Prefiguration: Gadamer, Matisse, and the Hermeneutic Circle

Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience, 2016

Through a phenomenological reading of Henri Matisse’s Ecrits et propos sur l ’ art the paper analyzes in their mutual connection the themes of nature, feeling and origin in relation to the Artist’s works (in particular the ones of the Fauvist period) and to his own reflection on art. Interpreting nature through feeling is something more than a solipsistic glance on reality linked to private emotions, it is, according to M. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and expression, a way to create symbols of the living unity of consciousness and the external world. In conclusion, the paper shows the theme of the origin as Matisse’s pictorial way to meditate on the possibility of artistic creation in its necessary connection with the experience of the lifeworld. The constitutive ground of the lifeworld can only be represented into the effort of pure colors and arabesque to show a meditation on the temporal dimension of the origin in which a new disclosing sense can be expressed.

University of Sydney, 2019

The aim of this practice-based research project is an attempt to understand the perceptual space that occurs when a viewer encounters a work of art. More specifically, it reflects on the in-between space that occurs when viewers interact with artworks that draw on historical events to explore violent conflicts, death and commemorations. The thesis expands on contemporary notions of interpretations with a particular focus on the non-linguistic factors that may convene in the aesthetic experience. It has a dual outcome, consisting of creative and written components. The creative component, Shifting Horizons, is a body of work that was inspired by ancient Chinese burial sites. The artworks are a meditation on cross-cultural burial practices with a particular focus on interaction with the natural environment. As such, they engage with the tension between human transiency and the endurance of the natural environment. By evoking remains of the dead in the landscape, the artworks highlight the notion that landscapes are infused with significant historical dimensions. In its particular way, this body of work is an intermixing of symbolic means employed to point out that in contrast to the surviving fragments of the relics unearthed in the burial pits, the natural world is not a dead world, and perhaps it is most essential to the survival of human life. In making this body of work, I wish to suggest that works of art can act as a potentially transformative vehicle within a wide range of discourses. This is further explored in the written component - Event, Eventing, Eventuality. The text, which is concurrent to the creative component, applies the perspective of hermeneutical aesthetics to reflect on the determinants that may shape the encounter with a selected corpus of contemporary artworks. In addition to critically reflecting on these artworks, the writing draws on texts by a group of scholars – Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, Serres, Deleuze and more - to examine relevant concepts that have been identified in the course of the research. Moreover, this thesis suggests that applying a hermeneutic approach in combination with other, perhaps incongruous, thinkers in the critical traditions, can enrich the processes of interpretations and understanding that are central to qualitative inquiry in general, and particularly so to the discipline of fine arts.

Routledge Research in Aesthetics, 2022

This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity.

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, 2008

The object of the article is to assess whether the concepts of erotica and the erotic can be identified with the hermeneutic interpretation of art as understood by Hans‑Georg Gadamer. The starting point of the discussion is Susan Sontag's essay 'Against interpretation', in which the concept of the erotic interpretation of art is outlined and which culminates with the author setting up a deliberate opposition between the erotics of art and hermeneutics. The present article is an attempt to present the issue of the eroticism of hermeneutic interpretation on the basis of Son-tag's essay, and thus a response to the provocation contained in this essay. In the final part of the text, another possible approach to the issue of the postulated eroticism of hermeneutics is presented. The first part of the present article is devoted to explaining what Sontag means when she writes about the erotics of art and hermeneutics. The next part will demonstrate the connections and similarities between the concept of erotic art presented by Sontag and Gadamer's concept of the hermeneutic interpretation of art. In the third part of the article I present Gadamer's proposition and answer the question of whether the hermeneutic interpretation of art can be erotic. The final part of the article is devoted to invoking additional arguments for linking erotics and hermeneu-tics, followed by a summary.

1993

2017

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

to be published in: Continental Philosophy Review