Expanded Painting: Ontological Aesthetics and the Essence of Colour 9781350004177, 9781350004191, 9781350004160

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Expanded Painting

Also available from Bloomsbury Endless Andness, Mieke Bal Thinking in Film, Mieke Bal Reparative Aesthetics, Susan Best Making Sense, Lorna Collins Aesthetics and Painting, Jason Gaiger The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, edited by Joseph J. Tanke and Colin McQuillan The Curatorial, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon

Expanded Painting Ontological Aesthetics and the Essence of Colour Mark Titmarsh

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Mark Titmarsh, 2017 Mark Titmarsh has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0417-7 PB: 978-1-3501-0199-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0416-0 ePub: 978-1-3500-0418-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Cameron Tonkinwise, the university of one

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5

The Presence of Paint Expanded Painting Post Aesthetics An Ontology of Colour The Painting of Being

Notes Bibliography Index

viii xi 1 13 77 131 157 173 195 213

List of Figures 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

2.9

2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17

Mark Titmarsh, Ecology of Art Diagram, 2016 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912, paperboard, paper, string, wire (restored), 65.1 × 33 × 19 cm Vladimir Tatlin, Painting Relief, 1914 Vladimir Tatlin, Complex Corner Relief, 1915 Kazimir Malevich, Alpha Architecton, 1920 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1916–1917 El Lissitzky, Prounenraum, 1923, reconstruction 1971. Collection Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil on oil-cloth over canvas edged with rope, 29 × 37 cm Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913, reconstructed 1964, painted wooden stool and bicycle wheel, overall 126.5 cm, stool 50.4 cm, wheel 64.8 diameter cm Ian Burn (1939–1993), No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other, synthetic polymer paint on wood, mirror, lettering, 64.5 × 64.5 × 3.0 cm frame Ian Burn (1939–1993), Artists Think No. 2, 1993, oil on canvas boards, painted frames, three parts, each 38.5 × 29.0 × 4.5 cm Donald Judd, Untitled, 1963, light cadmium red oil on wood, 49.5 × 114.3 × 77.5 cm Frank Stella, Polk City, 1963, zinc chromate on canvas, 207.33 × 232.09 × 7.94 cm Robert Smithson, Corner Mirror with Coral, 1969, 91.5 × 91.5 × 91.5 cm Robert Smithson, Mono Lake Nonsite, 1968 Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (2), 1969 Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, 1969 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, 1969

3 19 20 21 22 23 25 27

27

33 35 36 37 40 41 42 43 43

List of Figures

ix

2.18 Robert Smithson, Drawing of Concrete Pour, 1969, pencil, ink, crayon and tape on paper, 20 × 25 cm 43 2.19 Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950 47 2.20 Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), An Apple Shrine, environment presented at the Judson Gallery, New York (1960) 48 2.21 Jeff Koons, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced, Tripledecker, 1981–1987, four shampoo polishers, vacuum cleaner, acrylic, fluorescent lights, 231.1 × 137.2 × 71.1 cm 55 2.22 Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1981–88, six poster panels with collage, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view from the exhibition, Ilya Kabakov: Ten Characters, Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York, 30 April–4 June 1988. Photograph by D. James Dee 57 2.23 Jessica Stockholder, Growing Rock Candy Mountain Grasses in Canned Sand, April 1992, 23 × 12 m piece of violet bathing suit material, sandstone native to Munster, gaseous concrete building blocks, plaster, basket material, electrical wiring, three very small lights, newspaper glued to the wall, acrylic paint, metal cables and Styrofoam, overall 29 × 9 m. Installation view at Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany 58 2.24 Rosalind Krauss, Diagram of Expanded Sculpture, 1979 60 2.25 Mark Titmarsh, Diagram of Family Resemblances of Expanded Painting, 2016 63 2.26 Huseyin Sami, Spaghetti Ball #3, 2008, acrylic paint, 20 × 23 × 23 cm 64 2.27 Richard Dunn, Shadowzone, 2005, fluorescent lights, polyester, wire rigging, loudspeakers, 1,500 × 1,500 × 350 cm, sound component, ‘An Einem Ort – An Einem Andere Ort’, Marcus Kaiser, Cello, 2004/05. Installation view Artspace, Sydney, Australia 71 3.1 Jim Lambie, Zobop, 1999, remade on installation, presented by Tate Members 2006, vinyl tape, overall display dimensions variable 123

x

3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3

List of Figures

Katharina Grosse, Cincy, 2006, acrylic on wall, floor, glass, styrofoam and soil, 480 × 740 × 1,180 cm Sandra Selig, Ancient Angle, 2016, spun polyester thread, nails, acrylic paint, 280 × 365 × 180 cm Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint, 1974; performance, video, photographs Video still, Andrew Liversidge, ‘ALL THAT FALL (red, yellow, blue)’, 2013, HD video, 16:9, 34.02 min

125 159 161 162

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Andrew Benjamin and Kees Dorst, who helped shape the text, and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, The University of Technology Sydney, Australia, whose generous support made the whole project possible.

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The Presence of Paint

If one uses paint to make art, then it is first of all paint before it can be realised in its intended state, that is, as art Ian Burn1

Painting? 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.

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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. As a result painting in the twenty-first century is understood as a visual phenomenon that can be physically extended and challenged by non-visual practices. This was originally initiated by Conceptual Art in 1960s with an attempt to get beyond the eye, to include other sensory modes and in particular the critical power of thinking in relation to art making. The eye was seen as a political prejudice that somehow denigrated the other senses and forced work ‘up against the wall’, so that it could be captured as a commodity for a fully self-sufficient viewer. Conceptual Painting2 dematerialized the painted image in favour of ideas, constructions, processes and ephemeral events. This completed the synthesis of a physical/pictorial dialectic begun in Cubism, where painting was, for the first time, treated as something more than an infinitely thin surface on which illusory depths could be projected. The movement from Cubism to Conceptual art constituted an historical drive to dismantle painting and reconstruct it in the context of new regimes of vision brought on by media revolutions of the twentieth century that included photography, cinema and television. Since then new digital media and the related concepts of information space have forced another rethinking of the camera obscura model of perspectival vision towards a decentred multi-layered quantum of sensory experience.

An ecology of painting? The freedom of painting to move beyond a flat picture plane is more than a conceptual argument about vision. Understanding the broader context of painting involves a movement outward through the formal technologies of the craft to a global cultural environment as well as a journey inwards through conceptual schemas to formal trends in contemporary art making. To be able to move in both directions at once involves a different intellectual schema

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beyond those provided by art discourse to date. Outside of art world notions of vision and conceptualism, but intimately connected with it by virtue of a global dynamic, is the science of ecology. In ecological thinking there is no such thing as an independent thing; everything is interconnected and interdependent through a living web of relationality. In the organic world there is no clear division between tree, roots, tubers, earth, microscopic creatures, moisture, each is dynamically interconnected and none survives without the other. An ecologically informed discourse in relationship to contemporary art practice would involve a reconsideration of what a painting can be in relation to all the other components of the art world. Consequently, an artist and their painting would have no distinct barriers within the entire cultural field of art. This field would in turn be dynamically linked to all other cultural practices, which are further integrated into the natural environment of the planet. Within an ‘ecology of art’ the object status of a painting would no longer be that of an isolated thing discussed in terms of visual pleasure and personal expression. It would be understood as one element within a dynamically evolving environment of interconnections, between all the players in the art world such as artist, dealer, viewer, critic, curator, collector and beyond (Figure 1.1). Consequently, ecological thinking could become an all-encompassing lens through which everything including painting could be seen and understood.

Figure 1.1 Mark Titmarsh, Ecology of Art Diagram, 2016

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Where does such a view originate? The term ‘ecology’ was coined by the nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, who used it for the first time to describe the interrelationships between organisms and their environment.3 By the twentieth century ecology was exclusively associated with biological issues such as animal behaviour, pollution, conservation, climatology and habitat management. However, since 1960s many cultural issues have become ecological. Henry Hawley developed the term ‘human ecology’ so as to treat human society and urban spatial patterns as ecological phenomena.4 Felix Guattari fused the disciplines of ecology and philosophy into an ‘ecosophy’ that proposed an ecologically nested relationship between self, human community and the natural world.5 However, in the visual arts ecological discourse has had little impact. Suzi Gablik attempted to link the two by suggesting that there is a general sense of disenchantment with contemporary art because it has become alienated from practices of community and ritual.6 She suggests we have entered an age requiring new forms of essential interconnectedness that can only be provided by art forms inspired by ecological philosophy. From this position artists have stepped outside the mould of individual expression to develop works based on community partnership and compassionate action for the environment. Yet this kind of work does not define the full potentiality of an ecology of art, let alone an ecosophical discourse for art. Hints of both are found in a new kind of language developed for art by Martin Heidegger in his seminal essay ‘Origin of the work of Art’7 (OWA). In it he disposed of a bias towards pure visual phenomena as contained in traditional discussions of fine art. Instead of the language of visual pleasure he introduced the terms ‘earth’ and ‘world’ to indicate material and cultural principles that form the basis of an artwork. Heidegger’s use of the term ‘earth’, indicating a dynamic force uncontainable and unfathomable to human reason, has become an important concept in the contemporary deep ecology movement8 as well as a new model for discussing art in its elemental status. Heidegger also focuses on inter relationships as opposed to isolated individuals and objects in his discussion of tools and their usage. He argues that the tool disappears into the empire of equipment and at the same time the user and the tool become part of a process of making where there is no division between the person, the tool and the process. From an ecological perspective the same field dynamic occurs in a natural setting where each element such

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5

as animal, earth, sun, air and water play an indivisible part in the life of an ecosystem. Neither tool nor ecosystem is thought about in the daily rounds of life until they break down and need some kind of repair, as we find in our current state of global warming.

Fieldworks The problem with ecological models applied to art is that they are framed in relation to biology and the natural sciences and tend to exclude more subtle methods for the consideration of contemporary art. The precise language and mathematical constructs of science-based ecology leaves little room for the imprecise non-functionality of art. What can be borrowed from ecology is the model of a general field dynamic, already familiar to practitioners of structural analysis in literature and the visual arts. Consistent with this, Rosalind Krauss used a field model, borrowed from structural linguistics, to study avant-garde developments in contemporary art.9 Her writings on the expanded field became the basis of a postmodern understanding of art in relation to both sculpture and painting. She also provides the link for building a line of enquiry that grows out of scientific mathematical thinking into a more specific yet flexible discourse for art. Consequently, this book builds towards a philosophy of art with a particular focus on painting, as opposed to a science of art by way of ecology and structuralism. From such a position the primary questions become: What is painting? How is painting ordinarily understood? What do unusual nontraditional forms of painting tell us about the boundaries of painting? What do boundaries and limits tell about essences and the core of painting? And finally what is the being of painting? The nature of painting is something that is rarely discussed in a deeper philosophical sense. Much discussion of contemporary painting focuses on the death of painting, the end of a conservative and ossified discipline now superseded by contemporary forms such as installation art and digital media. Other discussions of contemporary painting focus on the content of painting, its figuration or abstraction, its political nature, its topicality, references to

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Expanded Painting

popular culture and so on. In all these something of the essential nature of painting, its very materiality and primordial presence is passed over. Even in formalist analysis, where canvas, liquid, colour, brush and flatness of the surface are foregrounded, something of the difference between the object nature of painting and its thingliness10 is still obscured.

Painting expanded Since the relevance of painting has been so often challenged over the last 100 years, painting has become a question to itself. The result is that painting has thrown up a genre of practice in response to its own disappearance, a genre still in the process of being articulated, that I would like to call ‘expanded painting’. Where does this name come from? From nowhere really. Or at least nowhere in particular, it has just come into popular usage, from the studio and the street, without any defining principle governing it. It turns up in fringe situations such as the Prague Biennale, The Spanish Castellon Prize, writings and events by the curator Paco Barragan, academic texts inspired by Rosalind Krauss. The term is basically a reworking of the title of Krauss’ essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. If we replace sculpture with painting, we get ‘painting in the expanded field’, which becomes ‘expanded painting’ for short. This kind of painting-as-more-than-painting is like mobile phones and popular Transformers toys since each involves coupling and shape shifting. Looking at the whole history of painting it could be argued that painting too is a transformer, a convergent medium, inherently a changeling, a morphological engine producing novel ways of being different from what it has been in the past. Thinking reflexively, expanded painting appears as a medium deepening itself through self-questioning. It questions itself at a formal level, challenging surface, colour and image, digging down to a series of questions: What is essential to painting? What can be removed or added to painting? Can paint be removed from painting? Can sculpture be added to painting and so on. As formal boundaries tumble in nearly every art discipline the riddle arises: how to identify the various connections between expanded painting, expanded sculpture, expanded film, video installation, conceptual photography,

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deconstructed architecture as they converge on each other’s domain? When historically separated disciplines do develop common boundaries then our language for discussing them becomes challenged and inadequate. Allan Kaprow identified this tendency as early as 1950s and proposed abandoning all discipline-based definitions of art: the young artist of today need no longer say ‘I am a painter’ or ‘a dancer’, he or she is simply an artist.11

Another more recent solution has been to develop the term ‘installation art’ which catches all these practices in one sweep but says very little about their potential differences or specific applications. Installation art as an alternative term for expanded painting has identifiable roots that thread back through Minimalism, Conceptualism, Arte Povera, Fluxus, Rauschenberg, Pollock, Duchamp, Lissitzky, Tatlin and Picasso. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the balance between painting as an object and painting as an image began to tip with Picasso’s synthetic cubism. By introducing ‘foreign’ objects such as wallpaper, newspaper, cardboard, sand and rope, Picasso denied the infinitely thin surface of the image and extended the range of painterly operations. Almost immediately afterwards, Duchamp pushed the extended modes of painterly production to an a-logical extreme by abandoning all the craft skills associated with painting. By continuing to exhibit readymades as an extension of painting practice and in the context of avant-garde painting Duchamp challenged the ‘proper name’ of painting.12 Schematically, the historical evolution towards expanded painting has five stages: First stage – the challenge to mimesis and representation, from Cezanne to abstraction. Second stage – the challenge to surface and picture plane, featuring exaggeration or elimination of the frame and the interruption of the flat surface with unusual objects, as in synthetic cubism, constructed painting and readymades. Third stage – the challenge to the vertical picture plane, where painting leaves the wall and rests on the floor collecting debris, as in Rauschenberg and Minimalism.

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Fourth stage – painting abandons the picture plane to occupy space, with the division of painterly elements like frame, colour, surface into objectlike substitutes and their alliance with other media, as in Conceptual Art, concrete painting, where the term ‘installation art’ grows in usage. Fifth stage – painting abandons materiality and embraces experience, temporality and an indeterminate theoretical practice that awaits proper consideration. At the culmination of this historical drive, Expanded Painting moves out beyond our understanding of what painting could be, demanding a discourse outside of what art history can provide. From the domain of philosophical discourse, particularly the existential thinking of Martin Heidegger, comes the dynamic of ontological difference. It appears to speak the same language of contemporary art and begins to generate a productive conflict between the fundamental materiality of paint and cultural specificity of the discipline of painting. Painting couched in the primary terms of fundamental being can move back and forth between the earthly nature of materials used in the studio, the being of the planet and individual human being.

Post aesthetics Investigating the essential being of painting, rather than conceptualizing painting as a visual phenomenon, means looking at all the aspects of an artwork beyond its physical presence as a completed work. It has a prehistory in the studio, a period of production, reaching a state of completion, then a period where it enters the cultural stream and is appropriated by institutions and discourse. As painters shed layers of old easel-based identities, a few questions arise. What is it about painting that makes it painting? What is it about any media that gives it a proper name? What is it about an artist that makes them different to a designer or lawyer? What is the most appropriate language for discussing these new kinds of artwork? It is this propensity for ontological doubt, to question everything that ‘is’, that is part of the spirit of our age. Everything solid has now turned to a question, from the nature of art to the future of the planet. We are continually

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challenged by events from 11 September to the Global Financial Crisis, which go to the heart of our everyday presumptions. At the same time the nature of traditional and electronic media goes through more and more rapid change and development affecting our ability to think and visualize a world in flux. Krysztof Ziarek13 captures this moment by suggesting that art stands at a five-way crossroad, with each direction leading to a different kind of finality. In one direction 1. art is already dead, a thing of the past. In another there is a new dawn, an age of 2. neo-aesthetics, based on recent attempts to revive the beautiful and sublime to justify an aesthetic understanding of contemporary art. In another, art has fused with and been completely supplanted by 3. popular culture: popular cinema, social media and video game culture become the site of contemporary artistic innovation. In another direction, there has been an irreversible fusion of 4. art and technology, art and new media, leaving digital media rather than art as the primary term. On the fifth and last signpost is written 5. ‘post aesthetics’, which is an attempt to think art beyond aesthetics, beyond subjective affects and beyond technological functionality.

‘Post aesthetics’ is a term Ziarek develops in relation to the thinking of Martin Heidegger. When Heidegger began to take art philosophically he found it poorly served by the discipline of aesthetics. Aesthetics as a modern philosophy of art had diminished the potentiality of art by reducing it to a private sensory experience. In previous ages art had defined a world by setting the limits between people, communities, nature and gods. Heidegger saw art in our own age as simply producing titillations for a jaded audience. He re-values art by giving it his philosophical attention, by lifting it out of aesthetics into a new discourse of art, artist and artwork. Rather than talking about the subjective experience of the artist or the viewer he focuses instead on the material presence of the artwork and how it invokes a cultural situation without necessarily addressing any one person in particular. As such art does not happen as a communication between two individuals rather it is an event that opens up a cultural world and reveals the essential materiality of things in the same stroke.14

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Research-making When art is recalibrated in this way our habitual aesthetic understanding becomes untenable. Art can no longer function simply as a luxury commodity for equitable acquisition, as decoration of dwellings or as visual entertainment in global media. In the so-called creative industries, art is taken as a valueadding device for any economic activity from advertising and tourism through to town planning and retailing. In most of these situations art is seen as ‘the ultimate economic resource’15 bringing wealth and personal pleasure rather than new kinds of presence and understanding. When art can hold open a space beyond aesthetic and economic commodification, it becomes an interface between matter and thinking, between active physicality and bringing-to-knowledge. Artworks in this view become hybrids of thoughtful research and active making that could be named ‘research-making’, engendering an engaged responsiveness that contributes to the understanding of art as well as the broader cultural context. By treating the studio as the place where action is framed between the push of ideas and the pull of materials, art making like many other kinds of research is a way of discovering knowledge through applied practice.16 When painting is taken as a form of research-making, it generates a series of new questions: How much understanding of art is lost by not knowing what goes on in the studio? Does an artist actually think while making or are they just lost in the process?17 Is making in the studio qualitatively different from other kinds of production such as carpentry or engineering? Why do certain kinds of making result in something we call painting as opposed to sculpture or installation? If studio production is a broad patchwork of processes including drawing, carpentry, journaling and so on, how do they come together as a particular practice? Many of these issues arise when considering the contemporary work of artists such as Jim Lambie, Katherine Grosse, David Batchelor, Jessica Stockholder, Julian Opie, John Armleder, Karen Kilimnik, Douglas Gordon, Cai Guo-Qiang, Stephen Prina, Rudolf Stingel, Takashi Murakami, Tobias Rehberger, Andrea Zittel, Liam Gillick, Tom Friedman, Cady Noland, Gunther Forg, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Artschwager and Lynda Benglis, all of whom work across disciplines with no predominant affiliation to painting. Their

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work involves various modes of production that include painting, objects, environments, video and text, and it is indefinite whether any one of them determines the work. The work is best described as multi-modal, not fitting easily into disciplinebased categories of painting, sculpture or video. Their outcomes have an ongoing nature that is always being reframed, taking on the character of a moving target for any critical enquiry. While individual works may be completed and shows mounted, the process of making more work in new media is always at hand. Consequently, there is a loose ensemble of relationships between processes and outcomes that becomes the nature of the work, giving it a quality of coherence and completeness in its shifting diversity. No specific form of critical analysis is implicated in the work, so preconceptions and theoretical overviews need to be dropped so that an emergent characterization can develop. As a first step on this path it can be said quite simply that all of them have an aspect of visual engagement, without that necessarily being the ultimate goal of the work. Rather, visuality is the means for establishing a connection with something in the world, noticing that it stands out, thereby defining it as a thing of interest with something more to be said and done about it. Many of the works contain aspects of colour and line, which are often characterized as the two of the primary elements of painting.18 While painting is historically the home of colour it is not exclusively so, as is demonstrated by coloured sculpture and the predominance of colour in video and other media. Conversely, all paintings have some kind of dimensionality or thickness that can be deployed in various modes, through thickness of stretchers, thickness of paint, extra elements added to the surface of the painting and so on. Thus three-dimensionality is not the exclusive domain of sculpture and so on. In the very process of focusing on painting, in choosing one studio discipline over another, paradoxically the boundaries between disciplines become more fluid and interconnected. This begs the question, does painting have an essence, an essential set of qualities that define it as painting? By using paint, sculptural objects and video, artists range across multiple materials that can carry colour, from paint in a tube, through readymade mass-produced commodities, to coloured pixels on a screen. Intentionally or not, they pose colour in new forms and challenge the objectification of

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paint as the dominant medium for carrying colour. Consequently, what they do is suggestive of a non-traditional painting practice, no longer confined by the conventions of easel painting, while searching out new spatialized environments for colour to take place. Expanded painting is another way of naming a multi-modal practice that takes place in the context of the artworld, cohering around the visual, in particular the appearance of colour in a non-traditional form of painting. While non-traditional painting provides an adequate description of a broad field of practice, it gives no insight into the significance of the work. To elaborate on a context of significance involves placing the art and the act of making in the larger cultural domain of aesthetic discourse traditionally articulated through art history and art theory. Overall, painting has been present as a significant art form since the dawn of human culture and because of that is sometimes taken for granted in both its importance and its materiality. Under more critical scrutiny it can be shown that paint as the basic unit of painting practice has evolved through various manifestations from water and egg to oil and plastic-based acrylics. All of those methods for carrying colour and applying it to a surface are technical developments that support and suspend changes in meaning as painting moves from prehistoric caves to churches, museums and domestic dwellings. In the past few decades, the presence of paint as pigment in suspension has become very complicated in relation to our habitual understanding of painting and its importance in the overall context of visual phenomena. Perhaps anything that carries colour, whether it be an automobile chassis or builder’s string, has as much claim to being ‘paint’ as something squeezed out of tube. It is this complication in the presence of paint and the significance of the experience of painting that will be the subject of the following chapters.

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Expanded Painting

Expanded painting could be simply defined as painting plus something else. As a result, it is a kind of painting that moves out beyond the easel and the physical limitations of the image to investigate how far painting can go in spatial and temporal dimensions. By expanding off the wall it engages objects and environments while mingling illicitly with sculpture, installation, video and nearly all other media. But, is expanded painting a recent phenomenon or does it have a history? Does it take place in a broader social context? The story begins over a 100 years ago when artists began to challenge the limited presence of painting, gradually shedding flatness and craft-based rules, in favour of spatial and conceptual expansion. A century-long drive to transform the nature of painting has resulted in a paradigm shift as momentous as previous developments from the cave wall to portable easel painting. Ultimately, it involves a radical refiguring of the presence of the painted image and the object-based nature of painting.

The death of painting Coincident with the transition in the nature of painting has been a consistent discourse about the end of painting as a relevant practice in an age of new media and information technologies. This begins in the middle of the nineteenth century when photography first challenged painting as a dominant mode of representation and continued into the twentieth century with the development of printmaking techniques, mass production technologies, cinema and digital media. With each of these new technological developments, ushering in new ways of capturing images of the world, painting was seen as superseded. However, with each instance, painting survived, albeit in an altered state,

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staging itself as a response to, or anticipation of, the new conditions of visibility and reproducibility. The multiple deaths of painting could be characterized as a series of rebirths or transitions in the nature of painting. The end of painting, seen as a series of little deaths, becomes the story of painting’s mutation by degrees. By surviving each mortal blow, and breaking free of the ‘logic of the end’,1 an endless set of new possibilities is released in relation to painting. As Eva Geulen puts it when discussing another end in the history of art: The end of art constitutes a privileged site for exploring problems of the end. For art, aesthetics, including the question of transcendence, overcoming, or obsolescence, is the domain in which questions of the possibility or impossibility of unity and closure, end and beginning, success and failure, are handled as questions of form.2

The so-called ‘end of art’ provides a privileged site for discussing historical shifts of any kind, whether they be social, political or aesthetic. When painting shifts from the cave wall to the built environment there is a significant shift in the nature of society and the language for art. The closure of one kind of world and the opening of another are reflected, amongst other things, by a change in the form of painting. Painting dies in one kind of society and is reformed in another. When painting is no longer relevant, when it has come to the end of an historical line, then it dies to its formal conventions and opens the possibility of another state, another way of being painting. The end is a rupture, and a rhetorical device, that enables a re-examination of the rules that make the appearance of painting possible. The end of painting covers and discovers continuities, so that an alternative beginning can be proposed.

Cave, church, easel, other By taking a broad overview of the history of painting from prehistory to the present, four moments of radical formal transition, leading from cave painting, to church painting, to easel painting, to non-traditional painting, stand out. These four epochs are schematic generalizations that do not take into account the complexities of detail between Egyptian and Greek art or the many styles of painting in Gothic, Byzantine, Renaissance, Modern and Postmodern

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art. However, they do reveal basic technological and sociological shifts that temporarily throw light on how painting comes to be in each place and time. Cave painting in Europe dates back 32,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic period and in Australasia some 40,000 years or more. All of these paintings are of animals and tracings of hands and the human body. No definitive information remains about them but some interpretations are that they are images of prey invoked to increase the outcome of the hunt3 or that they are images painted by shamen in visionary trances seeking to invoke the power of the rock itself.4 The rock paintings do not occur in the same place as habitation and are often in small remote caves. Consequently, they were not for decoration or for general consumption. While magic seems to be an important part of their reason for being, it is the form of the paintings, where they are found and the very appearance of an image that is of interest. As Jean Luc Nancy points out, cave paintings are the first time that an image-maker touches the wall not as support or obstacle but as a spacious place where something of the world can be evoked.5 The cave wall as a surface-for-painting is fixed and requires a certain kind of ritualistic visitation for both making and viewing the work.6 The transition to church painting involves painting frescoes on walls and ceilings in religious architecture. Since these works involve an immovable surface and religious ritual they are similar in spirit to cave painting. However, the secretive nature of the cave has been lost, with the paintings being displayed in public places and accessed by large numbers of people. While much can be said about the developments in style of imagery and the use of colour7 what is of interest is the formal presence of the painted element. Painting now exists to be seen and to communicate, and is tied very closely to the institution of the church both as a permanent architectural edifice and a source of social power. The next paradigm shift in painting takes place with the rise of easel painting which takes painting out of its fixed relation to a place. While an easel is the wooden structure that holds up a canvas while the painter paints, it refers iconically to the fact that the painted surface can be lifted onto and off the easel and is inherently moveable and portable to and from various locations. Early easels were constructed like desks to hold the painted surface below the eye of the painter. Later easels were established as vertical, placing the surface to be painted at eye height. Typically the self-conscious introspective artist represents themselves in self portraiture facing the easel. The easel mirrors

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the subject, since both are mobile, active, independent and authoritative. It is no coincidence that both came into being with the birth of humanism and a separation from the power of the church. As the easel tears itself away from the monumental authority of the church wall, so the individual pulls away from the hierarchy of god’s kingdom. The modern authority of easel painting carried with it prejudices about canvas and liquids, just as the subject carries certain prejudices of independence and self-possession. Easel painting has dominated thinking about the nature of painting for half a millennium. So it is no coincidence that when humanism and rational subjectivity are challenged in the twentieth century, that the next stage is set for a shift in the nature of painting.

Another beginning The drive to get beyond easel painting with another kind of painting begins in the first decades of the twentieth century when avant-garde artists become as concerned with the form of the work as they are with its contents. Thus artists begin to take their exclusive attention away from what is happening inside the frame of the painting and start to consider the nature of framing itself. Similarly, imagery and aspects of representation that might have been confined to the flatness of an illusionary surface are detached as general principles and applied to concrete materials and situations. By challenging frame and surface the whole edifice of easel painting is dismantled, reaching a peak in the 1960s during the time of Conceptual art when a new form of poststudio practice is established. By the 1980s artists returned to the studio armed with the institutional critiques of conceptual art, producing neo-conceptual8 work that received the catchall title of ‘installation art’. Installation art grew out of a dialectic between skills crafted in the painting studio and the political critique of art world structures particularly the ‘white cube’ exhibition space.9 Contemporary non-traditional painting takes its coordinates from installation art since installation art is the very broad formal term out of which a more specific and accurate practice is to be identified. Is there a more appropriate term other than, ‘non-traditional painting’, that can be historically and theoretically validated?

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To find it involves looking more closely at four historical stages in the evolution of painting away from the easel to a contemporary non-traditional form: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

The early twentieth-century avant-garde 1960s conceptual and minimalist art 1980s neo-conceptualism Recent non-traditional painting

(i) Early twentieth-century avant-garde – Punching through the screen By aggressively penetrating the imaginary screen, constituted by the canvas substrate of painting, a repressed tension between virtuality and actuality, image and object is released with uncertain results for both painting and sculpture. While nearly every avant-garde artist in Europe is touched by this tension, five artists at crucial moments in their practice, lead the discussion. Namely Picasso during the period of cubist constructions, Tatlin at the time of his corner reliefs, Malevich during Volumetric Suprematism, Lissitzky and Proun Rooms, and finally Duchamp in the transition to the Readymades. (a) Picasso’s cubist constructions Cubism is crucial to the understanding of non-traditional painting since it is the point where all the Renaissance delimitations of painting, in the form of perspective, flatness and framing, are thoroughly disturbed. Broadly speaking, Cubism rejects the convention that a painting is a representation of reality and proposes instead the formal concept that a painting is a flat surface covered with conventional symbols of perception.10 Consequently, cubist artists refused to represent the unity of space and integrity of objects, something accepted unquestioningly since the Cinquecento. They replaced rational space with an indeterminacy of dismembered planes and multiple points of perceptual concentration. In the early stages of cubism, African sculpture was an important influence on Picasso, since it exemplified an ability to distort anatomy free of representational conventions. The result was that Picasso treated mass, void, line, plane, colour and value as independent entities that could be individually explored as part of an open-ended language of painting. Cubist artists became so vigorous in their rejection of Renaissance

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conventions that ‘contrariness’ or complete inversion of rules became a hallmark of their paintings. Thus solids replace voids, voids replace solids, opaque objects become transparent, transparent objects opaque, straight lines curved and curved straight. It was in this kind of mood that the flatness of the surface of painting became solid and the wetness of paint was extended to include dry matter such as paper, rope, wallpaper, sand and so on. Thus a whole series of inversions of established pictorial conventions leads dialectically to physical extensions out from the painted surface, in the form of collage, papier colle and ultimately ‘cubist construction’.11 In ‘Guitar’ (Figure 2.1), made in the winter of 1912–1913, Picasso ‘constructs’ a guitar from cardboard and string using the exact same conventions that he had developed in several years of cubist painting. He uses the same subject matter as his paintings in that he often painted musical instruments and musicians. He also uses the same cubist anti-conventions of casting voids as solid and solids as voids and so on. Rosenblum identifies cubist construction as the next step on from cubist collage in painting: The very nature of collage, with its piecing together of materials conceived as physical realities, was almost more closely related to palpable constructive processes of the sculptor than to the illusionary techniques of the painter. In 1912 Picasso made metal and paper cut-outs such as Guitar which in a logical but heretical way, paralleled the technique of pasting papers in the world of real space by liberating Cubist planes from the confines of a flat rectangular background.12

Picasso had never trained as a sculptor and never claimed to be one. Consequently, the work appears to be a spatialization of cubist painting that simply discards any need for canvas, paint and a ‘flat rectangular background’. It is the relation between Picasso’s cubist paintings, collage works and cubist constructions that suggests a triangulation between illusory depth, literal surface and actual volumes. This triangular tension results in a move towards a ‘constructed’ rather than a ‘painted’ painting, that influenced and inspired other avant-garde artists such as Tatlin, Malevich, Lissitzky and Duchamp. Even though Picasso only did a few cubist constructions, and returned to painting on canvas almost immediately, he had let the genie out of the bottle for the others to invoke.

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Figure 2.1 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912, paperboard, paper, string, wire (restored), 65.1 × 33 × 19 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, © Succession Picasso. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

(b) Tatlins painting reliefs and corner reliefs Vladimir Tatlin as a young artist was so impressed by Picasso’s cubist paintings that he sold his possessions to pay for his visit to Picasso in Paris in 1913. At that time Picasso was working on his cubist constructions and Tatlin immediately understood their significance for painting. He begged Picasso to let him stay as an unpaid assistant but to no avail.13 Returning to his studio in Moscow he completely transformed his practice from painting on canvas to what he called ‘painting reliefs’ and then ‘corner reliefs’. The first painting reliefs (Figure 2.2) were made in direct response to Picasso’s cubist constructions and featured the shallow construction of objects using selections of materials such as metal, wood, wire and paint. These works were still close to painting since they were presented in a frame and hung on the wall. Soon afterwards he dropped both the flatness of painting and the frame to develop corner reliefs that occupied the indeterminate space where two walls joined (Figure 2.3). From these works Tatlin developed his philosophy of faktura, or ‘real materials in real space’,14 which is posed as the polar opposite of ‘painted objects

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Figure 2.2 Vladimir Tatlin, Painting Relief, 1914 (destroyed), image courtesy of The Russian Experiment in Art, Camilla Gray, Thames and Hudson, 1962

in representational space’. The frame of painting was seen as a barrier isolating the work of art from real life and locking it into a private ideal bourgeois world. This conflicted with the revolutionary ideals of the new Russia and the leftist artists who supported, and were supported by the new regime. Tatlin went on to design his most famous work, The Monument to the Third International (1919–1920), which was to be an enormous public building twice the height of the Empire State Building and constructed in glass and iron. Though never built it symbolizes a monument to the new artist-engineer who dismissed easel painting as an anachronism both in its tools and its social conventions.15

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Figure 2.3 Vladimir Tatlin, Complex Corner Relief, 1915 (reconstruction by Martyn Chalk 1994), courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London, © Martyn Chalk

The power of Tatlin’s rejection of painting operated as a slingshot that catapulted him out of pictorial conventions into new ideas of artistic production where not only painting would come to an end, but art itself. Art fully merged into the demands of a new technological worker state would no longer be art, but a new mode of cultural practice in relation to productive mode and social formation.16

(c) Malevich’s Volumetric Suprematism Malevich and Tatlin were ideologically opposed since Malevich continued to believe in the transcendental power of abstract painting. Malevich affirmed the absolute autonomy of painting while Tatlin believed painting should be dismantled in service to new technology and the state. Malevich believed the Russian Revolution opened the way for a new spiritual freedom above and beyond the demands of a technological society. Despite these differences, which culminated in blows on one occasion, they shared a remarkably similar path leading from cubist influenced painting through to forms of object

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making established on painterly pictorial conventions. Malevich between 1913 and 1918 developed through various stages of Black Suprematism, Coloured Suprematism and White Suprematism. Suprematism, so named by Malevich, was an avant-garde movement in painting that was defined as a search for ‘pure sensation’.17 This period of intense activity culminated in a work entitled Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), which was a painting of entirely white tones. For Malevich the colour white represented all space in all time, achieving the ultimate invocation of pure sensation in paint. As such White on White was a terminus point, leaving him nowhere else to go in the practice of easel painting. His subsequent work could only go beyond the canvas and signalled a new spatio temporal practice known as Volumetric Suprematism. In it he applied the principles of suprematism to everyday practices such as teaching, applied arts and what has been ambiguously understood as a form of architecture. In works known as ‘architektons’ he extended the geometric purity of suprematist painting into three-dimensional form (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4 Kazimir Malevich, Alpha Architecton, 1920, Creative Commons. Photo by Saliko

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While these works have an architectural appearance and subsequently influenced artists and designers who would teach at the Bauhaus, they are more readily understood as a material extrusion based on the pictorial conventions and motifs developed in Malevich’s Suprematist paintings particularly those from the coloured suprematism period (Figure 2.5). This kind of inter-dimensional shift from painting principles into material constructions is of the same order as Picasso’s movement from cubist painting

Figure 2.5 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1916–1917. Photo by Hogers & Versluys. Collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

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to cubist constructions. The metropolitan Moscow avant-garde, in which Malevich flourished, was functioning as an experimental laboratory taking Picasso’s innovations in painting to the next stage of development that Picasso was unable to do himself. (d) Lissitzky’s Proun Rooms Before falling under the influence of Malevich and the principles of Suprematism, El Lissitzky trained as an engineer and architect. His predisposition was to develop a fusion between the visual arts and architecture that culminated in a series of paintings he called ‘Prouns’. Proun was a Russian acronym signifying ‘for the new art’18 and meant for Lissitzky a place where painting could ‘change trains to the spatial effects of architecture’.19 Like his Russian contemporaries, Malevich and Tatlin, Lissitizky’s idea was not containable by the mere surface of painting. Thus by the mid-1920s principles developed in oil on canvas had evolved into theatre and exhibition design. As Alan C. Birnholz points out: It is important to recognise that Lissitzky approached Proun composition essentially as a problem in the definition of space. As the Proun series developed, the spatial interplay increased in both in dynamism and subtlety.20

Eventually the visual language of the Proun paintings, geometric and refined, exploded out to occupy an entire room (Figure 2.6). As Lissitzky puts it himself: Room-space is not there for the eyes alone, it is not a picture; it must be lived in … the six surfaces (floor, four walls, ceiling). These are the given factors to be designed.21

Lissitzky’s evolution into objects, painted wood and interior design elements meant that he had moved away from the virtualities of painting into ‘real space and real material life’,22 a position very similar to Tatlin’s ‘real materials in real space’. However, Lissitzky was somewhere between Malevich and Tatlin in that he was indifferent to Malevich’s exotic metaphysical concerns while at the same time not willing to sacrifice art as Tatlin did to the demands of industrial culture.23 All the artists discussed so far have evolved out of painting into threedimensional forms while at the same time continuing to carry the essential

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Figure 2.6 El Lissitzky, Prounenraum, 1923, reconstruction 1971. Collection Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

principles of enquiry established by painting. For them easel painting in its traditional historical form was found to be somehow inadequate, a barrier to be penetrated, overcome, transcended. The question remains whether the transcendence of painting results in a new form of sculpture, or architecture, or a form of transcendent painting.24 The works of Picasso, Tatlin, Malevich and Lissitzky give witness to the fact that painting is in a serious state of transition, at an ‘interchange station’ moving from one place, defined by pictorial conventions and crafts skills to another unnamed, unmapped zone. (e) Duchamp’s readymades It is Duchamp’s readymades that drive home the point that this mutation in the nature of painting is primarily driven by a confrontation with industrial culture. Chronologically speaking, Duchamp’s readymades should be discussed directly after Picasso’s cubist constructions. The readymades appear in the Parisian avant-garde art scene in 1913 as something of a response to Picasso’s

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synthetic cubist works.25 Yet Duchamp’s manoeuvre is such a quantitative leap away from painting that any earlier discussion of it would tend to overwhelm the more subtle transitional stages suggested by Malevich, Tatlin and Lissitzky. It is still possible to identify in their work a pictorial language developed in painting transposed into a practice beyond painting. However, with the Readymades there is no visual similarity with Duchamp’s earlier painting whatsoever. In the context of Parisian cubism, Duchamp was a minor figure and any comparison of his most well-known cubist work, Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 (1912) with works by Picasso and Braque is disappointing. Even Thierry de Duve one of Duchamp’s major contemporary commentators accepts that he was an industrious cerebral painter who was not enough of a born painter to attack his canvas directly with ‘natural flair’26

It is only the exotic infamy the painting received at the hands of conservative critics in the United States during the Armory Show that catapulted it into international notoriety. Nude simply alerts us to the fact that Duchamp is closely following the developments of cubism in his own practice and has some ambitions in that area. By 1912 Picasso had moved into a Synthetic Cubist phase where he was replacing the traditional materials of painting with objects of mass production such as newspaper clippings, printed fabric, wallpaper and even rope. In his most famous work from that time Still Life with Chair Caning (Figure 2.7), he bordered the oval painting with thick maritime rope. Concentrating on these ‘extra-mural’ objects populating the surface and perimeter of painting, it does not seem an enormous step for Duchamp to go from rope to bicycle wheel27 (Figure 2.8). Duchamp continued to challenge easel painting through a series of readymades and a later work, The Large Glass (Figure 2.10), which is not strictly a readymade but neither is it an easel painting. John Rachjman describes it as a ‘pictorial object’,28 indicating something that is not quite painting but not entirely free of it either. Similarly, Thierry de Duve reinforces the work’s relationship to painting by saying that: Even if it constituted a considerable point of rupture … in the tradition of painting, the Large Glass was nonetheless a ‘painted object’29

