography, it traces reflexivity in Italian mural and panel painting at the dawn of the Renaissance, and presents novel interpretations of several key works of Giotto di Bondone and the Lorenzetti brothers. The potential influence of the contemporary religious and social context on the program design is also examined situating the visual innovations within a broader historical horizon. The analysis of pictorial illusionism and reality effect together with the liturgical, narrative and typological role of images-within-images makes this work a pioneering contribution to visual studies and premodern Italian culture. ‘Reflexivity is the name of the game they say when it comes to modern and especially to postmodern art. This study tells a different story. Péter Bokody’s book goes back to where it all began: to Italian Trecento painting which marks the beginnings of the realistic mode. Realism means, among many other things, that one medium can embed another medium. If it does so it will enhance its realistic potential, strengthen the meaning of the whole scene and, finally, it makes a meta-statement: about the power of images, the different qualities of the artforms or even about stylistic options.’ Wolfgang Kemp, University of Hamburg 'Bokody’s book combines visual sensitivity, methodological variety, historical erudition and theoretical sophistication. His work encourages us to think with more precision and flexibility about the concepts of "realism" and reflexivity as applied to the achievements of Giotto and his contemporaries and in relation to subsequent generations of artists. Bokody provides fresh insights for all those who study, admire and teach this material.' Joanna Cannon, Courtauld Institute of Art, London 'Engagingly written, this study will add significantly to our understanding of Giotto and his circle (including Lorenzetti, Gaddi and Daddi) in the dynamically changing world of fourteenth century Italy. Although primarily concerned with images within images in panel and mural painting, the work goes beyond its initial parameters and looks at such concepts as realism, spatial relations, illusionism, meta-painting, self-reflexivity, time and reception in Italian art. It is a study which exposes the viewer to new ideas and details that could easily be passed and whose iconography is significant in understanding the work in its entirety.' Colum Hourihane, Independent Scholar, UK

Sidetracks: Painting in the Paramodern Continuum

In the book Watermark, a travel account of Venice, Joseph Brodsky describes human eyes as organs and instruments for perception. Everything flows into these biological organs; they do not filter anything out. While unceasingly taking everything in, they are also the means for expressing emotional reactions. Tears well up uncontrollably. The eyes are the place where involuntary perception interfaces with the unconscious and affective reactions to what we see.

The Performative Turn in the Visual Arts

2016

The 1970s saw the emergence of the performative turn in many areas of the humanities. Although its most important representatives emphasized that it did include visual arts, specific examples were usually limited to action art phenomena, bordering on performance art, painting, or sculpture. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that the performative approach to art can be traced back to the avant-garde movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Paul Klee’s concept of painting discussed here shifts the performative aspect from the artist's activity to the elements of the image, interpreted from the point of view of their interactions. The article examines the theoretical and pedagogical writings by Klee (both published during his lifetime and posthumously), considered as the basis for the interpretation of his paintings. The artist assumed that the pictorial elements are bound by the principle of motion – a line is a trace left by a moving point, while a p...

What Drawing and Painting Really Mean - The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture

The bulk of this document is the Introduction to a book called 'What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture' . The book was published by Routledge in its 'Advances in Art and Visual Studies' series on 26th April 2017. IT IS NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK ! The book’s main theme is as follows. There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. (These are even found in drawings and paintings done by computers) Such intrinsic meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto. Indeed, the dominant tendency has been to reduce the visual image to models derived from literary theory. This amounts to a kind of existential mutilation of drawing and painting. Some philosophers (notably in the phenomenological tradition) have addressed the meanings of these practices more insightfully, but mainly by assimilating them to their own general philosophies rather than by offering a genuine phenomenology of what is involved in the very making of an image – pictorial or abstract. By explaining and developing this, our understanding of art practice can be significantly enhanced.

Involvement, Inbetweenness and Abstract Painting

Painting the In-Between (exhibition catalogue), 2019

This paper situates this concern for abstraction within an art historical narrative. In the process, the author draws attention to issues relating to what E. H. Gombrich termed pictorial representation: to spectatorship and the act looking in respect of the functioning of language and the possibilities of depiction. This essay, then, looks to abstract painting’s situation with regard to the idea of figuration (the showing of other things). And so, both semiotic and phenomenological frameworks of understanding the meaning of paintings become foregrounded in the course of seeking to establish a clearer sense of abstract painting’s peculiar persistence. What might it mean for one ‘to be with abstract painting’, and, moreover, what is implied today when a claim is made for a painting to be other than abstract: i.e., figurative or representational? To locate abstract painting’s position is thus, in part, to speculate on its perceived boundedness—on the indeterminacy of location and the presumed ontology of its site of meaning.

THE ARTIST'S CREATIVE PROCESS: A Winnicottian view

The Artist's Creative Process: A Winnicottian view, 2018

The existing body of psychoanalytic literature relating to the process of making visual art does not include formal studies of first-hand reports from contemporary artists. This thesis addresses that gap through the creation of a new series of artworks and through a qualitative study of artists’ accounts of the states of mind they experience as they work. It aims to provide new evidence relating to the artist’s creative process and to question the extent to which psychoanalytic theory in the Winnicottian tradition can account for artists’ experiences. My methodology was two-fold: I kept a written record of my own states of mind as I created six video, installation and animation artworks; I also conducted thirty in-depth interviews with professional fine artists. The testimony of the artists and myself was interrogated using psychoanalytic theory from the Winnicottian and British Object Relations tradition. Winnicottian theory was chosen because it offers a particular understanding of the inter-relationship between inner and outer worlds and the thesis considers the artist’s process in these terms. Drawing on Winnicottian theory, the thesis presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’ and the spaces between. The research reveals aspects of artists’ experiences that are not fully accounted for by the existing literature. To address these gaps, the thesis proposes the introduction of several new terms: ‘pre-sense’ for an as-yet undefined first intimation of the possibility of a new artwork relating to a particular aspect of the outside world; ‘internal frame’ for a space within the artist’s mind, specific to a particular medium, which the artist ‘enters’ when starting work; and ‘extended self’ and ‘observer self’ for two co-existent self-states that constitute the artist’s working state of mind.

2-12; David Rosand, Drawing Acts. Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation

2001

The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegno has tended to overemphasize the rhetoric promoting a separation between design and execution, mind and body, and asserting a hierarchy of the arts constructed on the friction between intellectual and corporeal engagement in the making of artefacts. Building on written sources such as so-called "technical treatises" and on objects taken as evidence of the design process, it is suggested that we should consider instead a more integrated, organic, technologically engaged and "mechanical" notion of disegno, in which design might be seen to grow within a physical environment from the interconnection of human action and materials. Using Renaissance pottery as a case study, and exploring its understanding within different linguistic, literary and material contexts, the article proposes an epistemology allowing for greater fluidity, overlap and communality between supposedly distinct arts. The emergenc...