The Afterlife of Painting

Abstract

This thesis situates my painting practice within the broad context of developments arising from the so-called ‘death of painting’ and its aftermath. My claim is that those developments involved a change in the ontology or the nature of painting, so that it is no longer medium-specific but post-conceptual in its operations. Hence the title: The Afterlife of Painting. After an Introduction on the formulation of the research topic and its relation to my art practice, chapter one examines the arguments proposed for the death of painting. The principal finding is that the putative death was largely a discursive event centred on the New York art scene in the 1980s rather than an enduring historical reality for Western culture. Nonetheless, painting did undergo significant change from the 1960s, experimenting with new paradigms of production within an art world increasingly dominated by conceptual forms of art. Chapter two divides into three parts, each dealing with an aspect of my painting practice. Chapter 2.1: Methodology explores the question of contemporary painting when practised in the name of research, or as research, within the University context. Chapter 2.2: Methods focuses on my studio methods and their elaboration through a reflective process informed by the archive of past painting. Chapter 2.3: Theory then provides an account of ideas that have influenced my understanding of the production and reception of art, particularly the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze (with Felix Guattari). Chapter three uses Peter Osborne’s six-point definition of the conditions of postconceptual art to argue for a form of post-conceptual painting. I contend that Osborne gives insufficient weight to the aesthetic in art today, and I draw upon the work of J.M. Bernstein to discuss painting’s role in reclaiming our capacity for sensuous embodied experience. On the basis of these arguments, I define my own work as participating in the ontological change to post-conceptual painting. The Conclusion provides further reflection on the idea of an afterlife of painting, including painting’s temporal dimension and the recent rapprochement between aesthetics and ethics.