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Figure 2.7 Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil on oil-cloth over canvas edged with rope, 29 × 37 cm, © Succession Picasso. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

Figure 2.8 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913, reconstructed 1964, painted wooden stool and bicycle wheel, overall 126.5 cm, stool 50.4 cm, wheel 64.8 diameter cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973 © Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy 2016

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While many artists took the innovations of cubism in the direction of pure painting or abstraction, Duchamp opted for an ambiguous abandonment of painting that continued to question the nature of painting. To ‘abandon’ something is not just to discard it. It is to register the moment of its loss or ‘impossibility’ within a work in such a way as to open up, or call for, another history.30

Duchamp’s invention of the Readymade is a crucial moment where ‘another history’ of painting is called for, a history based on challenging the common sense presuppositions of painting’s past and a willingness to continually ask, can this new thing also be called painting? Challenging the presumptions of painting has a long history, whereby generations of artists have abandoned some aspect of painting considered sacred by years of conventional practice. Thierry de Duve lists some of them: The abandonment of chiaroscuro by Edouard Manet, of linear perspective by Cezanne, of Euclidean space by the Cubists, of figuration by the first Abstractionists, down to the figure/ground by many generations of monochrome painters.31

Each abandonment serves to question what painting has been, and to install ‘questioning painting’ as an important aspect of painting itself. Duchamp, by passing through the middle of cubism and out the other end into the Readymade continued this avant-garde tradition of placing a question mark above and around painting. The new questions that Duchamp’s work asked were, how can painting function in the new cultural context of industrial production, what kind of pictorial practices can survive in the face of mass reproductions, in a burgeoning machine age what place can there be for the visual, for the artist studio, for the craft of painterly production? Industrialization, new materials and new means of production seemed to make painting ‘objectively useless’.32 At that particular moment, the readymade was a nodal point in the abandonment of the common sense of pictorial practice … that transformed the ‘field of possibilities’ in which paintings could be made … reveal[ing] the fact that painting was ‘not happening’ [in the sense that] avant garde art accounts for the active

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destruction of tradition … [But this ‘not happening’] means not only ‘not happening anymore’ but also ‘not happening yet’.33

The readymade is Duchamp’s literal abandonment of painting, particularly its basis in craft skills meant to entertain the eye. However, by abandoning painting he is not affirming that painting is dead as a discipline, not even that it is dead for him as a personal interest. Rather, painting as historically understood is dead, is ‘not happening’. Whether painting has a future, as something yet to come, something ‘not yet happening’, is the very question incubating somewhere inside the Readymade. While Tatlin, Malevich, Lissitzky and Duchamp rode the crest of cubism towards a form of constructed anti-painting, many other European artists took cubism as a signpost towards abstraction. Abstraction, the major event in avant-garde painting at the time, was also a way in which painting was ‘not happening anymore’. Abstraction was yet another destruction of tradition, in particular the crafts of figuration and representation. But as with the successive loss of the traditions of chiaroscuro, linear perspective and rational space, destruction involved the creation of new traditions: Craft and the abandonment of craft are one and the same thing … the painting of the avant-garde affirmed new values where it seemed to deny old values.34

By abandoning the handmade craft element of painting Duchamp pushed the development of new non-visual skills, something that would be beyond mere ‘retinal painting’35 as he called it. The readymade figured a new conceptual craft for painting, since what is precisely non-retinal, is thought, concept and idea. Thus as the craft skills of studio production exited one wing of painting, conceptualism in the form of wit and philosophy, entered from another. The new values established by the readymade could only be found by an enquiry into the foundational language of painting, to ask what painting could be in an age when ‘industrialisation had made painting an impossible craft’.36 It could no longer be argued that painting had essential trans-historical qualities, instead it existed in a differential tension where the perceived borderline between what is still painting and what is no longer is a dialectical one that is always being displaced by history.37

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All the artists discussed in this section worked in the first decades of the twentieth century, with industrialization challenging each of them to reinvent painting beyond its physical and skill-based definitions. Each abandoned some aspect of the craft of painting as a way of pushing painting forward into the ‘yet’ to be of painting. Duchamp went further than all of them by abandoning all the known aspects of painting. It was just at that moment when, being a painter and abandoning painting would have required each other.38

It is this quantum shift in painting, a differential shimmy, where painting is in two places at the same time, both painting and not painting, that is captured by the readymade. The readymade is not a painting in terms of the history of painting up until that point. Whether it is a painting in terms of what painting is ‘yet’ to become remains undecidable since the readymade is permanently suspended between painting and not painting. Does the readymade ‘belong to painting’? The question has no meaning … It … is the moment of delay, a retardation, an ‘opening up’. It is the bar between two names … Such is the readymade’s nominalist way of naming as a possible painting a thing that is impossible to name a painting.39

The readymade is not a painting because there is nothing of painting in it, no paint, canvas, image, surface or frame. Yet the readymade might almost have been a painting, a possible painting, since it was conceived by a painter, in the context of avant-garde painting, as a way of saying something about painting. Thus the readymade is an impossible painting that opens up for discussion the very possibility of what painting can be. This type of fundamental questioning down to the ground of painting did not happen again until the 1960s when Duchamp was lifted from the history of Dada into a new movement that would be called ‘Conceptual Art’. Conceptual artists, all of whom began as painters, found in Duchamp an important precursor for the proposal that concepts were more important than retinal effects and that the artist was an artist by virtue of being an anti-artist producing non-works that challenged historical classification and commodification. It is undeniable that an enormous amount of fetishization has gone into Duchamp’s Readymades such that it now exists as an instantly recognized icon of twentieth-century avant-garde art. It is referenced by theorists, deployed by

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curators and reworked by generations of artists as a sign of avant-garde alterity. In the process of all this noise, the readymade is elided into a work about art in general rather than painting in particular.40 As a result all the subtleties of the argument with painting contained in the readymade are lost. (ii) 1960s Conceptual Art and Minimalism – The escape from painting Some fifty years after Duchamp’s first readymade an entire generation of artists took up a renewed attack on painting. This was based in many instances on a conceptual interpretation of Duchamp’s work with a particular focus on the readymades. The result was an enormous migration away from the craft of painting into new practices defined negatively in relation to the idea of painting.41 In fact all the major artists who came to prominence in Conceptual Art and Minimal Art followed in the steps of Duchamp in that they trained as painters and then abandoned painting for the sake of establishing new frontiers. Ian Burn, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson all painted for a time until developing new work methods that formed the basis of art movements known as Conceptual Art, Minimal Art and Land Art, respectively. However, in all their work some trace of painting remained, some indeterminacy between painting and not painting. At the extremities of their practice some fragrance left by the absence of painting, lingered on. For Burn and Judd it was an unbroken interest in colour and the continuing presence of quadrilateral forms that harked back to the wooden stretcher of easel painting. For Smithson it was quadrilateral forms and the ambiguous reflected images provided by mirrors that were reminiscent of painted illusions on canvas. Consequently, while all of them rejected most of the elements of painting, they did not reject them all, and thereby maintained an ongoing though subtle argument with painting. In saying this about their work I am aware that I may be contradicting the stated intentions of the artists who were determined to move beyond one discipline to create another way of working. I realize that it must be possible for someone to change their mind about a practice that was once very close to them, to begin a new chapter in life, free of the limitations of the past. It is not my aim to deny the personal story of each artist, each of whom developed a powerful self-understanding of their practice, resulting in the publication of significant collected writings.42 Rather I wish to slice through their work at an

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oblique angle to reveal the positive constructive effects on painting brought on by critique and abandonment. I will now look at these three artists in more detail to chart the relationship between their painting background and the kind of work they developed beyond it. (a) Ian Burn Ian Burn trained as a painter at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, Australia and worked through early stages of figurative and geometric abstraction. He eventually abandoned painting in favour of glass and mirrorbased constructions (Figure 2.9) and then eventually moved beyond any kind of object in favour of texts. In a 1970 interview he was asked to consider the relationship between painting and his current conceptual work: Fisher: You came out of an exclusively painting background. So how do you relate your current work to your earlier paintings – was there any decisive break? Ian Burn: No there was no break like that. In fact it was sometime after I stopped painting that I realised I had stopped, that was in 1967. For instance the Mirror Pieces had a strong relation to the last paintings which were monochrome mirror like surfaces or simply painted mirrors.43

Thus for Burn there was no particular moment when he decided to abandon painting, rather an inner logic that drove him through issues within painting took him to a point where he, of a sudden, realized he was no longer making objects that could comfortably be called ‘painting’. Furthermore there was an easy transition between the last paintings and the first mirror constructions, based on a continuity between flat surfaces and virtual images. The next stage of ‘abandoning painting’ involved abandoning the production of objects in favour of published texts44 in which he examined the preconditions of art itself. Burn himself describes this evolution, A simple way of tracing my own development would be to say that I was first involved with the object, then there was a theory or framework contingent on the object, then the object became contingent on the theory, and finally in the current work there is the theory or framework by itself.45

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Figure 2.9 Ian Burn (1939–1993), No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other, synthetic polymer paint on wood, mirror, lettering, 64.5 × 64.5 × 3.0 cm frame, collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Photo by Ian Burn, courtesy of Avril Burn

In his 1970 article for Art and Australia, ‘Conceptual Art as Art’, he was willing to characterize this development from objects to text as the very heart of Conceptual Art: It is the nature of [conceptual] art that it replaces the customary visual art constructs with arguments about art.46

Thus the journey from painting, to objects concerned with issues of painting, to writings about the possibility of art, are part of a drive that frees the artist from the constraints of a particular format of presentation. Burn describes this as a morphological argument about the material constraints of any work that can be called art: Through Duchamp’s readymades and subsequent work and recently Yves Klein’s Empty Gallery show, art was able to become art regardless of morphological status.47

Thus the abandonment of painting releases the artist into a generalized state of practice no longer defined by studio nominations such as painting or

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sculpture or writing. Burn rejects ‘the morphologically bounded “language” of painting’48 as conceptually timid because painting has become the unspoken carrier of a presumption that anything presented as a painting in a gallery must be art. He argues that for any work to be ‘conceptually germane’, or ‘real’, or ‘art’,49 it must confront and develop the discourse of art that sustains it. Burn’s constant reference for engaging a particular discourse of art, is always the very discipline that he has abandoned, namely, painting. So just as the readymade lead us back to a question about painting, so too does Burn’s textbased Conceptual Art. Duchamp’s readymade is an abandonment of painting that dramatizes the problematic of painting within an historical context of industrialization and mass production. In Conceptual Art, the rejection of painting in favour of text foregrounds another situational crisis for painting, this time the birth of global capital and international media in the post-war West. As Burn put it, paraphrasing John Cage, It was a time when painting had to get another idea rather than painting.50

Burn stepped back and away from painting in various manoeuvres to make art more articulate in the face of global capital, new modes of electronic communication and the distractions of entertainment culture. Artwork was made away from the traditional studio by having it fabricated by another, by making it in the workplace, or by using typewriters, as Burn did, to eliminate the aesthetic production of objects.51 As he moved further and further away from painting he eventually abandoned traditional art practice altogether and became the supplier of creative imagery and texts for the trade union movement in Australia.52 Yet it is no irony that at the end of Ian Burn’s career in the 1990s, his last stage of work involved a return to the art world with a re-synthesis of text-based work and painting. His ‘Value Added Landscapes’ (Figure 2.10) were created by presenting his and other artists’ amateur landscape paintings together with an overlay of textual statements that investigated the conventions of painting, uses of colour, language and perception. In these works the circle between painting and the abandonment of painting is closed. But it is not a closure that signals a simple return to painting. Rather it is a renewed challenge to the morphological possibilities of painting,

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Figure 2.10 Ian Burn (1939–1993), Artists Think No. 2, 1993, oil on canvas boards, painted frames, three parts, each 38.5 × 29.0 × 4.5 cm, Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2007. Reproduced courtesy of the artist’s estate and Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Photographer Carl Warner 2008

shifting the shape of painting, as well as its conceptual possibilities in accord with the demands of the time. (b) Donald Judd Donald Judd is the pre-eminent figure in the art movement known as Minimalism. He began as a painter and had his first exhibition of paintings in New York in 1957. By 1962 his paintings had evolved from meaty expressionist brushstrokes to a form of abstract painting with low relief, somewhere between painting and sculpture. In 1963 he stopped painting to make what he called ‘specific objects’53 (Figure 2.11) that were neither painting nor sculpture, neither representational nor abstract. For Judd painting had been smothered by the weight of European tradition, in which he believed there was no room left for development.54 Like Burn he rejected the presumption that painting was the paramount art form automatically invested with a status of relevance and reverence. He challenged this by saying: Painting has to be as powerful as any kind of art; it can’t claim a special identity.55

Once painting lost its mantle as a medium of status it became obvious to Judd that the whole discipline had reached an historical terminus. The image within the rectangle of [painting] is obviously a relic of pictured objects in their space. This arrangement had been progressively reduced for decades. It has to go entirely.56

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Figure 2.11 Donald Judd, Untitled, 1963, light cadmium red oil on wood, 49.5 × 114.3 × 77.5 cm. © Judd Foundation/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.

Judd called his work specific objects in direct opposition to the virtual images of painting. ‘Specific’ meaning they were exactly what you saw, metals, industrial plywood, concrete and coloured Plexiglas, and were not contaminated with symbolism or iconic implication beyond their brute presence as matter. ‘Objects’ in that they were three-dimensional things in real space that automatically avoided the problem of illusionism inherent in painting. Ultimately, he believed that Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.57

Yet in the passage from painting to specific objects Judd takes with him two remarkable aspects of a painterly sensibility, namely a profound feeling for colour and the primary visual structure of the rectangle. The rectangle has been the primary shape of painting since the time of panel painting and easel painting. This closed right angled form is defined by the physics of a wooden

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frame holding canvas taught so that it makes a flat working surface. Even though Judd saw the rectangle as the symbol of painting’s ultimate spatial and conceptual collapse, he took that very same shape into his specific objects, which were all rectilinear in one dimension or another. By making metal boxes that hung on the wall or plywood boxes that rested on the floor he showed the remarkable perceptual variation with which rectangle-ness could be invested. A similar experiment was happening with a large number of artists working with shaped canvases.58 Artists like Frank Stella (Figure 2.12), Kenneth Noland, and Ellsworth Kelly were making paintings that broke away from the rectangular format to shape the canvas as a ‘logical extension of the painted shapes’.59

Figure 2.12 Frank Stella, Polk City, 1963, zinc chromate on canvas, 207.33 × 232.09 × 7.94 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson and Museum purchase, © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

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By testing the limits of the rectangle painters were developing a hybrid pictorial space somewhere between painting and sculpture.60 Francis Colpit claims that ‘the shaped canvas was the dominant form of abstract painting in the 1960s’61 and it culminated in a show entitled ‘The Shaped Canvas’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964. In this broader context Judd’s boxes are closer to the spirit of shaped canvases than they are to geometric sculpture. Most telling is Judd’s fascination with rich extravagant colour that he found in the new industrial materials. Richard Serra described Judd’s relationship to colour as a fetishizing attitude, a hedonism for the slickness and glitz of fluorescent Plexiglas, anodised aluminium, stainless steel, polished brass, metallic paints, and honey-lacquered finishes.62

Colour and an interest in new materials, provided by the latest developments in industrial production, are one and the same thing in Judd. His use of colour in metal and Plexiglass is paralleled by new developments in synthetic pigments and acrylic paint. If new water-based plastic paints were challenging the traditional use of oil paints in the artist’s studio then Judd would add anodized metal and brightly coloured acrylic glass to the list. Just as Andy Warhol, Judd’s contemporary, became the greatest colourist of acrylics, Judd became the greatest colourist of industrial materials. Judd himself, in his own writing, continually invites painting back into the equation, when discussing the so-called minimalist sculpture: The new work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer to painting.63

Thus Judd stands with Duchamp and Burn in that his abandonment of painting is filled with questions for a new kind of coloured thing yet to come. His work is no longer painting but neither is it completely detached from it. Ultimately, it asks the paradoxical question, what kind of nearness can there be to painting in the very act of moving far away from it? (c) Robert Smithson Smithson shared with Judd the idea that painting had become anachronistic and that a new kind of practice was required. Smithson had trained as a painter

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at the Art Students League in New York City and after abandoning art for a period returned to practice in the early 1960s during the rise of Minimalism. His most well-known work is Spiral Jetty (1970), a 500 m spiral-shaped earth work that extends into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, constructed from local rocks and bulldozed earth. Spiral Jetty has become an iconic work of Land Art, an art form that involves rejecting the spatial and market constraints of the gallery in favour of working in, and with nature, often in remote sites well away from cities and museums. Smithson, like Burn and Judd, was a prolific writer and had this to say about museums, Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead the viewer to things once called ‘pictures’ and ‘statues’. Anachronisms hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on the eye. Multifarious nothings permute into false windows [frames] that open up into a variety of blanks. Art settles into a stupendous inertia.64

In the same stroke he challenges both the false window of painting, its inherent illusionism, and the deadening effect of the places where paintings reside, namely museums and galleries. While Smithson continued to make work specifically for the gallery he strategically named them ‘Nonsites’, constructing them so that they physically and conceptually challenged the ‘stupendous inertia’ of the conventions of art. Nonsites were typically made from earth and rocks collected from a specific remote area, a ‘site’, and installed in the gallery often combined with mirrors and glass. Consequently, the gallery and the art work is problematized in relation to an absence, a negative space of unsettled references that shuttle between the Site and Nonsite, a place and its reference, a material presence and a conceptual absence. This negative presence is figured in the Nonsite primarily by the use of mirrors in box shape constructions that produce a vertiginous interplay between real and virtual spaces, inside and outside the mirror construction (Figure 2.13). While Smithson is primarily remembered for his work on sites, such as Spiral Jetty, something of his peculiar negative relationship to painting persists in his Nonsites and photographic works. In an unpublished essay from 1968, ‘Picturable Situations and Infra Maps’65 he develops the idea of a ‘picturable situation’, a picturing unrelated to painterly illusionism

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Figure 2.13 Robert Smithson, Corner Mirror with Coral, 1969, 91.5 × 91.5 × 91.5 cm. © Robert Smithson/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

that suggests other modes of figuring an experience of place. For example, in ‘Mono Lake Nonsite’, (Figure 2.14) he presents a bin of rocks collected from a Site and above it a near blank map of the uneventful nature of the location. Smithson is straining to develop a conceptual kind of picturing that blends actually being there, as is suggested by the un-transformed rocks from the site, with a kind of mapping, where the map reveals very little and in fact acts as a ‘negation of the picturable’.66 Maps are an alternate picturing system to painting, and are used in this work to indicate a conceptual mapping that enables raw material presence and mental constructs to coexist in a way that had not occurred in painting. Smithson often used mirrors to complicate and disrupt ‘picturable situations’. In a series of photographic works documenting the placement of mirrors in remote locations, the mirrors create a visually ambiguous

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Figure 2.14 Robert Smithson, Mono Lake Nonsite, 1968, painted steel container, cinders and map Photostat, © Robert Smithson/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

experience when placed on the ground since both ground and sky are seen at the same time (Figure 2.15). As Smithson recounts, they disrupted the visual field and ‘created holes in the ground’.67

Mirrors are akin to painting in that they contain a virtual image defined by a surface. However, since the image in a mirror is never fixed, always changing depending on what comes before it, it is wholly unlike the fixed image found in a painting. Smithson compared the mirrors in opposition to paint, by saying that by using mirrors he was dealing with actual light as opposed to paint.68

Yet like Burn, Smithson’s use of mirror is an escape from painting while at the same time maintaining a dialectical link with it through inversions of opposing terms like image and surface, actuality and virtuality.

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Figure 2.15 Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (2), 1969 © Robert Smithson/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

Even in a work like Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s visual engagement with the work suggests the presence of a painted surface. It was Smithson’s habit when making a large earth work to fly up in a plane and view it from a great height to see if it was complete and what adjustments needed to be made.69 In such a moment, Spiral Jetty would have returned to the graphic nature of drawing or abstract art, now transposed to the vast horizontal surface of the earth, rather than the miniscule vertical canvas in the painter’s studio. Further aspects of painting stand out in three unusual works he did in the year 1969, each involving pouring a different liquid, namely asphalt, glue and

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Figure 2.16 Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, 1969 © Robert Smithson/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

Figure 2.17 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, 1969 © Robert Smithson/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

Figure 2.18 Robert Smithson, Drawing of Concrete Pour, 1969, pencil, ink, crayon and tape on paper, 20 × 25 cm, © Robert Smithson/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

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concrete. In these works he inverted the conceptual opposition of place and materials found in the Nonsites. In the Nonsites, nature was gathered as rock samples from a prospected site and framed within the artificial parameters of the gallery in effect staging the displacement of the natural. In his pours the artists reversed the emphasis [by] grounding manufactured material as if [they were] geophysical processes. For Asphalt Rundown (Figure 2.16) in Rome, Glue Pour (Figure 2.17) in Vancouver, and Concrete Pour (Figure 2.18) in Chicago, Smithson took industrial materials [liquids] and sited them [in natural locations] as geological flows.70

‘Geological flow’ or natural process was recreated by pouring an industrial liquid down a naturally sloping surface. The sloping surface in each case was a ‘celebration of the natural angle of repose of the soil’71 and an engagement with metropolitan industrial sites, respectively a quarry, a site of industrial erosion and a concrete waste dump. Consequently, Smithson dramatizes the meeting between ‘volcanic nature and the furnaces of industry’ and suggests an unexpected equivalence between the two processes of industrialization and alluvial flow.72 A strong visual counterpoint in each of these works is the industrial colour of the liquids ranging from black asphalt to orange glue. In each of the three works a liquid is poured from a container, a truck or a drum, onto a surface where there is impact and then gravity completes the final distribution of the material. Smithson is primarily invoking natural phenomena such as glaciers and volcanoes; however, there is the strong shadow of Jackson Pollock, particularly his use of gravity as an instrument of pouring and splashing paint. In fact, Smithson … had a strong interest in Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist works … Smithson takes the drip away from the canvas and monumentalises it in a slow ooze. Pollock, who moved the canvas off the easel and onto the floor understood the monumental gesture in his ‘action paintings’. Smithson … realised his own action painting outdoors. The flows were in some sense a homage to and walk away from the expressionist mark.73

For Smithson painting was an impossible craft at a time when the earth was being confronted and challenged by hegemonic capital and the ‘furnaces of

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industry’. Yet in the transition from painting to Land Art something of the pictorial practice of painting persisted as a structural shadow negatively imprinted on geological forces and industrial materials. If natural forces, more powerful than the hand of the artist, are realized in the flow of bitumen and cement, then so too in the elemental flow of paint is something greater than the instrumental name of ‘painting’. The work begins to allow an emergence of a difference between paint and painting, between the conditions of possibility of paint and the limitations of the known discipline of Painting. Paint is closer to the infinitive ‘to paint’, more about coloured fluids in process, in a state of becoming. Usually for paint to become operational, for it to be seen, it has to become a painting, a formal object defined by the historical discipline of Painting. But paint separated off from Painting, is paint released into an unusual state of becoming. It is paint becoming something else, yet to be named, a process in some sense unnameable. There is something of this primary differential in all three artists, Burn, Judd and Smithson. All have rejected their first relationship with art in the form of painting. Just as in the break-up of a personal relationship, what is said in parting can be hurtful or constructive and determine the flavour of the next relationship. In saying goodbye to painting each of these artists harshly listed its historical limitations, but in moving on, their original love for painting shaped whatever they did afterwards. What their work became could not be called painting, but at the same time their work is situated in relation to a journey away from painting, towards something to be refined and interpreted by later generations who looked to them as the creators of a new way.

The Pollock effect While Jackson Pollock never advocated abandoning painting he was very influential in the 1960s on a range of artists, including Smithson, who saw in his work a radical confrontation with easel painting in favour of informal process-based outcomes. Other artists like Lynda Benglis and Eva Hesse abandoned the traditional nature of their discipline to create spatial works,

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which like Smithsons ‘pour’ works, resonated with the dynamics of liquids. Similarly, Alan Kaprow abandoned painting in the 1950s to create events that he called ‘happenings’ based on the thresholds suggested by Pollock’s way of painting. There were two thresholds that interested Kaprow. One was the act of painting itself, something rarely considered in art criticism and theory, which was usually focussed on the outcome of a completed work, not the actions of making itself. Kaprow found the action of so-called Action Painting at least as interesting as the painting. He saw the way Pollock danced around the canvas (Figure 2.19), approaching it from all sides, as a process that could become primary material in and of itself, above and beyond the imagery and contents of its completed state. The second threshold was the physical edge of the canvas itself, the environment where the painting met the floor or the wall. Across that edge Pollock flung endless skeins of paint, each one reaching past the representational ‘field’ of painting to encompass the space, the place beyond it … the places of human social exchange.74

Those places of social exchange were the studio, the gallery, the street outside, the world of everyday life. Kaprow crossed both thresholds at once by developing a practice he first called ‘action collage’ (Figure 2.20) which involved creating artworks, not just with paint but, cardboard, chicken wire, crumpled newspaper, broken glass, record players, recorded sounds, bursts of words and the smell of crushed strawberries.75

These works expanded to occupy the whole space of a gallery, became environmental, and also included more and more participation of viewers. It was at this time that he called the works ‘Happenings’ which became the direct precursor for another term Performance Art. Even though Kaprow encapsulated these ideas as early as 195876 the idea of going beyond easel painting had been ‘canvassed’ eleven years earlier by none other than Clement Greenberg in a Pollock review: Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture.77

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Figure 2.19 Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ ARS. Licensed by Viscopy, 2017. Photograph by Hans Namuth, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, 2016

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Figure 2.20 Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), An Apple Shrine, environment presented at the Judson Gallery, New York (1960). Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063) © J. Paul Getty Trust

For Greenberg, this ‘beyond easel painting’, could only be thought in terms of another kind of painting, perhaps a return to an earlier age of wall paintings like mural painting. Mural Painting had been influential on Pollock with New York visits by the great Mexican muralists David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Murals were large in size, as were Pollock’s canvases, creating the experience of all enveloping environments. Yet Greenberg eventually rejected the mural option: Between the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness78 of the mural, easel painting has come out stronger, having acquired a new and unorthodox density.79

This ‘unorthodox density’ takes the form of surface texture, skeins of paint and an environmental spread, the so-called ‘all overness’ of action painting that reaches past the edge of the canvas. In Greenberg’s words again, Painting increasingly rejects the easel and yearns for the wall.80

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‘Yearning for the wall’, for Greenberg could not be taken any further than a symbolic concern for surrounding space. He seemed unable to imagine anything beyond the flatness of the mural and the subjective intensity of the easel. It took the generation of artists epitomized by Burn, Judd and Smithson to take this yearning into the unorthodox densities suggested by objects, texts, processes and the natural environment. It is at this point somewhere in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the proper name of painting could be erased from the story of art. Finally after many resuscitations painting as a viable discipline had expired. Withering critiques of painting’s irrelevance in an age of space flight and satellite communications went unanswered and unanswerable. The arrival of new technologies in the arts such as video, photocopying and computer animation made painting the dead hand of the past. Artists who had trained as painters seemed to realize the error of their ways and simply readjusted their direction through the artworld away from painting. So by the late 1970s painting was about to be long forgotten and it was sculpture’s turn to be measured against the historical and technological requirements of the day. Ironically it is out of the demise of sculpture and its rebirth as expanded sculpture that a new practice and discourse for painting became possible.

The genesis of expansion Writing in 1979 in her seminal essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’,81 Rosalind Krauss noted that, rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert. Nothing it would seem, could possibly give to such a motley of effort the right to lay claim whatever one might mean by the category of sculpture. Unless, that is, the category can be made to become almost infinitely malleable.82

Krauss traces the development of this work back to the previous century. Just as painting had been challenged by the mimetic power of photography in the

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nineteenth century, at the same time sculpture was confronted by the demise of the public monument. Late in the nineteenth century we witnessed the fading of the logic of the monument. [Consequently] one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of its negative condition – sitelessness, or homelessness … [that is] functionally placeless and largely self referential.83

The history of sculpture had been inseparable from commissions for public monuments. Usually figurative, vertical and placed on a pedestal, they sat in a particular locale and had something symbolic to say about the meaning of that place. With the diminishing demand for monuments and the transition to modernism, sculpture becomes placeless, homeless, nomadic and selfreferential to the point of abstraction. Krauss describes this state as ‘a kind of ontological absence’,84 since sculpture was defined in opposition to what it is not, that is, as ‘the negative condition of the monument’.85 Sculpture was recognized as that thing inside the public building but not the building, or that thing over there in the landscape but not the landscape. These exclusions, defined sculpture as simply not-architecture and not-landscape, and were the outer limits that modernist sculptural practice was not able to surpass. This frontier was eventually challenged in the 1960s with the development of conceptual and minimal practices of land art, marked sites and serial structures. Artists, none of them really sculptors, were beginning to explore the boundaries of sculpture’s negatively defined condition. By problematizing negativity they incorporated the positive terms, landscape and architecture into new permutations of practice. Krauss characterized this as a movement out of the purity of modernism into the plurality of postmodernism. For within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium – sculpture – but rather in relation to a set of cultural terms, for which any medium – photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself – might be used.86

Krauss is not arguing for an abolition of studio boundaries in favour of ‘cultural operations’. Rather she is concerned to develop a new idea of medium specificity that avoids the absolutism of Greenberg, and approaches the inclusivity of the postmodern condition. This condition is epitomized by ‘the expanded field’:

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Thus the field provides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for an artist to explore and for an organisation of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium … the logic of postmodernist practice is no longer organised around the definition of medium on the grounds of material … it is organised instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.87

The field replaces any literal notion of matter or material. Thus sculpture is not to be essentialized in terms of marble or steel, and impliedly neither could painting be essentialized in terms of paint or flatness. Instead sculpture is activated and understood by a set of cultural operations that have historically gathered around the medium. By revealing cultural operations in the form of structural oppositions, Krauss was able to say sculpture advanced by incorporating ‘not-sculpture’, that is landscape and architecture, into its field of possibilities. It was this almost perverse combination of sculpture and not-sculpture that defined the important sculptural work of the 1970s. At the very end of the article Krauss applies the notion of the field to painting as well: The postmodernist space of painting would obviously involve a similar expansion around a different set of terms from the pair architecture, landscape – a set that would probably turn on the opposition uniqueness, reproducibility.88

Soon after writing this there was a sudden return of painting to international prominence and a proliferation of quoted, pastiched, parodied and appropriated imagery that was discussed exactly in the terms Krauss predicted. In fact most postmodern discourse89 from architecture to music, focussed on ‘uniqueness and reproducibility’, and related terms such as originality, authorship, appropriation, historicity, seriality and so on. While Krauss’ deployment of ‘uniqueness and reproducibility’ may seem prescient it does appear in her article as something of a one-line statement. In contrast she builds a sustained argument to justify and validate the use of architecture and landscape as the core generators of the expanded field of sculpture. The limitations of ‘uniqueness and reproducibility’, and the way they were used in postmodern theory, is that they tend to focus on the image content of painting and the originality of the artists. The very physicality of

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painting, its presence as a thing, is marginalized because it is fraught with the danger of a ‘collapse into physicality’, reminiscent of Greenberg’s prioritization of canvas and flatness.90 From this crucial essay Krauss delivers something as simple as a name, a name more appropriate than ‘non-traditional painting’, ‘transcendent painting’, ‘constructed painting’ and ‘pictorial object’. It is a name that says something about painting seeking out its opposite in not-painting, testing its own limits, becoming infinitely malleable, self differing, separating off from itself in search of other ways of being itself.

Expanded painting The word invokes painting in a state of transition, a practice being reinvented and rearticulated with broadening horizons. The possibilities for painting are no longer at an end, but are suddenly wide open again. While no definition has been established, the expanded field of painting as a name for work from Duchamp to Smithson is broad but not limitless. It might be ‘infinitely malleable’ but to be understandable and meaningful in relation to other practices it must be graspable and finite. Expanded painting could just keep expanding and become a kind of total painting, an absorption and ‘synthesis of all the arts under painting’.91 This would be the opposite of pure painting, something imagined by Greenberg as distinctly separate from any other discipline and refined down to the essential flatness of canvas.92 If we go to the most readily available online dictionary for help we get a very simple definition of painting: the practice of applying a pigment suspended in a medium to a surface.93

From this we could say, ‘application’, ‘pigment in a medium’ and ‘surface’ are the three members of painting’s quorum. Brushes do the application and pigment in a medium would be oil or acrylic, while the surface of painting is the place where paint is manipulated, allowed to dry and then displayed. The flat surface of painting differentiates it from the volumes of sculpture, and creates a physical division between the world of the viewer and the world of

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painted illusions. Greenbergian formalism made the flatness of the stretched canvas the apotheosis of painting. Michael Fried refined the point by saying, flatness … ought not be thought of as the ‘irreducible essence of pictorial art’ but rather as something like the minimal condition for something to be seen as painting.94

Stephen Melville in a catalogue essay95 for the show entitled ‘As Painting’ makes much of Fried’s use of the word ‘as’ in ‘seen as painting’. ‘As’ suggests a moment of interpretation when something is not immediately apparent. For example, silence in response to a question could be taken as a negative response. In the absence of actually saying no, silence is seen ‘as’ no. Consequently, something that is not apparently painting might nevertheless be seen ‘as’ a painting. Melville quotes Fried in support of this: The essence of painting is not something irreducible. Rather it is the task … to discover those conventions that .. are capable of establishing work as painting.96

Melville further argues that for anything to be seen as painting it must be established in relation to all other media that constitute the field of art. As he puts it: the internal capacities of one medium cannot be thought apart from its relation to other media.97

Painting is not to be defined internally but by virtue of its relationship to a contemporary field of practice, which would include sculpture, film, video, performance and so on. In this way of thinking, painting is, all edges, everywhere hinged both to itself and to what it adjoins, making itself out of such relations.98

The search for a definition of expanded painting is suddenly made very complicated because the idea of definitions seems either unattainable or pointless. Definitions define limits and boundaries, and limits and boundaries are what expanded media put into play, make indeterminate. As Melville puts it, what is needed is a calculus [rather] than a straightforward arithmetic.99

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Calculus or differential thinking shifts attention away from the mathematics of ‘what is painting’ to the more subtle question ‘how is painting’. To ask ‘how is painting’, is to ask what its state of being ‘is’. ‘Total thereness’100 is Stanley Cavell’s response, by which he means painting is wholly open to you, absolutely there in front of your senses.101

Melville reins this in by reminding us that any thing, including painting, only makes sense when it is, somehow less than totally there, which is why painting’s acknowledgement of the conditions of its presence is always an acknowledgement of some finitude apart from which painting would not be at all.102

(iii) 1980s Neo-conceptualism – Painting forgotten and the misnomer of Installation Art An understanding of the finitude of painting was blocked at the beginning of the 1980s with the sudden appearance of the ‘infinity’ of painting. Painting in an easel-based form returned to the studio repertoire of artists across the globe, it became a massive commodity in a booming art market,103 and generated new writing about painting at a serious theoretical level. In the 1980s the two major artistic positions were Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Conceptualism.104

Neo-expressionism was an extravagant return to painterliness, referencing the meaty brushstrokes of previous forms of expressionism in Germany in the 1930s and the United States in the 1950s.105 The pinnacle of Neo-Expressionism is exemplified in the work of Julian Schnabel whose famous plate paintings, featuring oil paint and broken crockery, were so large that they had to be executed in a tennis court.106 They were sold at prices similarly vast. Neoconceptualism was the counter-movement to neo-expressionism and involved a complete sublimation of painting according to the terms of conceptual critique developed in conceptual and minimal art in the 1960s and 1970s. In Neo-Conceptualist art the status of the object, including the art object, is at issue … [Neo-Conceptualist art] presents commodities as art objects … in what Marcel Duchamp called ‘assisted form’.107

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Donald Kuspit refers here to the work of Jeff Koons (Figure 2.21) and Haim Steinbach who in the 1980s presented store bought commodities such as vacuum cleaners, basketballs, gym shoes and utensils, in Perspex vitrines and on formica shelves. The major references for this kind of work are Duchamp’s readymades and Judd’s specific objects, works already discussed in terms of a flight from painting.

Figure 2.21 Jeff Koons, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/ Dry 10 Gallon Displaced, Tripledecker, 1981–1987, four shampoo polishers, vacuum cleaner, acrylic, fluorescent lights, 231.1 × 137.2 × 71.1 cm, © Jeff Koons

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Once again painters were withdrawing from their craft training for the sake of a new kind of practice. Both Koons and Steinbach began with painting and then evolved into object-based practices108 that eventually became part of a larger tendency in the 1980s known as installation art. Installation art was originally a marginal practice, occurring outside the mainstream disciplines and institutions, critiquing market-based commodities and the structured forms of painting and sculpture. Site specificity was an important element of installation art since it demanded a consideration of the physical and political aspects of the place of exhibition. This was contrasted to traditional easel painting which could be hung in any ‘white cube’ gallery regardless of its geographical location or political persuasion. Site specificity was a form of institutional critique that exposed an apparent bias of galleries and museums in favour of portable quietistic works.109 Site poses the concrete materiality of place against the ephemeral virtuality of the painted image. The shift from virtuality and the siteless picture plane to materiality and the density of place is dramatized most acutely in the work of Allan Kaprow. Kaprow, in moving away from painting, named his work ‘action collage’, signifying a link with experimental traditions of painting and a concern for action and doing above and beyond refined static images. Anything that the artist could reach out and hold was potentially part of the work. As Kaprow explains, The action collages became bigger and I introduced flashing lights and thicker hunks of matter. These parts projected further and further from the wall into the room and included more and more audible elements: sounds of ringing buzzers, bells, toys etc.110

Rejecting pictoriality in favour of ‘hunks of matter’, the works began to occupy more and more space, becoming expansive and environmental. In fact the new word Kaprow coined to describe this work was ‘Environments’.111 Only later when the interactive participation of the viewers became important did Kaprow change the name again to ‘Happenings’. As Julie Reiss has shown, the term ‘Environment’ persisted as a generic description of room sized multimedia work until 1988, when it was replaced in leading art reference texts and journals by ‘installation art’.112 Ever since, installation art has been understood as an enveloping environment in which an entire exhibition space

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is occupied with objects and media that require a viewer to activate their skills of navigation and interpretation.113 By the early 1990s artists such as Guillaume Bijl, Ilya Kabakov (Figure 2.22), Jannis Kounellis, Wolfgang Laib, Meg Cranston, Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, Ange Leccia, Sherrie Levine, Mike Kelley, Cady Noland, Jessica Stockholder (Figure 2.23) and Hany Armanious were producing work that was object based, environmental, time based, multimedia, interactive, or participatory. All of these elements, that are not yet a definition of installation art,114 are posed negatively in relation to the formal aspects of painting that Kaprow was avoiding, namely static, flat, image based, timeless, silent and a one way form of communication. The irony for installation art is that it has gone so far beyond any kind of formal or conceptual constraint that it has come to contradict its original status as a critical practice. Site specificity, concerns for the geopolitics of place and environmentality were reactions against, and critiques of museum and gallery

Figure 2.22 Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1981– 1988, six poster panels with collage, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view from the exhibition, Ilya Kabakov: Ten Characters, Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York, 30 April–4 June 1988,. Photograph by D. James Dee, courtesy the artist © Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, courtesy Pace Gallery, New York

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Figure 2.23 Jessica Stockholder, Growing Rock Candy Mountain Grasses in Canned Sand, April 1992, 23 × 12 m piece of violet bathing suit material, sandstone native to Munster, gaseous concrete building blocks, plaster, basket material, electrical wiring, three very small lights, newspaper glued to the wall, acrylic paint, metal cables and Styrofoam, overall 29 × 9 m. Installation view at Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, USA

practice epitomized by the white cube. The white cube,115 the unadorned space of modernist exhibition, tamed the wildness of art for the sake of quietistic good taste, curatorial portability and administrative repeatability. Yet by 1992 Roberta Smith noted that installation art, is present in unprecedented quantities in museums, the very places it was supposed to render obsolete.116

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Clare Bishop affirms this saying installation art has become the institutionally approved art form par excellence.117

Installation art, once considered uncommodifiable and uncollectible has now become the centrepiece of museum blockbuster shows and a major feather in a museum’s collection. Even sited earthworks such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1974–1977) is listed in the collection of the DIA Art Foundation, USA, which also runs a bed and breakfast nearby for visitors. Along with the capitulation of installation art to the museum comes its undecidability as a medium. It has become such a vast mode of practice, so ‘infinitely malleable’, so all inclusive and non-specific as to be ineffective and empty. As Clare Bishop puts it: Almost any arrangement of objects in a given space can now be referred to as installation art … It has become the catch-all description that draws attention to its staging and as a result its almost totally meaningless.118

Installation art has lost any sense of critical tension between what it is and what it is not, what it stands for and what it stands against. As a result the formal distinction between installation art and the installation of any work of art in a gallery is obscured. Since it has become so difficult if not impossible to define as a practice, Installation has moved from being … ‘medium specific’ to ‘debate specific’.119

Claire Bishop also abandons the idea of defining installation art on the basis of medium and instead identifies installation with activating the viewer … to induce critical vigilance.120

Installation art enters a limbo induced by its own in-finitude, a total saturation in limitlessness that devours specific debate and subjective activation just as easily as it does any other notion of form or content. How to avoid this situation? Since most of the antecedents of installation art were based on the dialectical tension between the image and object nature of painting, and since most of the practitioners of installation art have been painters facing the impossibility of painting, installation art is still fuelled by an originary argument with painting. Bishop agrees that,

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many artists turned to installation art precisely through the desire to expand visual experience beyond the two-dimensional, and to provide a more vivid alternative to it.121

Consequently, ‘installation art’ as a generic name is a misnomer that artificially separates multi-modal outcomes from painterly origins. Installation art, like conceptual art and the readymade, is constructed out of a negative relation with painting, opposing physical form, flatness, pictoriality, with what Krauss terms a ‘post medium condition’.122 In the post-medium condition art is no longer confined by the material properties of a merely physical object like support.123

Installation art attains a post-medium condition as an inverse logic structured on the ontological absence of painting. It is just this kind of negatively defined condition that lead Krauss to develop a permutational field she named expanded sculpture. Consequently, it would be tempting to go back to her use of a Klein Group diagram (Figure 2.24) in her original argument in ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’.124 The diagram was constructed by defining sculpture negatively as ‘not architecture’ and ‘not landscape’. As extreme forms of experimentation began to focus on the outer limits of practice, they crossed the boundaries of exclusion and included those previously prohibited elements.

