"The intertwining – Damisch, Bois, and October’s rethinking of painting" (peer-reviewed article) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review of Craig Staff's book 'Painting, History and Meaning: Sites of Time'
caa reviews, 2022
Painting, History and Meaning is an ambitious book that seeks to redress conventional understandings of temporality within the study of contemporary painting. Craig Staff takes his “interpretative framework” (4) from the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s notion that painting occupies several “sites of time” simultaneously. Staff seeks neither to replicate the arbitrary attitude to temporality apparent in some works of postmodern eclecticism nor to reduce painting to the linear history of progress inherent in modernism and modernist criticism. His approach is rather to construct an alternative that opens up the differences in time inherent in the object that is the painting. Drawing on the work of other commentators, critics, and exhibitions, the book highlights the extent to which examples of contemporary painting are able to “converse with paintings of the past” (3) rather than simply quote, sample, or remix their signifiers from the privileged position of now.
The Condition of Painting: Reconsidering Medium Specificity (PhD Thesis)
The Condition of Painting: Reconsidering Medium Specificity (PhD thesis), 2018
The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object. This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time. Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry. The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.
re-published in a modified version as The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression in Toward the Postmodern, ed. R. Harvey and M. Roberts (Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, 1993, pp. 2-11). Opposing itself to various other psychoanalytic approaches to art and literature (approaches that Lyotard criticises along the way), the paper argues that because artistic and literary works are laden with figure, which operates according to a different logic than that of language, artistic expression must be understood as having properties different from those of spoken or written commentary. Expression is thus set off from meaning, and is shown to reveal a very specific kind of truth: the trace of the primary process, free for the moment from the ordering functions of the secondary process. Its formative operations not only leave their mark on the space in which artistic works appear, but produce new, plastic, figures. Lyotard argues that the artistic impulse is the desire to see these unconscious operations, "the desire to see the desire." Attention to this function of truth and to the role of artistic space in giving the artwork its "play" brings attention back to Freud's analysis of expression in tragedy and its link to the results of his own self-analysis -and thus to the very constitution of psychoanalysis itself.
How the Materiality of Paint is Intrinsic to the Work of Art: An Explanation of the Meaningful Placement of the Medium of Painting in Contemporary Art Theory, 2013
"The material nature of painting is considered as a leading actor throughout art history, as well as the source of its viability as a contemporary medium of artmaking in contemporary art practice. Viewing painting in the context of its art historical present, this manuscript examines painting’s history in art, its death by art theory, and its resurrection in various forms in contemporary art practice. In this context, prevailing art historical theories are examined in order to position painting in contemporary society. The rhizomatic web theorized by DeLeuze is revisited to both explain and expand the material presence of paint in conceptual art practice, as well as to connect art theory, art history and art-making. In this context, painting is considered as a complex mode of thinking and positioned as both a post-modern avant-garde strategy and a medium of artistic significance in a post-medium age. Integral to the discussion is resonance, the quality embodied in a work of art that continues to engage the viewer in visceral communication over time. Resonance is therefore a determining characteristic in the viability of painting in any age. The role of materiality in resonance is explored and identified as the embodiment of painting’s ontology. This is materiality of surface and beyond, distilled from the characteristics of the paint, the painter’s experience with the paint, and its presentation to the viewer in such a way as to evoke a visceral response. Painting is alive; painting has evolved and is yet evolving. Even now, painting is reconfiguring and reinventing itself in the artifacts themselves as well as in the context of contemporary art theory."
Michael Fried is often recognised as one of the first art critics to explore thematics of beholding and embodiedness in artistic practice. Yet what still seems to go under-acknowledged is his treatment of artworks as themselves embodied, capable of returning the beholder's gaze. This article makes use of Fried's 'Art and Objecthood' and his trilogy of art-historical books examining the anti-theatrical tradition in French painting, as well as arguments made by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, in an effort to illuminate these aspects of Fried's enterprise. It further argues that not only are artworks for Fried allegorical of social relationships, but that allegory is a dimension of artworks, a condition of their appearing and relating to beholders and other artworks. Finally, this article addresses the relationship between allegory and 'presentness,' suggesting that there is a deep link between the two modalities rather than a relation of opposition.