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.

Art Journal, 2011

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."

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.

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.

Today, ancient wisdom and the latest science seem to have reached the same amazing conclusion: the walls around reality are porous and open to infinite transformations. At the same time, the unlimited traversability of cyberspace has added a massively alluring new dimension to life, one in which the normal balance between our senses and our subjectivity is permanently destabilized. Indeed, the fact that we are now living with and in the new digital media means we can shake off the limitations imposed by material reality and bodily existence, and in this accelerated virtuality, the temptation to ignore our physical constraints can become overwhelming. We live in a new kind of reality, where the biological and the technological merge to produce a " post human " ecology. How can painting address this situation?

2011

The expansion of digital media and technology is rapidly transforming our perception of the material world. Marginalising the tactile potential of an image to convey meaning, advances in new-media have emphasized speed and efficiency over weight and substance. In light of the digital paradigm, my research promulgates the concept of painting as a physical encounter. An encounter that negates the disembodied nature of digital technology and that initiates an important rupture within the established fields of visual representation and communication. In order to extend the relevance of painting within contemporary art and culture, this paper analyses the material dimension of painting; its potential to convey significant meaning through creating a visual experience that is both optical and tactile. As the invention of photography can be seen to have liberated painting from a mimetic, narrative role, the nature of digital media likewise offers painters a unique challenge – digital techno...

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...

JOLMA, 2021

This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutability of image is tested against the material, spatial and durational conditions of painting, and the attentional attachments it might mobilize through an examination of the working methods of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R.H.Quaytman. Painting is not positioned as image, but as a processor of image information, able to prompt an image response, A resistance to image is framed by the art historical and philosophical legacy of image expectations and preclusions that each artist feels compelled to work against, and the expanding opticality of our contemporary social, cultural and economic interactions.