Figure 2.24 Rosalind Krauss, Diagram of Expanded Sculpture, 1979 © Rosalind Krauss. Licensed by MIT Press 2016

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For example, ‘marked sites’ is a form of expanded sculpture that is both notlandscape and landscape, exemplified by the work of Robert Smithson. By going around all four points of the diagram and all combinations of positive and negative terms she generates the new field of expanded sculpture. This diagram could be used to develop a definition of expanded painting by replacing the neutral term ‘sculpture’ with ‘painting’ and proposing primary exclusions in relation to painting, such as ‘not three dimensional’ and ‘not temporal’. The opposite points of these exclusions would be the inclusion of three dimensionality and temporality. These four positions could then be used to create permutations that include video, installation and performance as complex modes of expanded painting at the outer perimeter of the diagram.125 However, since Krauss never used this type of diagram again, preferring other post-structuralist modes of analysis, the ongoing value of this structuralist device is thrown into doubt.126

Family resemblances One possible alternative to a structuralist ‘definition’ of expanded painting would be the analysis of ‘painting’ as the instigator of a set of ‘family resemblances’. Family resemblances are more flexible than definitions and permit an unusual play of connections and disconnections between painting and extended relatives. Ludwig Wittgenstein127 used the notion of family resemblances to understand common words that are instantly recognizable and usable, but seemed to defy ‘definition’. He focussed on the word ‘game’ and the different types of games, board games, ball games, Olympic games, games of luck, games of skill, team games, solo games and so on. He concluded that, if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities and relationships … many common features drop out and others appear … the result is a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing.128

Family resemblance typifies a workable concept, that is not closed by a frontier … is not everywhere circumscribed by rules, no more than there are rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis or how hard, yet tennis is a game for all that, and has rules too.129

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The rules of tennis enable a game to take place so that players know when and where to act, but many gaps exist where no rules apply and where innovation or free play are permitted. It is the very indistinctness of the situation, where the frontier is not closed, where the situation is impervious to definitions that play happens. Wittgenstein describes a moment of free play: We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many games without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly in the air, chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke.130

Expanded painting exists in just such a relation of free play with painting, it is connected by a certain family resemblance, there is a series of connections and disconnections, that relate it to painting and at the same time can make its definitive connection seem tenuous. Painting can be the game or discipline that started the play, but painting can be left unfinished or new rules added as painting proceeds towards an indefinite outcome. Painting begins as a set of conditions suggested by paint, brush, canvas, frame, colour, verticality, frontality, easel and so on. Along the way any or most of those can be dropped and at the same time other things added such as video, performance, objects, time, space and so on. Accordingly an alternate diagram of painterly free play (Figure 2.25) could be composed whereby expanded painting is the combination of elements from painting and other things, named ‘not-painting’. The one rule to the game of expanded painting is that at least one element of painting must be present, if not the work might be something else like expanded sculpture, expanded photography or some other medium in an expanded state. For example, a work might be solely about colour separated from a support surface as in the work of Huseyin Sami (Figure 2.26). Sami’s work is an intense focus on colour as an object, as a quantity of matter as opposed to a quality or surface appearance. The work may use sculptural devices, it may even look like sculpture in its three-dimensional appearance. However, according to its family resemblance, its parentage from both painting and ‘not painting’, it fits clearly in the game of expanded painting, feeding a discussion about something beyond ordinary understandings of painting. Family resemblance is also another way of reconnecting with Krauss’ thinking, since it bears an operational resemblance with her term, ‘differentiality

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Figure 2.25 Mark Titmarsh, Diagram of Family Resemblances of Expanded Painting, 2016

specificity’.131 She defines this term in opposition to formalist thinking and the tendency to essentialize painting and sculpture based on purely physical characteristics. Thus differential specificity is the specificity of media … understood as differential, self differing, and thus a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support.132

Thus in an age where traditional aesthetic boundaries have been superseded, a singular focus on physical support through the modernist master narrative of painterly flatness, is no longer relevant. By contrast in a postmodern and post-medium condition133 artists may use elements of a traditional medium

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Figure 2.26 Huseyin Sami, Spaghetti Ball #3, 2008, acrylic paint, 20 × 23 × 23 cm. Courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, Australia

but with the ‘technical support’134 of other media. Krauss refers to William Kentridge as an example of an artist who has taken the traditional craft of drawing into a post-medium condition,135 into a state of differing from itself by employing the ‘technical support’ of film and animation. His films, by showing the act of drawing and its effects of smudging and transformations, reveal the specificity of the ‘hand wrought’ while at the same time making drawing selfreflexive within its filmic condition. Differential specificity acknowledges that an artwork has a physical presence but that its presence is complicated by reference to layers of convention. Such is the case with expanded painting, it is a medium that does not collapse itself back into the physicality of its support, it references the layers of conventions of painting, and with the aid of technical support in the form of another medium like video, photography, or performance invents itself as an expanded medium.

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However, the question remains, why mention painting at all? What is the point of talking about painting in work that goes beyond painting? Isn’t a postmedium condition precisely that, a state in which we don’t need to mention painting and sculpture any more? Don’t contemporary artists make ‘art’, rather than painting and sculpture? Don’t most artists use whatever medium suits them, some combination of painting, sculpture, film, video, photography, performance, whatever helps them achieve the desired overall result of art making? Yes, but whatever an artists uses has some material basis, it has physical characteristics, that exist in a world of social, cultural, economic, political and aesthetic relations. Krauss shows that contemporary artists in dismissing medium specificity are nevertheless involved in ‘unpacking the specificity’136 of whatever materials they use as technical support. By going down this path Krauss develops a new way of talking about medium specificity beyond Greenberg and modernist purism. She clarifies this in the introduction to her book Perpetual Inventory, where she attacks the common understanding of ‘post-medium condition’ as an escape from specificity. She calls it a ‘monstrous myth’137 and that ‘the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art’.138 Most telling is the assertive claim that her lifelong project has been ‘to wrestle new media to the mat of specificity’,139 that is to show the background rules of materiality in any art form that purports to be beyond medium specificity. This position is at times strangely contradictory, even Greenbergian, since she also claims to ‘speak for the continuance of modernism, [and] against kitsch’!140 Yves Alain Bois extends this position by saying to Krauss that ‘its not a question of the materiality of the medium so much as the concept of the medium’.141 The medium provides a ground set of rules for production, usually craft based at the outset. Then the artist will riff on those rules by generating various analogues or concepts that stand in the place of the medium. This is why Krauss uses the alternate term ‘technical support’ as opposed to ‘medium’ so she can say that a painter can ‘use almost anything as a support for colour’.142 In the same way expanded painting uses anything that can carry colour as a technical support for painting, extending it elementally into all areas of life. It captures and substantializes colour as it withdraws into a world of production and functionalization, showing painting as the trailing ash that elemental fires of expanded media leave behind.

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Accordingly the discussion of expanded painting is also a consideration of painting in a post-medium condition. When painting uses the technical support of other media, sculpture, video, photography, performance, it shows its differential specificity, the way painting is self-differing and self-deferring, moving away from painting as a way of staying connected, however tenuously, to the specific medium of painting. (iv) Recent expanded painting – Not painting now Are we any closer to an understanding of the finitude of expanded painting? Very broadly from the work discussed so far, two things seem to happen. Firstly, there is an end point reached with painting that leads artists to divorce themselves from painting, to abandon painting in favour of some other medium or unspecified practice. Secondly that new practice seems to involve some aspects of painting practice but not all of it, certain elements are removed and other elements are inserted. The process goes back to the first decade of the twentieth century when Picasso could go no further in painting and had to reach out for aspects of sculpture to move painting forward. By introducing ‘foreign’ objects such as wallpaper, newspaper, cardboard, sand and rope, he denied the infinitely thin surface of the image and extended the range of painterly operations. Almost immediately afterwards, Duchamp pushed painterly production to an a-logical extreme by abandoning all the craft skills associated with painting to produce readymades. Following Duchamp, the subsequent story of painting is a litany of abandonments. Wave after wave of painters in the following decades began withdrawing various elements from the tradition of painterly practice. Pollock abandoned brush and easel in favour of the performative act of ‘doing’ painting. Allan Kaprow, inspired by Pollock, abandoned painting and all discipline-based definitions of art, in favour of hybrid events that he called ‘happenings’ and performance art. At about the same time Robert Rauschenberg abandoned the vertical picture plane by placing his canvas on the floor where it accumulated objects rather than images. By introducing an ‘aggressive physical dimension into pictorial space’143 painting asserted its object status over its pictorial function. The few traces that remained of easel painting by the late 1960’s were globally erased when an entire generation of painters abandoned their studiobased craft and migrated to conceptual art and minimal art.

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Neo-expressionism in the early 1980s was a brief resurgence of traditional painterliness in the form of meaty brushstrokes and rich imagery. Very soon afterwards painters returned to ritualistically abandoning their craft in favour of object-based practices that resulted in the creation of a new medium, installation art. Acquiring the skills of studio painting, understanding the history of the medium and then abandoning it continues to be the most radical move a painter can make. Barry Schwabsky notes in Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, that to ‘not paint’ has become a ‘fully institutionalised practice’.144 By that he means that the professional journey from the painters studio to an alternative practice has become something of a compulsory cultural ritual. In the current decade artists enter the professional field of painting where ‘not painting’ is their starting point and whatever is done from there is determined by relational movements away from painting. However, in such an orbit, to ‘not paint’ is still centripetally driven by the gravitational centre of painting itself. Consequently, artists who abandon painting for a rainbow alliance of media and skills, ultimately move along the same path, away from concerns for a flat image towards object-based practices. Wave upon wave of abandonments have nevertheless left painting as the preferred starting point in art schools and galleries. As painters make their leap into a new practice, where they land defines a new boundary, or at least a new sense of possibility for expanded painting.

Crafting new skills As painting and traditional media give way to expanded painting and other works in a post-medium condition there is an impact on the craft skills required to make such work. Peter Dormer points out that since the 1960s the status of craft knowledge has sharply declined … brought on by abstract art, installation art, non traditional media and the substitution of craft knowledge with art theory.145

He laments that there is no longer a community of craft knowledge shared by artists and that younger artists are no longer prepared to put aside years of

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their life to acquire the skills that seemed important to previous generations. He identifies a radical difference between craft knowledge and propositional knowledge and implies that most contemporary art is devoid of skill and full of content at the level of theoretical and personal propositions. Allegedly, a gradual wasting away of craft knowledge is also caused by the loss of the mentoring process in the art world and its replacement by generational friction. Contemporary artists show contempt for previous generations and their skill set particularly if there is an identification with rebellious individuality and the misfit. The rebel breaks the historical lineage of practice and takes the risk of going alone, showing, hostility towards craft, knowledge and skill.146

However, Dormer fails to acknowledge that lost skills are often condensed into new components of practice that require the development of new skills not previously considered as relevant to the craft. Not so long ago, part of the painter’s historical skill set involved grinding pigments and mixing colours before applying them to canvas. With industrialization this laborious, but intimately elemental process, was dropped and painters could respectably use mass-produced paint sold in tubes. The loss of the skill of grinding and mixing was quickly filled with the new skill of en plein air painting, or painting outside the studio, often in remote locations. This could only be achieved through the compactness and portability of tubes of paint together with collapsible easels that turned the artist’s studio into something that could be carried around on their back. This trade of one skill for another facilitated the entire Impressionist revolution of working in natural light and the new look of rapid unmixed application of colours. Similarly as the skills of the traditional painter based on colour theory, life study and representation are replaced by the relative instantaneousness of the readymade and installation art, new skills are required to make such an artwork ‘work’. Some of the new skills are conceptual and political, such as being able to think and articulate the relevance of work as it sheds older conventions and takes its place in a contemporary environment. Other skills involve a return to tradesman-like fabrication of wood and other physical elements, as well as the skills of the art director who can judge the timing and composition of complex components in a large exhibition space or outdoor site.

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Craftiness The language for identifying the practice of expanded painting and the skills involved in making such work is only being developed now. As Stephen Melville puts it, there is the struggle to define both an object and an account of our access to it.147

Expanded painting is the development of a new craft for artists and a new discourse for critical thinkers engaging with the work. When the artist is both148 maker and writer, as is often the case during a period of crisis and transition, expanded painting becomes the combined skill set of material making and conceptual thinking. Artists like Liam Gillick and David Batchelor have developed a consistent discourse about the aesthetic and material dimensions of contemporary practice in its transition from painting into something hybridized and spatial. While neither use the term ‘expanded painting’, their understanding of poetic production and philosophical enquiry makes a significant contribution to understanding the praxical skills of the expanded painter. Many artists from the past and most contemporary artists reach an end point with painting as it has been known, followed by an attempt to develop a new practice based on what might be salvaged from painting within a contemporary context. To reveal the presence of painting as a family resemblance with expanded practices often demands a kind of reverse sleuthing. This involves the use of multiple senses to sniff out the sublimated presence of painting, which exists as a deconstructed shadow cast by the edifice of new hybrids. The medium specificity of painting within an expanded practice is not collapsed into mere materials such as canvas and paint but opens out into a free play of skills and multi-modality, at all those places where painting interfaces with other media. For example, Jim Lambie’s work (Figure 3.1) operates overtly at the interface of fashion, music and abstraction. His brightly coloured vinyl tape affixed to the floor denies the traditional experience of painting but retains the primary sensual experience of colour. Lambie’s works are vast, covering the floors of great museums around the world, becoming a totalizing experience that claims the floor on which the spectator walks, as well as the prismatic

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intensities of club culture and an array of fetishized objects from pop culture. By stepping away from his training as a painter he has liberated himself from the requirement to produce mere objects such as paintings. At the same time his work imposes a new requirement to compose colour in vast architectural spaces such as the Duveen Gallery at the Tate Britain in London. Katherina Grosse’s move away from easel painting also means she is able to break free of the conventions of the frame and cover everything reachable with a spray gun. By spraying paint directly onto the gallery edifice (Figure 3.2) she makes architecture part of the work while at the same time deconstructing and foregrounding its hidden presence as sense maker. Her works are powerfully retinal, garishly coloured abstract graffiti that has invaded the precise geometry of museum design to impose another sense of dis-order. By abandoning paint tubes and brush she heightens the technical skills of a colourist and event designer, composing intricate traces of colour together with dirt and balloons across the vast spaces of international contemporary art galleries. Like Lambie and Grosse, the Australian artist Richard Dunn trained as a painter but moved into practices frequently described as installation art. ‘Shadowzone’ is a work comprising two large white translucent screens (Figure 2.27) that run down the centre of a gallery with a bank of fluorescent lights occupying the wall behind. The fluorescent lights are extremely bright, almost blinding, and are the only source of light within a darkened room. The intensity of synthetic light is filtered through the screens to create an opalescent alley running down the corridor between the screens. The white screens exaggerate the dimensions of painterly canvas to the almost limitless proportions of sailcloth. Typically canvas is the barrier between the viewer’s world and the world of the painted image. However, here the screens function as a safety zone, a ‘shadow zone’, that invites the viewer into a shaded place protected from the very bright lights on the opposite wall. The lights, as opposed to discretely withdrawn track lighting, intrusively occupy the place where a painting should be, that is on the wall and directly facing the viewer. When standing between the two screens, where the spatial dynamics of the room guide you, the lights illuminate the screens from behind and seem to emanate from the very interior of its fibres. The lights ‘illuminate’ the work in the dual sense of reflecting light from a surface and also granting an inner light that becomes the inherent content of the screen. Thus painting

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Figure 2.27 Richard Dunn, Shadowzone, 2005, fluorescent lights, polyester, wire rigging, loudspeakers, 1,500 × 1,500 × 350 cm, sound component, ‘An Einem Ort – An Einem Andere Ort’, Marcus Kaiser, Cello, 2004/05. Installation view Artspace, Sydney, Australia, 2005 courtesy the artist

is reversed or turned inside out, in that electric light enlightens an obscured interior, as opposed to the simulated light effects of a painterly surface. The screens, escaping their role as support surface, become containers of light. In this work the viewing experience is broken down into elements consisting of support surface, lighting source and a place for a viewer to stand. The support surface is not flat but curved and enormous, all enveloping. The lights do not assist the viewing of the work but attack the eye encouraging a literal retreat. Similarly, the usual white cube environment would encourage the viewer to withdraw to an inner place of silent observation and contemplation. This is made impossible in this work by virtue of the reversal of the role of light. Thus fragments of painting, through stages of inversion and exaggeration, are pushed into a spatial format, an ‘installation’, that nevertheless shows off its family resemblance to painting. Painting is broken down into building block units, some elements are discarded, some foregrounded and with additional

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‘technical support’ from an ambient sound component that gives the work the status of totalized painting.

Conclusion How is it that so many artists from different parts of the world have arrived at a practice that is so similar in its rejection of painting while at the same time maintaining a conceptual link with it? Artists like Jim Lambie, Katherine Grosse, David Batchelor, Jessica Stockholder, John Armleder, Karen Kilimnik, Douglas Gordon, Stephen Prina, Rudolf Stingel, Tobias Rehberger, Andrea Zittel, Liam Gillick, Tom Friedman, Cady Noland, Gunther Forg and Hany Armanious were all trained in a similar intellectual milieu. They studied at influential art schools such as St Martins and Goldsmiths in the UK, Cal Arts and Parsons in the United States, Dusseldorf Academy of Art in Germany and Sydney College of the Arts in Australia where developments in many fields outside visual art were important. In particular a broad field of critical theory and cultural studies, that included psychoanalysis, film theory, semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, linguistics and phenomenology were major influences in teaching and curricula dating back to the 1970s. This potent combination of intellectual enquiry placed older skill-based traditions under review. Thus the primary concern for artists shifted from technical skills towards understanding how meaning is generated, the affairs of everyday life and what matters in a world of constantly changing social and political relations. Very influential in this process was the arrival of cinema studies as a new academic discipline flourishing in liberal arts universities and art schools from the 1970s onwards. Originating in French intellectual life it brought with it the mainstays of continental philosophy such as Marxism, psychoanalysis and structuralism. As a result new understandings of media formalism and the nature of a viewing subject meant that links could be made between traditional media such as painting and new experiments taking place in independent cinema and experimental film. Film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey argued that cinema is by nature ideological, since

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the mechanics of filmic representation, constituted by the camera, the lens, the editing process, the projector and the screen are inherently subordinated to the ideology of consumption, gender roles and authority structures. Thus ideology is not imposed from outside the world of cinema, it is an inherent part of its technological nature. Baudry149 condenses these ideas into what he calls the ‘camera effect’, that is, the subjective positioning of the viewer in the place of the camera, and the psychological and power identifications that take place. In Baudry’s argument the cinema is cast as a metaphor for the entire psychic apparatus whereby lens, projector, darkness, screen and illumination become the viewer’s ‘dream screen’ and the disembodied eye of the camera casts the viewer as dreamer into a mirror world of psychic identification. Laura Mulvey extended these arguments through feminist discourse, proposing that the cinematic apparatus as shaped by classical Hollywood cinema invariably constructs the spectator in the position of a masculine subject, with the correlative figure of the woman as the object of that gaze, and the subject of male desire. Stephen Heath used the surgical term ‘suture’150 to characterize the psychical modes that cinema employs to stitch the viewer from the world outside the screen into a total identification within the events on screen. Suture is activated by subjective forms of looking used in the cinema to create an intimate space between characters interacting with each other. He used Jacques Lacan’s writing on the gaze that introduces a series of paradoxes that challenge rational thinking about eyes that look, what is seen and the relation between subject and object. This rethinking of the look as something more than the seer’s shoot, posed possibilities that an object might possess a gaze, that a painting or object could have its own independent otherness with powers to generate thinking and be an active thought in a visual field. Consequently, a concern for the psycho-dynamics of the gaze and the formal technological nature of all media carried over into the way many painters thought of their relationship to works from art history, and the contemporary world of printed media and popular culture. Gene Youngblood’s book Expanded Cinema, published in 1970, combined critical theory, and an understanding of new technologies such as video and computer animation, to create an awareness for artists that a new era of aesthetic and technological metamorphosis had arrived. Artists trained in this environment began to move away from a singular concern for the image

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towards an extra consideration of the material basis of their discipline, in this case painting and its possible status as an inter-media art form. This resulted in a tension between the image-laden surface of the canvas and object-like disruptions and extensions of that surface. Painting once more was becoming a physical extension away from virtual space on the surface of the canvas, out into the ‘live’ space of the viewer, the space in the gallery usually left clear for looking and thinking. Artists like Fred Sandback used string as a substitute for the linear element in painting, to graphically define a space and build an aesthetic of spatial composition. The string cut into open space with a coloured line and at the same time bounded space with a density defining perimeter. Ian Burn used mirrors instead of paint and canvas to complexify the literal and psychological relationship between actual objects and their image in virtual space. Haim Steinbach reversed the relationship between eye and window by making shelf works that created a flat bed picture plane151 where objects, as opposed to images, begin to accumulate. Painting was becoming the subject for a set of experimental processes producing a series of technological effects. At those points where painting was able to give itself up, releasing canvas or brush, was another coordinate in the historical understanding of painting as an effect that could be foregrounded, made strange and reconstructed. Testing the edges of painting was like addressing the medium as if it had an anthropomorphic status, as if it might give an answer. Similarly, questioning painting directly as a living medium, produced a certain self reflexivity in the artist, rendering painter and painting existential equals. The formal search for the boundary of painting meets a psychological search for the edge of the self where painting and being become one. At the same time as regressing into the inner workings of painterly materials and individual subjectivity, there is an equal and opposite tendency to escalate off the surface of painting into the spatial dynamics of objects and environments. Both regression and escalation152 are devices for asking the same question, what is painting and how far can it be pushed? So far it has been argued that within the professional context of painting there has been an historical tendency to question the limitations of painting, while at the same time maintaining a familial link with it. This work should be called expanded painting, rather than installation art, since according to

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the calculus of Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblances’ and Krauss ‘differential specificity’, painting is the primary term generating a field of permutational connections. As such expanded painting shows a drive within painting to separate from itself, to examine and extend its own boundaries, to be multidisciplinary and multi-modal, to stay as a question unto itself. Rosalind Krauss reminds us from the outset, that the primary practice of sculpture is not excluded from the expanded field of sculpture, rather it is one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other different structured possibilities153

By analogy paintings that hang on a wall are within the expanded field of painting, even though the boundary has been significantly enlarged to include many possibilities that once seemed inconceivable as painting. Similarly, by using the concept of family resemblances, work that doesn’t look like painting can be shown to be a close relative, created by splicing the genomic elements of colour, frame and paint with various suitors outside the realm of painting. With Kraussian ‘differential specificity’ we can go even further and say that work that is wholly indeterminate, that refuses to be collapsed into the material characteristics of painting, can nevertheless be understood as a riff on the cultural conventions of painting. There is no arithmetic that will give us a definition of expanded painting but there is a calculus, a complex logic that enables us to understand certain works not nameable as painting, that are nevertheless originary within its differential field. While it may be impossible to call some expanded works ‘paintings’, they are ultimately works about painting, in relation to painting, that establish a sense of difference with painting. In them the medium of painting has become the entity to ‘whom’ the work is addressed, which is to posit the medium not as a material susceptible of being purified but as the site of a missing addressee.154

As such there is no search for a timeless essence of painting, painting cannot be reduced to colour or paint or flatness. Rather it is an evolving historical relationship, a changing pact between artist, medium and audience that accepts certain works as within a current understanding of painting. It is in such an environment that Katy Siegel can pose the question,

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When is a sculpture, an installation, a photograph or a building really a painting?155

The challenge is to identify an original leap away from painting, to find the family resemblance of painting within a convergence of materials and practices, and thus to be able to experience a building, an installation or photograph ‘as’ painting. The word ‘painting’ persists in one form or another, it will not be supplanted by ‘installation’ or any other word as the most appropriate word in this discussion. As all the conventions of painting are critiqued, deconstructed and abandoned, a new theory of painting comes forward in the work as it is made from year to year. Abandoned painting results in work that falls outside the realm of painting, outside the word ‘painting’, which might be re-embraced later as a new theoretical heretical understanding of painting. With each abandonment of painting, aesthetic conceptions are destroyed but the name ‘painting’ endures. As Thierry de Duve puts it, There exists a word with which to talk of the imaginary and real work of all the painters of the world, no matter what they are doing, and that word is painting.156

So far the tools of art theory have revealed what can be ‘known’ about painting, what painting is in an historical sense, and how it might be moving into a new epoch of expanded painting. But something is missing, art theory is not able to show ‘how’ painting ‘is’. To find how anything is in its ‘is-ness’, involves going beyond epistemology, beyond art theory and art history as a system of knowledge, to ask about the very ‘being’ of painting. Art theory stumbles in the face of expanded painting, misnames it installation art and reclaims it as a theoretical aesthetic phenomenon. If, however, expanded painting is taken as an ontological investigation of painting, that shows the limitations of art theory, then it demands the intervention of another discipline better suited for asking the right question.

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The proper name ‘expanded painting’ is given to a century of historical events that show generations of artists attempting to twist free of painting in favour of new forms. The extended passage from painting to another kind of practice leaves these questions open: Does painting survive? Does a paradigmatic shift into a radical new kind of work result in the death of painting? Painters have continually tested the discipline by removing certain elements such as frame, canvas, and brush to see if they were essential to the practice. In doing so new forms of painting and anti-painting were established, not all of which were identifiable as painting but each retained a special relationship with painting. The further artists moved away from historical determinants such as paint, canvas, and frame the closer they came to asking the question, what is painting in its essence? It is at this point that art theory began to break down, to become inadequate to the question. The deeper the enquiry went into the nature of painting the more complex and uncanny the language was required to deal with it. The more precarious painting became the more important it became to know if there was anything crucial about painting that needed to be retained. Painting seemed to become an independent entity separate from its practitioners, a cultural tendency that worked itself out through different artists in different ages. Beginning as a challenge to mimesis and representation, it defies surface and picture plane, eventually becoming a hybrid of all art forms, a kind of total painting. Through each stage, as painting sheds layers of its identity like Russian nested dolls, the question of essence begins to arise. How many layers and identities are there to painting and which is at the core? What is it about painting that makes it painting? What is it about any medium that makes it what it is? It is at this point, as questions produce even more questions, that the argument shifts subtly but significantly from art theory to ontology.

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Ontologically, the discipline of painting shows up as inherently differential, separating off from itself, contradicting any comfortable notion of transhistorical unity. Consequently, the art history of expanded painting needed more and more art theory to make sense of complex and contradictory forms of practice that both challenged and embraced painting. Once art theory began to ask these kinds of questions, to consider this kind of language, it seemed closer to a world view, a form of philosophical questioning that tried to get behind painting and discover what made it possible. From this point of view expanded painting is a way of philosophizing in painting, which asks fundamental questions about painting in particular, and being in general. Asking an ontological question of painting, changed both painting and the artist.1

Questioning ontology Ontology is a relatively new word coined2 in the seventeenth century from Greek terms and in deference to classical modes of thought. The present participle of the Greek word ‘to be’ is ‘on’ and combined with the Greek word for reason, ‘logos’ becomes ontology, the study or science of being. Ontology is a modern alternative to the discipline of metaphysics that began with Aristotle as a study of the features common to all beings. After defining metaphysics as ‘a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature’, Aristotle had been careful to add, in order to preclude all possible confusion between metaphysics and the other branches of human learning: ‘Now this is not the same as any of the so called special sciences, for none of these others deals generally with being as being. They cut off part of being to investigate the attributes of part’. Thus for instance, the mathematical sciences deal with quantity, the physical sciences with motion and the biological sciences with life, that is to say with certain definite ways of being, none of which is being as being, but only being as life, as motion, as quantity.3

The very word ‘being’ is partly responsible for any subsequent confusion since it functions in so many grammatical forms and from so many voices. As a verb, to be, no longer signifies something that is, nor even existence in general, but rather the very act of whereby any given reality actually is or exists.4

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As such metaphysics and ontology run the risk of getting lost in the ambiguities between ‘what is’ and the ‘being of what is’. The former would be a list of extant things and the latter a philosophical enquiry into the fundamental nature of being itself. The challenge then is to develop a study of being that is not either a pure tautology or a metaphoric or infinitely regressive chain.5

Martin Heidegger dramatized the tension between ‘what is’ and the ‘being of what is’ by calling it ‘ontological difference’. ‘What is’ is taken for granted in our daily activities, and the ‘being of what is’ is a troubling philosophical question that is often simply passed over or forgotten. Heidegger termed the two major players in ontological difference as ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’. Put simply, ontic refers to what is, ontology to an enquiry of what is, while ontological refers to the condition or behaviour of what is.6

Heidegger emphasized his version of ontology as a fundamental ontology since he sought to ask about the ground and fundament of being. It was also a kind of meta-ontology since he sought to place ontology in a long history of the study of being which revealed not only a history of different ways of understanding being but also a ‘history of being’ in a state of ongoing evolution. To begin this kind of fundamental questioning about the ground of being, Heidegger first asks about the nature of the questioner themselves, the human enquirer. In a thorough going attempt to avoid the shape of traditional ontology and metaphysics Heidegger rethinks and renames the human enquirer as Dasein. Dasein refers to human beings and the type of being they have, something that is lost in the term ‘subject’ and faintly alluded to in the double barrel word, human being. Dasein has two aspects, firstly it is extant as an individual living thing and secondly it is a type of being that human beings have. Those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not properties of some entity which looks so and so, they are in each case possible ways for it to be. So when we designate this entity with the term ‘Dasein’ we are not expressing its ‘what’, as if it were a table, house or tree but its Being.7

Thinking philosophically about the nature of being involves the ability to catch the difference between beings and being and to hold the tension between the ontic and the ontological. While holding this differential tension it may seem

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that the ontological is intellectually superior and that the ontic is concerned trivially with brute presence. But as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, the difference between being and beings is an essential and active relation.8

He seeks to pull us away from prioritizing the ontological to instead privilege the ontic since even as Heidegger puts it, only as long as an understanding of being is ontically possible, ‘is there’ being.9

We are constantly involved in a world of beings and continually engaged with things at the level of ontic affairs. Any ontological analysis of being will also be grounded in the ontic. Conversely, the discussion of painting is rooted in the ontic presence of paint as a wet coloured substance that dries and congeals, that give itself up as a coloured object in a world of finite possibilities. Expanded painting sets up the finite matter that constitutes painting ontologically, by posing questions about the nature of painting down to its very being. To question in this manner involves a move from art theory to philosophy, in particular that area of philosophy that takes a particular focus on art. The proper name for the philosophy of art has changed through time with each new name, critical theory, cultural theory and so on, indicating new historical developments in the articulation of what is most important about art. The original philosophy of art, aesthetics, is defined by Miguel de Beistegui as knowledge of human behaviour with respect to sense, sensation and feeling, and knowledge of how those are determined.10

With Baumgarten and Kant aesthetics meant more specifically thinking about the sensation of beauty in relation to the arts. However, by the late twentieth century the word ‘aesthetics’ was gradually withdrawn from the theoretical vocabulary of art. It had become both too universal and too particular. Too universal in that everything had become aesthetic, sport, management, theology, and so nothing was more aesthetic than anything else, not even art. Too particular in that the aesthetic language of beauty was unable to confront the present situation of avant-garde art as it unfolded during modernism and postmodernism. Aesthetics in this area was replaced by new disciplines for thinking about art, critical theory, art theory, cultural theory, visual culture and so on.11

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The derivation of the original term aesthetics comes from the Greek word aeisthesis, meaning to feel, sense or perceive. Thus we can say very generally that aesthetics is a study of the way we feel the world through the things that surround us, from works of art through to things of everyday experience. This very broad notion of a living aesthetic field encompasses all our activities from relationships, to homes, to sport, to business management to systems of belief. All of it is a way of ‘feeling our feelings’ about the world, to find a way to articulate whether it be good and proper, correct and beautiful. It is this very saturation of ‘sheer aesthetic mindedness’ in modern living that confronted Martin Heidegger when he turned his attention to art in the 1930s. It inspired him to reactively develop a thinking about art that sought out those parts of art and art making that aesthetics had not been able to reach or articulate. It begins with a declaration about the primacy of art, the question concerning art leads us directly to the one that is preliminary to all questions12

namely, the question of being. Both traditional aesthetics and Heidegger’s thinking beyond aesthetics, develop a definition of being. Traditional aesthetics thinks ‘being’ in terms of subjects and objects. Subjects produce objects as works of art, and objects produce in subjects affective states. The project of aesthetics was to define which objects were works of art and which affective states were aesthetic. Aesthetics becomes a social construction in which all human feelings are subject to reason and judgement, while forms of production are justified as producing objects for interpretative matrices. Aesthetics as a discipline, art as a category of practice, and the independence of the human subject all come into being at the same time since each reflects and co-defines the other.

Picturing worlds In The Age of the World Picture (1938),13 Heidegger argues that the rise of the modern subject coincides with an objectification of the world brought on by the new disciplines of modern science and aesthetics. He argues that one of the key phenomena of the modern period14 is

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the event of art’s moving into the purview of aesthetics. That means that the artwork becomes the object of mere subjective experience.15

Representations of the world established by scientific experimentation and visual art systems become a way of grasping the world as something certifiably present and rationally explicable, in short, object like. Modern man becomes the relational centre and from that vantage point a picture of the world is established, not as a representation of the world, but as a system out of which everything can be prepared for representation, visually, conceptually, scientifically. Thus to be is to be represented.16

Heidegger opposes modern ‘representing’ with pre-modern ‘apprehending’. Modern man looks upon the things of the world and represents them as way of understanding them. By contrast, pre-modern man stood in the exact reverse situation, he was looked upon by the things of the world and he apprehended that very experience. That which is, does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception. Rather man is the one who is looked at by that which is, he is the one who is – in company with itself – gathered towards presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, [is] to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord.17

In contrast, ‘representing’ establishes a system for measuring and guiding, calculating everything that is. Man as representing subject … pictures forth, whatever is, as the objective, into the world as picture.18

Whatever is ‘pictured forth’ in representation is tamed, made into an object especially for the subject who manages a world. In ‘apprehending’ humans are ‘maintained within openness’, beyond the closedness of calculated representation and in such a way that ‘opposition and discord’ is still possible. In an attempt to get beyond the reach of world picturing Heidegger introduces

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the idea of the ‘incalculable’. The incalculable is what lies beyond rational and reasonable thinking but is somehow implied in it: This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things, everywhere man has been transformed into subject and the world into picture.19

In the infinitely large and infinitely small, calculation and representation break down forcing a quantum abstraction both in science and art. In the infinitely small, the world of atoms and molecules, and the infinitely large, the edge of the cosmos and time, systems of representation breakdown. This shadow that surrounds the system as an unthinkable limit, that defies being pictured, resonates with another concept that Heidegger developed at roughly the same time, namely earth.20

Falls the shadow Aesthetics is a mode of thinking that presupposes a world picture where certain types of objects appear to subjects as fully available and present. However, Heidegger alerts us that any thing that stands out in presence also casts a shadow of absence, of non-presence. Ultimately, that absence is the very ground on which presence subsists. Being and nothing both being wholly indeterminate pass into each other and thus give rise to becoming and determinacy.21

Presence is the appearance of something oriented towards us, while absence withdraws into the unsaid and unseen. The task in this kind of thinking of presence and absence is to see their crucial relationship, and not be blinded by the sheer overtness of presence. To think into the shadow is to think beyond aesthetics. To think what becomes absent in art is to ask art a question that aesthetics is not able to formulate. If aesthetics is a way of feeling presence, of sensing that something is there and that because of my feelings I am there as well, then art will be validated as a form of affective presence. If post aesthetics gets beyond presence and thinks into absence as well, then it will have an entirely different

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question to ask. To invoke post aesthetics as an ontological questioning is to ask: what is art doing if it is not guaranteeing my subjectivity, not pleasing me with beautiful affects, not presenting a presence?

Revelation Heidegger has a surprisingly brief though cautious answer: could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally?22

Like many of Heidegger’s terms ‘revelation’ is an everyday word that grows in significance through thoughtful and particular usage. In daily usage revelation means the revealing of something that was not known before, usually in surprising circumstances. In news reports there are revelations of shady dealings behind the tender for a government contract, or seeing a rooky sportsman play extremely well is a revelation of their nascent ability. In each case something not known, a secret or unappreciated quality becomes known. Heidegger focuses his meaning when he refers to the ‘coming to presence of art’ which indicates the way art is made or brought into presence. So we can say that when an artwork is made there is a revelation, something, not known or seen before, is revealed in the transformation of materials. Revelation has a general application since all things that are made, that pass over from non-being into being, are revealed. In ‘being made’ there is a movement from non-existence to existence. Any such journey has the character of a revelation and what is revealed is what happens to materials in the process of making. What is revealed in art, according to Heidegger, can be discussed in terms of two ontological dimensions, earth and world. He presents these two terms together for the first time in his 1935 essay The Origin of the Work of Art,23 where they appear to operate as a substitute for the traditional aesthetic division of form and content. They are also reminiscent of the phenomenological dyad of ground and horizon. Jeff Malpas in Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World,24 establishes a genealogy of both earth and world from Being and Time in 1927, through to The Origin of the Work of Art in 1935. World is initially characterized in

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Being and Time as a context of useful items and interpersonal relations, simply as a starting point for developing a deeper understanding of the human as being-in-the-world, a being whose world is a matrix of meaningfulness. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics25 Heidegger continues the analysis of world through a comparison of three kinds of being: stone, animal and human. He concludes that stone is worldless, animal is poor in world and the human is world founding. As Mark Sinclair reminds us, world is not to be considered a thing or collection of things: World is more a cultural dynamic that determines what is significant in anything that can be said and done. It is a process, a way of being meaningful, rather than any meaningful thing or things. As such world is an already established sense of coherence and ordering, it is the web of ‘paths and relations’ within which individuals already find themselves.26

World is essentially a projection of human being, of Dasein, implicating notions of meaning and truth. For Heidegger truth is not a singular correspondence with fact but a dynamic tension between worldly appearance and a horizon like limitation or ground: the disclosedness of world is underpinned by the impenetrability of … ‘ground’ 27

Ground suggests both the limits of finite being and something beyond, a mystery, that which is concealed and cannot be made manifest. It is this tendency to withdrawal and concealment at the heart of world disclosure that Heidegger will later call ‘earth’. Yet both terms are in their own way entirely new. Even though ‘world’, was a major focus in Being and Time it is developed in The Origin of the Work of Art specifically in relation to the work of art. Most surprising is the term ‘earth’ since it has not appeared in any of Heidegger’s previous texts.

