Painting: A philosophy of the invisible and silence (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Painting and its Philosophical Significance: Merleau-Ponty and Maritain
International Philosophical Quarterly, 2019
Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of painting, though widely influential and much discussed, remain enigmatic. In this paper I compare his views on painting with those of his older contemporary, Jacques Maritain, who also holds that painting can give us a nonconceptual insight into deep truths about things that are inaccessible to discursive thought. I argue that some ideas that are obscure and undeveloped in Merleau-Ponty are developed more clearly and fully in Maritain; and that even where there are significant differences between them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. This comparison can help us to see the ways in which both philosophers’ theories of art are important for understanding their philosophies as a whole; while the views they hold in common can continue to suggest a plausible and fruitful way to think about art today.
Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance-e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion-the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this paper is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically).
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.
On the Post-Metaphysics of Painting: Raphael at the Limit
This is a draft of a book chapter from "On the True Sense of Art: A Critical Companion to the Transfigurements of John Sallis," eds. Jason M. Wirth, Michael Schwartz, and David Jones, which will appear this fall on Northwestern University Press. The chapter unpacks Sallis's innovative notion of the elemental and impact on his views on art, art matrices (displacing the notion of art-media), and the enactment of philosophical art criticism. The paper moves to deploy these terms, with critical modifications, towards instances in the history of Western painting, including disclosing the elemental geo-radiance of an early Monet; and concludes with an extended reading of an early Raphael altarpiece as a Eucharistic symbolization of the mystery of the Trinity, which exceeds any ontotheologics of God.
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.
The Opening of Conceptual and Perceptual Horizons Through the Working of Art
The context of this essay is a larger project of mine which has been examining the concept of space and self which we have inherited in the Modern tradition. I owe a lot to the work of Alberto Perez-Gomez who has shown own how our concept of space as geometric void upon which a transcendent consciousness bears upon -fully codified by Descartes -evolved out of the detached abstract post-socratic philosophical tradition, and has gone on to fruition within technological society. If you live in the modern secular world, as most in the west now do, then this is the pre-given conceptual understanding of spatiality, and it has repercussions on how we understand our relationship to knowledge. In the detached perspective consciousness achieves knowledge by the appropriate correspondence of symbolic representations to an external reality. This is commonly called mediational epistemology. 1 The other tradition one could say comes out of the Abrahamic heritage of the west, and during the 20th century has been expressed in the works of the existentialists and phenomenologists. This work has been primarily a return of awareness to the dependency of our detached rational conceptualizing upon our embodiment and existential investment in reality. From this perspective space is not a void, not detached, but something we as body and mind, are within, and by our action achieve accord with truth, which includes but is not exclusive to conceptual understanding. This has repercussions for how we understand the artist's relationship to knowledge.