Painting and Presence; Why Paintings Matter

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Time Regained, 2019

The Danish artist Peter Brandes celebrates his 75th birthday in 2019 with two retrospect exhibitions, one in Kerteminde and one in Lemvig, Denmark. In the exhibition catalogue, Time Regained, Christoffersen writes about religious motifs in Brandes’ works. Brandes’ paintings, sculptures etc. are not illustrations, but interpretations and conversations about the human condition from a point of view deeply rooted in the Jewish-Christian tradition and in antiquity. His works are intersections where human experience and a variety of traditions are kept together in an open work of art. Often a multiplicity of symbols are connected in one and the same shape. Through the materiality of the work of art Brandes creates an awareness of spatial presence.

Signs, 2015

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...

The artistic notion of the 'death' of painting needs little introduction. It has shaped the course of twentieth century art, and affected the lives and practices of millions of artists in fundamental ways, but the model of the human mind upon which it implicitly rests is no longer considered to have useful relevance in the twenty-first century. Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology have concluded that the mind is not a blank slate but content-rich at birth, and as such humans bear an array of innate expectations of reality and non-reality, many of which apply as much to the artform of painting as they do other cultural behaviours and expressions such as religion or music. This eclectic and creative thesis takes in a diverse series of case studies tracing the prehistory of painting in light of these cognitive propensities, from the beginnings of human culture in Southern Africa to abstract designs and hand-prints in the Palaeolithic caves, from Bushman rock art depicting swift-people to the reported experiences of painters living today, to uncover a perennial and foundational function for painting which cannot die: the ubiquitous sensation of an 'otherworld' beyond the surface of the canvas or rock face. This simultaneously new and ancestral approach to painting demands a rehabilitation of the medium as both a humanising self-expression and as beyond-the-self exploration in a modern art context increasingly estranged from the wider world. Painting as 'Liminal Contact' seeks to abandon artistic ideologies and limiting art theories of what is possible in favour of a direct image-based communion with human nature. This is the second in a series of explorations towards a more holistic system of thought, perception and experience, entitled Visionary Humanism.

Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, 2019

This study investigates viewing experiences that came with the introduction of cinema. Merging (film) history with aesthetic theory, this dissertation entails historically informed theoretical reconstructions of viewing experiences between 1896 and 1898. During this novelty period, projected moving pictures evoked a wide array of reactions: on the one hand, early cinema was an extraordinary and astonishing attraction while, on the other hand, it was deeply rooted in daily life and everyday perception. To contemporary audiences, early moving pictures presented an unevenness hovering between amazement and contemplation. This study argues that the cinematograph, the vitascope, and other animated-picture attractions were popular at this early stage because they immediately appealed to the senses. These sensations are subsequently discussed as effects of presence. Early moving-picture exhibitions, moreover, can be seen as performances involving spectators in a play with presence vis-à-vis absence. While moving-picture attractions had an immediate impact on the viewer's body as situated in the "here and now" of the auditorium, the pictures presented places and objects that were irrevocably inaccessible and absent. Exploring different viewing situations in two different contexts, the current study therefore proposes the aesthetic experience of presence as a framework to understand these various late 19th-century viewing experiences. The three chapters of this dissertation are organized separately around the concepts of intermediality, movement, and space. Chapter 1 proposes that, in the context of fairgrounds in the Netherlands, early cinema's "intermedial enmeshing" is a probable cause for the aesthetic experience of presence. This chapter employs the concept of intermediality to outline how the kinematograph attraction caused both a semantically rich as well as a sensuously multivalent experience. It then presents a detailed study of the activities and attractions of the showman Henri Grünkorn before he exhibited "Electric Cinematograph." Chapter 1 also investigates the various layers of discourse involved in Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (1897), a series of scenes exhibited by Grünkorn that was popular with local audiences at the time. Chapter 2 focuses on the experience of movement. Through a close study of the introduction of moving images in the context of Chicago in 1896 and 1897, it proposes that moving pictures presented a radically familiar form of motion. It was familiar in the sense that it brought together a number of constellations of motion and energy fundamental to modernity. Situating moving images in the rhythms of the city allows us to conceptualize the spectator as physically engaged with the motion of the kinematograph. Chapter 3 studies the paradox of proximity and distance and discusses moving-picture attractions as they were introduced in vaudeville and popular theater in Chicago. It describes the different constellations between screen and live performance from a spatial perspective while focusing on the representation of bodies. In many ways, the paradox of nearness and distance allowed for a spatially oriented play with presences. The study concludes with a discussion on the potential and challenges of including presence effects in film-historical research on viewing experiences in early cinema and beyond.

2021

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content-related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. Attention to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences.

2009