Thinking earth In earlier texts Heidegger used the term ‘nature’ to signify an impenetrable ground.28 Michel Haar in his analysis of Heidegger’s use of the related terms phusis, nature and earth, argues that ‘nature’ for him indicated:

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a harmonious unity that gathers and traverses the totality of beings, fashioning their differences … Nature is not restricted to a distinct ‘natural’ domain. ‘It never lets itself be encountered somewhere within the sphere of the real as some isolated real thing’, its divinity consists in giving to every isolated appearance but above all to the ‘contraries’ the tension of their belonging together.29

Heidegger developed this primordial sense of nature, from the Greek30 word for nature, phusis. He argued that phusis can be also translated as ‘self emerging presence’, suggesting a self-initiated and self-directed movement rather than simply the fecundity of nature: The Greeks had grasped under the name phusis both initial appearing of things as well as the basis of all things, the universal support which remains in reserve throughout and beneath all forms …. Thought as the most general trait which embraces and penetrates reality … a cause of all particular things.31

Both nature and phusis contain a primary conflict between, ‘contraries that belong together’, producing a dynamic tension, a struggle between advancing and withdrawing: The essence of phusis is emergence, unconcealment, coming to presence out of withdrawal … Thus the phusis of the Pre-Socratics is defined as that which returns to itself in a self flourishing, as an arising that shelters a selfconcealing.32 (my italics)

Four earths Heidegger eventually drops any reference to nature and uses instead the term, earth, while retaining some of the connection to phusis.33 However, earth is not a simple translation of phusis. Michel Haar identifies four senses of the word ‘earth’ as used by Heidegger, 1. An obscure ground Earth belongs to the dimension of withdrawal and concealing [however] Earth is not self enclosed to the point of being totally removed from what appears. .. It must show itself as what holds itself in reserve.34

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2. Nature The Earth35 as ‘living nature’ in the sense of a spontaneous emergence of forces and forms, a continuous flow returning to itself, resting in itself, and never becoming entirely exterior.36 3. A terrestrial homeland Grund [ground] designates the Earth in the sense of rootedness … the nourishing soil … native soil … soil of a people …. Familiar abode … place of habitation … the Earth of the house, the Earth of dwelling.37 4. The material form of the work of art A new sense of the concept of Earth appears in the description of the work of art, no longer outside it but within it … a matter of what one calls the ‘material’ of the work, what it is ‘made of ’: stone, wood, sound, language …. radically rethinking the very notion of ‘material’.38

These four ways of considering earth remind us that earth is not simply matter, pigment, or dirt or the globe we stand on. Earth is that which allows material presence, that which provides a ground on which the world can stand. Earth is inherently a duality since like phusis it is an ‘emerging flowering’ and a ‘withdrawing decaying’, that is both a presencing and absencing. We become aware of it when a flower blooms and decays, things live and die, and everything under the sun casts a shadow. But why does Heidegger need the concept of earth in his thinking? He developed earth in The Origin of the Work of Art only a few years after completing Being and Time. Wasn’t the concept of world enough to deal with the full realm of cultural possibilities? What more could earth bring to the allencompassing schema of world?

Thinking world In everyday usage the world is everything around us. The world is full of people, events, things, buildings, work, loved ones, personal issues and global politics. The world is also the way things happen, the way things are, such is the way of the world. World is used in so many ways that it also includes the globe we live on, the earth, nature, the environmental state the world is in, and so on.

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In Being and Time Heidegger begins with this ordinary kind of thinking about world by considering Dasein in its average everyday-ness. Everyday, in our average way of being, we are in a world and existing in such a world is our way of being. ‘Being’ and ‘being in the world’ are one and the same. World as discussed in Being and Time is the familiar all surrounding environment in which people operate. Humans are in the world, and of the world, and world is constituted by this human involvement. The most immediate things in the world are the tools and equipment we use for daily purposes, but these in turn point to others who provide those tools and other worlds that cluster around people and things outside our immediate world of activities. This world points beyond itself to a larger world.39

World is an environment in which we operate and it is one that keeps opening up and opening out to a broad sense of related inhabitation. It is just this sense of the world that we overlook when we, assume that the world consists of extended natural entities.40

Being and Time shows that world is not a collection of entities and events but is an environment or web of meaningful connections in which people are always immersed. Thomas Sheehan reminds us that world as environment has two aspects, static and dynamic, where world is both a place and a giver of meaning: World when viewed statically and intransitively is the place of meaningfulness. But viewed dynamically and transitively it is the placing of things in meaning, the enworlding and contextualising of them within a set of possibilities that makes things able to be known and used in terms of those very possibilities.41

Precisely because world is an environment it tends to be outside our thoughts, it operates in the background of awareness, and only comes forward as a question when we step out of everydayness, in this case, into the mode of philosophical questioning. In this way world, like earth, shows a tendency to withdraw, to not be obvious.

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Absent nature Heidegger himself laments that the discussion of world in Being and Time took no account of nature as the natural living environment.42 His introduction of the term earth, remedies that situation and serves to ground the concept of world as a living phenomenon, as a life world. Understood in connection with earth, worlds also live and die, just as humans do. Civilizations set themselves up for eternity and become ruins, just as earth provides the material for abundant success and the counter cycle of withering decay: Worlds ordain themselves and decline, earths open up and suffer destruction.43

Earth comes to operate as a vital agonistic term in relation to world. Here Heidegger reveals a Hegelian predisposition to think in terms of (quasi) dialectics between being and beings, concealment and unconcealment, clearing and concealing and so on. However, unlike dialectical terms, earth and world never resolve their tension. Their irresolvable relationship embodies the idea that any intelligibility presupposes something that cannot be fully articulated.44

World in its expansive inter relatedness seeks to contain everything there is, to make it ‘intelligible’, to make it worldly. At the same time earth functions as the constant reminder that there are physical and conceptual limits to everything of this world, that world is always earthed by what can’t quite be said or done.

Pres-absential Through the term ‘earth’ Heidegger conceptualizes the riddle of how something can be present and absent at the same time, how something might advance and withdraw simultaneously. In the artwork we catch sight of earth through paint but at the same time paint withdraws into the image or the finished nature of the artwork. When looking at a painting we can notice paint as a material for the first time, particularly in representational painting when a lick of red paint can suddenly refuse to disappear into the image of blood or fire. In such a situation the materiality

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of the thing, the very matter of the paint, can seem strange and worthy of a double take. If I persist with treating paint as a thing and I try to penetrate it by examining it as a hardened object, it simply lets itself be destroyed and falls into smaller pieces without revealing how it works.45 If I try to analyse paint scientifically and discover it to be made of atoms and wavelengths I have understood nothing of the way of matter, or the liveliness of colour. Through the dynamic of earth there is also a rethinking of what it means to make an artwork. In the making of a sculpture or painting, stone or paint, is not to be thought or used as inert passive matter. Rather each has a particular quality, there is something that paint can do that stone can’t and vice versa. The process of making is a drawing from the earth in its material form, drawing out of the earth into the cultural domain provided by world. In making an artwork there is a revealing of what stone or paint will allow. The act of making is a relationship or a conversation between maker and material. The block of stone constitutes the possibility of the statute and yet it is the work of art alone that makes manifest what the stone is capable of.46

Prioritizing the material relationship between maker and medium is nothing new, it was common thinking during the Renaissance to consider the sculpture hidden in the raw marble.47 In the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century, and in twentieth century architecture48 and sculpture,49 an honest and direct relationship to materials was described as ‘truth to materials’. With these few examples it is clear that moments can be selected from art history showing artists, architects and artisans, have been concerned with revealing the nature of their materials, in short to understand how stone cleaves and paint flows. However, earth-thinking involves something more, a recognition of a type of creativity on the side of nature, that matter is not an inert substance to be simply tamed and mastered. Earth suggests something further, it indicates the humid creativity of matter, partially waiting and partially driving forward from in itself.50 To acknowledge the creativity of materials involves rethinking matter as a kind of ‘creative intelligence’.51 The creativity of matter is its plasticity, in that matter has a predisposition to movement, change, interpenetration and transformation.52

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This kind of thinking amounts to a reformulation of materiality that acknowledges its plastic intelligence, its gifts for recombination.53

The artist harnesses some of the creative power of the material of earth to bring something into appearance, into presence, into form, to bring it out of itself, to disclose it. The making of an artwork is more than a means to an end, more than the operation of an efficient causality,54 more than simply transforming raw matter into something it was not. Making is a revelation, a creative discourse with matter such that both matter and artfulness are revealed. Something of the being of matter and the being of art are revealed at the same time. Both the nature of making as a particular kind of production and the nature of the made thing as a particular kind of presencing are brought into view. In this view the presencing of an art work is ‘pres-absential’,55 it makes certain things present, discloses that there is material that has been worked and at the same time there is an absence, an absencing of the material in favour of form, image, meaning, content.

Strifely assemblages Almost as unusual as earth and world themselves is their special relationship.56 World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth and earth juts through world.57

Though it is tempting to treat each as a separate entity, capable of independent investigation, this is just not possible, since each permanently interpenetrates the other. World, as a cultural domain sits in the background of our awareness as an unspoken matrix of meaningfulness, somehow always already there. We only notice world in special moments, for example when we shift from one sub-world to another, when we visit another country and find that postage stamps are to be bought in a tobacconist’s shop, or when we visit an art gallery and find that a urinal is to be regarded as a work of art. In such a situation the hidden functioning of world is momentarily brought forward as a surprise, and glimpsed as a new set of relations. In each of those situations something

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material, something shaped by a material presence has enabled that worldly event to take place. That material presence, the stamp, the urinal, has a specific characteristic as matter, it has certain physical limitations and many physical possibilities as well. Each element of world and earth, requires the other, there can be no hypothetical presence of the one without the other. Without a world there is no cultural engagement with matter. Without earth there is no material with which to produce a meaningful domain of things and events. Yet when they are together it is not necessarily a stable relationship: The world in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there. The opposition of earth and world is strife.58

World ‘as self opening’ tends to draw everything into the open, to disclose what ever exists in the realm of knowledge, the known and potentially knowable. Whereas earth while fundamentally giving also tends to take things back into itself. It gives plentifully on the condition that the gift be kept secret and quickly returned; life flourishes and must die, buildings tower and must crumble. The relationship of tension between earth and world cannot be resolved, they are drawn together like dialectical opposites, but there is no synthetic resolution. The world and earth never combine in a dialectical synthesis in order to form a third, definitive term. They are contraries in a permanent strife. This struggle never appears in itself, but only in actions and works.59

This special state of strife is unhealable, permanently torn between its opponent components. It is an original cleft, a rifting that emerges as a shape or an experience most clearly outlined in the work of art as the sense of something being there. It is briefly glimpsed, as if the artwork strains to hold open a set of jaws which quickly snap shut. In Heidegger’s words: Art breaks open an open place.60

This almost tautological statement serves as a reminder that the experience of an opening can be brief and unexpected. Often artworks have an immediate peculiarity that leaps out at first glance but then is quickly stabilized by the

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environment of the gallery and an everyday attitude. The struggle is then to remember the open place that suddenly appeared, to hold it open in the face of an ordinary way of coping and thinking, which seeks to close it off again, to explain it away. Why then does Heidegger persist with this unusual language that is at times quite technical and at other times strangely poetic, involving a whole series of terms that function almost as characters in a drama? Heidegger’s purpose here is to twist free of ordinary language through linguistic contortion and quasitautology, to invoke a different kind of thinking about art. With this he is able to get beyond aesthetics by thinking absence and withdrawal in terms of revelation, earth and world. His concern for ‘the coming to presence of art’61 engages the artwork as a presence based on absence, withdrawal and non-presence.

Coming to presence From the time of Descartes, Western thinking has been guided by a substance ontology, that suggests entities or things are taken to be self-subsisting and independently existing objects that stand over and above detached observing subjects.62

Heidegger’s thinking challenges this pre-conception by showing that in everyday activities we do not make a conscious separation between self and thing: Our involvement with entities does not primarily consist in detached viewing in which we consciously represent them, but in an absorbed involvement in which we make use of, without consciously noticing, things in light of the tasks at hand.63

Absorbed involvement is part of the process of making where thinking withdraws to a less conscious level in favour of the momentum of making. Making as a kind of ‘coming to presence’ appears to deflect thorough enquiry since it often takes place without thinking, in the heat of the moment. Making can seem like a productive trance, as if the maker and their tools are at one with each other. It is only when the work is completed, that conscious thought is required to

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reflect upon events and objects. Donald Schön challenges the idea of trance-like making by arguing that what takes place in the studio is a vast series of small ‘reflections in action’,64 many of which take place as an artist weighs a brush, stirs some paint, feels the viscosity, tests the substrate surface, feels the friction of the brush, judges the colour relations and so on. Having completed the work the artist is virtually unaware of all those instantaneous but conscious decisions. To make a thing such as a chair or a painting involves various levels of physical and conceptual behaviour, involving intentional activity, absorbed involvement, and a dialogue with the specific material qualities of a medium. The grain and knot of the wood determines whether shaping is easy or difficult, whether the wood will shape the outcome more than the tool. The chaotic turbulence of paint resists or accepts being directed in certain ways. The ongoing dialogue of events between the material and the maker results in the work. The resistance of the material informs the maker and shapes the outcome. The repeated experience of working a material leaves a body memory as an unthought background presence we call ‘know-how’ or ‘tacit knowledge’.65 Know-how requires that explicit attention on skill be dropped so that skilful making can take place. Michael Polanyi calls it ‘disattending’,66 that is dropping our attention at one level so we can attend to other demands required to complete the work. In fact if we don’t disattend then access to a skill can be lost or jammed. For example, By concentrating on his fingers a pianist can temporarily paralyse his movements.67

When artists do drop into disattention through absorbed involvement, there can be an experience of the work making itself. In fact many artists attest to situations where the work seems to arrive fully formed, as if guided from elsewhere.68 Whether the source of the work is the artists buried skill sets, an inner necessity in the materials or some other combination of forces is not fully determinable.

Ontology of making When considering the visibility of production processes museums occasionally display an artist’s working palette and smock. Critical texts will sometimes

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discuss the working methods of say Seurat as opposed to Monet, how paint is actually applied and so on. However, the nature of making has been left untouched in any of these considerations. Western art history and theory fails to take into account the space of the studio and the body of labour engaged in the material practice of making.69

‘To make’ is as primordial as ‘to do’ and ‘to be’. In fact my fundamental way of being is a way of making something in and of the world. When I make something I disclose a particular world which acknowledges that made thing within a particular set of relations. When I make something I also take an ontological perspective on a world of possibilities. Yet I can’t make anything in just anyway. I can’t make a wooden frame in such a way that it is weightless or that it reveals a world of utopian relations. The world is already established and I must conform to it even if I wish to challenge it. The resistance of the world, the friction and grain of things reciprocates by shaping and making me. Consequently, making has a dual existence that is indicated by the dictionary definition of the word, ‘to bring into existence by shaping material’.70 One aspect of this duality is concerned with bringing something into being, the other is its shaping. Shaping could be cutting and carving wood to make a painting stretcher with dovetailed corners and bevelled edges. The stretcher is brought into being once I have shaped the wood according to its particular way of being. Wood can do things that metal can’t and vice versa. The wood offers resistance to being cut but also cleaves in a certain way that is conducive to my frame building. I establish a know-how with wood on the basis of an economy of physical resistance. An ‘ontology of making’ is an unlikely coupling of words since each moves in different directions. One asks ‘what is’ and the other is concerned with ‘what does not yet exist’. Ontological thinking involves returning to first principles and considering things, beings as such, in their very state of being. Heidegger sought to access ontology through analyses of moods such as boredom, and the work involved in a so-called ‘work of art’. In boredom we become aware of being in time as it stretches out in a raw state of disengagement. With art,

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when Heidegger investigates [it] he does not do so to determine its characteristics as a specific and isolated region of human experience, but as a possible clue to decipher the meaning of Being.71

Making Heidegger paint While the intimate process of making is not a subject of discussion for Heidegger he does consider it indirectly by way of the matrix of tools in the studio and the production process of various technologies. Because of this difficult questions arise: Can I use Heidegger to explain the performance of paint in the studio? Can Heidegger clarify what happens when a painting is being made, and correlatively does making a painting clarify Heidegger? To explore this I will use the messiness of paint in the process of making to develop an ontology of making. I will look at the process of making a painting to find out what it reveals about earth, how matter facilitates or resists certain purposes. Also I will look for what it discloses about world, how paint becomes significant and how cultural domains show up to support paint in its completed state as a painting. I will take what ‘shows up’ as some revelation of the way things work, of how there is both push and pull, resistance and facilitation in all things. To do this, I will use Heidegger’s terminology of earth and world to catch painting in the act of making. There is still some doubt as to whether Heidegger is the most appropriate thinker in this process. In Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger discusses a Van Gogh painting but he does not mention the fluid nature of paint, the application of paint or the presence of colour in the work. Superficially, it appears that Heidegger is only interested in the artefact, the content of the painting at the discursive level of an image. However, in Being and Time Heidegger does discuss making in terms of tool usage in the context of the artisan’s studio. Even though Origin of the Work of Art does not discuss making at all, his two major terms, earth and world, are posed in such a way that they fill that gap. Earth alerts us to the formability of artists materials and world suggests cultural influences that shape a work for social purposes. Earth involves the discussion of colour, the flow of liquids, the very sense of possibility when working with paint in the world of the studio.

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World facilitates a domain where studios are built, paint is manufactured, exhibitions are held and aesthetic work is rewarded. Making a painting begins in the studio where both making and painting show certain qualities. Paint, as a material to be worked, has an earthiness which makes it available for certain purposes and not others. It also has a worldliness, a cultural history on which it rests that encourages and articulates some ways of making and not others. In the studio paint is resistant to being shaped and tends to ‘do its own thing’. Paint in its liquid state is very easily disturbed and tends to act chaotically and turbulently. It flows, mixes, impacts, interacts and does not easily conform to the artist’s will. Part of its presence is this resistance. Yet it is both resistant and assertive. It resists performing like marble or steam, it will not do what a solid or gas will do. But it will display certain specific properties: As painters say, the paint seems to have a mind of its own – it ‘wants’ to do certain things and it ‘resists’ the painter.72

This kind of resistance is not confined to paint but is shared with all things that have a sense of fluidity, all things that arise from the drying of wet states. Ultimately, all beings have a character of resistance and resistance carries the paradoxical sense of a possibility yet to be revealed. In all things there is the duality of movement and the resistance to that movement. Resistance is encountered in a not coming through and as a hindrance to willing … When Being-out-for-something comes up against resistance and can do nothing but ‘come up against it’, it is itself already alongside a totality of involvements … The experiencing of resistance – that is the discovery of what is resistant to one’s endeavours – is possible ontologically only by the reason of the disclosedness of the world.73

Resistance discloses the world as the tension between what someone might want from certain materials and where they can get with it. In the process the totality of involvement with paint is revealed, including the possibility of worldly goals the completed painting might achieve. In such a world the artist applies painterly skills so that it will take an aesthetic form that can be exhibited and discussed in an artistic context. At the same time resistance gives a brief glimpse of the earthiness of paint, the way it carries colour, its fluid dynamics,

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its untameable wildness. Resistance clarifies what is possible it terms of worldly goals, and material capabilities. The sense of the possible that resistance gives, blocks the artist from trying to fly above earth and do the impossible. At the same time it invites them into other possibilities, that might show up through error, or however wilful intention is diverted towards unexpected results.

Paint-tool To go further into an ontology of paint requires taking the position of the ontological worker working with paint, treating art making as an ontological event rather than the precursor to an aesthetic experience. By looking at paint as a tool in the process of making an artwork, something of the being of paint is revealed. Consequently, paint is shown to be a tool much like other tools in the painter’s studio, such as brush, canvas, stretcher and so on. Practically speaking paint is simply a liquid material bulk that carries colour and can be manipulated accordingly. Like any other tool, it disappears from awareness in the process of being used. Human beings do not usually encounter entities as discrete visible objects, as substances present-at-hand … our primary interaction with beings comes through ‘using’ them … Equipment is forever in action, constructing in each moment the sustaining habitat where our explicit awareness is on the move.74

Paint as tool disappears into the empire of equipment; paint and painter become part of a process of making where there is no division between the person, the tool and the process. Even though the artist is working with paint, thinking through the paint to what it can do and what it might become, the artist’s explicit awareness is always somewhere beyond the smoothly operating tool. Paint is indivisibly incorporated into a habitat of tools already in use. To try and separate paint out from this habitat can result in turning paint into a broken tool, something simply present, to be stared at, outside the infrastructure of integrated tools. Paint in its tool nature withdraws into the process of making. It also refers in all its operations to a completed state, to a canvas, a painting. Just as the carpenter’s tools vanish in favour of the completed house, paint is swept up into the totality of painting:

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Each individual piece of equipment is by its nature equipment for – for travelling, for writing, for flying. Each one has an imminent reference to that for which it is. It is always something for, pointing to a for-which.75

Paint tends to disappear into a context of tools all of which are equipment for, all of which point towards a painting in its completed state. The question then is how to catch a glimpse of the elusive withdrawing aspect of paint before it is eclipsed by the overt bulk of a finished painting? An answer might exist in the grammatical nature of the two words paint and painting. They look and sound very similar but there is a linguistic and practical differential. Paint is a noun and an infinitive verb. It is a material used in the painters studio and it indicates the action of using paint. As an infinitive it is uninflected, yet to be parsed, pregnant with possibility. Painting on the other hand is a definitive noun, it describes a specific process, a completed work and an art historical category. Paint is to painting as raw matter is to cultural event. Paint is to painting as earth is to world. If, ‘the world grounds itself on the earth and earth juts through world’,76 then painting grounds itself on paint and paint juts through painting.77 Paint as jut-material is spontaneously forthcoming, while at the same time resistant and wild, trying to overcome painting, to pull it back into chaos and entropy, opposition and discord. This is the moment when painters attest to the unpredictability of paint or compare it to a kind of alchemy.78 Painting on the other hand, while resting on paint tries to surmount it, to make it submit to knowledge and expertise, to make paint disappear in an invisible brushstroke79 or some other aspect of style, content or image. Paint in its earthiness tends to give way, secedes so painting can happen. Paint sets back into a painted work, so painting can come forward just as in nature, the flower gives way to the fruit. The fruit can only come forward if the flower has withdrawn and so painting can come out only if paint has given way.

The being of becoming The dynamic relationship between the matter of paint and the discipline of painting is most tellingly revealed in the artists studio in the act of making. A

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certain story of paint appears when paint is approached as a coloured viscous fluid that can be worked in certain ways. Paint shows its own figure when the artist enters the trance of making and to some extent gets out of the way, so that the substantiality of paint can come forward in its own terms. Hence, The artwork is no longer envisaged as the outcome of a productive process governed by the producer’s ability to mould matter. Rather it is envisaged from the work itself … as the unfolding proper to the work itself.80

In making work something comes into being that was not there before. The Greek word for bringing into being out of nothing, is poiesis which carries with it the sense of poetry and wonder associated with the creation of an entirely new entity. Making from this point of view is no mundane manufacturing, it is closer to the wonder of a natural process that enables a ‘coming into being’. In that ‘coming into being’ there is an evolutionary progression as the work grows from a raw state to a completed state, revealing, as it goes, the ‘being of becoming’. During the making, what is being made is still underway. It has not yet arrived at its completed state, it is still becoming and that ‘becoming’ can be appreciated as such. As the work is being made a certain something, that is not yet anything in particular, insinuates itself and to some degree directs the making of the work in a broad but not yet specific direction. At this point, there is no clear difference between the artist and the half formed work. Neither is in control, neither clearly makes the other.81

That which is in the process of coming forth directs whether the work should continue, whether it is working as a work in progress. If it is not working, if that which was coming forward has passed away, then the work could be discarded or significantly changed. As the process of making continues, the options for making something become more specific, a painting begins to take shape in the direction of a telos or completed state. Now the path of becoming grows narrower and more refined as something partially planned, or indeed something totally unexpected, begins to take shape. At this point the inner necessity of the telos as a kind of momentum pushes the work in a direction towards completion.

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What was coming forward in the work has arrived, it reaches a point where it can be said, ‘there it is’. It is a painting, it is complete and there it is. It is has entered the world, it accords with the notion of a finished painting, it can be exhibited and discussed as a painting in a world of paintings. What was coming forward in the work was a cultural interface, a sense of potential meaningfulness in the work. The artwork manifests world and in particular, art world, that place where elemental materials and a community come together. Once the artwork has been made, the ‘work’ of the artwork is not over. The completed work continues do its ‘work’ even though the physical process of production is complete. A certain worldliness that came forward in the making of the work, continues to come through in the completed work, yet it’s coming is not a completed event, somehow at rest or residing in the work. It is that certain something in the work that drove it to be made and it is a certain something that captures attention once it has been completed, giving it a peculiar sense of completion in relation to the studio but an ongoing life in relation to the art world.

Thinking making Barbara Bolt in Art Beyond Representation82 draws attention to the uncanniness of the act of making through concrete dealings with tools such as brush, palette, stretcher, canvas, paint and, more elusively, the performative actions that results in something we call art. That ‘something’ we often take to be an object such as a painting, or book or dance. However, it might rather be an experience, an ongoing process for which the painting simply acts as a place marker. The trace of artistic production is not the completed work but an ‘unleashing of becomings’83 released by the indeterminate possibilities of making. Bolt discusses art, not as the creation of aesthetic commodities, but as an alternative mode of production. To do this she sets out ‘to think again what constitutes the work of art’84 beginning with a consideration of the network of processes involved in ‘handling’ materials. In handling paint the nature of liquids, colour capabilities and light is revealed together with a sense of the world, where concrete possibilities are

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shaped by matter, social purposes and the artist. In the flux of this relationship between a maker and materials, a particular understanding based on experience is established that is projected as a world of possibilities. Yet the process of making is never completely captured or mastered. Even lifelong practitioners like Francis Bacon say that paint is such a supple medium, you never quite know what it is going to do.85

Consequently, any attempt to show making as the ultimate conquest of a human maker will always be confronted by the complex ‘handlability’86 of matter.

Causing making Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology87 develops a different kind of thinking in relation to making that helps us understand a variety of influences above and beyond the artist’s intentions. The Question Concerning Technology is concerned with making and the artefact, to the extent that the artefact carries the ontological traces of its making. Heidegger clarifies this through Aristotle’s concept of the four causes88 which he uses in order to answer the ontological question of why any made thing is as it is. Accordingly, there are four interdependent reasons or causes: 1. causa materialis, the shaping in relation to the particular material the thing is made from, such as canvas and paint 2. causa formalis, the shaping into a particular form such as a framed canvas 3. causa finalis, the end use to which the thing will serve such as a painting in an exhibition 4. causa efficiens, the force that will bring about the completion of the work, such as the artist themselves.89

This fourfold causality is collapsed by modern instrumental thinking into causa efficiens, where making is primarily understood as a means to an end, acted out by an intentional artist on passive matter. As Mark Sinclair puts it, our post-Cartesian propensity is to think causality purely as efficient causality.90

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Likewise Barbara Bolt suggests that the fourth cause, causa efficiens is, the cause that gets results .. that sets the standard for all causality.91

In The Question Concerning Technology Heidegger attempts to twist free of means-to-ends thinking by re-deploying Aristotle into a rich idea of multiple causality. Rather than an artist simply mastering material there is a shared responsibility for making that is based on an attunement between the four areas suggested by each cause, that is primary matter, social purposes, human makers and those who will participate in the ritual of using or appreciating the work. Heidegger grants agency92 to each cause so that each is co-responsible for engaging with the others to contribute to making. The artist does not simply conquer material, matter contributes creatively to the process, social contexts invite making and give due reception of works. Each are in play as the work is being made and each calls out from the completed work. From this way of thinking, making is not a kind of manufacture, but a fine tuning between human and inhuman forces, between matter and will, between world and earth. What is made, what comes through in the act of making, is not just an object, but a showing, a revelation of the special relationship between causes.

Genres of production Making art is one kind of production while at the other end of the spectrum, industrial manufacturing is another. Making art is a creating that generates a peculiar kind of complex presence, whereas manufacturing is a technological production that generates reliable things of use.93 In The Question Concerning Technology Heidegger emphasizes revelation rather than mode of production as the decisive difference between an artwork and a manufactured product; What is decisive .. does not lie in making … but rather in revealing .. not as manufacturing [but as] a bringing forth.94

Manufactured products reveal the world through technological devices such as those used in medical imaging, space travel, digital communications, mobile telephony, computing, internet connectivity, home entertainment systems and

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so on. Manufacturing also reveals the earth as a resource for the production of those material devices and attendant lifestyles. Heidegger uses the generic term ‘technology’ to indicate the modern environment of tools, equipment, machinery, manufacture and the relatively new kind of thinking that goes with living in that environment. On this basis art and technological products might seem entirely antithetical, yet they are actually united by a common history. As Heidegger points out the words ‘art’ and ‘technology’ derive from the same Greek term techne: There was once a time when it was not only technology alone that bore the name techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. Thus the poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne …95

On this basis art and technology are united on two fronts, they are both modes of production, and they are both modes of revealing. However, there are aspects to art’s way of revealing that keep it different from technology. Artworks do not just reveal things temporarily, instead they found worlds, that is, both find them through acts of exploration and then found or establish them in a sustaining way. In art, worlds are not passively indicated, but set up, confirmed and activated as in Lascaux, a Greek temple, a Renaissance fresco, or an impressionist painting of modern life. The meaning of what it is to be, changes each time a culture gets a new artwork.96

Even in our own age where art has become a marginal practice, it is the very marginality of what was once world founding, that reveals an aspect of the contemporary experience of world loss. By contrast, technology finds nothing but a generic something to be transformed into anything, it acknowledges no prior essence, not even the outcomes of its own manufacturing, which it will recycle as an energy source just as soon as they are completed. The velocity of this cycle increases daily leaving a mountain of disposed commodities as a resource for cannibalization, landfill or recycling. More significantly, what keeps art from being subsumed into the technological is that art reveals concealments. What art brings to the world is

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earth, that is, that which precisely resists being brought to the world. Heidegger attempts to demonstrate this by looking at a Van Gogh painting of shoes and a Greek temple. In the shoe painting he compares seeing the shoes as mere equipment ‘that serves to clothe the feet’97 with a more unusual almost poetic experience of the shoes: From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth.98

Perhaps Heidegger is projecting far more into the painting than is actually there. There is also the suspicion that poeticizing on this image is heavily reliant on its representational nature. Heidegger seems to anticipate this objection by immediately considering a non-representational work of art, a Greek temple. The temple reveals a world by unifying and articulating all the important aspects of life in that time and place. At the same time, standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of the rock’s bulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings radiance to the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.99

This example is far more convincing since it captures a sense of the background and foreground tension between earth and world. Earth as nature buffets the temple and reveals both temple and storm, earth as matter provides the material for building the temple and the possibility of noticing nuances of light, colour, sky and air. In the process we notice how difficult it is to notice earth. It tends to slip away, out of view, out of awareness requiring a poetic twist of language and peculiar looking to indicate it, to glimpse it. Earth ‘shows’ itself to be inherently self-secluding and art indicates this by an uncanny sense of presence based on concealments that generate a sense

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of something lying beyond, of other possibilities. These earthly qualities are what cannot be completely accounted for in any reflection on practice, what is glimpsed when attempting to articulate the materialist history or technological understanding of an artwork’s making. These hints of a hidden ‘always more’ arrive only as ‘strife’, as a conflictual resistance to the drive towards the open disclosure of world. In aesthetic terms, earth and world are very similar to notions of form and content but are each developed in an extended phenomenological sense in their application to art works. As discussed previously earth identifies the sensuous material aspect of the work, what it is made of, and a certain tendency within earthly natural things to withdraw, to hide, to be elusive for understanding and articulation. World, rather than a totality of objects, is an environment of meaningfulness and a way of giving meaning. Earth and world are inextricably woven, earth must come through world to appear at all, and world must rest on the earth and be constituted by it. In their interpenetration, each is prone to absorb the other, world consumes earth, while earth draws the world into entropy: The world tends to annul the ‘ground’, whereas the Earth tends to dehistoricize, to decontextualize the ‘decisions’ of the world.100

Their dramatic struggle is irresolvable and leaves a permanent scar that is the very precondition for a shaping, that brings the work into presence.101 In the work of art we first catch sight of earth through the material presence of the art form, whether it be the colour of paint, the heaviness of marble or the sound of music. Similarly by virtue of their conflictual union the background nature of the world is brought forward and opened up, world is disclosed. Revealed world is a historical world, delimited by the kinds of decisions and inchoate possibilities that each age sets for itself. Heidegger identifies four such ages, Greek, Medieval, Modern and Planetary.102 It is the Planetary age, coming after the Modern age that is characterized by a relationship to technology that seems to coincide with our own period of Postmodern Globalization. Modern aesthetics is grounded in the same primordial disclosure of being as is modern technology. In such a situation Heidegger can appear to create an entirely negative picture of technology in comparison to the liberating effects of art. However, he does urge

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that technology should not be considered a mere dark force to be struggled against and rejected. On the contrary when we open ourselves to technology, we go right into it, and first come to notice its objectifying nature. Thus it is pointless to simply, push on blindly with technology or to rebel hopelessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil. Quite to the contrary, when we open ourselves to the essence of technology we find ourselves taken into a freeing claim.103

By going into technology we realize it is an essential part of our everyday lives. It is undeniable that devices such as mobile phones and computers generate the possibility for real connection, for new kinds of focal practices and social action. To recognize both the dark and light sides of technology is to notice technology for the first time and appreciate ‘a freeing claim’, the possibility of something beyond it.

Producing expanded painting Art production is a singular kind of production that reveals the peculiar presence of things, an ‘uncanniness’ as opposed to the levelling of difference, that results from rationalized technicity. Both art and technology are modes of production and modes of revelation that reveal the world in different ways. The production process of painting has developed through a series of historical evolutions from the time of Lascaux to our own age of digital media. Some of those developments in painting have occurred at the level of style and some at the level of paradigmatic form. Expanded painting is in the simplest of terms, the expansion of painting from a flat surface into a spatial domain. The drive towards this new mode of painting was signalled by the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century and continues to the present day. Expanded painting shows the absence of painting as a kind of presence. Painting withdraws from what seems most essential to it and in doing so it brings forward its hidden conventions making them articulate again. Expanded painting results in a certain self-consciousness about art, a refusal to take artistic boundaries as absolute, a questioning in relation to the essence

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of the artwork. Expanded painting demonstrates a tension within itself, a tendency to be both this and that, to be painting and not painting, to generate thinking about the conditions of its own being. Expanded painting is a problematic thing since it is almost outweighed by absence. The only presence of painting might be as a colouring, where colour is made present not by paint but by coloured things that stand in for paint. Whether the thing that stands in for painting is a video screen, a photograph, a performance or coloured string is a matter of indifference since it merely serves the function of delivering colour, making colour present. The extension of painting into a kind of formlessness, an environment of things, colours, events, is an escalation of painting into a latent informality, a painterliness-without-paint. At the edge of what history might allow to be called painting is a whole series of latent possibilities that sit in the background, generating the cultural and historical forms of painting. The surprise is that the forms of painting are not fixed, that this latency within painting keeps generating new forms of painting, culminating today in expanded painting, but ever ready to move off in other directions, other ways of questioning after painting. Consider for example the way painting changed in the 1960s with the work of Andy Warhol and Pop Art. Up until then Abstract Expressionism had involved expansive canvases, overt expressive paint and a heroic individualism tinged with angst and alienation. Warhol’s work changed both the look of painting and the way artists related to their cultural environment. He rejected angst in favour of cool detachment, saying he wanted to be a machine and he rejected aggressive individuality in favour of an oceanic immersion in popular culture. In doing so he embraced the explosion of post-war industrial culture and embedded it in his own work. He did this by naming his studio ‘The Factory’ and using production line techniques to mass produce paintings by screen printing rather than using a brush, and using colleagues as workers to perform the labour of making. Another kind of redispersal of painting takes place with expanded painting as it coincides with a new era of Post Industrial Information Culture.104 Post Industrial society is signalled by a shift in the largest corporations from those that produce material products like General Motors to those that service information technologies such as Microsoft and Google. Information

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culture is exemplified by digital networks such as the internet and convergent media devices such as the mobile phone. Instantaneous production of information engenders communication, networks, hypertextuality, and an all-encompassing environment of connectivity. Expanded painting parallels this moment in time by shifting from hard production techniques to soft relational networks where painting becomes environmental and convergent. Painting is environmental when it becomes all encompassing, a spatial experience no longer limited by pictures on a wall.105 It becomes convergent when it begins to merge and interact with the media adjacent to it, sculpture, installation, photography, video, digital media and remake itself out of those new connections.106

Post aesthetics When painting breaks its own boundaries by converging with adjacent media it also leaves behind established modes and terms for discussing painting. It demands a new talk to match its walk, a ‘post aesthetics’, a hybrid voice that is both art theory and ontology yet not strictly either. As in postmodernism and posthumanism, post aesthetics is not entirely free of its secondary term, aesthetics. Post aesthetics refers back to aesthetics, even in the process of attempting to revise and overcome it. As Heidegger himself puts it, all counter movements remain entangled in what they overcome.107

Aesthetics has many meanings accumulated in historical writings on the subject and further complicated by alternative terms such as art theory and cultural theory. Broadly speaking, there are three ages of aesthetics, classical, modern and contemporary. It was not until the modern era, in the eighteenth century, that the term aesthetics was coined and it is only through the lens of modern aesthetics that we can even suggest that there is anything like an earlier classical aesthetics. As such classical aesthetics refers to the original thinking of the ancient Greeks who did not use words like art or beauty in relation to what we call fine art or sensory pleasure. For the Greeks, art or techne was an act of skilful making, and beauty was a term primarily associated with morality, ethics, knowledge and science:

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When the Stoics connected Beauty and Goodness the context suggests that they meant by Beauty nothing but moral goodness and in turn understood by good nothing but the useful.108

When Plato discussed beauty in The Symposium he did so in the context of the overriding topic of Love. His discussion moved from the beauty of the human body, through spiritual beauty, to the beauty of knowledge and ultimately a transcendent abstraction of beauty: This process rises through increasingly abstract levels until it reaches the ultimate in abstraction – the Form of Beauty.109

In Platonic philosophy beauty goes beyond sense experience, treating all sensations as a kind of illusion, and leaves beauty as essentially indefinable. However, in modern aesthetics, as discussed in relation to Baumgarten and Kant, aesthetics and beauty have become almost interchangeable terms. Historically ‘the aesthetic’ appeared as a reformulation of ideas about beauty. It then became a replacement for them.110

Beauty, the major concept and term of aesthetics, was and continues to be associated with perceptual pleasure. British contemporaries of Baumgarten such as Shaftesbury, Burke and Hume went further and internalized the experience of beauty as something beyond a sensory faculty. For them the perception of beauty is not a matter of the external senses like seeing or hearing … [rather] they thought they had discovered a new internal sense, the sense of beauty.111

This new sense, a kind of sixth sense, became known as taste. Kant’s subsequent thoughts on aesthetic judgement are an extension of this theory of taste. He acknowledges that all aesthetic experience begins with individual pleasure but results in a universal and necessary judgement about aesthetic value. To be universal and necessary, he argued aesthetic judgement must be disinterested since, interest springs from individual inclinations. Disinterested pleasure derives from what is common to all mankind and not from interests which are peculiar to some persons only.112

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This sense of taste installs a new faculty in the experiencing subject who through a pleasurable navigation of the world is granted access to the universal and transcendental. Judgements of beauty are now sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once. Consequently, discussions of aesthetics often overflow into discussions of reality, knowledge, experience and being. If reality is defined by a subject who captures a world in their sensual experience, then aesthetics provides the language for dealing with it in terms of beauty, taste and sensory delight. Aesthetics like consciousness is always an aesthetics of something. Aesthetics is always already aesthetic attention, aesthetic experience or aesthetic judgement, where Any object can be experienced aesthetically, no object is inherently unaesthetic.113

Thus modern aesthetics is a lens through which all experience is sensed and judged. Any thing and every experience exists on an aesthetic scale. Aesthetics is no longer a theory of art but a measure of how an experiencing subject engages with a world and gives it meaning and value. Contemporary aesthetics begins with attempts to get away from this kind of language and the isolation of subjective individualism. Many twentieth-century attempts to get beyond terms such as beauty and taste, involved a rejection of the discipline of aesthetics altogether. New disciplines like art theory and cultural theory spring from a desire to overcome historical subjectivity and get closer to cultural constructions and concrete events over and above subjective delectation. It is in this context that Heidegger dramatizes the shift from aesthetics to another way of thinking art. Post aesthetics retains a link to aesthetics, not because of the importance of beauty and perceptual pleasure, but simply as an indicator that it is first and foremost a philosophy of art with implications for the ways human beings exist in the world. Heidegger writes about aesthetics because he considers modern aesthetics to be a problem, that it needs revision from the ground up and so develops a new language to dispose of it. He rarely uses the word ‘aesthetics’ except to discuss its genealogy and etymology from Greek sources. Consequently, he concentrates on the cluster of Greek words techne, poiesis, phusis and aletheia all of which shape the way we use contemporary words like art, technology, truth, beauty and aesthetics.

