The event of painting (original) (raw)
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In this paper I shall present an argument against Deleuze’s philosophy of painting. Deleuze’s main thesis in Logic of Sensation is twofold: [1] he claims that painting is based on a non-representational level; and [2] he claims that this level comes out of the materiality of painting. I shall claim that Deleuze’s theses should be rejected for the following reasons: first, the difference between non-intentional life and the representational world is too strict. I submit that the non-intentional relation that painting opens up is itself part of and emerges out of the representational force of painting. If this would not be the case, then the criterion for differentiating between paintings and other objects cannot be developed. Indeed, Deleuze fails to give us a criterion. Second, Deleuze’s way of dealing with materiality in painting remains unsatisfactory, insofar as he is unable to take into account how materiality is charged with an “attitude towards the world.” In sum, materiality can only be painting’s materiality if we understand it as being formed and disclosed in representation.
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."
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 Affect of Painting as a Physical Space
2018
This Ph.D by Practice narrates five spatial paintings that took place over three years, between 2014 and 2017, across a range of sites and exhibition spaces in the UK. This series of work and written thesis seeks to understand what a new materialist reading could bring to painting’s language once it enters architectural space. Each painting uses fragments of both made and found things, that are closely interrelated with painting’s vernacular: edges; translucency; colour; thickness; proximity; etc. These are theatrically staged with space itself - where architectural space becomes complicit with the work. It is the viewer/reader who makes the work do its work, from within the painting, through being in-action with the works as a physical spatial encounter, examining thematics of visibility and invisibility through the concrete materialization of the structures that govern painting. The thesis argues how the experience of painting as a spatial practice requires new interpretative meth...
Diffracting Painting: 'Mattering' as Reconfiguration of its Making, Understanding and Encountering
This practice-led PhD thesis proposes a radical reconceptualisation of painting independent of its traditional means of production: painting is the singular multiplicity of material-discursive practices cohering around ‘facing’, which names the intra-active event of ‘seeing all at once’. This and other original categorisations (such as ‘work-of-violence’, ‘painting-as-a-body’, ‘painting-for-screens’ among others) emerge from analyses of artworks that were produced either during the PhD or personally encountered. They radically reposition the artwork as an event rather than a medium and define ways in which different paintings function in terms of ‘intra-action’ and ‘diffraction’ instead of identity and reflexion. Within the consistently sensuous, non-ontological frame of ‘mattering’, such conceptual propositions are not prescriptive or totalizing. Rather, they are intended as a means for setting the images of painting and art out of equilibrium. That is, in the discontinuous/intense state from which such categories have first emerged. In this respect, the thesis structure aims at rendering the way in which artworks and arguments have cohered in an entangled singularity as research in which sense has performatively informed questions. By focusing on a discursive method along the methodological lines of Barad, Golding, Lyotard and Stengers, the research contributes to the current debate among continental philosophy, ‘wild sciences’ and fine art by introducing conceptualisations such as ‘slowing up’, ‘artwork-in-potency’, and ‘sense of self’ (intended as the contingent pattern that implicitly embodies normality, thus making a non-directly detectable, yet grounding difference). Further contributions encompass diffractive reconceptualisations, e.g. ‘beauty’ as adequate degree of differentiation and ‘homage art’ as a methodology of art reception that is intrinsically one of art production. By moving away from the mainstream understanding of originality as creation ex nihilo and rethinking artistic agency in terms of a coincidence of care and risk-taking not belonging to the artist exclusively, the thesis offers a significant and unique contribution to methods for practice-led research and rethinks art as a non-hierarchical environment for sensuous experimentation.
More than material: art and the incorporeality of the event
Studies in Material Thinking vol 16, 2016
Rethinking material relations has enabled writing on art to focus on the work of the work of art, what it does, and its material operations that acknowledge matter's potential force and dynamics. An influential contributor to these discussions has been the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, whose 2008 book, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth, offers new approaches for thinking about the way art enables matter to become expressive. More recently Grosz has argued for an understanding of incorporeality that encompasses both ideality and materiality. Her recent writings suggest a relation between sense, signification and materiality in which sense is not in opposition to matter, but a shared surface of the incorporeal and the material. Through a discussion of Scott Mitchell's New Millennium Fountain, this paper will examine the seemingly paradoxical understanding of sense Grosz advocates as a challenge to thinking about the sense making properties of artworks.
