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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.
2017
This book is a map of painting and the questions that confront its ongoing status in the professional domain of contemporary art. It involves searching the full spectrum of painting, from the processes that take place in the artist’s studio right through to the intellectual arguments that position and justify certain disciplines and genres of painting above others. Painting is a major art form that has been both rejected and revered. It is often rejected as an outdated tradition very long in the tooth, 40,000 years if we go back to Lascaux and the rock paintings of the original Australians. Surely something so old is irrelevant by now, lost in the stories of its own past, tangled up in conventions that are like old coins, details worn away, but still shopped around as common currency. On the other hand painting is revered because so many still practice it, passionate students arriving at art school, art markets dealing in new and old masters, galleries selling painted canvases for appreciation, investment and decoration. Painting, together with Sculpture and Architecture, forms an original triad of classical arts dating back to ancient Greece. Since that time painting has been the dominant art form, with an ability to say anything about everything, including self and world, politics and literature, science and popular culture. All of it is done in the hushed silence of colour on an immobilized surface. Over the last 100 years the position of painting has been questioned and vanquished many times, in particular by photography and new media. Yet somehow it lives on, commanding our respect like an immortal warrior or at least some kind of urban zombie. It has become a hybrid of the living and the dead, something contemporary and something remembered, involving the use of craft materials that can plug into electronic media, sculptural objects, performative events and theoretical texts. All of these elements form a new kind of contemporary practice for painting that struggles for a proper name.
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.
InFormation - Nordic Journal of Art and Research, 2012
This contextual essay accompanies a research project and presentation that I conducted in 2010 as partial fulfillment of the Diplomate and Masters degree in process-oriented psychology (also know as Process Work). The primary purpose of the project was to engage in a heuristic study of the creative process in an attempt to answer the question: Who or what creates? Is it me, the individual? Or is it some force outside of my personal identity like the Tao, the unconscious, nature, the divine, or some other organizing background intelligence? In order to answer this question, I studied my own creative process over a nine-month period by videotaping myself as I painted. During these videotaped sessions, I noticed and verbalized my inner awareness while painting, and then I journaled about my creative process after the sessions, reflected on the completed paintings, reviewed and analyzed the videotapes, and wrestled with many related questions that fascinate me but were outside the scope of this project. I also found myself drawn to explore other sources of information on the creative process including books, websites, documentaries, interviews, and the writings of other artists.
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.
Catalogue essay for the MFA Painting program, Concordia University, Montréal 2012
Глас САНУ No. CDXXXIV, Одељење историјских наука, књ. 19 (2023) / Glas de ASSA, No. CDXXXIV, Classe des sciences historiques, № 19 (2023), 2023
Calamus , Yıl 2, Sayı 7. Sonbahar 2004, 2004
G3 (Bethesda, Md.), 2012
FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, 2014
The Biological Bulletin, 1989
The Korean Journal of Pain, 2004
Prosiding Seminar Kajian Ilmiah Seni Persembahan 2024, 2024
Molecular Pharmaceutics, 2013
Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2017
Review of Scientific Instruments