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Even though Heidegger never used the term ‘post aesthetics’ I am suggesting that his struggle to overcome aesthetics, to develop a more appropriate philosophical reflection on art, results in a going beyond aesthetics, to something appropriately called ‘post aesthetics’.114 Post aesthetics is itself not a new term, it has been used to describe a kind of postmodern reflection on art, that rejects traditional aesthetics in favour of other disciplines coming from literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy as major tools for discussing art. I am sympathetic to those trends but I want to claim the term ‘post aesthetics’ anew and claim it specifically in relation to Heidegger’s reflection on art. In this process I understand Heidegger as taking a future-primitive position based on an overcoming of aesthetics and a restitution of original aesthetics as established in Antiquity. I believe Heidegger establishes his position in a variety of sources, namely The Origin of the Work of Art, The Question Concerning Technology, his Nietzsche lectures, particularly The Will to Power as Art115 and various shorter statements in Parmenides116 and Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’.117 In those writings Heidegger is not entirely anti-aesthetic but is rather trying to retrieve and reinstate what aesthetics is supposed to be, based on a re-reading of early Greek philosophy. An original aesthetics is concerned with the showing and appearing of things, the things that make up our world as a meaningful matrix of objects. This kind of thinking about primary things, involves a rethinking and a re-experiencing of both things themselves and the act of being present, the ‘presencing’ of things. The Greeks had no word that corresponds directly to our word, art. The closest Greek words are techne and poiesis. Heidegger discusses techne as meaning being well versed in something, a thorough going masterful know how,118

contrasting with poiesis which is characterized as the act of making such that something is brought out of non-being into being, a bringing forth into the unhidden.119

Both techne and poiesis when used in the context of human affairs, indicate a process whereby a skilled maker using practical action and knowledge, produces a work of art, brings it into being, into a state of presence. The

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economy of presence involves a productive tension between aspects of earth and world, involving the surging substantiality of matter, a worldly context of understanding and the contrariness of decay and decontextualization.

Phainesthetics Heidegger argues that the established methods of thinking presence derived from Western philosophy particularly metaphysics, are entirely exhausted and need to be rebuilt out of the original thinking of the early Greeks.120 Heidegger participates in a new science of presence, Phenomenology, by returning to the Greeks in search of an essential unsaid, something already begun in Greek thinking, but now only existing as a hint, as yet unfulfilled in modern thinking and further obscured by historical translation. As Heidegger explains in Being and Time, phenomenology is derived from the Greek words phainomenonon and logos.121 Phainomenonon means that which shows itself122 and logos means a logical, quasi-scientific way of applying reason, judgement and definition to so-called phenomena.123 Thus phenomenology, originally declared as a return, ‘to the things themselves’124 is a way of looking at things in their mode of being, in a way that is most appropriate to the way they show themselves. It is a way of being faithful to things and events that have become inconspicuous in their obviousness or are overladen with subjective and historical interpretation. Heidegger argues that, ‘phenomenology is needed because some matters, especially being itself, are hidden. Hidden not because we have not yet discovered them but because they are too close and familiar for us to notice or are buried under traditional concepts and doctrines’.125 Quite often the things Heidegger considers phenomenologically are very ordinary objects and events like door handles or the sound of a passing automobile. As Joseph Kokelmans points out there are two elements to this method, one involves how things are to be discovered and the other a judgement about what is true or false about them.126 For phenomenology to do this kind of work there must be a fit between the way things show up and the way they are approached so as ‘to let that which shows itself be seen from itself the very way it shows itself ’.127

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Heidegger developed this idea iteratively through three versions of Origin of the Work of Art written between November 1935 and December 1936.128 Between the first and last version he shifted away from an original priority given to human intentions back towards the sheer power of presence itself. The work of art was crucial in that it revealed how things came to be, what different kinds of things there were, and what kind of opening in the experience of being was required before anything could be said ‘to be’. In Being and Time and the first two versions of Origin of the Work of Art ordinary ‘things did not deserve questioning because their Being had nothing enigmatic’,129 but by the third version of Origin of the Work of Art he preferred to say that ‘the unpretentious thing evades thought most stubbornly’ causing him to ask, ‘can it be that this self contained independence belongs to the nature of the thing?’130 In everyday experiences for a thing to show up as substantially present to our awareness it must be apparent, that is, have some aspect of accessibility. What shows up could be true or false, useful or irrelevant and so we ask the question, what does Phenomenology allow us to see in such a situation? From what has been said so far, Phenomenology shows an everyday way of experiencing things that somehow covers up those very things. The logos of Phenomenology shows that there is a process of being hidden and the possibility of something being revealed, being un-hidden.131 What is revealed as un-hidden is not the being or object of attention, but the very manner of showing that a being offers.132 The way something shows itself also requires a reciprocal approach, a sympathetic manner of address before a phenomenal handshake can take place. Once the dynamics have turned in this way, the hunter becomes the hunted, the object dictates terms to the subject and throws the idea of subjectivity itself into question. Thus all the terms used in this analysis, ‘show’, ‘present’, ‘awareness’, ‘apparent’, ‘access’, become loaded terms that demand a revision in the structure of perception as well as the understanding of subjectivity. It is at this point that the primary terminology of Phenomenology, and Heidegger’s drive for a new understanding of art, begin to overlap and serve each other in the creation of a new aesthetic discourse. Phainestai, is the verbal root of phainomenon and is translated by Heidegger as ‘to show itself ’.133 This makes it very similar to the Greek word phusis, ‘self emerging presence’ as discussed previously in relation to earth and world. Heidegger justifies this connection

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by arguing that both words are linked through a common derivative, phuein, which means to ‘illuminate, shine forth and therefore to appear’.134 Things show up in this way not simply because we have eyes or senses, and not because they have been represented in some form, but because there is an ‘unconstrained spontaneity of presencing’.135 Heidegger uses the German term Schein roughly translated as ‘shining out’ to indicate presencing and the action of light as an appearance to the eye, both the eye that sees physiologically and an ontological eye that intuits presence. However, appearances can be deceiving and so Heidegger uses the related term Anschein to indicate a deceptive manifestation or mere semblance.136 Consequently, we can say there are three kinds of ways things show themselves for a human observer: (1) ‘mere appearance’ to the senses, as when looking, and (2) ‘seeming’ or semblance, where something appears as one thing but is actually something else. As William Richardson puts it, in such a situation ‘being withdraws behind the look’.137 Appearance in this case has a negative connotation, it functions as a deception, a lie, that covers up the reality that is hidden beneath the surface of appearances, demanding further investigation. (3) appearance as a general state of phenomenality, the act of rising into the light, becoming part of a world so that it may be seen or otherwise sensed.138 The German word for appearance, Erscheinen or Schein, implies light and shining luminosity as in sight and visuality but can also refer to the other senses, and even a shining of knowledge, understanding and truth. In apprehending appearance differentially the very phenomenon of appearing becomes apparent, there is an appearing of appearance, a glimpse of the ontological ‘light’ that makes appearance possible. This polyvalent understanding of phainesthai as appearance at various levels of truth and deception is derived from Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s Republic.139 In the Republic Plato seems to take a harsh position on the arts ability to touch on the truth of any matter, whether it be objects of perception or the conduct of human affairs. Painting in particular is seen to be a representation of a representation, twice removed from actuality or truth. It is described in

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terms of ‘phantasmata … appearances of appearances … so realistic that they manage to pass themselves off as what they represent’.140 As such the work of art occludes the rush of presence by substituting something else in its place, something that faithfully replaces presence with a representation. In such a case ‘presence can be forgotten when it is represented’.141 Phantasmata, which is a noun derived from phainesthai, suggests this kind of deceptive appearance as a fantasy or concoction. However, Plato is not so bleak as to dismiss phantasmata completely, in fact he describes a hierarchy of deception, whereby phantasmata are part of a process that leads to an eventual unveiling of truth. Phainesthai unveils not only what is visible. It occurs within the realm of ‘what can be known and hardly seen’ …. where its function is to make appear what would otherwise be inaccessible … [thus] phantasmata, despite their deceptive character are ‘true’ in the sense that they are indispensable means for approaching aletheia.142

From this it can be said that not only is phainesthai linked to phusis but also to aletheia, the Greek work for truth or unconcealment. The Greek prefix ‘a’ is privative or negative like the latin ‘in’, and the English ‘un’. So Greek derived words like ‘anonymous’ and ‘atheism’ mean the unknown and the nonreligious. Similarly since lethe means hidden or forgotten, its privative version, a-lethiea suggests the un-hidden or that which moves out of obscurity into the open.143 Aletheia carries the double sense of coming out of concealment, partially closed and inaccessible by its very nature, and partially available, partially revealed by a certain kind of light or understanding. This kind of thinking involves a step back out of modern representational thinking into a Greek alterity in which the difference between presencing and that which presences can be accessed.144 Phainesthai as appearance, like aletheia, can also be two things at the same time, both revealing and deceiving, appearing and withdrawing. In its deceiving mode an appearance can replace reality, and at the hands of skilled manipulator be used to make people believe anything. This was what concerned Plato the most about artists and why he would have them banished from the city. In its positive mode all appearance has some aspect of essence or approximation of truth. Something shines out in appearance that comes from the heart of

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matter. What shines out in appearance also withdraws, slips back out of grasp, requires some following and articulation before it can be engaged. Shine is experienced instantly, but then hides behind the look until the correct mode of approaching it releases it again. Its enigmatic character, instantly bright and shining, then furtive and hiding, revealing itself through glimpses and winks, makes it fascinating and seductive. It is at this point that the interrelation of phainesthai, aletheia and beauty comes into view. The work of art rather than being attractive or beautiful because of its sensory delectation, its aesthesis, is ‘enchanting’ because it holds open a place where presencing can take place, so that it ‘comes to radiance (Schein) in the fullness of its enchantment’.145 All things when allowed to shine, come into presence with a certain grace that could be called beautiful. All things are potentially beautiful, not because they have been represented in a certain way, but because something of the dynamic of presencing shines out from them as an ‘intrinsic radiance’.146 Plato calls this kind of appearing, the Good, which is ‘that which appears more than everything exists’.147 By this he means that, ‘once the maximum of appearance has been reached the object appearing must necessarily be the idea of the Good’.148 ‘Maximum of appearance’ for Plato is an appearance that is less deceiving, it has moved away from its phenomenal frailty as mimesis or representation, and entered in the fullness of visibility and ontological truth, which is the good itself. Heidegger follows this theme in his book Holderlin’s Hymn the Ister where he discusses a non-aesthetic, non-metaphysical understanding of beauty. By using the originary thinking of the Greeks he compares the modern aesthetic notion of beauty, linked to consciousness and sensual enjoyment, with the Greek concept of beauty based on the good and the true. Paraphrasing Plato, Heidegger claims that ‘what is beautiful are beings, and those beings that are “in truth” are the beautiful .… the good is that which makes all that appears fit to appear and is therefore that which appears most purely before everything else … and that which appears in everything is the good’.149 The good, the true and the beautiful converge around phainesthai and appearance where appearance becomes a ‘surging source of revealment …. that prepares for the presencing of what is beautiful’.150 At this point we can say that the constructive aspects of phainesthai have become the basis for a phainesthetics.151

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In phainesthetics, the primordial phenomenon of appearing happens when ‘entities show themselves with the kind of access which genuinely belongs to them’.152 Even in full visibility, there remains an aspect of enchanting enigma that is associated with the experience of beauty. In this kind of appearance, to be beautiful is to be inherently resplendent, to offer a phenomenal radiance.153 Consequently, presence is not granted by the will or perception of a human observer, or the laws of representation in art, but comes from the spontaneity of disclosure, of shine itself. Shine as an irradiating light of unconstrained presence is given most directly through the revelatory character of the work of art.154 For the ancient Greeks beauty was not a matter of subjective response but a recognition that the truth of being was literally made present in a painting, sculpture or architecture.155 Artworks in this way gave a glimpse of being, by uncovering its hidden nature, and revealing it to understanding. Consequently, the Greeks did not appreciate what we call ‘art’ aesthetically, that is as a personal experience. Instead statues and temples were understood as an expression of civic power and as tribute to the Gods. Aesthetic reflection for the Greeks took place at the level of rules over the production of artworks rather than their contemplation. Art works were appreciated as the primary source of knowledge about the world, over and above science.156 For the Greeks it was through art that a meaningful relationship between people, nature and the gods could be unified and established.157 The meaningfulness of this relationship was seen as the truth of being itself. Heidegger argues that today, technology performs the role art once had. Technology in the form of techno-science and techno-economics defines the truths of our world, specifically the matrix of meaningfulness between people, culture and nature. As a result art is defined today by its relationship with technology, whether it be the technological production of acrylic paint or the technology of digital media or ultimately the techno-industrial complex of contemporary life. As an offshoot of this, rational economic thinking begins to demand certain quantifiable outcomes for art, that art should stand for something in particular. Hence the search for the meaning of artworks, and an answer to what artworks can do and how they can be useful.158 Heidegger believed that aesthetics, as a discipline born in the eighteenth century and crumbling in the 1930s, was simply an emissary of western

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metaphysics, that aesthetics represented metaphysical thinking as expressed in relation to art. Metaphysics, the ‘study of the features common to all beings’,159 has been in a state of evolution since ancient times culminating in a contemporary world view thoroughly determined by a distinction between subjects and objects. This way of understanding began with the conceptual duality of matter and form established by the Greeks and reached its apotheosis in the Cartesian subject who stood opposed to a world of objects. Aesthetics reflected this metaphysical duopoly by enshrining the subject and its affective states as produced by objects, most notably objects of art. Aesthetics provides an alibi for metaphysics by theorizing a sensual field that can be captured in representation, and a human subject for whom the world as representation is simply a collection of objects to be manipulated for sensuous affect. Heidegger revises the hard-edged Cartesian subject in favour of a dynamically relational ‘being-in-the-world’, namely Dasein. This being is usually immersed and involved in action, performing tasks, relating with people in various fallen or authentic modes, negotiating spatial environments with explicit awareness and always on the move. With a shift away from the sovereign subject comes as well a new discourse on being, human being, things, the meaningful objects of our world and in particular this thing we call art. In fact art comes to embody for Heidegger the last realm for questioning the uncanny and complex nature of existence. Ironically it is Heidegger’s thinking on technology that sheds significant light on this new understanding of art. As he suggests: The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.160

In pondering, Heidegger paradoxically proposes that the essence of technology is nothing technological,161

that is, that it has nothing to do with the actual workings of computers or tractors or hammers. The essence of technology is the ‘set up’,162 a way of ordering the world that reveals the world as a quarry for manipulation and production. This mode of revealing, which he calls Gestell, is crucial since it becomes the way all things are brought into appearance and understanding. According to

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Heidegger this set up is the ultimate danger since it is so powerful that it might eventually eclipse any other understanding of being in the world. This very bleak view is surprisingly similar to Marx’s concept of capitalist alienation and Lukac’s notion of reification and carries within it a call for a global cultural response. Additionally Heidegger is no Luddite, he is not proposing Amish like rejection of wicked machinery and devices, he fully accepts that we live in a technological world and that is our starting point. It is only just recently that we have begun to realize that because we have treated the earth as a quarry, and let the system of economic productivity get away with itself, that we are faced with a vast environmental problem. The source of our current distress relates directly to our practices of production and consumption, all of which rely on forms of technology that use enormous resources of energy and are justified by modes of thinking that make sense in rational economic terms. It is our everyday lives that have become the locus and generators of a dangerous unsustainability that results in global warming and environmental spoliation. Yet despite the flood of green activism we remain, as a global village, unable to connect our daily actions with environmental effect because our thinking has not yet changed, we still cannot see in terms of relations. To develop the possibility of new sustainable futures involves rethinking everyday practices as well as exceptional practices such as technological production, philosophy, image making, design, art and so on. To this situation art comes as one possible indicator of something completely different, it points in a different direction, suggests a ‘new beginning’. It is the counterpoint to technology and shows technology as the background to all our thinking and action. While technology reveals functional products in an ordered world, art reveals uncanny things in an unhomely world. Today art does its work when it brings into play the contrast or strife between technical and poetic modes of revealing: Art is at once closest to and farthest from technology in as much as it stems from a response to, and a greeting of, that which remains hidden and suppressed in technology. Art is the unnamed, unknown and unsurpassed ‘other’ of technology.163

Heidegger appears to cast art and technology in the much the same bellicose relationship as he does earth and world. We could say then that despite their

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strife, art and technology need each other and meet each other as a differential pairing. In their conflictual union they encroach upon each other, attempt to overcome each other. Art tends to decontextualize technology, to make it absurd and somewhat useless, while technology tends to annul the ground of art, to deny its authentic connections to place, people and time. But is contemporary art actually doing this kind of work? Hasn’t art rolled over with technology and become a lifestyle choice within the management of personal experience? Art is certainly no longer the centre of things as it once was in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Europe or as it still is in contemporary tribal cultures like Aboriginal Australia. The culturally defining role that art once had has now been taken over by technology. As a result we all live our lives happily dependent and occasionally inspired by our phones, cars, computers and information-based lifestyles. Into this situation art can come as another mode of entertainment, or as one remaining practice that still upsets the ‘set up’,164 and is not yet technological in its essence.

Post aesthetic enigma Both art and technology are modes of production and modes of revelation. All works reveal, all types of artwork and technological works share in revelation, however the nature of what is revealed is subtly yet fundamentally different in each case. It could be summarized by saying: (i) technological works reveal functional utility,165 (ii) aesthetic works reveal affect and representation, and (iii) post aesthetic works reveal earth and world, that there is a process of revealing and concealing. While both aesthetic and post aesthetic works share aeisthesis, a certain sensuous experience, the post aesthetic work involves something more. This something more is an excess that is generated by the heat of revelation, a friction and conflict between the opening of world and the withdrawing of earth. Post aesthetic revelation is not a thing in the artwork but a process generated by

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the artwork, it is a struggle, a strifely conflict between overlapping regions of disclosure. The artwork does not represent the strife, rather it provides a place for it to happen. This place is not the physical confines of the artwork, but the very sense of presence itself, the sense of a ‘there’ where something can have physical presence and take place. In the artwork it is the very Da (There) that is freed up- not the actual physical contours of the work, its presence here and now, but the scene of presence itself, the ‘there is’ in excess of everything that actually is, including the artwork itself.166

Applied post aesthetics Since Heidegger develops the idea of earth and world in Origin of the Work of Art with reference to ancient Greece and early modernism, the sheer gravity of his argument has kept much secondary literature stuck in the limited world of exemplary objects mentioned by him such as temples, shoes, silver chalices, jugs and bridges. If post aesthetic discourse is to have any relevant future it must work as a discourse for contemporary art. At present virtually no commentator uses Heidegger to discuss actual examples of recent art with the notable exceptions of Barbara Bolt,167 Richard Coyne,168 Gary Shapiro169 and Matthew Biro.170 However, at the coal face, where serious writing about art appears most regularly in international journals like Artforum and Frieze and in Australia Eyeline and Art Monthly, Heidegger makes no appearance whatsoever. Indirectly he has influenced many writers who come from a cultural studies background where phenomenology and deconstruction are important. I imagine that is the primordiality of Heidegger’s language that is off-putting to many who might otherwise find his general project insightful. Some find his writing impenetrable or otherwise incoherent, particularly when Heidegger writes in a way to confront language with language, to release poetic form, where the style of writing becomes the thinking itself.171 The very notion of translating Heidegger’s concepts and language to an everyday or journalistic discourse contradicts his attempts to get away from the well-worn prejudices of accepted usage. Yet it is the everyday that is of interest to Heidegger, the daily events and focal practices that shape our understandings of ourselves and

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the things of the world. Heidegger often wrote profoundly about very ordinary events and felt the need to generate new words to replace old words hopelessly mired in historical meaning. Consequently, I would like to write in ordinary language about the profundity of art. I will negotiate this by attempting to ‘apply’ Heidegger to recent art on the basis of the discussion developed in the last two chapters. If expanded painting is a form of painting that twists free of the historical conventions of painterly practice then it will need a new aesthetic discourse to fully engage it. I would like to test this case by applying a Heideggerean post aesthetics in an analysis of recent expanded painting by Jim Lambie and Katherine Grosse. Jim Lambie creates his Zobop (Figure 3.1) installations by applying brightly coloured vinyl tape in geometric patterns on the floor. In doing so he transforms the neutral zone of the gallery floor into a visually activated space.

Figure 3.1 Jim Lambie, Zobop, 1999, remade on installation, presented by Tate Members 2006, vinyl tape, overall display dimensions variable, © Jim Lambie/DACS. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016. Photo © Tate, London 2016

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The tape maps the floor so as to reveal the architectural shaping of space, reminding us of the relationship between a two-dimensional floor plan and a three-dimensional structure. The work also jams that space by overwriting it with hyperactive line work and maximal sensual intensities. The colour is so strong in brightness and contrast, and the line work so hypnotic in its rhythmic differentiation that it induces a kind of vertigo. This excess of sensuality disturbs the planiformity of the architectural environment and transposes the sober authority of a museological institution into a playpen or mosh pit. While the work seems to deflect any generic description, the discipline of painting is invoked since the conventions of painting are both present and absent. Painting is conspicuously absent since there is no painted canvas hanging on the wall. Yet the colour of painting is all around us, unexpectedly under our feet, threatening to tip us headlong into an infinite visual sensuousness. The disappearance of painting in its traditional form is concealed by the sensationalism of colour itself. Colour is not carried by liquids exuded from a tube and applied by a brush, but by industrially manufactured vinyl strips cut into shape and affixed to the floor. Industrial colour is shown to be artificially intense, producing a chemical experience of colour not unlike that in an altered state of consciousness. Industrial colour in the form of vinyl strips is also infinitely extendable, making the creation of works of this enormous size quite feasible. Lambies Zobop series, executed in various venues from the 1990s to the present, are all floor works. Floors are the cultural, architectural extension of the surface of the earth. As we stand on the earth everyday, it withdraws into the background of our awareness, completely taken for granted. It is the ground on which we contemplate the action taking place at a thoughtful level somewhere at eye level. Zobop reveals the floor as the basis of an architectural space that presumes a vertical conceptual orientation. By refusing the verticality of the painted canvas, Lambie liberates colour and almost literally tips it at our feet. By colouring the floor, making it the surface of painting, the floor itself is invited out of its background presence, out of neutrality into an uncanny presence. Unexpectedly the work throws a light on how much work the floor does, how it holds us up, guides us through space, facilitates movement through a world. On the basis of a post aesthetic reading we can say that by freeing the work from the current conventions of painting, paint is freed to earth and world,

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to reveal the chiaroscuro of that which grounds and that which appears. Zobop brings colour to the floor so that the floor can become part of a worldly presence, part of an ontology of floor-ness. The artwork reveals that the floor functions by its very withdrawal, by resting outside of everyday awareness. The work is a revelation of absence and presence in floor-ness, in architectural materiality, in aesthetic conventions and in painting itself. Katharina Grosse makes work by spray painting onto the walls and architectural fittings of galleries, museums and public buildings. The works transform objective non-spaces such as the white wall, the corner where walls meet, all those spaces out of view, into the carriers of colour, into a unified place where nothing can escape the effervescence of colour. The works come forward as pure colour by receding into the discrete architectural zones hidden around sites of exhibition. In doing so the works reveal the space between art and its environment, the subtle unspoken space that holds the inside open, that attaches to a sense of place inside the museum and by extension outside into the ever evolving urban environment (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Katharina Grosse, Cincy, 2006, acrylic on wall, floor, glass, styrofoam and soil, 480 × 740 × 1,180 cm. Photo: Tony Walsh © The Artist and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 201; CAC-Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

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By spraying paint directly onto the gallery edifice Grosse incorporates architectural form into the folds of her work. Consequently, architecture becomes an environment to be deconstructed by the physical traces of painterly performance. The flow of paint does not stop at an edge but keeps going as far as an arm extended by a ladder will permit. The work often resembles an exterior urban space such as the tagged edifices underneath a freeway. These exterior spaces come to occupy the gallery space and turn it into a space of fringe dwelling, liminal decay and institutional critique. Grosse often works high with her colours reaching into the ceiling and the places where lighting, electrical functionality and architectural keystones intersect in a hidden infrastructure. The works create a deconstructive situation totally dominated by the presence of colour in an uncontained state. As the colour escapes from the spray gun it threatens to envelop everything, not just surfaces but any sense of good form in painting and architecture. The spray paint can tail off into diaphanous dots or congeal into pools of colour that spill over in long dribbles. The colour can be deep and obscuring of the surface, or be light and transparent laying across the shape of a room like a veil. As in Lambie’s work, painting in its traditional form has receded so that colour in an informal state can be loosed on the environment. As the form of painting recedes, the essence of contemporary synthetic colour advances. Similarly, as the usual form of exhibition display is rejected, so the conventions of exhibition etiquette are exposed and inverted. If Lambie’s work reveals floor-ness then Grosse’s reveals wall-ness. Usually a viewer is not interested in the wall itself, but rather what is hanging on the wall, what the wall can facilitate without making itself felt. The wall by its very nature withdraws in favour of a hanging. By spray painting directly on the wall, the wall is made to advance out of its background obscurity into an uncanny presence, standing there wounded, decorated and dramatized. By treating it so Grosse, touches the wall not as a support, nor as an obstacle or something to lean on, but as a place, if one can touch a place …. The wall makes itself merely spacious: … a spacing in which to let come – coming from nowhere and turned toward nowhere – all the presence of the world.172

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The wall now reveals a world by showing the hidden work it does. The wall works as a facilitator of the act of viewing in a gallery environment, it also performs the architectural labour of holding up a building and does the infrastructural work of delivering light, warmth and spaciousness. The wall has been earthed, brought to earth by spray painting, so that its hidden materiality appears as the support on which the worldly conventions of exhibition hang. For a moment wall-ness is revealed and becomes articulated visually and conceptually before withdrawing back into an integrated environment. The expanded painting work of Lambie and Grosse is ‘pres-absential’, in that it consists of presences and absences, advancing and withdrawing, world and earth. What comes forward is enabled by that which withdraws and their dynamic interplay is the production of sensuousness and sense, a field of material and cultural possibilities. It is an unstable dynamic, historically volatile, constituted by an engine of difference and differentiation between absent and present, earth and world. It is not a dialectic that offers synthetic resolution, it is an endless tension where presence attempts to overcome absence, and where absence reveals the secretive partiality of presence. The heat generated by the process is the cold fission of revelation itself. Revelation as the ringing of presence and absence is foregrounded materially in the work and in the very discourse it takes to engage with the work. The one demands the other and they co-produce each other.

Applied Heidegger This chapter begins and ends as an aesthetic enquiry into painting. By drawing on Heidegger’s attempt to overcome traditional aesthetics, ‘free(ing) the concept of art itself from its status as an aesthetic category’,173 I have explored a new discourse that gets beyond the limitations of subjective affect and representational thinking. This new discourse, a post aesthetics grounded in ontological thinking, was applied to the elemental practice of painting. It was shown that the historical discipline of Painting, rooted in the earthiness of wet paint, has a natural tendency to branch out to its own limits resulting in expanded painting. In expanded painting sensuous pleasure and visual effect is a beginning, but there is something more, an unusual reconfiguration of

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colour, surface and frame. Expanded painting, rather than simply evoking a sensuous response, proceeds disclosively, working to reveal the space between the disappearance of painting and the appearance of colour as another kind of presence, colour as its own presence for the first time. At the heart of this process of revelation is Heidegger’s conception of earth and world. To explain them Heidegger reaches for Van Gogh. Instead I reach for expanded painting. As a result, expanded painting clarifies Heidegger’s thinking by showing that earth and world are the hidden basis of a dramatic struggle for presence. This struggle, shaped by our own age of technological rationality, inspires an ontological questioning that asks how things are and how they come to be, particularly in the act of making. Once again Heidegger’s thinking of earth clarifies by showing paint to be creatively resistant rather than passively inert. Earth is that which can’t be put into words, refusing to be shown in the artwork. Earth also appears in this text as that which cannot be accounted for in any reflection on practice. The works are of the earth, and cannot be captured as concepts in strategical orbit around the art world. There is something there that is more than an aesthetic experience, there is the sense of an ontological opening that begins with the unusual form of expanded work and ends with uncanny sense that the work suggests something beyond its own presence. When acrylic paint dries it becomes a film of plastic. There is a certain magic and mystery when anything changes from one form to another, such as the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, day becomes night and so on. When wet acrylic paint becomes a dry film of coloured plastic it shares certain properties with other coloured plastic things such as string, toys, blister mouldings, household products, consumables, buckets, water bottles and so on. With this kind of attitude to materials an artwork cannot be taken as a picture or representation of an idea. It is a productive thing where revelation is taking place, not for the viewer to see, but to be apprehended. Representation presumes a world that can be captured by a clever kind of looking, whereas apprehension is the reverse, it results from being looked at by the world or in this case, the work of art. In apprehension the work looks back, gathering the viewer up into an unusual apprehensive presence. The two primary players in the drama of disclosure are caught in an irresolvable conflict, driven by clefting, rifting, oppositions and discord. A

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similar tension arises from the polemical position Heidegger takes against all previous thinkers, metaphysics and the entire tradition of philosophy. Heidegger attacks notions of subjectivity, common understandings of language, he shows no respect for certain well used words, obliterating them, erasing them, cutting and pasting them into new words, neologisms for a new beginning in thinking. In doing so he confronts the subjective understanding of aesthetics, the industrialization of art, technology as a life diminishing form of cybernetics. However, these ideas are only ever presented in partial texts and short essays. Just as Being and Time was left unfinished so his writings on art and aesthetics are fragmentary compared to the vast tomes of Hegel and Kant. As open-ended fragments on art Heidegger’s writing invites participation, since they are well sketched but not completely definitive, leaving room to interpret and manoeuvre. In the process of developing an ‘applied Heidegger’ based on these texts, a certain kind of violence is required. In using Heidegger I have not attempted to reduce, explain or close Heidegger off, but to open up a new aesthetic discourse and ways of looking at art forms that are not yet fully understood, as is the case with expanded painting. I aim to write with Heidegger, without Heideggereana, without his classic jargon, in a way that nevertheless resonates deeply with his thinking.

Conclusion So far I can say that expanded painting has demanded a rethinking of the craftbased technique and the historical tools of painting. It involves a movement beyond the traditional materiality of paint towards the incalculable of painting. By going beyond the habitual picture of what painting can be, there is a shift from ontic productivity to an ontological question about the nature of painting. As a result expanded painting is less a painted thing than it is a place for the opening of possibility, a brief glimpse of the ‘there’, the scene of presence itself, something in excess of the artwork yet enabled by it. Paradoxically what stands out is withdrawal, painting withdraws so that a new hybrid practice can develop, aesthetics withdraws so that a new thinking about art can take place. Withdrawal reminds us that aesthetics is more about what can’t be done rather

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than what can. Consequently, the ultimate challenge is to identify what can’t be made present rather than simply making pleasant that which is present. In the past the pleasure of painting, its visual sense, has relied heavily on the sensual workings of colour. But if painting withdraws for the sake of a new kind of presence particularly through the use of colour, then the enigma of what can shine out in any appearing returns in the question of colour itself. If expanded painting has a special relationship with colour, what is colour itself?

4

An Ontology of Colour

Colour is the first revelation of the world Helio Oiticica1 So far, it has been suggested that a certain kind of painting, expanded painting, sets up the material elements of painting, surface, image, frame, paint and colour, in a way that demands an existential engagement above and beyond what art theory can offer. Expanded painting as an ontical challenge to the finite materiality of painting initiates an ontological question as to the very nature or essence of painting. To respond comprehensibly to this challenge required a change in critical language, a post aesthetic discourse that was articulate in the face of the incalculable differences erupting within painting. Post aesthetics shows expanded painting as a form of revelation within painting enabled by a peculiar tension between two ontological dimensions, earth and world. Contemporary art, as discussed in relation to the work of Katherine Grosse and Jim Lambie, does not represent this tension, but provides a place for it to happen. This place is not the physical confines of the artwork, nor the gallery or museum, but the very sense of presence itself, the sense of a ‘there’ where art happens. For example, when Katherine Grosse spray paints the wall of the gallery there is a regression into the natural presence of paint showing what becomes most hidden about paint. What appears is its tendency to flow, to form smooth curves, to mix, to distribute colour, to interweave, to seek out boundaries and edges dispersed across surfaces and architectural interfaces. The tension between paint doing its own thing and painting as a set of conventions for disciplining paint is made apparent. In a similar manner of getting beyond the discipline, many artists have sought out materials that substitute for paint,

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thereby revealing a porous boundary between good form and institutional infrastructure. Jim Lambie uses vinyl tape, David Batchelor uses light boxes and Sandra Selig uses coloured thread. None of their works can be called painting but the possibility of another kind of painting is signalled through the significant presence of colour. In them most of the elements of painting have been removed except one, colour. Painting’s almost complete absence lingers as an honorific presence, functioning as a kind of homeopathic2 dose, intensifying painting the more diluted and negated it becomes. While the traditional physique of painting has given way, the presence of colour comes forward to fill the gap, indeed to occupy space. Disembodied colour is pregnant with these questions: How much can be removed from painting and there still be painting? If colour is the limit point of painting, what counts as colour for painting? Historically, colour has been applied to painting in the form of a wet medium, oil, tempera, acrylic, holding coloured pigments in liquid suspension. Since the twentieth century many more things have been empowered to be a carrier of colour, such as string, tape, light boxes, plastic utensils, smoke, video screens, clothing, cars and buildings. The pigment that is added to a tube of green paint is the same pigment that goes into the plastic mould for a bright green picnic fork. When an artist reaches out and chooses vinyl tape or plastic toys instead of a tube of paint, the colour is the same but the delivery mechanism is changed. In either case colour retains its compositional dynamic amongst a life of forms. Consequently, an awareness grows that colour is both a quality, that is, a sensuous experience in the work, and a quantity, a material element placed in space. The chiasm between colour as sensation and colour as object generates another ontological question for painting. The way it is answered determines whether painting is considered a qualitative phenomenon or quantitative structure. If colour is considered as a quality then even the quantitative requirement for line in painting disappears. If colour is considered a quantity then even in its complete absence, as in the case of darkness or transparency, it retains a spectral presence much like zero in mathematics. Colour in any situation is capable of invoking the presence of painting even when painting is otherwise absent. Anything that carries colour, from string to video pixels, functions as a substitute for paint in a tube. As such, colour is a standing reserve for painting without necessarily being the irreducible element of painting.

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Even if colour is the essence of painting, there still remains the question, what is colour? Colour, like other everyday terms such as ‘time’ and ‘space’, is taken for granted. In fact they have to be taken for granted, as their own special way of getting out of the way, so simple operations of daily life can happen. We travel through cities according to bus timetables, check the time on our watches, and choose socks of a certain colour. But if we ask what is time, what is space, what is colour, we are suddenly confronted with some very difficult questions which would otherwise make getting to work very difficult.

What is colour? Colour is an entirely familiar everyday experience; we are always already immersed in it. However, when it comes to speaking or writing about colour, something else happens, that is neither colour nor language. The more we try to talk about colour in any depth, the more we bump up against language and its limitation at the phenomenal edge of perception. The difficulties of articulating colour are circumvented by a set of prejudices against colour that tend to close the conversation down. Most of these prejudices fall on the side of deeply ingrained cultural taboos against colour that align good taste and cultural sophistication with a severe restriction on the use of colours. As such the West is inherently chromophobic,3 equating taste and sophistication with clothes, houses and paintings that are black, white, grey, or brown. This is to be contrasted with chromophilia,4 a wantonness of colour which erupts in the excessiveness of the ‘feminine, primitive, infantile, vulgar, queer or pathological’.5 This apartheid of colour is reinforced by the ancient argument between colour and line, dating back to Aristotle who argued that the ‘repository of thought in art is line, the rest is ornament’.6 Ever since then colour has been understood as superficial, an ephemeral occurrence on the surface of things, whereas linearity aligned with a dark palette is seen as permanent, structural and meaningful. Despite some of the prohibitions against immodesty in colour, the meaning of the most basic term in this discussion, namely ‘colour’ itself, is rarely argued. The slipperiness of colour has been sometimes held in place by symbolism that ties some colours to specific social purposes and meanings. For example, the Sumptuary Laws of Elizabethan England mandated that only royalty could wear purple attire.

