A Non-Conservative Defense of Contemporary Painting?--Remarks on Jason Gaiger's Philosophy of Painting (2022) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Why Nothing Can be Accomplished in Painting, and Why It Is Important to Keep Trying
This is a paper invited for the Irish art magazine "Circa," which had a special issues on the state of painting in 2004. It argues that painting's supposed dead ends (the eternal return of the monochrome, the end of the medium and of medium-specificity) are tropes in the ongoing practice of painting. I distinguish five kinds of writing about painting, in an attempt to step back from current critical impasses: 1. Writing that promotes or judges, as in exhibition catalogues. 2. Writing that classifies, for example some art historical accounts. 3. Writing whose primary purpose is to ask if painting is dead, or how it is dead, or how it lives on under different conditions; for example Tom Mitchell's essay about small communities of painters in Florida. 4. Writing that asks about painting's distance from modernism--for example Clark, Jones, Krauss, Melville, Shiff, and other historians. 5. Writing that takes painting as an occasional subject, and is interested mainly in political contexts--for example Jameson, Bhabha, Canclini. This is the first sketch for a chapter in the book "Project of Painting." The idea is to acknowledge the tremendous range of writing on painting by beginning at the greatest possible distance, and then focusing in on individual discourses.
"The intertwining – Damisch, Bois, and October’s rethinking of painting" (peer-reviewed article)
Journal of Contemporary Painting , 2019
While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay ‘Painting as model’, it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium (Damisch 1984) – the subject of Bois’ review – has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology and structuralism. This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of ‘Painting as model’ suggests a sea change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism. Contents of issue here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jcp/2019/00000005/00000001
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."
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).
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.
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 Political Theory of Painting Without the Politics
Art History, 1987
Since the early 1970s, John Barrell has produced a succession of books and articles which have gained him a well-earned reputation as one of the most stimulating commentators on British art and literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His background in English Studies means that he brings to the interpretation of painting and art theory a command of literary sources most art historians can only envy, and this has permitted him to make some extremely telling juxtapositions between visual images and texts, as in his comparisons between Gainsborough's paintings and contemporary developments in pastoral poetry in The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge, 1980). If the connections he makes between images, texts and class outlook do not always convince even those sympathetic to his method and interests, they do at least represent an effort to deal with significant historical issues, and Barrell has had considerable success in provoking that art historical Old Guard which imagines that a painting or a text has no political dimension unless its author intended it to. The present book is an extended consideration of issues which Barrell has already tackled in at least two conference papers and a journal article, I the basic concern of which has been to articulate the social and political assumptions of the various versions of the theory of painting produced by British artists and critics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in particular to identify their shifting conceptions of 'the public'. It includes chapters on Reynolds, Barry, Blake, Fuseli, and Haydon and Hazlitt, together with much briefer discussions of Shaftesbury and Richardson. Consideration of this theme is long overdue and, as in The Dark Side of the Landscape, Barrell has addressed himself to issues which most historians of British art, with their customary aversion to anything resembling sociology, politics, or theory, have chosen to ignore. The Political Theory of Painting is, however, a different kind of book from The Dark Side of the Landscape: whereas the latter is essayistic and provocative, this new work is a long scholarly tome, which is unlikely to appeal to any but an academic readership. But if its style and length proclaim the book as a sternly academic edifice, it is one which from some angles appears to rest on rather insubstantial foundations. Barrell has not been given to pronounce on theory in his published writings, and in his paper at the 1984 Conference of the Association of Art Historians he observed that he had never been 'terribly concerned' with inspecting his methods. While it is easy to feel surfeited, not to say choked, with the vast output of theoretical industry over the last decade or so, the problems of theory and method can only be ignored at the price of producing work which may have outstanding moments but which is unlikely to form a satisfying whole. This seems to me a price which Barrell has paid in the present instance. While the book contains some very fine passages of critical exegesis, it also contains passages which involve a cavalier use of historical sources, in