Representation and Sensation—A Defence of Deleuze’s Philosophy of Painting
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2016
Abstract Deleuze’s philosophy of painting can be seen to pose certain challenges to a phenomenological approach to philosophy. While a phenomenological response to Deleuze’s philosophy is clearly needed, I show in this article how an approach taken in a recent paper by Christian Lotz proves inadequate. Lotz argues that through Deleuze’s refusal to accept the place of representation in art, he is unable to distinguish art from decoration, or to give a coherent account of how the (non-representational) content of art can be represented. I show that this criticism emerges from a misreading of the place of representation in Deleuze’s philosophy. I will argue that by failing to take account of some of the key features of Deleuze’s wider ontology, such as the importance of both the virtual and the actual for his analysis of objects, Lotz’s critique proves unsuccessful. In particular, I want to show that Lotz’s criticisms rest on a failure to attend to the systematic nature of Deleuze’s philosophy, and in particular, the place of Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon within the system as a whole. I will further show that Lotz’s phenomenological defence commits the fallacy of petitio principii, assuming the validity of the phenomenological method in order to justify the phenomenological approach.
2018
This research project evaluates historical and contemporary approaches to art medium and how problems of medium specificity may be re-thought through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetic materialism and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics. While coming to different conclusions about art’s critical potential, both modes of thought are informed by poststructuralist premises. Nancy’s concept of the ‘singular-plural’ is used to account for both translations and discordances between painting and other mediums such as digital printing and 3D animation. The singular-plural is relevant to the question of medium in contemporary art because it provides a critique of artistic projects that subordinate formal and sensory meaning to conceptually driven ideals beyond material features of artworks. Nancy’s materialist aesthetics revitalises the artwork’s formal characteristics as capable of rendering sensory meaning without entirely relying on pre-determined significations. This approach is contrasted with ‘socially engaged’ artistic trends of recent times that privilege a yet to be realised ideal of social re-configuration over the tangible, material characteristics of artworks. Rather than claiming to represent social or political content ‘outside’ of the sensory impact of the artwork, my practice stages juxtapositions between divergent material supports, suspending conceptual resolution, while heightening effects of difference. At the same time, in some of my works, formal relations between different media operate alongside symbolic references to typically opposed historical regimes of technological modernity through digital prints, and anti- or pre-modernity through figurative, folk-art type paintings on hessian. Both connections and incompatibilities between differing modes of production are not only explored for their formal and sensible features, but are also deployed for their signifying potential. This approach intersects with philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conception of modern art as a surface of conversion between sensory, material aspects of artworks and their discursive re-inscription. In this way, formal components of the artwork generate sensory, inter-medial affects, while also activating diverse conceptual associations related to social and political events. My project contends that formal, inter-medial features of artworks may be viewed as ‘political’ through their potential to form new relations of meaning at odds with conventional or singular expectations.
Deleuze’s Tensive Notion of Painting in the Light of Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer
Deleuze's Logique de la sensation is not a canonical art historical interpretation of Francis Bacon's painting and even less an illustration of Deleuze's philosophy. It is better read as a prolegomena to a semiotics of plastic art in which the visual image is related to the dialectics of touch and vision. These issues feature strongly in the art theories of Aloïs Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer and Heinrich Wölfflin. This article presents a comparative approach to the relation between Deleuze's and these writers' conception of the image and attempts to answer the following questions: does a painting appeal strictly to the sense of vision? Does its structure point to a virtual haptic function of vision and if so, does painting overturn the stable hierarchy of senses with vision at the top? Is there a gradual relation between touch and vision? Reading Deleuze reading Riegl, Worringer and Wölfflin offers an occasion to reconsider the image as a tensive surface grasped with a touching eye and seeing hand.
Why Painting Matters: Some Phenomenological Approaches
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2017
The question of the value of painting – why paintings should matter to us - has been addressed by a number of Phenomenological philosophers. In this paper I critically review recent discussions of this topic by Steven Crowell and Paul Crowther - while also looking back to work by Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. All the views I discuss claim that painting is important (at least in part) because it can make manifest certain philosophically important truths. While sympathetic to this approach, I discuss various problems with it. Firstly, are these truths verbally explicable, or only communicable through the art-work itself? Secondly, if its truthfulness is the reason why we value painting, can this criterion track our intuitive judgements about relative artistic merit? Thirdly, can the truthfulness of painting be a reason for valuing it if that truth is divorced from its traditional association with Beauty and Goodness? I suggest ways in which the first and second problems could in principle be solved, but argue in response to the third that truth must indeed be seen in the context of other values if it is to explain why painting matters.