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In the twentieth century, various modern artists attempted to develop a grammar of colour linked to music or emotions. Kandinsky developed a primary polarity of yellow and blue that suggests active and passive perceptual sensations. Johannes Itten a colleague of Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, developed a complex colour theory that linked colours to certain emotions and spiritual states. Colour is verifiable, it surrounds us at all times, we are drenched in it, but the words we use to divide the spectrum of colour into functional divisions is quite arbitrary, shifting wildly between different cultures and epochs. The North American Inuit supposedly have a vast array of terms for the single colour we call white, the French use brown and purple as interchangeable in certain situations, Russians see two colours where we just see blue, and Hindus don’t differentiate red and orange.7 The word ‘red’, or any colour term in any language, has no inherent chromatic value and is only an arbitrary signifier shifting under cultural and historical differences. Colour is undeniably there, but it continually evades the grasp of linguistic possession. David Batchelor in his now classical twenty-first-century text on colour, cites Plotinus8 to show us why. In short, there is an incommensurability between colour and language because colour is indivisible, there are no breaks in the rainbow, while language is based on divisions and conceptual units that contradict colour’s natural tendency to ‘spread, flow, bleed, stain, soak, seep, and merge’.9 Because of this, the difference between the perception of colour, the social experience of colour and the history of colour terms, has produced a bewildering set of conflicting possibilities. At various points in history, science has weighed in to settle some arguments on the matter. However, even there, conflicts between great classical scientists such as Newton and Leibniz, and more recently between quantum wave and particles theories, have resulted in ‘one of the worst muddles in the history of science’.10

Colourism Colour is a constant challenge to our understanding. It challenges the scientist to quantify light, the thinker to bring colour to language, and the artist to

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embrace it elementally. It is the indeterminacy of colour in its movement between physical presence and modes of understanding that leaves us with a bewildering array of colour strategies in art. In twentieth-century art whenever there was a struggle between concepts as pure idea, unadorned by colour and perception embodied in colour, idea always won out. In this respect consider the different status of Conceptual Art and Cubism as opposed to Op Art and Fauvism. The polarity of colour versus concept is a lingering Platonism that favours the immortal realm of ideas over the temporary and sensuous.11 Colourist artists are usually associated with a kind of anti-realism, breaking with the natural colours of things, to make colour an expressive, affective or formal element as in impressionism, abstraction and colour field painting. The nature of colour for a colourist changes over time according to the presence of pigments and the material process by which they are made available. Before the twentieth century colour came from earthly pigments, sometimes captured in a tube, later on synthetic colours were produced in tins and made from laboratory concoctions, culminating in contemporary colour which is largely pixel based. During the twentieth century, the demand for colour in various non-art situations, house paint and industrial surfaces, pushed the nature of art making away from the accurate representation of flesh to the seductive presentation of colour that might compete with the spectacular materials of the modern world. To be a colourist in the twenty-first century means thinking colour anew, specifically in terms of the ubiquity of coloured plastics and the plasticity of colour on an electronic screen. As Batchelor points out the change in our understanding of colour from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is embodied in the shift from the colour wheel to the colour chart. The colour wheel is historically steeped and scientifically justified in its hierarchies of colour that rationalize the visible and makes it ready for representation. Whereas the colour chart is a ‘disposable list of readymade colour’ in a ‘grammarless accumulation of colour units’12 that strips colour free from colour theory and places it in an entirely autonomous zone ready for abstraction. We might take a similar step from the colour wheel through the colour chart to the colour cell, that is, the picture cell or pixel of the video and computer screen. These are the colours of any screen we might use for domestic entertainment, telephony, global location, gaming platforms, video

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art or media facades. The pixel that makes up the LCD screen on a phone or the plasma screen that hangs in a gallery is electronically endowed with a colour more intense than any painting could ever be. As Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe puts it, these kinds of screens make the world more than it is, more colourful and more defined …. offering painting another surface to which to refer …. brighter than any that preceded it, unimaginably thin, a surface without depth.13

What permits the impossible brightness and thinness of electronic colour is plastic itself, the plastic of the surface of the monitor and the plastic components that hold the screen elements together. Plastic, the ultimate technological surface has also become the agent provocateur of colour, transmitting a new kind of colour while also challenging painting to find ever more intensities that can match it. In the history of colour, pigments were originally refined by hand from natural materials such as ochre, beetle eggs, flowers and crushed shellfish. Later industrial science and the petrochemical industry produced synthetic pigments that were more intense and not reliant on expensive exotic biomass. Today the colour cell has no origin in material substances at all, shining out from the interior of electronic light itself. The colours of a digital screen have moved beyond the materiality of pigment towards something like structural colour. Structural colour occurs in nature without pigment through optical effects such as interference, refraction and diffraction. It happens when the arrangement of physical structures interacting with light produce a particular iridescent colour as happens in peacock feathers, mother of pearl shell, beetle shells and butterfly wings. Many things today aspire to the condition of structural colour, whether it is made of plastic or pigment, whether it is material or electronically immaterial. The challenge is taken up in the laboratory where new synthetic chemicals attempt to reach the colour intensity of a data screen through fluorescent paint or the integration of LED technology into wearable fibre and building exteriors.14 As such the electronic monitor and painting reach out to each other through the medium of colour and the format of the screen, alternately embracing and exceeding each other. If Jackson Pollock and Barnet Newman embraced wide angle cinemascope screens, and Technicolor film stock aspired to the intensity of painterly expressionism, then contemporary painting refers

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to the digital monitor in its luminescence and multi-modal forms, while small digital screens show complex visual presences mimicking miniature painting and postage stamp design. This change in the nature of colour involves refiguring the presence of paint and the object of painting itself. The matter of paint in this new environment of colour can no longer be constrained by coloured stuff gathered into a tube, but must also include any object that has been invested with colour such as string, clothing, furniture, cars, data screens and buildings. Similarly, the object of painting can no longer be confined by a flat surface but must include works that spread out across space and time encroaching on other media like sculpture, installation, performance and video. Riffing on painting, mixing colour in different painted materials, some things are left out of the painters repertoire, such as brush and easel, and new things are introduced, such as anodized aluminium, coloured smoke and architecture. These works are not immediately nameable as painting but nevertheless originate within the differential field of colour. In the current situation there is nowhere that colour can’t go, there are green stripes on toothpaste as it is extruded from the tube, cars and cleaning utensils have an infinite array of tones, human skin as well as everything plastic can be injected with myriad colour variations. Wherever colour is, in commodities, on screen interfaces, in experiential environments, painting can take a stand, addressing colour as that which is environmentally all around.

Colour is One thing is certain at this stage, colour is, but the nature of its presence has not yet been captured or named15 since it is essentially resistant to nomination.16 Colour invokes a series of nested questions, how does it present, how is it experienced and how can it be spoken? Experientially, colour rains down from the sky in the warmth of the sun and erupts up out of the earth as raw pigment and the hues of nature. Colour is awesome and ubiquitous in its presence, it is in everything, on everything, everything is shot through with colour, colour shines out from a world of things, and in its shining brings a world into existence. Colour is not a solitary separate thing or event; it is always

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the colour of something. The whole world is coloured and so to some extent the world is colour. Everything is in colour, colour emerges from the obscure ground of things, it is all around like air, things are always already coloured. In the everyday we are so immersed in colour that it is taken for granted, it becomes un-thought, a background phenomenon, until a sunset, or work of art shocks us into remembering its uncanny way of being surprising, awesome, astounding. As Michel Haar puts it, ‘Colours are all at once the ground, “the secret soul of what is below”, the surface, and what sublimates the surface, “the ideas”, substance, figure, and “general harmony”, “the life of God”’.17 Colour is not just seen, it is experienced in depth, through and through. It is an unfolding embodiment from sensation, to perception, to affect, to my sense of being in the world. In this movement from perception to being, ‘colour cracks open the form-spectacle’.18 Thus colour is not a spectacle or an element of form, but a necessary precondition to both. Colour is more than my affective or sensory experience, it moves me to a place of ecstatic embeddedness. Through the sensation of colour I am of the world. Colour, like the act of thinking, can be forgotten and at times must be forgotten, so that performance and experience can take place. One way of remembering the forgotten of colour is through painting. In painting, touching colour as a maker, or being touched by colour as a viewer, is much the same thing. It begins with seeing colour, then really seeing colour, then touching colour, then feeling colour, then knowing colour, then being in colour, then in colour, being. This kind of language is an attempt to find another way of talking colour that honours and justifies the new ways we walk with colour today. I find some help in this process once again in the writings of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was not known for his chromatic sensibility despite the fact that he was a personal friend of modern masters such as George Braque and Paul Klee. In several places he does briefly mention colour as lighting or shining out, in an ontological sense, without relying on any scientific theory of colour or light. In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ he mentions stone, colour and language as various materials that can be used to set forth a work of art, such that rock comes to bear and rest; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colours to glow, tones to sing, the word to say. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness

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and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and lustre of metal, into the lighting and darkening of colour, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word.19

All these types of work from sculpture, to painting to poetry rest back into a material element. If we try to understand the work by analysing the materiality of stone, metal, colour, tone and word, the material itself simply withdraws. Thus for example ‘if we attempt a penetration by breaking open the rock, it still does not display in its fragments anything inward that has been opened up. The stone has instantly withdrawn into the same dull pressure and bulk of its fragments’. And similarly with colour, ‘colour shines and wants only to shine … when we analyse it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained’.20 It is the work of art that allows us to see the shine of colour as opposed to a more direct physiological and scientific understanding. Art, particularly painting reveals an ontology of colour in which shine and radiance is experienced as ‘showing self-showing’.21 The artwork introduces what is undisclosed about colour into the world, while a scientific grasping of colour simply dims it down as explanation or calculation. The shining of the earth through the material of colour radiates through the world as a sense of manifest meaning. ‘The world stands as the medium through which the shining of the earth distributes itself through relations of significance.’22 Colour as an aspect of earth, presents a radiance that penetrates or ‘juts’ into the world as pure shine or shimmer. Kenneth Maly describes it as a ‘shimmering that shines with a certain unsteadiness where it is always at something like a boundary, it can never cross that boundary, even as it is always moving ‘across’ the boundary’.23 At that point, colour casts an ontological light rather than an optical presence, moving closer to the dynamic of thought and away from the physiology of vision.

Apprehending light In everyday experience for something to show up as substantially present to our awareness it must be apparent, that is, have some aspect of accessibility. The current understanding of visual access relies on a model of perception

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based on the laws of representation and the physiology of the eye. In our time the eye has become the dominant sense and because of that seems to stand over the other senses and ultimately all experience itself. The eye observes from a distance and its very objectivity is its separation rather than integration with what it sees. Many have critiqued this so-called dominance of visual distance, reaching an apogee of contempt in the writings of Sartre.24 Martin Jay condenses this position into the reasonable claim that vision alone is incapable of capturing ‘a primordial reality prior to the differentiation of the senses’.25 However, other ages, notably ancient Greece, had no such conceptual structure. For them vision was more laterally democratic in that ‘the one who looks shows himself and appears’26 in the act of seeing. Thus objects seen and those who look ‘emerge in the double sense that the object rises in self showing and the essence of the looker is collected in the look’.27 Looking is the way humans come into presence with other beings, all sharing the commonality of appearance, each drawing out and revealing something of the other in the moment of appearing. While we tend to be highly sceptical of mere appearances, distrusting it as the site of deception, earlier cultures, particular the ancient Greeks took a more nuanced approach. For them, appearing was of the essence of being, in that the outward look of things ‘is what in all beings shows itself and what looks out through them’.28 Gorgias, an early Greek philosopher who was introduced as a main figure in one of Plato’s Dialogues, argues, ‘Being is unrecognisable unless it succeeds in seeming, and seeming is weak unless it succeeds in being.’29 Thus to show is to appear and to appear is to be, and so ‘being essentially unfolds as appearing’.30 The tension between seeming, modern looking and the successful entry into being is deeply buried in the historical language and the particular words we use to tease them apart. It is hard to make sense, to avoid nonsense in this context, without conforming to the modern scientific view of wilful looking, lens-based perception and representational mapping. In addition, so much of our language is tangled in visual metaphors that equate sight and seeing with understanding and sense. Consider the number of visual metaphors I have used so far. So some non-sense in the form of poetic ellipsis is required to be able to speak another kind of seeing-looking that is latent in historical thinking on visuality and is demanded by our current optical environment. For this Heidegger invokes the ancient philosophical argument regarding the

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difference between being and seeming to overturn some of our conceptual prejudices. At a common sense level, being and seeming create an opposition between authenticity and a lie. Yet both the authentic and inauthentic ‘appear’, and in so appearing offer the possibility of discovering how they truly stand in relation to actuality and deception. Seeming and appearing are demoted by a modern knowing look that grasps what is seen and holds it in the mode of scientific interrogation. This is emphasized in aspects of film theory, where the look or gaze is that which captures the target of vision. In feminist film theory the grasping male look captures the feminine appearance as a sexual object for visual consumption.31 This kind of impaling gaze, which presupposes the model of active subject and passive object, is ‘the look of a being that advances by calculating … the look of a predatory animal’.32 Gazing, as a form of glaring and gawking, is a cultural optic that pushes beyond visual engagement to a form of entrapment. Heidegger invokes another style of looking that is less violent and closer to a contemplative encounter by avoiding the contemporary terminology for light and vision. To do so he uses terms such as ‘shining’ and ‘lighting’, ‘What shines is what shows itself to a looking.’33 Once again the etymology behind this kind of deconstructive drive is Greek. The Greek word for the look, thea, is the same word for goddess.34 The fact that these two meanings share the same word is no coincidence since there is some suggestion that those who look are the divine ones who look into the very essence of existence itself. They are the looking ones who by their looking shine into existence and meet existence at the place of its shining out. From this kind of divine look comes ‘a pointing while shining and attuning while pointing’.35 Those who can see, point towards what shines out and in doing so their looking is a kind of shining look, a fire from the eyes as Empedocles would have it. In the fifth century BCE, Empedocles believed that the Goddess Aphrodite placed fire in the human eye so that light would shine out making objects visible. If this were true, then one could see during the night just as well as during the day. Empedocles overcame this impediment to his thesis by postulating an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays from a secondary source such as the sun.36 Even up to the time of Descartes it was believed that cats eyes projected light enabling their ability for night vision.37

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Since then, emission or extromission theory has been replaced by a modern intromission theory, which states that visual perception is based on something representative of the object, namely rays of light reflected from the object that enter the eyes. Yet something of the duality of looking and emitting lingers in modern psychology and psychoanalysis where looking is a kind of subjective projection that determines what is seen above and beyond the physics of light entering the eye. Thanks to Empedocles we retain a primordial sense of extromission where looking is an encountering that meets a shining out. As such we are outside the requirements of ‘conformity, correctness of perceiving, presenting and representing’,38 outside the modern basis of human subjective perception. That which shines out is a self showing in the form of appearing and seeming, in other words a ‘self emerging presence’.39 What shines out in appearance establishes a relationship to being while at the same time withdrawing, slipping behind the guise of mere appearance. What is required is a fit between the way things show up and the way they are approached so as ‘to let that which shows itself be seen from itself the very way it shows itself ’.40

The idea of light Heidegger develops ‘shine’ and ‘shining out’ from the Greek word phusis and its derivative phuein, which means to ‘illuminate, shine forth and therefore to appear’.41 In Greek thinking light played a special role in physiological and ontological understanding. For Plato eidos determined the relation between appearances and a higher realm of ideas. Another important term, doxa, originally meaning brilliance and glory, was the respect given to that aspect of being that showed itself in appearing. Doxa is the respect in which someone stands and in a wider sense the aspect that each being possesses and displays in its look (eidos).42

Doxa also meant common belief or opinion, the aspect which was most commonly seen or understood of any particular being. A degenerated meaning comes down to us through the word, orthodoxy, meaning that which is taken for granted or something that has become an unquestioned belief.

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In contemporary thinking doxa are assumed and not articulated, they appear self-evident and function as a limit to what can be thought and said. The shift towards an orthodoxy of appearances began with Plato who famously reduced the standing of seeming to a ‘mere seeming … at the same time idea was elevated to a supersensory realm … (creating) a chasm between merely apparent beings here below and the real Being somewhere up there’.43 Plato used both eidos and idea to refer to aspects of the suprasensory realm of ideas. Eidos is closest to the Latin and English ‘idea’, but in its earliest use eidos meant outward appearance and even image. In Plato eidos as outward look, meant ‘what something in itself shows itself as’.44 Eidos designates what is visible in that special moment of seeing into the very essence of a thing. This kind of true or accurate seeing was meant to be an insight into the form of the thing seen, going beyond its momentary outward appearance. An insight into the world of form was also an entrée to the higher realm of ideas and metaphysical truth, imposing a division between appearance and essence, as well as between different kinds of light that gave different kinds of access to beings. To make this understandable Plato used the allegory of the cave to differentiate the light of the sun, the light from a fire and the light of understanding. In the first instance anything that shows itself in the cave is accepted as a being without any more proof than its appearance as a shadow on the wall. Light is required from a fire for things to be seen and accepted even if it is only accessible to a small degree as in the shadows cast on a dim cave wall. For a deeper understanding of beings to occur there must be another understanding of the light itself, an appreciation that there is light, and that it can come from various sources and contexts. Once the light of the fire is relativized by the discovery of the sun outside the cave there are new physical and conceptual challenges to consciousness. Firstly, there is an acclimatization to the light, which involves deflecting a glare, squinting and resetting the eyes from the half-light of the fire to the full light of the sun. The sun supplants the fire as the primary source of light and comes to represent the highest understanding since it is the source of the brightest and most constant light. The movement from the flickering shadow world of the cave fire to the almost blinding light of the sun in the sky brings a change in both visual and philosophical paradigms. Moving out of the cave and ‘Being drawn more and more into the light … opens the gaze for beings and their various ways

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to be … (it) is not a mere influx of new cognitions, but an overturning of the entire … position … with respect to what is taken … as a genuine being’.45 The precondition of seeing beings as beings, is shown by way of a movement up a ladder of understanding based on the quality of light and the context of its source. Shadows cast by a fire into human eyes give something fleeting and transient, while beings revealed to a deeper formal understanding are persistent and constant. Ever since Plato this metaphysical understanding of vision as an insight, revealing what is substantial and unchanging, has stood above and beyond mere transient appearances given by sensory experience.

The good light For Plato, the highest idea, the idea of ‘the good’ was a kind of pure being that cast shadows on our world leaving only hints as to the nature of its being. ‘The idea of the good … “begets both the light in the domain of what is visible as well as the lord of that domain” … the sun. The good is the effective power and source of all light … it “bestows truth, disclosedness and understanding”’.46 The good was the idea of idea itself, the idea of all ideas. So the allegory of the cave tells us something about physical light, the physiology of sight and ‘a certain kind of ontological visibility’.47 The truth of what is seen and experienced in the cave depends on a ‘fantastic convergence of gazes’,48 whereby not seeing, seeing only shadows and averting the gaze from the sun, from too much seeing, come together. A new kind of truth is created in the ‘imprint, figure and form’49 of the shadow and its constitution as the ‘essence-idea-aspect-figure-configurationimage-picture’.50 Consequently, truth becomes a kind of correct gaze, the one that conforms the act of knowing to the thing itself, a kind of philosophical gazing up at the world of eidos and ideas. The source of truth is outside the cave, beyond the world of human experience, a transcendent place of ideas. ‘Transcendence is the “beyond of those things that are experienced”, and this “beyond” is, starting from Plato, nothing other than the ensemble of ideas, that “are the suprasensible”’.51 Heidegger adds to this, ‘highest in the region of the suprasensible is that idea which, as the idea of all ideas, remains the cause of the subsistence and the appearing of all beings. Because this “idea” is thereby the cause of everything, it is also the “idea” that is called the “good”’.52 The good

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in Greek, is theon, the divine, so the journey from ‘the good’ to god, ultimately the one true God is a very short step linguistically and conceptually. It is no coincidence then that the first lines of the Christian Bible should contain a reference to light, in particular the division of light and dark as a primary of act of world creation.53 In the same place, Genesis 1:4, light is described as ‘good’ carrying with it some of the Platonic implications of a higher order. In this context it is also no coincidence that the closest Greek word to sense perception, pistis, means faith or trust. For the Greeks ‘amid the multiplicity of individual things, any one of them is accepted in good faith, but without complete certainty regarding its Being’.54 Through the throng of sensations trust plays an important role since certainty was not yet an aspect of appearance. In the attitude of trust, seeming is not merely a deceptive gloss on the surface of appearance. Rather it is the first and crucial aspect of self showing, it is the point of entry into presence and being. As Nietzsche suggests, even if we were to go to the depths of things, to penetrate behind seeming and appearances, all we would see is more appearances: ‘The reasons for which “this” world has been characterized as ‘apparent’ are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable’.55 Deception, seeming, self showing, shining out are all ways beings shows up for us in the first instance. Heidegger calls this the ‘interlocking triple world of Being, unconcealment and seeming’.56 As such, seeming becomes the trace of presence, the glint of gold in the pan that pulls our attention regardless of whether it is fool’s gold or the first strike of a Klondike vein. Because there is an intrinsic radiance of seeming and appearance there is also the potential of revelation. Shining out of obscurity, and the dullness of presumption, there is a struggle to set appearance free, because there is an inclination in it ‘toward concealment, whether in great veiling or silence, or in the most superficial distorting and obscuring’.57 The struggle between being and seeming, like that between earth and world, is essential since neither exists without the other, each defines the other by contrast, each incites the other through interpenetration, and their ongoing tension makes presence of any kind possible. The artist Fred Sandback came to a similar understanding when discussing the tension between concrete presence and illusionism as evidenced in his string installations, ‘In no way is my work illusionistic. Illusionistic art refers you away from its factual existence toward

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something else. My work is a flail of illusions, but they don’t refer to anything. Fact and illusion are equivalents. Trying to weed one out in favour of the other is dealing with an incomplete situation.’58 While much of what has been said so far is conceptually abstract, Sandback’s practical insight from a working artist brings us back to the moment of appearance and its presence in a particular situation. Thus the emphasis shifts away from the physiological eye and active subject, towards the object and the open place in which appearance happens. ‘The open and lighted determines what appears and makes it comply with the essential form of the look that looks into the light.’59 We can no longer think of looking as either a projection of knowledge onto raw matter, or a capturing of self-sufficient visual presences. What appears in the open is radically in between, since it posits a receptive looker and the eye that looks, setting up the very possibility of looking. We see because, ‘the open is the light of the self luminous’.60 Up to now we have tended to understand the open in contemporary scientific terms, as an extension of space and time ready for reception of data and distribution of objects. ‘Yet the open does not mean space or time.’61 It is rather a form of freedom that first releases space and time as a possibility. Once this kind of inversion mantra has been thought through, and the old thinking begins to crack, there can be a moment of essential reversal, such that ‘we do not see because we have eyes, but we have eyes because we can “see”’.62 Appearance as a shining out creates an opening in the darkness and a presence in the midst of a throng of sensations. That which takes place in the open has the character of a shining light that has a certain demeanour.63 It opens a place for encountering the eye, revealing a predisposition between looking and shining. ‘That is why the emergence into the open has the character of shining and appearing. And that is why the perception of what emerges … is a perception of something shining in the light. Only because looking is claimed in this way can the “eye” receive a priority.’64 The active subject as the master of seeing and looking gives way to a spaciousness between what sees and what is seen, as if light can come from the eye, an object, the sun, or any active combination of them all. Each is connected literally and metaphorically, shuttling from biological looking, to metaphorical looking, to being looked at by things that have no sensual apparatus, that have no eyes to see. There is a ‘looking of Being into the open that is lighted by it itself as itself …’65

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The other look By treading around the extreme edges of what is currently understood about the eye, light and subjectivity, old certainties begin to give way. New possibilities beyond the scientific quantification of light- and lens-based metaphors begin to take shape. An attempt to completely rethink the nature of visuality beyond ocularity took place in the late writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty particularly in his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible. He sought to rescue visual perception from Cartesian perspectivalism and suggest a field like integration of seeing and being seen. Much of this was developed from Heidegger who contrasted modern representational looking and pre-modern apprehension of presence: That which is, does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception. Rather man is the one who is looked at by that which is, he is the one who is – in company with itself – gathered towards presencing, by that which opens itself.66

At first instance apprehension might seem to be a passive mode requiring only a certain openness and availability on the part of those who look. However, Heidegger does go on to define both active and passive poles of apprehension. Passively the looker lets something come to be seen so that what appears can show itself out of itself. On the active side apprehending is a dynamic claiming, similar to the legal term where a witness is apprehended for detention and interrogation. Apprehension in this double sense denotes a process of letting things come to oneself … (and) take up a position to receive what shows itself.67

Thus apprehension is not simply a passive absorption or active consumption by a knowing subject, since it takes place beyond any mode of sensory perception. Apprehension is not a way of behaving that the human being has as a property; to the contrary, apprehension is the happening that has the human being.68

Apprehension ‘has’ the human being by actively creating an appropriate receptivity in the moment of looking. It is ‘fundamentally a de-cision … and

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thus a confrontation with seeming’.69 The ‘de-cision’ to be made is not a conscious choice but a separating that establishes the possibility of a new meeting place between self showing and a welcoming invitation. It requires a certain touch since if it is too soft as an act of looking then nothingness reigns as an ‘unseeing gaping’,70 and if it is too hard then deception rules as a form of self-referentiality, seeing the world only as an anthropomorphic mirror. As Merleau Ponty put it, since the seer is caught up in, what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity – which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissim: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.71

In apprehension the seer is seen by what appears, and what appears settles back into itself through the action of shining out. Apprehension is the moment of shine, a moment of encounter between looking and being seen. MerleauPonty rebadges Heideggerean apprehension as a chiasmatic interwining72 of the sensible. Using the sense of touch as a model he shows that when a hand touches an object, the hand is also subjected to being touched. Both hand and object are part of the tangible world, so touching and being touched are simultaneous, irrevocably intertwined.73 And so, ‘it is not different for vision’.74 Visibility is conceived as a field in which seeing and being seen are intertwined, essentially indivisible yet operatively reversible. Unusual support for the counter intuitiveness of this idea comes from quantum physics where a reversal of the dynamic relationship between seer and seen has been documented. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle,75 suggests that simply looking at something causes it to change its behaviour. This was based on the observation that sub-atomic particles, beings that do not have sight or emotions, were effected by the act of human inspection regardless of the accuracy of the technology being used. The uncertainty principle was found to be inherent in all wave-like systems of which light is one. The uncertainty

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principle is one of many theories that show a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain basic physical properties, like position and momentum, can be known. The more precisely the position of a particle is known, the more mysterious is its momentum and vice versa. The uncertainty principle in quantum physics is a variation of the observer effect in traditional physics, where simple acts of observation interrupt the phenomenon being observed. For example, when pumping up the tyre on a bike to the recommended level of 60 psi, on releasing the pump a certain amount of air always escapes leaving the precise measure of pressure unknown. However, this error can be reduced to almost insignificant levels by using better instruments or different observation techniques. This cannot be done in quantum mechanics because things observed are at a sub atomic level, at the limit point where energy and matter become indistinguishable. Quantum systems are infinitely vulnerable to the presence of observational technology showing that observer and system cannot be separated, that the observer must be considered part of the system being observed. Even in psychoanalysis the act of looking is made problematic and reversible in a similar manner. Freud initiated this discussion when he identified Shaulust or scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, as a major component of human sexuality.76 Laura Mulvey applied this idea by suggesting that there was a particular kind of sexualized male looking in modern cinema that subjected women to ‘a controlling and curious gaze’.77 In this kind of thinking, looking is the seer’s shoot, a shot of power coming out of the eye that intentionally holds what is seen in a wilful and self-serving manner. In this way the cinema became a unique situation for analysing the nature of human looking or the gaze as a new kind of extromission theory. On this basis there are three types of look in the cinema, that of the camera recording the event, the looks between characters on the screen and the viewer watching the completed film. Sitting in the cinema the viewer has little to do but sit still in a seat. There is no need to move their eyes since attention is fixed strait ahead on an immobile screen placed at a convenient distance. The viewer’s look has been laid down in favour of a screen that looks back at the viewer with the omnipresence of an all seeing eye. ‘I not only look at the point of fixation (the screen), it looks at me.’78 The same uncanny sense of being looked at by the object of our gaze was discussed by Jacques Lacan, the most important psychoanalytic theorist

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after Freud. In his discussion of the development of the human ego, looking into mirrors, specularity and the gaze were of paramount importance. For Lacan looking was not a one way street, the look existed in a field of looks whereby what is looked at is also an active looker. ‘I am not simply that being located at the geometrical point from which perspective is grasped.’79 ‘In the scopic field … I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture’80, looked at by the world. Žižek notes that from a common sense point of view Lacan’s concept of the gaze is easily misunderstood as belonging to the subject. However, ‘it is crucial … that it involves the reversal of the relationship between subject and object, as Lacan puts it there is an antinomy between the eye and the gaze, i.e. the gaze is on the side of the object’.81 Almost at the level of banal anecdote, Lacan claims he originated his ideas while on a fishing trip in Brittany when he noticed a floating can, ‘It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated – and I am not speaking metaphorically.’82 Some of this counter intuitive play between human looking and objectsthat-see is played out in the film work of Andy Warhol. Warhol is most well known for a series of paintings that capture the post-war moment of industrial production and mass media through images of movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and consumer culture products like Coca Cola. His personal presence in this work seems driven by a desire to step out of the mundanity of everyday existence into the glowing presence of stardom. Being a ‘star’ is to generate light and attraction based on the kind of fame associated with success in the world of popular film and music. As Stephen Koch puts it, it is about ‘the obliteration of the self, the unworkability of ordinary living. Warhol proposes the momentary glow of a presence, an image–anyone’s, if only they can leap out of the fade-out of inexistence into the presence of the star’.83 The star in nature shines in the night sky as a source of light, navigation and visual fascination. In popular culture the star is a person who has acquired the cultural status of a heavenly body, capturing the look of ordinary consumers who drift and dream under a virtual firmament. In shining, the star activates a certain kind of enchanted look that draws the looker towards a phantasmatic presence. As Christian Metz puts it, ‘The film is not exhibitionist. I watch it, but it doesn’t watch me watching it. Nevertheless, it knows that I am watching it.’84

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The star captures and transforms the look, offering a certain glow as a bestowal on those who look. In this way the star looks back, not with an intentional gaze but through the marvellous shine of a hypnotic presence. Warhol in his own experimental 16mm films, inspired by his love of Hollywood stardom, demonstrates a way of looking at the world that is both actively voyeuristic, and passively immobile, as if an inert object was initiating or imitating a look. His camera gazes at people and things but refuses to follow the action; it is ‘an inattentive camera … that will not give the spectacle its full concern’.85 As a director, as an individual with human choice, he absents himself and takes a certain distance, while at the same time drawing out an exhibitionistic display from those who appear in front of his camera. Paradoxically it is Warhol who becomes the star, not the performers who strut on his temporary stage, but Warhol as the one who shines from an untouchable distance. It is as if the absent Warhol ‘leaves his gaze behind and it mingles with the light’.86 In separate ways, from vastly different disciplines, Heisenberg, Lacan and Warhol, take us out of subjective gazing into a primordial encounter with shining light, where there is a loss of the division between subject and object, where ‘looking is the primordial way of coming into the light’ (my emphasis).87

Moment of vision Human beings are intrinsically oriented towards sight and visibility as way of knowing the world. ‘All human beings strive to see, …. to existence there belongs a pursuit of seeing, of being familiar with.’88 Any action in the world requires a moment of deliberation and decision in the face of the unknown, an orientation towards the unknown for the sake of familiarity. In the moment of action, such as taking a journey, conducting an experiment, making a work of art, a view ahead is established. It is suddenly seen as a ‘catching sight of the here and now’.89 Something is determined in ‘that moment at which talking and deliberation come to a standstill’.90 In that moment the doctor makes a prognosis, the craftsmen picks up a tool, and the artist makes a mark. Something has been sighted, it is now in view and all action is aimed towards it. Yet it is also the moment of having been looked upon. That which has been sighted has the looker in its hold and guides them towards its light. It

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is the moment of apprehension, ‘the moment of having-seen, in the sense of having been looked upon … removing any … connotations (of) an “active” or “perceptive” seeing that would belong … to (an individual’s) own originating accomplishment’.91 It falls outside the contemporary understanding of ‘modern looking in which we direct ourselves to an object of representation and thereby “grasp” it’.92 In being looked at, an ability to look is activated, and in the act of looking I show myself as engaged and orientated towards the world and all its possibilities. Thus it is ‘only because we are already addressed, looked upon by beings themselves, can we respond to them in the manner of looking “at” them’.93 A grasping look is a fallen kind of looking that crushes what is seen with a predetermined intention, while apprehending is ‘not yet a “looking at” but is a more subliminal and pre-discursive “catching sight” of something’.94 In the moment of apprehending the seer is no longer one who sees and knows, ‘in having seen there is always something else at play other than the completion of an optical process. From there … seeing is not determined by the eye’.95 Various modes of looking, not determined by a physiological eye, can be found in the historical records. Modern theories of sight and understanding date back to classical Greece in particular Plato’s allegory of the cave that sets up a division between shadows and reality. However, even further back to the age of Homer there is a different and more primal sense of non-visual radiance. This is demonstrated in a passage from the Odyssey where the goddess Athena appears in the form of a beautiful woman. Ulysses sees her but his son Telemachus does not, ‘for it is not to all that the gods appear enargeis’.96 By way of Plato’s thinking the Romans translated enargeis into evidentia, a mode of becoming visible, literally visual evidence in the form of an outward appearance. However, for Homer enargeis meant ‘a brilliance, a shining, a lighting up, a radiance proceeding from things themselves as they presence’.97 This kind of etymology detects a double valence of light, lost in layers of historical usage and translation, latent with potential for strategic reactivation. Since Ulysses saw and Telemachus did not, enargeia and radiance need not have a necessary relationship to light or outward appearance. This aspect remains latent in the English word ‘light’ and its two contemporary usages. Light usually refers to the registration of brightness and optical presence. It has a secondary meaning, to lessen a burden or lighten a load, that is ‘to push aside whatever resists, to bring it into a realm without resistance, into a free realm’.98 The free realm is

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radiant in the sense that it liberates the eye and all the senses in a moment of self-showing presence. It is the simultaneous moment of seeing, enacting the bodily capability of seeing and being seen. It suggests a brief experience, where there is sight, insight and something out of sight, something that has not been created by the actions or thoughts of any individual. In this way the visible world has us rather then we having it. Consequently, the so-called primacy of perception is made secondary to the opening of presence.99 Perception is no longer an original relation to being or things since it already ‘presupposes a world to be given and understood’.100 The sense of the world, is not created through an accumulation of perception nor a totality of sensible impressions. ‘Perception, although it seems to arise at first glance, is late-born, derived.’101 What we mistakenly call perception is the concretion of a world whose essence is to appear, in it ‘the visible has a relation to itself which traverses me and constitutes me in seeing’.102 Once again arriving at a situation where ‘I can feel looked at by things’.103 Even at the most basic level of biology we understand things like photosynthesis as a kind of non-human looking, whereby the look of the sun as perceived by plants generates the building blocks of life. The sunflower, an aptly named representative of plant life, returns a look without eyes by orienting itself towards the compelling gaze of the sun. The result is the transformation of light into energy and the dehiscence of seeds into new generations of life. From here it seems no coincidence that the birth of human vision is linked to photosynthesis in the earliest forms of life on earth. Four billion years ago, microscopic single cell organisms, had no eyes but photoreceptors, that were receptive only to light direction and intensity. They had no vision for objects, they could not see each other, but they sensed the light from the sky. In the middle of the day, the light was too harsh so they swam down, while at twilight they swam to the surface to turn light into energy. The same molecule that was used in their body to photosynthesise, to give them life, is the same one that facilitates vision in creatures with developed eyes.104 The sun, as the source of light grants the possibility of sight as a donation from one that does not see to those who cannot yet see. The sun in its generous looking attracts the gaze of the sunflower and the dehiscent splitting open of the seedpod, returning the gaze as the movement of life from one generation to the next. In the light and warmth of the sun humans are open to a similar process of

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looking as dehiscence. ‘Dehiscence opens my body in two, … between my body looked at and my body looking, … there is overlapping and encroachment.’105 This kind of thinking about looking and light momentarily disturbs the modern understanding of a self-sufficient subject who grasps the world through a calculating gaze. It is no longer possible to say ‘we … have on the one hand, things identical to themselves which would afterwards give themselves to sight and on the other hand, a vision, at first empty, which would then open itself to the visible’.106 Something more primordial than an optical mechanism enables an encounter with things in the form of a shining out, where the one who looks is more correctly looked upon by what is seen. What shines comes into sight by virtue of an opening, where presencing, can take place. The seer can only see what appears because they have already gotten out of the way to some extent. The seer, in the moment of shine, has laid down a nominal subjectivity for the sake of a captivating absence, namely the immediate withdrawal of that which appears in favour of a shining out. ‘It is the prevailing absence in which the seer is held … responding to that which presences in its very withdrawal, in its unfathomable and multiple concealments.’107 It is literally and metaphorically a hole in vision, a blindness that is a precondition to sight, occurring at the point where the optic nerve connects with the retina, requiring a second sight to occult its absence.108 The withdrawal from opticality coincides with the flash of radiance, occurring in that brief instant before presence is dulled down to a functional availability. It remains only as a lingering hint, an after image that is strangely fascinating and ‘enchanting’. As such, it ‘comes to radiance (Schein) in the fullness of its enchantment’.109 It is as enchanting as the twilight glow is for a single cell organism, holding the promise of the fullness of life. Further up the human evolutionary chain, but in the same lambent glow, it shimmers and irridesces, constantly showing different facets of appearing and being.110 As such light has the character of excess, moving beyond scientific readability into the realm of the incalculable. It is both the light of our understanding and the shadow that surrounds us as an unthinkable limit, that defies being pictured. Art, through the medium of painting, indicates this in its apprehensiveness, being looked at by colour, caught up in its shine, shining out in the midst of being, revealing an opening where light and meaning can occur co-extensively.

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Conclusion This chapter began as enquiry into the world of colour and ended as a revelation of looking and light. Light and colour, are at times the same thing, with each being the precondition of the other, engaged in an ontological dance of presence and absence. Light brings life through photosynthesis, time through the phases of the day, and colour as an aspect of its tracings on the earth. Colour is the ‘condensation of and excitation of (light) moving towards its referent’,111 towards its name-ability. Light is the inaugural metaphor of colour, but colour refuses to settle back into the word other than as a pure naming. Because colour is so elusive and excessive, outside of ‘Law and Nature’,112 it tends to be collapsed into the physical science of light, occluding its wild being and downgrading its relationship to narcotic sorcery.113 Consequently, the enduring mystery of colour has led to a scientific stammer, a linguistic aporia and an unspoken prejudice against its apparent excessiveness. Just in case it should overwhelm us in its elemental effusiveness colour is restricted by good taste that equates cultural maturity with a limited palette. Yet colour continues to break free of its constraints, it bursts out of the earth and sky in an audacious display of autopoiesis, tempting poets and painters to reveal its power. The science of colour based on image, mimesis, physiology of the eye and individual subjectivity has somehow missed the phenomenon of colour altogether. Colour rather than being seen and calculated, shines out, shimmers and reveals a world in much the same way that thinking does. This new understanding of what colour ‘is’ is exemplified by shifts in emphasis from the colour wheel in its rationality, to the colour chart in its availability, to the colour cell (pixel) in its shimmering intensity. The ontology of colour and the phenomenon of shine stand apart and are incommensurate with the science of light, the psychology of seeing and the subject of vision. Understood ontologically colour makes things manifest by revealing them in their unique presence rather than merely facilitating communication, representation or spectacle. Before colour is seen, before colour can be looked at, colour looks at us in such a way that looking and seeing are provoked. In its ordinariness colour is captured and quantified by the grasp of scientific technical rationality. In its extraordinariness colour demands a certain attentiveness, a responsive lingering on the edge of the visible and invisible.

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All of these ways of being with colour erupt out of a formal evolution in painting, culminating in expanded painting and its orientation to everything in the everyday world that carries colour. Expanded Painting, unlike painting, no longer addresses an audience directly, an audience that might validate it through critical and economical response. Instead Expanded Painting engages a non-human respondent, the medium of painting itself. By analogy, the medium of painting however deconstructed or expanded, has become the entity to ‘whom’ the work of colour is addressed.

5

The Painting of Being

From the outset this book has posed a series of nested questions that ask how painting is and what it might become. This has involved a search for an appropriate angle of enquiry, a way of approaching painting so as to allow it to come forward in its own contemporary manner. In doing so unusual forms of painting have stepped out of the shadows disturbing unquestioned connections between historical painting and its essential possibilities. In this kind of exploration, the goal is to show a new understanding of painting that transcends the interface between painting and its antitheses. The result is a new walk, expanded painting and a new talk, post aesthetics, that makes sense of a growing area of contemporary art practice that falls somewhere between painting and every other studio discipline. At each stage of this enquiry into contemporary practice there has been a struggle to describe a moving target, to name an object of analysis and at the same time develop an appropriate language for it. In short, the aim is ‘to define both an object and an account of our access to it’.1 This has involved a journey from the ground of daily practice, showing what artists do at the everyday level of studio production, to mid-level theorizing about the historical drive towards expanded painting, then to the heights of Heideggerean ontological aesthetics and the technical language of philosophy. In each chapter of this book one kind of conceptualization reached its limit and demanded another level of thinking, resulting in a cascading through studio practice, art theory and ontology. Each level of questioning has generated a partial answer and a range of new questions. Once the being of painting and the nature of practice was shown to be historical, then expanded painting stepped forward as a current mode of revealing being through the act of painting.

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Paint itself Re-ascending this particular ladder of enquiry begins by considering the simple presence of paint in its liquid form, as pigment suspended in a medium. Over the vast period of time that is the history of painting, the constitutive link between paint stuff and painting has been suppressed and largely forgotten. This forgetting of the question of ‘the being of painting’ takes place in the glaring presence of so many painted works from Lascaux to Guernica. What has been lost is the tension between paint as the presence of colour, and painting as the drive towards new world views. By focussing on the studio practices of artists attention shifts from an exclusive focus on the artefactual outcomes of painting, to the materiality of processes given through the nature of paint itself. In the hands of many artists across several generations the historical presence of paint has gradually shifted from paint in a tube to an array of coloured things in constructed situations. The death of painting as natural pigment suspended in a liquid medium has spawned the rebirth of painting as synthetic pigment suspended in steel, smoke, string, space and time. Additionally, the historical process of painterly reduction away from craft-based applications has pushed painting right up against the phenomenon of colour itself. This results in a practical and conceptual tension between colour as ephemeral quality and colour as spatial quantity. For example Fred Sandback, while never claiming to be a painter, used coloured string as a substitute for paint, so that space could be coloured, and colour could become a sculptural element in occupying an exhibition space. In this way colour escalates away from a support surface into the spatial domain of the gallery. In a similar manner many artists from almost every discipline began to ask, what can carry colour besides paint? The response came in various forms, anything plastic, anything metal, anything mass produced, anything hand made, anything within sight, in short, anything under the sun. Sandra Selig uses spider webs collected from her garden, or fine spun polyester thread to create environments of coloured lines that hover on the edge of visual perception. From a distance the work appears to be a geometric drawing on the wall, but on closer inspection the constructed threads hover in space with an almost auditory sensation of colour harmony and frequency (Figure 5.1).

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Figure 5.1 Sandra Selig, Ancient Angle, 2016, spun polyester thread, nails, acrylic paint, 280 × 365 × 180 cm, courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, Australia

The first territory opened up by a flight away from the support surface of painting is the floor. By re-activating the floor, as in the work of Jim Lambie and Katherina Grosse, a tension develops between the historical verticality of painting and the practicalities of the spatial organization of the gallery. Floors, as opposed to walls, do not withdraw so that a painting can come forward as the sole focus of attention. Activated by expanded painting, the floor shows up as knotted and grainy, or glossy and reflective, no longer out of awareness but alive with worldly accumulations. It is the same floor, the same primary place where Pollock spread out a canvas on the ground to receive paint and to define the edges of the painter’s ritualistic performance. Rather than disappearing underfoot the floor becomes a new horizon of possible action for the transsubstantiation of painting. The floor shapes the impact of paint and generates a turbulence of colour by pushing up from the earth as the ultimate ground we stand on and the elemental source of all pigmentation. Artists like Ian Burn and Art & Language have used mirrors as another way of escaping the confines of painting but still retaining a critical link to it.

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Mirrors provide a surface similar to stretched canvas, but generate imagery without any recourse to paint. The surface of the mirror is an analogue of the picture plane and its window-like view of the world. However, what the mirror pictures is the very act of picturing itself. Appearances in the mirror are at times more convincing than what appears in a painting. What interrupts this process are incidental elements on the surface of the glass, a speck of dust, a painted word, or the appearance of random objects in the room of display and most self-consciously the image of the viewer themselves. Robert Smithson and Heimo Zobernig have used mirrors as a way of troubling painting, to move it away from the symbolic world behind the picture plane into the everyday world that stands before a pigmented surface. Mirrors implicate relations to reality and truth, as Nietzsche puts it ‘when we try to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end nothing but the things upon it. If we want to grasp the things we finally get hold of nothing but the mirror. This in the most general terms is the history of knowledge’,2 and the history of painting. Other artists exiting from painting have used the video screen as a form of electronic mirror that generates reflections on a technological surface. In particular performance artists have used video as the preferred medium for documenting and distributing works that often had something to say about painting. The unexpected gift from video is that it has a temporal dimension capable of revealing the teleology of paint from wet fluid to dry solid. By showing paint as an electronic trace, video reveals what cannot be seen in a completed painting, namely its essential liquidity. In an early performance work by Paul McCarthy, Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint (1974), paint is captured in its primary wetness, its sauciness, showing how it performs in its dynamic fluidity as opposed to the static desiccated paint found in most paintings (Figure 5.2).3 Video catches paint budding, rising and flushing with light and moisture, blooming in the fullness of a kinetic state. The temporal dimension of video is uniquely empowered to expose paint in the unusual physical state where it is best described as alive. It has a muscular presence, toned and round, as well as being highly reflective, catching light on its wet and glassy surface. Wet paint is also full of potential, anything can happen, it can be continually reworked until it is allowed to dry when it will change tone and physicality in a partially unpredictable manner rendering it continually vulnerable to chance and error.

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Figure 5.2 Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint, 1974; performance, video, photographs. Photo: Al Payne; courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Another temporal aspect of painting was shown by Dale Frank in a painting exhibited in his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2000. The work featured sagging sacks of slowly drying tinted resin that dripped onto the floor of the gallery during the entire period of the exhibition. By the time the painting had come to rest it had been produced by its own kinesis, without the intervention of the artist’s hand. Paint was invited to move under the force of its own weight, displaying its own ‘plastic intelligence’, revealing a natural desire to get beyond the edge of the painting and claim the floor and beyond. Once the exhibition finished and the gallery was cleaned up, the work only existed as a kind of legend, or at most a photographic trace. Both video and photography capture those ephemeral moments when the disappearance of painting as paint is at its most intense. In Olaf Breuning’s photographs of his Smoke Bomb series made between 2008 and 2013 we see the peak moment when coloured flares arranged in a grid on a temporary wooden structure explode into a cloud of wind driven abstraction. The work, as seen on the cover of this book, is shot front on, as we would normally view a painting, and defined by the shape of a wooden quadrilateral structure, as

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in a canvas stretcher. It is a type of un-painting that exists only in a time that photography can remember and comes to us filtered through the historical overtones of Robert Morris’ Steam Cloud (1969) and Judy Chicago’s pyrotechnic Atmospheres (1968–1974). Similarly in Andrew Liversidge’s performance video, ‘ALL THAT FALL (red, yellow, blue)’ 2013, the camera documents the demolition of three primary coloured brick walls specially installed in the gallery. The exhibition space displays the results of the destruction together with a video showing the artist at work, swinging a sledgehammer to bring down each wall in chromatic succession, from red, through yellow to blue. When the last wall is penetrated, and a clear view is permitted from the entrance of the gallery to the back wall, it is as if the visual scales of painting have been played in chromatic order, with the sledgehammer becoming a brush that undoes painting, falling as a shadow on the compelling absence of painting (Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3 Video still, Andrew Liversidge, ‘ALL THAT FALL (red, yellow, blue)’, 2013, HD video, 16:9, 34.02 min, Image courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney, Australia

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The idea of Expanded Painting As an evolving medium, painting appears as a professional discipline complicated by an internal and historical tendency to self-challenge. Every day painting continues to shed something of itself in search of new ways of being itself. This appears as a primary drive in many contemporary artists to create hybrid works that sit somewhere between painting and not painting, painting and its other, painting and every other discipline. The inter-media status of expanded painting does not destroy painting as it has been known. Rather it relativizes it as one of many positions in a play of between the known identities of painting and its various alterities. As Yves Alain Bois says, ‘its not a question of the materiality of the medium so much as the concept of the medium’.4 The medium provides a ground set of rules for production, like a basic musical score or rules for a game that can be played in so many ways. Consequently, as Rosalind Krauss says in response to Bois, all things considered, a painter can ‘use almost anything as a support for colour’.5 Paradoxically, expanded painting is where the arrival and departure of painting take place. It involves stepping back into painting so as to be able to take a giant leap beyond it. Painting remains as a gravitational force that dictates where the edges of expanded possibilities might advance. As both the presence and absence of painting, it is a peculiar ‘ensemble unified in advance in a process of differentiation’6 What is shown in one involves something hidden in the other, what can be understood in expanded painting involves a background phenomenon to painting that cannot be fully articulated. Expanded painting is a kind of painting that stands for the absence of painting, not simply cancelling painting out into nothing, but as a hole in the shape of painting. This hole is not merely negative or passive but has a compelling force. Like a black hole it has a backdraft that draws in light, matter, thought, the world all around. In the end painting is still there, a refrain recurring in objects, installations, performances, video, texts and events that are otherwise anything but painting. The historical shift into expanded painting represents a move away from the orthopaedic structures of painting, in particular its formal craft-based aspects. These aspects propped up painting as a powerful historical medium while

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at the same time constricting its freedom to advance and mutate. When the discipline of painting was finally challenged by mechanical and digital forces over the last 150 years, it was at first as cumbersome as a blunderbuss or a steam engine. However, now that the callipers and prosthetics have been thrown off, painting literally flies into the air. It navigates by line of flight towards true north, the outermost boundary of its own expanded field.

In a new light Expanded painting as the way to get beyond painting, involves a shift from lensbased subjective imagery (even if the imagery is abstract), towards a scenography of objects and a monstration of colour. While painting privileged the visual domain solely, it tended to support rigid structural definitions based on the craft of looking and the registration of sight. When the non-visual was incorporated, somewhere between cubism, abstraction and the readymade, then the scene was set for conceptual redefinitions that lead to what we loosely call ‘installation art’. Ever since then painting has been understood in the spatial context of installation and conversely installation art is seen in its (negative) relationality to painting. As our understanding of scopic regimes have evolved, from the eye, to camera obscura, to photography, to a scenography of cinema and digital devices, so the painters eye has shifted from a view on the world, towards a total immersion in its relational fields. Consequently, painterly issues concerning the eye, representation, emotion, space, time and colour have overflowed into existential concerns for a world accessed by more than one sense organ. Painting in an expanded state, is of the world, not a means of capturing the world. It is inherently intra-worldly because ‘after all, the world is all around me, not in front of me’.7 The enveloping connectedness of a world is the opposite of an isolated subjectivity stereotypically associated with the expressive painter. The world precedes alienated subjectivity as well as preceding sight and the division of the senses. The world is not ‘a spectacle viewed from afar by a disembodied mind’8 but an ecstatic environment predisposed to immersive unboundedness. From this way of being in the world, painting is always already in an expanded state, no longer a dialectical synthesis of seer and seen, but chiasmatically interwoven across various kinds of ecstatic presence and nihilating absence.

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The development of expanded painting parallels the refiguring of vision and looking that takes place in the writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This involves a critique of modern understandings of visual perception, in particular the belief that sight is the dominant sense capable of gaining a total understanding of the world. Instead sight is deconstructed as an historical and organic lens that must finally be democratized with the other senses. At its most extreme physiological understanding ‘the visible appears (only) when we engage in an exercise of intensive staring’.9 When we are not staring at something, our experience of things in the world is closer to an intermingling interpenetration of conceptual sense and bodily sensation. Heidegger indicated this kind of nonvisual immersion in the world through the term, zuhandenheit, readiness-tohand. It occurs when we use something practically, in everyday use, without having to visualize it, because we are wholly lost in the trance of action. In this mode of practical engagement looking and visualization withdraw in favour of doing and making. In the heat of action another kind of looking latent to our optical environment reveals itself. It involves an immersion within a total sensual field activated by light and its appearances. It is an engagement with things that shine, and an apprehension that in doing so we are looked at by the world in a way that makes any kind of seeing possible. It is an entry into the world of light, a way we come into presence with other beings, a mode of familiarity where we catch sight of what shows itself in any appearance. The historical move away from the merely visual in painting ‘is a move away from a world of appearances for the sake of an ever inaccessible horizon’.10 On that horizon, where the rainbow disappears out of sight, is the experience of colour itself. Colour was once considered the essence of painting, the point of difference between it and the other arts. In expanded painting colour signals the presence of painting even when paint is otherwise absent. Anything that carries colour, from string to video pixels, functions as a substitute for paint and a tool for extending painting into new hybrids and convergences. Because of these hybrid forms, colour is made thoughtful, even problematic, when at times it is impossible to decide whether colour is simply the quality of a momentary experience or a quantitative thing, almost sculptural, in its presence. If colour is taken as the essence of painting, then it is immediately complicated by the huge explanatory gap left by science in its attempt to understand and explain the workings of colour and its relation to light in general. Add to this

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the universal presence of colour brought on by mass-produced plastics and information screens where colour seems to shine out from everywhere and yet have no particular relation to anywhere. Colour looks out from so many technological devices and natural wonders so as to provoke a new seeing.

Ontological aesthetics Painting in its current expanded form invites a new kind of understanding attuned to an uncanny tension between the presence of painting as a coloured event and the absence of painting as a craft-based discipline. If the absence of painting comes about because it has begun mimicking and absorbing other art forms then there is a potentially fatal consequence. Painting runs the risk of being absorbed itself, of being cancelled out and overridden by those other converging disciplines. Consequently, it might be asked, why bother mentioning painting, or any of the other historical disciplines such as sculpture, video, performance and so on? This is particularly so when any contemporary artist from any kind of training can use any medium at hand to make their art? In such a situation there are only two terms, art and artist, and any formal investigation seems to get in the way of talking about the issues driving the work. For example in Paul Verwoert’s writing on the Welsh sculptor Cerith Wyn Evans, sculpture is not mentioned. Instead installation, literature and film are posed at the beginning of the article with the majority of the discussion focussing on issues such as space, power, thinking, hermeneutics, signs and language. How could any notion of expanded or convergent media, expanded sculpture in this case, add anything to this lucid evocation of an artist’s ideas and practice? At one level a formal consideration of the medium would get in the way of a free-flowing discussion of the issues at hand. It would be similar to a piano player thinking too hard about where fingers are going, or focussing on the technology of the piano while deep in the process of a performance. However, at certain points in the history of any art form, such as concert piano or fine art painting, the method of performance and the nature of the technology become important. Those moments are paradigm shifts when a piano might be physically altered as happened with John Cage, or painting might drop any need for a brush or liquid medium. Verwoert’s article

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acknowledges such a moment in his use of the word ‘stoa’. He defines stoa, as exemplified in Wyn Evan’s work, as ‘a free space which lies between all media, genres and disciplines, remaining open to all of them without submitting to the dominion of their rules and regulations’.11 While Verwoert never actually makes a value judgement in the article, the fact that he has written such a considered piece is taken as an affirmation of Wyn Evans’ work. There are no personal or subjective statements that the work is good or bad, simply a lingering with ideas and contexts evoked by the free space of various media. The informality of the work, the free play across media and disciplines, is in and of itself taken to be positive, liberating and communicative. Consequently, the question of aesthetic judgement, whether the work is working, is intimately tied to the formal informality of the work. In this way expanded media, multi-modal informality and post aesthetics come together as the same idea. Post aesthetics is an expanded form of aesthetics that inspects the tradition of aesthetics, asks what is essential about it and proceeds to its limits, bypassing a psychology of art in favour of a phenomenal ontology of art. It is a post aesthetics because it is beyond, it comes after aesthetics, scaffolding over the top of it so as to glimpse new kinds of work and engagement. It is not an antiaesthetics, it is not an aesthetic of ugliness, or a rejection of sensuous pleasure in favour of monastic asceticism. It is an aesthetic discourse appropriate to work that generates an ontological question about how something is in ‘being’. While aesthetics cleaves between subjective pleasure and objective presence, post aesthetics eclipses subjectivity in favour of integrated beings in a field of finite connectedness. Because of primary terminology, post aesthetics might be tarred as a movement away from aesthetics rather than the creation of something altogether different and differing. It would seem to be irrevocably entangled with aesthetics, much like postmodernism and posthumanism are knotted with modernism and humanism. If post aesthetics is to move towards something new, rather than away from something old, it might more appropriately be called ontological aesthetics. Ontology and aesthetics come together around the issue of sense and sensuousness. Aesthetics is a science of the senses, and ontology is a thinking of how we sense being, how being in the world is a way of making sense. In ontological aesthetics, I, eye, beauty and pleasure are

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no longer dominant terms since the psychology of pleasure is replaced by a phenomenology of being. However, this does not mean that an individual human being as creator or interpreter of works of art cannot exist in a lucid or ecstatic relationship to those works. The body remains in all its living sensuous potential, but the subjective aestheticization of experience is shifted in favour of the poetic revelation of material being. Expanded painting undoes the framework by which we have understood painting so that another painting can take place. Ontological aesthetics reconfigures the framework of aesthetics so that another way of making and encountering art can be identified and articulated. Aesthetics as a modern philosophy of art has diminished the potentiality of art by reducing it to a private sensory experience. Before the modern era, before the word aesthetics came into usage, art defined a cultural domain by setting limits between people, communities, nature and Gods. To get beyond aesthetics in the twenty-first century involves moving beyond the limits of subjectivity in both artist and viewer. Consequently, art and any judgement on art, can not be based on the quality of communication between individuals. For the ancients, in original aesthetics, the good, the beautiful and the true in art were one and the same. Today, with ontological aesthetics, there is the parallel possibility of an ‘ontological good’ that could establish and reveal what is true and good in our own time. As such, an ontological aesthetic could also suggest an ethical relationship between individual humans, the global community, the technological complex and the capacities of the earth. In this type of scenario a work of art could be said to be ontologically good if it makes a fully transparent disclosure, that is, that there is revealing and concealing. So, despite the tendency for presence to overcome absence, absence has been allowed to be, revealing the secret partiality of presence.

Politics of being If an ontological aesthetics indicates what is good at the boundary between people, communities, technology and the earth, could it also be the foundation of a politics of being? If the metaphysics of technology results in the injurious neglect of things, the disappearance of things, literally the disappearance of

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the earth in the age of global warming, could art be the practice that maintains things as things, in their uncanny presence, in their pres-absentiality? More specifically to this conversation, could expanded painting be the technical support for a politics of being. In the politics of being, politics is linked to the polis, the place where culture emerges into a world, and where things unfold according to the sense of possibility that a world grants. Everyday politics, the government of nation states also rests on the politics of being but is fundamentally different from it. Without engaging in the politics of being no fundamental change of everyday politics can take place. The instrumental ordering of the world we have come to expect from politics is not seriously questioned by any political party, rather new ways are found to develop temporary techno-fixes for issues such as sustainability and global equality. Art despite its apparent political ineffectivity is intimately involved in an alternative politics of being when it poses another way of dealing with beings, people, objects, things. Jacques Rancière supports this idea when he argues that the distribution of the sensible, including the visual in art, is a political act. As he puts it, ‘the system of boundaries that define what is visible or perceivable within any particular culture’ can be challenged by ‘new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjects’.12 For Rancière it is this partitioning of the sensible, between the visual and its other, between making, seeing and saying that constitutes the political structure at the heart of any aesthetic regime. Thus, once again and in a different way, aesthetics is much more than a way of thinking about art, it is a distribution of sensibility and power across individual roles ranging from thinking and deciding to manufacturing and production. This schema at the heart of artistic production, ‘unites the act of manufacturing with the act of bringing to light... Art anticipates work because it carries out its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self presentation’.13 Thus the politics of an ontological aesthetic is not to be equated with merely political art; it cannot function as a slogan or meaningful spectacle. As Rancière puts it, suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists

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signification. In fact, this ideal effect is always the object of a negotiation between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.14

Thus regardless of content, even if there is no content, art functions as a constant interrogation of the figures that form the foundations of our totality and ground.15 Yet how have we come to know political art? Usually in the form of something far more direct, such as a device to make current political statements, as a way of saying ‘we are the 99%’ in the occupy movement, or as an investigation of the political condition of art in institutional critique. Yet there exists another type of politics for art that gets beyond readable messages and the limits of direct political signification. This is a politics of being where art as an ontological intervention challenges dominant modes of rational economics, science and communication models propagated by everyday discourse and media mythologies. The contrast is between artists who deal with politics in a literal sense, at the level of current affairs, and those who work on politics beyond the newsworthy, a politics of foundational ontological concern.16 The former kind of work might be called political art, and the latter pol-ethetics, indicating a neologistic linkage of politics, philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. Pol-ethetic artists work under the presumption that no change in politics can occur without a challenge to the underlying structure of thinking, making and being.

Ontological goods In this kind of work something is as yet undetermined, provoking foundational questions at the level of human being, as well as the nature of art. Once the discourse that sustains art has been confronted, once the economics that justifies a certain kind of presence for art has been revealed, once the limits of a political subjectivity have been questioned, then an ontology of art is also a politics of being. This kind of ontological interrogation lays bare the presumptions and prejudices of everyday existence, such as working in an office, cooking a meal, shopping for essentials or visiting an art gallery. The space exposed between

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writing and making enables a new practice, a different artistic subjectivity and an artwork that reaches beyond its object status into the realm of social event. Consequently, the entire field of social relations becomes the object, rather than the mere material presence of the artwork. While no individual can change the ground that makes everyday life happen, a certain type of action can make that ground contingent and relative. Everyday ‘politics’ seems ubiquitous and absolute because we are always in it, by virtue of taxes, laws, wars, transport, education, elections, budgets and politicians. Similarly the politics of our contemporary understanding of art is driven by unspoken beliefs about creativity, commercial galleries, auction houses, artist-run initiatives, museums, biennales, magazines, art history and theory. The ‘political’ is the concrete sociality or ‘ground’, upon which ‘politics’ rest, and is the starting point for the radical difference between politics and the political. The ground of human affairs has been created in the past by god, logic, science, modernism, subjectivity, human will, reality and all have fallen. Each has been part of the search for an ultimate ground followed by an innocent realization that it does not exist, or at least that it is constructed, that it is temporal and historical. The continual play between a ground and its absence reminds us that groundlessness is not a nihilistic collapse; it actually offers a sense of something more, something yet to come. Freedom is experienced there because absolutes, totalities and essences have become permeable, questionable and temporal. All of this appears in the movement that begins with the making of an artwork, and is completed by an event that questions the conditions of art’s possibility. The sense of difference that arises there, between paint and painting, making and thinking, politics and the political, is revealed in the dyad of art and ontological aesthetics. Finally, the question that began as an enquiry into the practice of craftbased art production has by degrees of making and thinking generated an ontological aesthetics of expanded painting. To move beyond the form of easel painting is to twist free of a mode of production and a type of engagement based on the dynamics of subject and object relations. The historical look of painting had predetermined a productive comportment to things and images, so that once painting changed from a substance defined by visual properties,

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it immediately freed itself from the grammar of technical manufacture. In this moment, expanded painting emerged as a more original horizon for painting and a more authentic mode of revealing how things are in being. ‘Art (in this case, painting) becomes the condition for things appearing as things.’17 The artwork sets to work the fullness of presence, shaping a world pregnant with proliferating possibility and loaded with uncanny absences. In the midst of this, expanded painting continues to operate as a place marker for painting, now spread out across space and time, searching for its essence, finding only an earthly finitude, not quite a picture, but still a painting of being.

Notes Chapter 1 1

Ian Burn, ‘Interview with Hazel de Berg’, April 1970, Unpublished Interview,

2

A term tentatively used from 1960s, appearing more recently in Jan Verwoert,

Selected Notes, 1965–1970, compiled by Ian Burn, 1991, Ian Burn Estate. ‘Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It’s a Good Idea’, Afterall, Vol. 12, Autumn/Winter 2005, https://www.afterall.org/journal/ issue.12/why.are.conceptual.artists.painting.again.because (accessed 7 June 2010). 3

Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation, translated by E. Ray Lankester, London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1883.

4

Amos Henry Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure, New York, Ronald Press, 1950.

5

Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, London, Athlone Press, 2000.

6

Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1991.

7

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, David Krell (Ed), London, Routledge, 2002,

8

See Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and

143–212. Postmodernity, Berkley, University of California Press, 1994. 9

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, Vol. 8, Spring 1979, 30–44, reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985, 276–290.

10 An object is defined in relation to a subject, a thing is defined in terms of its ontological presence. Heidegger finds three levels of ‘thing’, namely, mere thing, tool and work of art, see ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Basic Writings, David Krell (Ed), London, Routledge, 2002, 146–165. 11 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, Art News, October 1958, 57. Rosalind Krauss also affirms the idea of a non-discipline-specific art practice in her discussion of postmodernism in her essay ‘Sculpture in the expanded field:’ ‘within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium … but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of

174

Notes cultural terms for which any medium … might be used’ Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, 288.

12 See Michele Cone’s ‘Unpainting’, a review of de Duve’s ‘Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade’, Arts Magazine, February 1992, 31. She goes on to say that in Duchamp’s work ‘painting had become as generic as language’. 13 Krysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004. 14 In Chapter 3, ‘Post Aesthetics’, I will discuss Heidegger’s philosophy of art as a partial restitution of original aesthetics. 15 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York, Basic Books, 2002, xiii. 16 For a discussion of practice as research see Douglas, A. K. Scopa and C. Gray, ‘Research through practice: Positioning the practitioner as researcher’, Working Papers in Art and Design, No. 1, 2000, http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/research/ papers/wpades/vol1/douglas2.html, ISSN 1466-4917 (accessed 13 May 2008). 17 Donald Schön describes this as a ‘reflective conversation with the situation’ with each move in the studio producing a situation where ‘materials are continually talking back’. Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot, Arena, 1995, 103 and 101, respectively. 18 Virgil C. Aldrich, ‘Form in the Visual Arts’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1971, 215–226.

Chapter 2 1

The end of painting and the end of art are particular discourses that suggest the end as a terminus, but never result in an actual ending. There is always a new discourse of the end.

2

Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour After Hegel, Stanford, Stanford

3

Henri Breuil, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art, Montignac, Dordogne, Centre

University Press, 2006, 7. d’Etudes et Documentation Prehistoriques, 1952. 4

D. J. Lewis-Williams and J. Clottes, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance Magic and the Painted Caves, New York, Abrams, 1998.

5

‘Painting in the Grotto’, The Muses, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996, 75.

6

Primitive peoples made other works that could be carried with them but these tell us more about the evolution of sculpture or the crafts than they do the cultural domain of painting.

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7

Mosaics, stained glass and illuminated manuscripts are important parallel forms

8

‘Neo conceptual’ is an epithet used in the 1980s and 1990s to describe a

involving coloured materials in various physical permutations and sites. generation of artists influenced by 1960s conceptual art who took the spirit of institutional and political critique and applied it to work that took the form of objects and commodities. 9

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999.

10 Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, Eaglewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1976. 11 The clumsy term ‘cubist construction’ has stuck since the work can’t properly be called sculpture or painting, despite the fact that it feels like a sculpture and looks quite a lot like cubist painting. No suitable alternate term has been devised until now. 12 Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, 294. 13 Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–I922, London, Thames and Hudson, 1971, 174. 14 Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 178. 15 Ibid., 228. 16 Hal Foster, quoted in Ross King, Emancipating Space, New York, Guilford Press, 1996, 70. 17 Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 166. 18 Lissitizky quoted by Alan C. Birnholz, ‘Notes on the Chronology of El Lissitzky’s Proun Compositions’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 3, September 1973, 437. 19 Lissitzky, ibid. 20 Alan C. Birnholz, ibid., 437. 21 Lissitzky, quoted in Andre Bernhardt (ZKM), Sally Jane Norman, ‘Enterable Paintings/Immersive Visual Aesthetics’, eRENA-D1.3, http://www.nada.kth.se/ erena/pdf/D1_3.pdf, 15 (accessed 7 February 2008). 22 Esther Levinger, ‘Art and Mathematics in the Thought of El Lissitzky: His Relationship to Suprematism and Constructivism’, Leonardo, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1989, 234. 23 Ibid., 235. 24 A question that is answered by later generations with the tentative term ‘installation art’, discussed in more detail below. 25 Thiery de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

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26 Ibid., 142. 27 While much has been made of the provocations caused by Duchamp’s readymades in particular the rejection of Fountain (1917) from the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1917 in New York, it is interesting to note that an image of an early version of Picasso’s Guitar published in the avant-garde journal Les Soirees de Paris in 1913 was so unsettling for some readers that they cancelled their subscription. See Ann Umland, ‘The Process of Imagining a Guitar’, Picasso Guitars 1912–1914, Anne Umland (Ed), New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2011, 18, 19. 28 John Rachman, ‘Foreword’, in de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, vii. 29 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 136. 30 Rajchman, ‘Foreword’, viii. 31 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 151. 32 Rajchman, ‘Foreword’, xi. 33 Ibid, xiii. 34 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 154. 35 Ibid., 108. 36 Ibid., 155. 37 Ibid., 157. 38 Rajchman, ‘Foreword’, xv. 39 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 162, 163. 40 Ibid. 190. 41 de Duve discusses the shift from craft to idea in ‘The Readymade and the Tube of Paint’, in Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996, 149. 42 Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History, North Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1991; Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975, Halifax, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005; Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996. 43 Ian Burn, Interview with Fisher (1970), ‘Unpublished Interview’ in Selected Notes (1965–70), compiled by Ian Burn, 1991, Ian Burn Estate. 44 Ian Burn was a regular contributor and co-editor of the conceptual art journal Art-Language. 45 Ibid., 2. 46 Ian Burn, ‘Conceptual Art as Art’, Art and Australia, Vol. 2, No. 8, September 1970, 167–170. 47 Ibid., 170. 48 Ibid., 167.

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49 Ibid. 50 ‘Minimal Covenants, Conceptual Demonolotary’, Unpublished Paper, given at George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, 1988. 51 Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2001, 10. 52 As documented by Ann Stephen in her On Looking at Looking, Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 2006, 181–204. 53 First published in 1964, then reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975, Halifax, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975, 181–189. 54 Philip Leider, ‘Perfect Unlikeness’, Artforum, February 2000, 99. 55 Judd, quoted in Leider, ibid. 99. 56 Judd quoted in Leider, ibid. 57 Ibid., 100. 58 Frances Colpitt, ‘The Shape of Painting in the 1960s’, Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Constructed Painting, Spring, 1991, 52–56. 59 Jill Johnson quoted in Frances Colpitt, ibid. 52. 60 As Judd himself pointed out in his Complete Writings, 158 and 161. 61 Colpitt, ‘The Shape of Painting in the 1960s’, 52. 62 Richard Serra, quoted in Leider, ‘Perfect Unlikeness’, 100. 63 Judd quoted in Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955–1968, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002. 64 Smithson quoted in Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, 50. 65 As discussed in Ron Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 26. 66 Smithson quoted by Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, 27. 67 Quoted in Ann Morris Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003, 179. 68 Ibid. 69 On 20 July 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash, while surveying his work Amarillo Ramp in Texas. 70 Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, 30. 71 Ibid., 92. 72 Ibid., 96–98. 73 Robert Smithson website, http://www.robertsmithson.com (accessed 7 February 2008).

178

Notes

74 Jeff Kelley, ‘Introduction’, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Allan Kaprow (Ed), Berkely, University of California Press, 2003, xix–xx. 75 Ibid., xix. 76 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, Art News, October 1958, 56, 57. 77 Clement Greenberg quoted in Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, Paris, Dis Voir, 1995, 24. 78 Murals would have been bland to Greenberg, even kitsch, because of their use of popular symbols and narrative structures. 79 de Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 29, 30. 80 Greenberg quoted in de Duve, ibid., 31. 81 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, Vol. 8, Spring 1979, 30–44. 82 Ibid., reprinted in ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths’, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985, 277. 83 Ibid., 279, 280. 84 Ibid., 282. 85 Ibid., 280. 86 Ibid., 288. 87 Ibid., 288, 289. 88 Ibid., 289. 89 Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, Washington, Bay Press, 1983. 90 In the following Chapter 3, I will argue for a reconsideration of physicality through the Heideggerean concept of ‘earth’. 91 Steven Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 10. 92 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (Eds), New York, Harper & Row, 1982. 93 ‘Painting’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org (accessed 7 June 2005). 94 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998, 169. 95 Stephen Melville ‘Counting/As/Painting’ As Painting: Division and Displacement, Wexner Center, OH, Exhibition Publication, May–August 2001, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001, 1–26. 96 Ibid., 10. 97 Ibid., 19.

Notes 98

Ibid., 21.

99

Ibid., 24.

179

100 Quoted by Melville, ‘Counting/As/Painting’, 22. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 22. 103 Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999, 178. 104 Donald Kuspit, ‘The Appropriation of Marginal Art in the 1980s’, American Art, Vol. 5, Nos. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring, 1991, 134. 105 Two of the major exponents of Neo-Expressionism, Anselm Kiefer and Michel Basquiat, also produced object-based works as extensions of their painting practice. 106 See ‘Postmodern Painting and Pastiche: The Plate Pieces of Julian Schnabel’ Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, Vincent B. Leitch (Ed), Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996. 107 Kuspit, ‘The Appropriation of Marginal Art in the 1980s’, 135. 108 See Eleanor Hartney’s early discussion of their work in these terms in ‘Simulationism’, Artnews, January 1987, 130–137. 109 For a discussion of the history of installation and its roots see Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Installation Art – Essence and Existence’, Australian Perspecta, Sydney, Australia, Victoria Lynn, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1991, 16–21. 110 Allan Kaprow, quoted in ‘Allan Kaprow’, Ubu, http://www.ubu.com/historical/ kaprow/index.html (accessed 15 February 2008). 111 Reiss, From Margin to Center, xi. 112 Ibid., xii. 113 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, London, Tate, 2005, 6–13. 114 For a discussion of the impossibility of definitions of installation art, see Reiss, From Margin to Center, 6–22. 115 For the classic analysis and expose of the politics and aesthetics of the white cube, see Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 1986. 116 Quoted in Reiss, From Margin to Center, 180. 117 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, 8. 118 Claire Bishop, ‘But is it installation art?’ Tate Magazine Online, No. 3, http:// www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/butisitinstallationart.htm (accessed 15 February 2008). A position she restates not so stridently in her subsequent book, Installation Art: A Critical History, 2005, 6. 119 Nicholas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry, Installation Art in the New Millenium, London, Thames and Hudson, 2003, 14.

180

Notes

120 Bishop, ‘But is it installation art?’. 121 Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, 11. 122 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London, Thames and Hudson, 1999, 32. 123 Ibid., 27. 124 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 283. 125 For some interesting attempts at diagrams in this area see Gustavo Fares, ‘Painting in the Expanded Field’, Janus Head, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2004, 477–487; Paco Barragan, ‘The Advent of Expanded Painting’, The Art Fair Age, Milan, Charta, 2008. 126 As she said in a recent interview, ‘when you do these (Klein Group) fields, the fundamental binary has to be right or the whole thing is gibberish’, in Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (Eds), Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters Between Art and Architecture, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2014, 14. 127 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, 32. 128 Ibid., 31, 32. 129 Ibid., 33. 130 Ibid., 39. 131 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 53. 132 Ibid. 133 Krauss equates postmodern and post-medium in the introduction to her Perpetual Inventory, London, MIT Press, 2010, xii. 134 a term she develops in ‘Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition’, October, No. 116, Spring 2006, 55. 135 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 56. 136 ‘Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition’, 56. 137 Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, London, MIT Press, 2010, xiv. 138 Ibid., xiii. 139 Ibid. 140 Rosalind Krauss in, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloch, ‘Roundtable/The Predicament of Contemporary Art’, Art Since 1900, New York, Thames and Hudson, 2005, 674. 141 Yve-alain Bois, ibid, 674. 142 Ibid., 675. 143 Curt Barnes, ‘Travels along the Dialectic’, Art Journal, Vol. 1, Spring 1991, 26. 144 Barry Schwabsky, ‘Painting in the Interrogative Mode’, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, Valerie Breuvart (Ed), London, Phaidon, 2002, 7. 145 Peter Dormer, The Art of the Maker, London, Thames and Hudson, 1994, 25. 146 Ibid., 92.

Notes

181

147 Stephen Melville, ‘The Temptation of New Perspectives’, October, No. 52, Spring 1990, 5. 148 The majority of artists discussed so far were also major contributors to the debate around their work, consider Malevich, Lissitzky, Burn, Judd, and Smithson. They begin to define a category of artists that might be described as ‘artists who write’. For more on this see my ‘Walk the Talk: The Politics of Artists Who Write’, Art Monthly Australia, No. 260, June 2013, 33–37; ‘Walk the Talk: The Politics of Artists Who Write, Part 2’, Art Monthly Australia, No. 261, July 2013, 44–46. 149 See his two classical texts, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, 1974–1975, 39–47; ‘The Apparatus: Meta-Psychological Approaches’ Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen (Ed), New York, Columbia University Press, 1990. 150 Stephen Heath, ‘Notes on Suture’, Questions of Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1981. 151 In the 1970s Leo Steinberg argued that this shift towards the physical end of a pictorial/physical dialectic resulted in a new kind of synthetic picture plane. At that time he discussed Robert Rauschenberg’s work as taking place on a ‘flat bed picture plane’, by which he means a picture plane placed at 90 degrees to the usual vertical picture plane of traditional painting. Consequently, the flat bed picture plane does not simulate the illusion of a world seen through a window but, ‘makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts- any receptor surface on which objects are scattered’, Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, 84. 152 ‘Escalation and regression often go together’, as Brian Lawson says in discussing methods of problem-solving in How Designers Think, Oxford, Architectural Press, 2005, 55. 153 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 284. 154 de Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, 59. 155 Katy Siegel ‘As Painting’, Artforum, May 2001, 51. 156 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 84.

Chapter 3 1

Confronting the essential question of painting turned many of the artists into philosophers as was seen with the predominance of artist writers in the 1960s like Ian Burn, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson.

182 2

Notes By J. Clauberg, a German pupil of Descartes, according to Heidegger, see Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999, 147. This claim is backed up by Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, Toronto, Pontifical, 1952, 112.

3

Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 1.

4

Ibid., 3.

5

George Steiner, Heidegger, Fontana, London, 1992, xix–xx.

6

Anne-Marie Willis, ‘Ontological Design’, Design Papers, No. 2, 2006, http://www .desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_index.html (accessed 10 November 2008).

7

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, 42.

8

Jean Luc Nancy quoted by Marta Heikkila, ‘At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-presence and Its Aesthetic Relevance’, PhD Dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2007, 35.

9

Heidegger quoted by Heikkila, ibid., 44.

10 Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger, London, Continuum, 2005, 129. 11 As the term ‘art theory’ has also recently fallen into doubt, the struggle to find the proper name and form for thinking about art goes on. 12 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 1, San Francisco, Harper, 1991, 142. 13 In Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, New York, Harper, 1977, 115–154. 14 Heidegger’s use of ‘modern’ is not equatable with ‘modernity’ beginning with the industrial age or ‘modernism’ an art historical category. Rather it is a broad name for an age that would roughly begin around the Fifteenth Century. 15 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology, New York, Harper, 1977, 116. 16 Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 185. 17 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, 131. 18 Ibid., 147. 19 Ibid., 135. 20 to be discussed further in the following pages. 21 Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 144. 22 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ The Question Concerning Technology, New York, Harper, 1977, 35. 23 In Heidegger, Basic Writings, 143–203. 24 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2006, 192. 25 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995, 274–309.

Notes

183

26 Mark Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art, London, Palgrave, 2007. 27 Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 192. 28 For a detailed study of Heidegger’s shift in terminology and thinking from ‘nature’ to ‘earth’, see Bruce Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and The Metaphysics of Nature, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1995. 29 Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, 53. 30 Heidegger continually returns to the Greeks to unearth an originary thinking that reminds us of what we have forgotten, and at the same time what the Greeks were unable to say. 31 Harr, Song of the Earth, 48. 32 Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, Albany, State University Press of New York, 1993, 83. 33 Harr, Song of the Earth, 48. 34 Ibid., 57. 35 Haar capitalizes earth, which I reproduce in my quotations, but in my own text I will refer to both earth and world in lower case so as to avoid what I perceive as a risk of objectification. 36 Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 179. 37 Haar, Song of the Earth, 61–63. 38 Ibid., 60. 39 Ibid., 32. 40 Ibid. 41 Thomas Sheehan, ‘Dasein’, A Companion to Heidegger, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Eds), Oxford, Blackwell, 2005, 200. 42 Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 247. 43 Ibid., 248. 44 Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Nihilism, Art Technology and Politics’, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles B. Guignon (Ed), Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 294. 45 ‘Earth shatters every attempt to penetrate it’, as Heidegger puts it in ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Basic Writings, 175. 46 Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art, 147. 47 As Sinclair points out via Panofsky, ibid. 48 Brutalism for example. 49 Direct Carving for example.

184

Notes

50 Reminiscent of the ‘self flourishing’ discussed previously in relation to phusis. 51 Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2004, xiii. 52 Ibid., 187. 53 Ibid., 185. 54 To be discussed below in terms of Heidegger’s reworking of Aristotle’s four causes. 55 A variation on Thomas Sheehan’s term, ‘pres-ab-sence’ in Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Phenomenology of Religion, 1920–1921’, A Companion to Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, Joseph J. Kockelmans (Ed), Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1986, 40–62. 56 This is Miguel de Beistegui’s term, coined in his The New Heidegger, 140. 57 Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, 174. 58 Ibid. 59 Haar, Song of the Earth, 58. 60 Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, 197. 61 Ibid., The Question Concerning Technology, 341. 62 Daniel E. Palmer, ‘Heidegger and the Ontological Significance of the Work of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 38, 1998, 398. 63 Ibid., 399. 64 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, London, Temple Smith, 1983. 65 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Gloucester, Peter Smith Publishers, 1983. 66 Ibid., 10. 67 Ibid., 18. 68 The psychological term is incubation, indicating a situation where a solution arrives out of the blue, see T. Bo Christensen, Creative Cognition: Analogy and Incubation, Denmark, University of Aarhus, 2005. 69 Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image, London, I.B.Tauris, 2004, 6. 70 Oxford Dictionary Online, http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/ make?view=uk (accessed 5 May 2005). 71 Palmer, ‘Heidegger and the Ontological Significance of the Work of Art’, 397. 72 James Elkins, What Painting Is, New York, Routledge, 1999, 121. 73 Heidegger, Being and Time, 253. 74 Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago, Open Court, 2002, 18.

Notes

185

75 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, 163, 164. 76 Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, 174. 77 Andrew Benjamin’s term is ‘insistence’, when the materiality of paint causes an interruption in our smooth experience of painting, see his ‘Matters Insistence: Tony Scherman’s Banquo’s Funeral’, Art and Design, Vol. 8, No. 5/6, 1996, 46–53. 78 Elkins, What Painting Is, the subtitle to this book is, How to think about oil painting using the language of alchemy. 79 ‘Stroke conceals stroke’ as Norman Bryson puts it, quoted in Bolt, Art Beyond Representation, 117. 80 de Beistegui, New Heidegger, 139. 81 Elkins, What Painting Is, 166. 82 Bolt, Art Beyond Representation. 83 Bolt quotes Deleuze, ibid., 45. 84 Ibid., 86. 85 Bacon quoted by Bolt, ibid., 84. 86 Ibid., 48. 87 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 311–341. 88 Aristotle Physics, Book 2, Chapter 3. 89 I am condensing Heidegger’s version of the four causes in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 313, 314. 90 Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art, 156. 91 Bolt, Art Beyond Representation, 73. 92 See Bolt’s discussion of non-human agency in Art Beyond Representation, 75, and also Roland Barthes. ‘The Death of the Author’ Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath (Ed), Fontana, Collins, Glasgow, 1977, 142–148; Bruno Latour’s ‘Mixing Humans with Non-Humans: Sociology of a Door-Closer’, Social Problems, Vol. 35, 1988, 298–310 where non human ‘actants’ have been given agency and responsibility for action. 93 See ‘Art vs Design: Saving Power vs Enframing, or A Thing of the Past vs World-Making’ (with Cameron Tonkinwise), Studio Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013, Octivium Press, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, ISSN 1839–6429, 6–17. 94 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 319. 95 Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 339. 96 Dreyfus, ‘Nihilism, Art Technology and Politics’, 297. 97 ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, 158.

186

Notes

98

Ibid., 159.

99

Ibid., 167, 168.

100 Haar, Song of the Earth, 59. 101 John Protevi, ‘The Stilling of the Aufhebung: Streit in the “Origin of the Work of Art” ’, Heidegger Studies, Vol. 6, 1990, 67–83. 102 As suggested by Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 146. 103 Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 330–331. 104 George Ritzer, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2007. 105 In a ‘post-medium condition’, as Rosalind Krauss would put it. 106 painting is hinged to everything else as Stephen Melville suggests in ‘Counting/ As/Painting’ in As Painting: Division and Displacement, Wexner Center for the Arts, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001. 107 Martin Heidegger in Contributions to Philosophy, as quoted by Josef Fruchtul, ‘The Struggle of the Self Against Itself: Adorno and Heidegger on Modernity’ Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions, Krzysztof Ziarek and Iain Macdonald (Eds), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008, 153. 108 Paul Kristeller, ‘Introduction’, Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin (Eds), Malden, Blackwell, 2008, 4. 109 George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction, Indianapolis, Pegasus, 1971, 4. 110 Susan L. Feagin and Patrick Maynard (Eds), Aesthetics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, 4. 111 Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction, 10. 112 Ibid., 28. 113 Jerome Stolnitz, ‘The Aeshtetic Attitude’ Aesthetics: The Big Questions, Carolyn Korsmeyer (Ed), Malden, Blackwell, 1998, 83. 114 Babette Babich also uses the term post aesthetics to describe Heidegger’s refusal of traditional aesthetics, see her ‘From Nietzsche’s Art to Heidegger’s World: The Post-Aesthetic Perspective’, Man and World 22, 1989. 115 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 1, 1–211. 116 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998. 117 Martin Heidegger, Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996. 118 Ibid., 164. 119 Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art, 160. 120 Veronique Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, London, Humanities Press, 1992, xviii. 121 Heidegger, Being and Time, 50.

Notes

187

122 Ibid., 51. 123 Ibid., 55. 124 Ibid., 58. 125 Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 160. 126 Joseph Kokelmans, Heidegger on Art and Artworks, Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985, 95. 127 Ibid., 96. 128 J. Taminiaux, ‘The Origin of “The Origin of the Work of Art”’, Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment, Michael Gendre (Ed), Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993, 153, 154. 129 Ibid., 167. 130 Ibid. 131 Kokelmans, Heidegger on Art and Artworks, 97. 132 Ibid., 98. 133 Heidegger, Being and Time, 51. 134 Ibid. 135 Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 4. 136 Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, ‘German-English Glossary’, Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger (Ed), New Haven, Yale Nota Bene, 2000, 237. 137 WJ Richardson, ‘Heidegger’s Fall’ in A Passion for the Impossible, Mark Dooley (Ed), Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003, 77. 138 Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 24. 139 Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, 1942, as cited by Alessandro Stavru, International Plato Society, Proceedings Papers, 2010, 200, footnote 1. 140 Alessandro Stavru, International Plato Society, Proceedings Papers, 2010, 201. 141 F. T. van Peperstraten, ‘The Sublime and the Limits of Metaphysics’, in D. Loose (Ed), The Sublime and Its Teleology: Kant, German Idealism and Phenomenology, Leiden, Brill, 2011, 187. 142 Stavru, Proceedings Papers, 202. 143 Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 13, 14. 144 Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 10. 145 Martin Heidegger quoted by Foti, ibid., 11. 146 Martin Heidegger in Foti, ibid., 6. 147 Stavru, Proceedings Papers, 202. 148 Ibid. 149 Heidegger, Holderlin’s Hymn the Ister, 88.

188

Notes

150 Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 12. 151 Originally coined pejoratively by John Caputo, in Demythologizing Heidegger, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. 152 Heidegger, Being and Time, 61. 153 Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 7. 154 Ibid., 6. 155 Ibid. 156 de Beistegui, New Heidegger, 128. 157 So any incorporation of original aesthetics into post aesthetics suggests that art might still be the site where a relationship between Dasein, nature and whatever has come to replace the gods, perhaps technology, might be established. 158 The usefulness of art is often made in terms of broadening the mind, instilling inquisitiveness, sensory appreciation, therapeutic effects and so on. 159 Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 126. 160 Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 341. 161 Ibid., 340. 162 Heidegger’s term is Gestell, often left untranslated or translated as en-framing. Sam Weber rejects the use of ‘enframing’ in favour of a more accurate and reader friendly term, ‘set up’, see his ‘Upsetting the Set Up’ in Mass Mediauras, Sydney, Power, 2006, 55–75. 163 de Beistegui, New Heidegger, 127. 164 Samuel Weber’s preferred translation of Gestell. 165 While design might be the discipline that tames technology, particularly through sustainable practices, it is also possibly the sugar coating on the harsh pill of technological revealing. 166 de Beistegui, New Heidegger, 140. 167 Bolt, Art Beyond Representation. 168 Richard Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995. 169 Shapiro, Earthwards. 170 Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999. 171 Rogbert Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991. 172 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996, 75. 173 Robert Bernasconi, ‘Heidegger’s Displacement of the Concept of Art’, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, M. Kelly (Ed), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, 378.

Notes

189

Chapter 4 1

Quoted in Mari Carmen Ramirez, Helio Oiticica: The Body of Color, Houston,

2

Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine first defined by Samuel

Museum of Fine Arts, 2007, 15. Hahnemann in the eighteenth century. Through serial dilution, with shaking between each dilution, the toxic effects of a substance is removed, while the essential healing qualities are retained in the dilutant, usually water or alcohol. This reverses the laws of modern science, since in Homeopathy the more the substance is diluted the stronger it becomes. See Samuel Hahnemann, Organon of Medicine, London, Orion, 2003. 3

David Batchelor, Chromophobia, London, Reaktion Books, 2000.

4

Ibid., 21.

5

Ibid., 22.

6

Ibid., 29.

7

Umberto Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, Colour, David Batchelor (Ed), London, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2008, 182.

8

Ibid., 85, 86.

9

Ibid., 86.

10 Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, 178. 11 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009, 71. 12 Batchelor, Chromophobia, 104, 105. 13 ‘Cabbages, Raspberries and Video’s thin Brightness: Painting in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’, Art and Design, Vol. 11, No. 5/6, May–June 1996, 14. 14 For a discussion of media facades see M. Hank Haeusler, Chromatophoric Architecture, Berlin, Jovis Verlag, 2010. 15 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, 169. 16 Stephen Melville, ‘Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction’, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, Peter Brunette and David Wills (Eds), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 33–48. 17 Michel Haar, ‘Painting, Perception, Affectivity’, Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, Veronique Foti (Ed), NJ, Humanities Press, 1996, 185. 18 Ibid., 188. 19 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Basic Writings, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, 171. 20 Ibid., 172.

190

Notes

21 Kenneth Maly, ‘Imaging, Hinting, Showing’ Kunst und Technik: Gedächtnisschrift zum 100 Geburtstag von Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Walter Biemel and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Eds), Frankfurt, Klosterman, 1989, 201. 22 A. J. Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010, 12. 23 Maly, ‘Imaging, Hinting, Showing’, 197. 24 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, 263–328. 25 Ibid., 286. 26 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992, 103. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 104. 29 Antiphon 26, in Walter Kauffman (Ed), Philosophic Classics, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1961, 78. 30 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 107. 31 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1975, 6–18. 32 Heidegger, Parmenides, 104. 33 Ibid., 107. 34 Ibid., 108. 35 Ibid., 111. 36 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996. 37 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 9, footnote 26. 38 Heidegger, Parmenides, 115. 39 See the discussion of self emerging presence and phusis in the previous chapter. 40 Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Artworks, 96. 41 Heidegger, Being and Time, 51. 42 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 109. 43 Ibid., 111. 44 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008, 79. 45 Ibid., 85. 46 Ibid., 87. 47 Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2011, 54.

Notes

191

48 Ibid., 56. 49 Ibid., 57. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 61, 62. 52 Martin Heidegger quoted in Malabou, The Heidegger Change, 61, 62. 53 The Bible, Genesis 1:3, ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light’. 1:4 – ‘And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness’. 54 Heidegger, The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, 198. 55 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, London, Penguin, 1988, 39. 56 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 115. 57 Ibid., 121. 58 Fred Sandback, ‘Remarks on My Sculpture 1966–1986’, Fred Sandback 1966– 1986, Munich, Exhibition Catalogue, Galerie Fred Jahn, 1986, 13. 59 Heidegger, Parmenides, 147. 60 Ibid., 148. 61 Ibid., 149. 62 Ibid., 146. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 162. 66 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, 131. 67 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 147. 68 Ibid., 150. 69 Ibid., 179. 70 Sophocles quoted by Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 185. 71 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Visible and the Invisible’ Basic Writings, Thomas Baldwin (Ed), London, Routledge, 2004, 256. 72 This is a reworking of the chapter title, ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’, which is the last chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Visible and the Invisible’. 73 Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty, London, New York, Routledge, 1998. 74 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (trans.), Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, 138. 75 Werner Heisenberg, ‘The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics (1927)’, Quantum Theory and Measurement, J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek (Eds), Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1983, 62–84.

192

Notes

76

Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, Vol. 7, London, Penguin Freud Library, 1991,

77

Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 8.

78

Claude Bailble, ‘Programming the Look’, Screen Education, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1979,

109.

102. 79

Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London, Penguin, 1979, 96.

80

Ibid., 106.

81

Slavoj Zizek, The Fright of Real Tears, London, BFI, 2001, 34.

82

Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 95.

83

Stephen Koch, Stargazer, New York City, Praeger, 1974, 12.

84

‘The Cinematic Apparatus as Social Institution’, Discourse 1, Autumn 1979, 34.

85

Koch, Stargazer, 77.

86

An adaptation of Sartre’s line, ‘When they were not present, they left their gaze behind and it mingled with the light’ from The Words, New York, 1964, 49.

87

Heidegger, Parmenides, 107.

88

Martin Heidegger quoted by William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1999, 21.

89

McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, 44.

90

Ibid., 46.

91

Ibid., 301.

92

Ibid., 307.

93

Ibid.

94

Ibid., 311.

95

Ibid., 320.

96

Homer quoted by McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, 332.

97

McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, 332.

98

Martin Heidegger quoted by McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, 334.

99

Michel Haar, ‘Late Merleau-Ponty’s Proximity to and Distance from Heidegger’, Merleau-Ponty, Vol. 1, Ted Toadvine (Ed), London, Routledge, 2006, 353.

100 Ibid., 354. 101 Ibid., 355. 102 Ibid., 356. 103 Merleau-Ponty quoted by Haar, ‘Late Merleau-Ponty’s Proximity to and Distance from Heidegger’, 356. 104 Simon Schaffer, The Light Fantastic, BBC Television Documentary, 2004, Episode 1.

Notes

193

105 Maurice Merleau-Ponty quoted by Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Phenomnelogy in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Work’, in Merleau-Ponty, Vol. 1, Ted Toadvine (Ed), Routledge, London, 2006, 289. 106 Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Work’, in MerleauPonty, Vol. 1, Ted Toadvine (Ed), London, Routledge, 2006, 289. 107 McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, 326. 108 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 8. 109 Martin Heidegger quoted by Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 11. 110 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, London, MIT Press, 2008, 37 and 249. 111 Julia Kristeva, ‘The Triple Register of Colour’, Colour, David Batchelor (Ed), London, Whitechapel, 2008, 159. 112 Roland Barthes, ‘Colour’, in Colour, 163. 113 Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Colour, 163.

Chapter 5 1

Melville, ‘The Temptation of New Perspectives’, 5.

2

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, 141.

3

Even if paint is black motor oil, as it is in the Paul McCarthy work.

4

‘The Predicament of Contemporary Art’, in conversation with Rosalind Krauss, Art Since 1900, Thames and Hudson, 2005, 674.

5

Ibid.

6

Merleau-Ponty quoted in Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Eds), Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992, 97.

7

Maurice Merleau-Ponty quoted by Jay, Downcast Eyes, 316.

8

Jay, Downcast Eyes, 308.

9

David Levin quoted by Jay, ibid., 274.

10

Dominique Janicaud and Jean-Francois Mattei, Heidegger from Metaphysics to Thought, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995, 54.

11

Paul Verwoert, ‘Cerith Wyn Evans, Under the Sign and in the Spirit of a Stoa’,

12

Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, London, Continuum, 2006, 9.

13

Ibid., 44.

14

Ibid., 63.

Broadsheet, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012, 22.

194

Notes

15

Oliver Marchant, Postfoundational Political Thought, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 2.

16

Derrida calls it the ‘ontopolitilogical’ in his essay, ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology’ in John Sallis (Ed), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993.

17

Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000, 106.

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Index abandonment of painting 28–9, 32, 33–4, 38 Aboriginal Australia, contemporary tribal cultures 121, 122 Abstract Expressionism 108 abstract painting 21, 35, 38 action collage 46, 56 painting 44, 46 actual space in painting 36 administrative repeatability 58 aeisthesis, art 81 aesthetics 9 judgement 110, 167 matrix of objects 112 post (see post aesthetics) agency 103 The Age of the World Picture (Heidegger) 81 aletheia 111 alienation, Marx’s concept of 120 ‘all overness’ 48 ‘ALL THAT FALL’ (red, yellow, blue) (Liversidge) 161, 162 alluvial flow 44 Alpha Architecton (Malevich) 22 analogues, medium 65 An Apple Shrine (Kaprow) 48 Ancient Angle (Selig) 158–9 Anschein 115 anthropomorphic mirror 148 anti-aesthetics 167 anti-painting, constructed 18, 29 aporia, linguistic 155 appearance, maximum of 117 applied Heidegger 127–9 applied post aesthetics 122–6 applied practice, art 10 apprehension 128 pre-modern 147 appropriation 51

architektons, painting 22 Aristotle 78, 102 concept of four causes 102 Armanious, Hany 57 Armleder, John 72 art/arts 77 aeisthesis 81 in ancient Greece 121, 122 applied practice 10 concealment 104–5 conceptual (see conceptual art) contemporary 121 creative industries of 10 critical theory of 80 cultural field of 3 cultural theory of 80 ecosophical discourse for 4 everyday experience 81 history 90, 171 institutional critique 170 land 31, 39 and language 31, 159–60 literature 112 material form of 87 new beginning 120 philosophy 112 postmodern understanding of 5 sensation of beauty in 80 sensory pleasure 109 visual culture 80 Art Beyond Representation (Bolt) 101 Artforum (journal) 122 artisan studio, tool usage 96 artists 158 run initiatives 171 Artists Think No. 2 (Burn) 34–5 Art Monthly (journal) 122 art theory 77–8, 80, 81, 157, 171 epistemology 76 to ontology 77 tools of 76

214 artwork 10 causality 91 fabricated 34 manifests 101 negative space 39 artworld 12 asceticism 167 Asphalt Rundown (Smithson) 43, 44 assemblages, strifely 91–3 Athena (goddess) 151 Atmospheres (Chicago) 162 attunement, responsibility for making 103 authorship 51 autopoiesis, audacious display of 155 avant-garde, painting 16–17 awareness process, paint tool 98 Bacon, Francis 102 Batchelor, David 69, 132, 134 Baudry, Jean-Louis 72–3 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 80 becoming, being of 99–101 Being and Time (Heidegger) 84–5 being-in-the-world, 85, 119 Benglis, Lynda 45 Bible 145 Bicycle Wheel (Duchamp) 27 biennales 171 Bijl, Guillaume 57 Bishop, Clare 59 blindness 154 blue colour 134 body memory, material 94 Bois, Yves Alain 65, 163 Bolt, Barbara 101 Breuning, Olaf 161 bridges, post aesthetics 122 brush, elements of painting 77 budgets 171 Burke 110 Burn, Ian 33, 35, 159–60 Cage, John 34, 166 calculating, system for 82 camera effect 73 camera, obscura 164 canvas 159–60 elements of painting 77 shaped 37–8

Index Cartesian perspectivalism 147 causa efficiens 102–3 causa finalis 102–3 causa formalis 102–3 causality, modern instrumental thinking 102 causa materialis 102–3 cave painting 14–16, 143 chiasmatically 164 chiasmatic interwining 148 Chicago, Judy 162 chromatic value of colour 134 chromophilia, colour 133 chromophobic, colour 133 Cincy (Grosse) 125 cinema 149, 164 studies 72 cinemascope 136–7 classical aesthetics 109 club culture 70 Coca Cola 150 colour/colouring 34, 38, 98, 131–2 abstraction 161 beetle eggs 136 beetle shells 136 of butterfly wings 136 cell 135 chart 135 diffraction 136 domestic entertainment of 135–6 as ephemeral quality 161 field painting 135 flares 161 flowers 136 global location of 135–6 in industrial materials 38 interference 136 iridescent 136 and line 11 materials 136 mimesis 155 monstration of 164 mother of pearl shell 136 ochre 136 ontological 139 optical presence 139 peacock feathers 136 petrochemical industry 136 phenomenal edge of perception 133

Index pigment 136 plasma screen 136 radiance 139 refraction 136 representation of 135 self-showing 139 shellfish 136 shimmer 139 shine/shining 139 shining of the earth 139 spectacle 138 stammer 155 structural 136 support of 163 synthetic pigments 136 technological surface 136 things 108 wheel 135 colourist 135 technical skills of 70 Colpit, Francis 38 commercial galleries 171 commonality of appearance 140 communication 170 community 168 Complex Corner Relief (Tatlin) 21 concealing 168 concealment, art 104–5 conceptual art 16, 30 different status of 135 in 1960s 2 painting 8 post-studio practice 16 conceptual painting 2 connectivity, environment of 109 consumer culture 150 consumption, practices of 120 contemporary, aesthetics 109 contemporary art 125 discourse for 122 practice 157 professional domain of 1 content 84 regardless of 170 continental philosophy 72 convergences 165 convergent medium devices 109 painting 6

215

craft abandonment of 29 applications 158 based aspects 163–4 formal technologies of 2 knowledge 67–8 of painterly production 28 propositional knowledge 68 skills 7, 67–8 craftiness 69–72 Cranston, Meg 57 creative industries of art 10 creativity 171 critical theory 72, 73 cubism 17, 26, 135, 164 cubist construction 17–19 actual volumes 18 real space 18–19 cultural studies 72 cultural terms, postmodernism 50 current affairs, level of 170 cybernetics 129 Dasein 79, 85, 88, 119 data, reception of 146 death of painting 5–6, 13–14 debate specific, installation 59 de Beistegui, Miguel 80 deconstruction, architecture 72, 126 deconstruction lens 165 de Duve, Thierry 26, 28, 76 dehiscence of seeds 153–4 de Maria, Walter 59 Descartes 93, 141 Diagram of Expanded Sculpture (Krauss) 60 Diagram of Family Resemblances of Expanded Painting (Titmarsh) 63 dialectical synthesis of seer/seen 164 Dialogues (Plato) 140 differentiality specificity 62–3 differentiation, process of 163 digital devices 164 digital media 109 age of 107 discipline of painting 99–100 disclosedness 144 disclosure/disclosing 85, 168 distribution 169

216

Index

Dormer, Peter 67 doxa 142 drawing, nature of 42, 43 Drawing of Concrete Pour (Smithson) 43, 44 Duchamp, Marcel 7 development of non-visual skills 25–31 readymade 25–31 Dunn, Richard 70, 71 earth, 3–5, 42, 44, 83, 84, 89–93, 96–9, 103–6, 111, 113, 114, 120–2, 124, 127, 128, 131, 135, 137, 139, 145, 153, 155 four senses of, 86–7 spiral-shaped, 39 thinking, 85–6 easel painting 14–16 architecture 70 informal process 45 pictorial object 26 practice of 22 quadrilateral forms 31 spray gun 70 ecology 4–5 economy of physical resistance 95 ecosophical discourse for art 4 ecstatic environment 164 education 171 ego 150 eidos 142 elections 171 electronic communication 34 elemental source of pigmentation 159 emission theory 142 emotion 164 judgements 111 Empedocles 141, 142 enargeis 152 en plein air painting 69 entertainment culture 34 equality 169 essence of technology 107 ethical relationship 168 ethics 109 etymology 111, 141 European avant-garde 107 Evans, Cerith Wyn 166, 167 event designer 70

evidentia 152 existential thinking of Martin Heidegger 8 Expanded Cinema (Youngblood) 73 expanded field 5–6 expanded painting 6–7, 13, 107, 157 awareness 159 description of 131 idea of 163–4 information culture 108 multi-disciplinary 75 producing 107–8 structuralist ‘definition’ of 61 expansion, genesis of 49–52 experimental traditions of painting 56 extromission theory 142 eye 164 physics of light entering 142 physiology of 140 presence 115 representation of 140 sense 140 visuality 140 Eyeline (journal) 122 faktura, philosophy of 19 false window of painting 39 family resemblances 61–6 fashion, interface of 69 Fauvism 135 feminist film theory 141 field 171 fieldworks, painting 5–6 film 53 filmic condition 64 film theory 72, 141 fine art 109, 166 flatness 52 floor/floorness 159 Forg, Gunther 72 formal informality 167 formal painting 14 form of painting 14 frame elements of painting 77 material elements of 131 Frank, Dale 161 freedom 171 Freud, Sigmund 149, 150 Friedman, Tom 72

Index Fried, Michael 53 Frieze (journal) 122 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger) 85 Gablik, Suzi 4 galleries 39, 44 architectural fittings of 125–7 floor/floorness 124–6 nonsites 39, 44 game/gaming 61–2, 163 platforms 135–6 gawking, form of 141 genealogy 111 genesis of expansion 49–52 geological flow 44 Gestell 119 Gillick, Liam 69, 72 glaciers 44 glaring, form of 141 global capital 34 globalization 106 global warming 120, 169 Glue Pour (Smithson) 43, 44 Gogh, Van 96 good/goodness 110, 117, 144, 168 Gordon, Douglas 72 Gorgias 140 graffiti, coloured abstract 70 grammar of technical manufacture 172 Greeks/Greece 106, 140 temple 105 Greenberg, Clement 46–50 Grosse, Katherina 70, 123–5, 131, 159 groundlessness 171 ground, phenomenological dyad of 83, 84 Growing Rock Candy Mountain Grasses in Canned Sand (Stockholder) 58 Guattari, Felix 4 Guernica 158 Guitar (Picasso) 18–19 Haar, Michel 85, 138 Haeckel, Ernst 4 handlability of matter 102 handling materials, network of processes 101 hand wrought 64

217

Heath, Stephen 73 Heidegger, Martin 4, 9, 79, 102, 129, 165 analyses of moods 95 analysis of world 85 boredom 95 concealment 85, 145 dialectics between being and beings 89 ‘earth’ as used by 86–7 on kinds of being 85 on non-presence 84 ontological aesthetics 157 optical environment 140 paint, making 96–8 post aesthetics 123 on revelation 84–5 sense of nature 85–6 use of terms 85–6 withdrawal, tendency to 85 Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Malpas) 84–5 Heisenberg, Werner 148 Hesse, Eva 45 Hirst, Damien 57 historicity 51 Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (Heidegger) 112 Hollywood, voyeuristic 151 Holzer, Jenny 57 Homer 151 horizon, phenomenological dyad of 84 Hume 110 Hymn, Holderlin’s 112 hypertextuality 109 ideology of consumption 73 illusionism, painting 36, 39 image 89 material elements of 131 immaterial, pigment 136 immersive unboundedness 164 impressionism of colour 135 inauthentic ‘appear’ 141 incommensurability of colour 134 industrial materials 38, 44 information screens 166 infrastructure of integrated tools 126 inhabitation, sense of 88 insight 153

218 installation art 7–8, 56–7, 109, 164 critical practice 57 site specificity 56, 57 staging 59 institutional critique form of 56 spaces 126 intellectual judgements 111 international media 34 intrinsic radiance 117, 118 Jackson Pollock painting (Namuth) 47 Jay, Martin 140 Judd, Donald 35–8 jugs, post aesthetics 122 Kabakov, Ilya 57 Kant aesthetics 80, 110 Kaprow, Allan 7, 46, 48 environments 56–7 interactive participation 56 thresholds 46 Kelley, Mike 57 Kelly, Ellsworth 37 Kentridge, William 64 Kilimnik, Karen 72 Klein Group 60 Klein, Yves 33 ‘know-how,’ presence of 94 knowledge 109, 111 Koch, Stephen 150 Kokelmans, Joseph 113 Koons, Jeff 55 Kounellis, Jannis 57 Krauss, Rosalind 5–6, 60, 163 cultural operations 50 expanded field 50–2 expanded sculpture 60–2 ontological absence 50 permutational field 60 pictorial object 52 post medium condition 60 structural oppositions 51 Kuspit, Donald 55 Lacan, Jacques 73, 149–50 Laib, Wolfgang 57 Lambie, Jim 69–70, 123–4, 126, 127, 131, 159

Index land art 31, 39 language of painting 17, 29, 34, 166 Lascaux 104, 158 LCD screen 135–6 Leccia, Ange 57 lens-based metaphors 147 Levine, Sherrie 57 light/lighting 138, 141, 144–6, 160, 163, 164–6 accessibility 139–40 awareness 139 boxes 132 idea of 142–4 painting 101–2 self luminous of 146 linguistics 72 Lissitzky, El 24–5 Liversidge, Andrew 162 logos 78, 113 look/looking 115, 140, 165 Lukac 120 luminescence 137 luminosity 115 magazines 171 making, actions of 46 Malevich, Kazimir, Volumetric Suprematism 17, 21–4 Malpas, Jeff 84–5 Maly, Kenneth 139 The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (Kabakov) 57 mapping, picturing system 40 Marx concept of capitalist alienation 120 mass-produced plastics 166 materiality of painting 89–90 materiality of processes 158 McCarthy, Paul 160–1 means-to-ends thinking 103 media facades 135–6 Medieval age 106 medium definition of 51 materiality of 163 material relationship of 90 specificity 65 specificity of painting 69 specificity, postmodernism 50 Melville, Stephen 53–4

Index Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 147, 165 metaphysics 78 of technology 168 Metz, Christian 150 Minimalism 31–2 mirror 150, 159–60 constructions 32–3 for picturable situation 40 relations to reality 160 virtual images 41 visual field 41 mobile phone 109 modern aesthetics 109 Modern age 106 modernism 171 Mono Lake Nonsite (Smithson) 40–1 Monroe, Marilyn 150 monument, sculpture 50 threshold 50 morality 109 Morris, Robert 162 multimedia 57 multi-modal informality 167 multi-modal, painting 11, 12 Mulvey, Laura 72, 73, 149 feminist discourse 73 mural painting 48 Museum of Contemporary Art 161 museums 38, 39, 94–5, 171 architectural fittings of 125 remote sites 39 music 69 musical score 163 name-ability 155 Namuth, Hans 47 Nancy, Jean-Luc 80 negative condition, space of 50 negative space, art work 39 neo-conceptualism 54–61 neo-expressionism 54, 67 New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced, Tripledecker (Koons) 55 Newman, Barnet 136 newsworthy 170 Nietzsche, Friedrich 145, 160 99% in occupy movement 170 Noland, Cady 57, 72

219

Noland, Kenneth 37 non-aesthetic understanding of beauty 117 non-metaphysical understanding of beauty 117 non-representational nature 105 nonsites, gallery 39, 44 non-traditional forms of painting 5, 16 non-visual immersion 165 non-visual practices of painting 2 non-visual radiance, primal sense of 151 non-visual skills, development of 25–31 No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other (Burn) 33 objects for visual consumption 141 observer effect in traditional physics 149 ocularity, nature of visuality 147 Odyssey (Homer) 151 oil painting 132 ontological aesthetics 166–8 ontological goods 170–2 ontology 139, 157 of making 94–6 questioning 78–81 Op Art 135 open/opening/openness 82, 92, 146 optic nerve 154 orange colour 134 original aesthetics 168 originality 51 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger) 84, 138 orthodoxy 142 orthopaedic structures of painting 163–4 painted object in representational space 19–20 painterliness-without-paint 108 painters 148 Painting Relief (Tatlin) 19–21 paint/painting 5–6, 13, 131, 157 abandonment of 28–9, 32 absence of 83, 162, 163 abstraction 35, 135, 164 acrylic colour 132 actual space 36 alterities 163 appearance of 160

220 paint/painting (continued) architektons 22 artefact 102, 158 of being 98, 172 body of labour 95 calculus 54 cave 143 chaotically 97 community 101 conceptual 2, 8 conceptual behaviour 94 conceptual redefinitions 164 conditions of possibility 45 conflictual union 106 contemporary 136 convergent medium 6 death of 5–6, 158 description of 99 desiccated 160 disappearance of 161 discipline of 99–100, 131–2, 163–4 discord 99 drawing, nature of 42, 43 ecology of 2–5 entropy 99 environmental 48, 109 equipment for 99 escalation 74 essence of 77 essentialized 51 expanded (see expanded painting) expanded sculpture 49 experimental traditions of 56 expressionism 136–7 expressionist mark 44 false window of 39 fieldworks 5–6 finitude 54 flatness 51 flows 97 fluidity 160 formal aspects of 57 formlessness 108 ground to receive 159 happenings 46, 66 homeopathic dose 132 hybrid 163, 165 illusionism 39 impacts 97

Index incalculable of 83, 129 indeterminate 75 informality 108 innovations in 24 intentional activity 94 interacts 97 inter-dimensional shift from 23 inter-media status of 163 jut 99 liquid material, colour 98 materiality 139 matter 163 medium 158 mimesis 77 missing addressee 75 mixes 97 morphological argument 33–4 multi-modal 11, 12, 60 mural 48 nature of 158 non-traditional forms of 5 ontological worker 97 ordinary understandings of 62 perception 34 performance 53, 108, 159 photograph 108 pictorial conventions 18, 21 picturable situation 39 post aesthetics 8–9 pouring 42, 44 presence of 1–12, 132, 158, 163 present-at-hand 98 proper name of 2, 7 qualitative phenomenon 132 quantitative structure 132 quantity 132 raw matter 99 in to real space 24 regression 74 relationality to 164 relational networks 109 reliefs 19–21 representation 77, 105, 164 retinal 29 self differing 52 shadow 162 of shoes 105 skeins of 46, 48 smoke 158

Index paint/painting (continued) space 158 spatial domain 107 spatial interplay 24 specific objects 35–7 splashing 44 spraying 126 steel 158 stretcher 95 string 108, 158 style 107 surface 77, 107 synthetic colour 126 telos 100 and thingliness 6 time 158 timeless essence of 75 tools 96, 98–9 totality of 98 transcendent 25 turbulently 97 verticality of 159 video screen 108 vinyl tape 69 virtual images 32 visual field 73 ‘yearning for the wall’ 49 palette 94–5 paradigm 166 Parmenides (Heidegger) 112 performance, art 46 perspectivalism 147 phainestai 114 phainesthetics 113–21 phainomenonon 113–14 phantasmata 116 phenomenology 113, 168 in teaching 72 phenomenon of colour 18 philosophy of art 5, 80, 111, 170 photography 161–2 photoreceptors 153 photosynthesis 153 phuein 115, 142 phusis 85–7, 114, 116, 142 physics 142 Picasso 26–7 cubist constructions 17–19 illusory depth, surface on 18

221

innovations in painting 24 literal surface 18 movement from cubist painting 23–4 synthetic cubism 7, 26 picture/picturing 81–3, 150 plane 77, 160 pigments 52, 158 pistis 145 pixels 135–6 Planetary age 106 plasticity, creativity of matter 90 plastic utensils, painting 132 Plato 110, 140 Platonism 135 Plotinus 134 poetry 100 poiesis 100 Polanyi, Michael 94 pol-ethetics 170 polis 169 political art 170 politics of being 168–70 Polk City (Stella) 37 Pollock effect 45–9 Pollock, Jackson 44–9, 136, 159 Pop Art 108 possibility, paradoxical sense of 97 post aesthetic discourse 131 post aesthetics 109–13, 167 applied 122–7 enigma 121–2 painting 8–9 posthumanism 109 Post Industrial Information Culture 108 post medium condition 63 postmodernism 50 cultural terms 50 medium 50–2 medium specificity 50 plurality of 50 postmodern understanding of art 5 post-structuralist modes of analysis 61 post-studio practice, conceptual art 16 post-war moment of industrial production 150 praxical skills of expanded painter 69 pres-absentiality 89–91, 169 primordial, way of making 95 Prina, Stephen 72

222

Index

production genres of 103–7 mode of 101 physical process of 101 rules for 163 visibility of 94–5 Prounenraum (Lissitzky) 24–5 Proun Room (Lissitzky) 24–5 psychic apparatus 73 psychoanalysis 72, 112, 142 psychology 142 public buildings, architectural fittings of 125 purple colour 133 quadrilateral forms, easel painting 31 quality of colour 132 quantum physics 149 The Question concerning Technology (Heidegger) 102 quietistic works, museums 56 rainbow colour 134 Rancière, Jacques 169 rational economic terms 120 Rauschenberg, Robert 66 readiness-to-hand 165 readymade 25–31, 164 colour 135 Duchamp’s 25–31 as extension of painting practice 7 reality, defined 111 realm of incalculable 154 rectangleness, shape of painting 36–7 red colour 134 ‘reflections in action’ 94 Rehberger, Tobias 72 reification, Lukac’s notion of 120 Reiss, Julie 56 relationality in ecological thinking 3 remote sites, museums 39 Renaissance Europe 121 representational space, painted object in 19–20 representation of world 82 Republic (Plato) 110 research-making 10–12 form of 10 resistance 97 retina 154

retinal painting 29 revelation of material being 168 revelation, potential of 145 Rivera, Diego 48 Rolfe, Jeremy Gilbert 136 Sami, Huseyin 64 Sandback, Fred 74, 145, 158 Sartre, writings of 140 scenography 164 Schein 115 Schnabel, Julian 54 Schon, Donald 94 Schwabsky, Barry 67 science 109 disciplines of 81 scopic field 150 scopophilia 149 screen printing 108 sculpture 109 cultural operations 51 domain of 11 figurative 50 homeless 50 mingling illicitly with 13 modernism 50 nomadic 50 pedestal 50 placeless 50 Renaissance 90 self referential 50 serial structures 50 vertical 50 Second Mirror Displacement (Smithson) 42 self differing 63, 66 Selig, Sandra 132, 158–9 semblance 115 semiotics 72 sensation, human behaviour 80 sense, human behaviour 80 sensible impressions 153 seriality 51 Serra, Richard 38 set up, essence of technology 119 sexuality 149 sexualized male 149 sexual object for visual consumption 141 shadow 83–4, 154 Shadowzone (Dunn) 70, 71

Index Shaftesbury 110 shaped canvas 37–8 shaping 95 Shaulust 149 Sheehan, Thomas 88 shine/shining 115, 141, 165 showing self-showing 139 Siegel, Katy 75 signs 166 silver chalices, post aesthetics 122 Sinclair, Mark 85 Siqueiros, David 48 sitelessness, sculpture 50 site, museums 39 site specificity of installation art 56 16mm films 151 skill, explicit attention on 94 Smith, Roberta 58 Smithson, Robert 38–45, 160 Smoke Bomb series (2008–2013) 161 space, extension of 146 Spaghetti Ball #3 (Sami) 64 spatio temporal practice 22 staging, installation art 59 star, images of 150 staring 165 Steam Cloud (Morris) 162 Steinbach, Haim 55, 56 Stella, Frank 37 Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso) 26–7 Stingel, Rudolf 72 Stockholder, Jessica 58 strife 91–3 studio discipline 157 production 157 space of 95 subjective individualism 111 subject/subjectivity 79, 93, 141, 171 suprasensory realm of ideas 143 Suprematist Composition (Malevich) 22–3 surface material elements of 131 painting 15, 52 texture 48 sustainability 169 suture, cinema 73 The Symposium (Plato) 110 synthetic cubism 26

223

tacit knowledge 94 taste, sense of 110 Tatlin, Vladimir 19–21 taxes 171 technical support, media 64–6 Telemachus 151 telephony, colour 135–6 thea 141 theon 145 thingliness, painting and 6 thinking, new beginning in 129 thinking, painting 101–2 three dimensionality of sculpture 11 time 83 extension of 146 totality of objects 106 of painting 98 total painting 52, 77 total thereness 54 traditional aesthetics 127–8 transcendence 144 transcendental judgements 111 transcendent painting 25, 52 transition, painting 50, 52 transport 171 tribal cultures 121 ‘truth to materials,’ direct relationship to 90 Ulysses 152 uncollectible, installation art 59 uncommodifiable, installation art 59 undecidability as medium 59 unhidden, process of being 112, 114 unhomeliness, uncanny things in 120 universal judgements 111 unorthodox density 48 unsustainability, locus and generators of 120 Untitled (Judd) 35–8 urban space 126 Verwoert, Paul 166–7 video 53 electronic mirror 160 pixcel of 135–6 screens 132 technological surface 160 temporal 160

224

Index

vinyl tape in geometric patterns 123 virtual images 32 mirrors 41 paintings 32, 36 The Visible and The Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) 147 vision moment of 151–4 refiguring of 165 visual field, mirrors 41 visuality 11, 115 visual perception 142 modern understandings of 165 visual phenomenon 2 volcanoes 44 wall/wallness 126, 127, 159 Warhol, Andy 38, 108, 150 wars 171 Whipping a Wall and a Window with Paint (McCarthy) 160–1 white colour 134 white cube 58 white cube gallery 56

The Will to Power as Art (Heidegger) 112 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 61–2 wonder, sense of 100 world, 11–18, 20, 34, 46, 49, 52, 65, 68–72, 76, 78, 80, 81, 84–5, 89–93, 95–7, 99, 101–7, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119–28, 135–9, 143–5, 148, 150, 151–6, 158, 160, 164 cultural, 9 notions of vision, 3 picturing, 81–3 representation of 82 thinking, 87–8 yellow colour 134 Youngblood, Gene 73 Ziarek, Krysztof 9 Zittel, Andrea 72 Žižek, Slavoj 150 Zobernig, Heimo 160 Zobop (Lambie) 123, 124 zuhandenheit 165