Abstract:
Easel Painting’s Malaise and Painting in the Expanded Field is a perceptual, material and theoretical exploration of painting. Central to this investigation is a search for the ontology of easel painting to ascertain whether this can provide a ground from which painting can convincingly unfold into an expanding field. This search is wrought from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of art, where he conceptualizes the work of art as a struggle at the horizon between intelligibility and unintelligibility. The theoretical work and the creative practice constitute separate but interwoven embodiments of my engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy of art as a contemporary painter. The written work explores the way painting can struggle productively in the fissures between what it is and what it represents as a history, a medium and a genre. Within this is the search is for how painting works at the horizon between intelligibility and unintelligibility, and how this in turn, clears a particular pathway toward the expanding field. Here, select examples of still life painting are discussed with particular emphasis on how our habitual perception of things is troubled by the way visual paradoxes and ambiguities present in the works. In this way the theoretical explorations bring into view those habits of making and thinking about painting that stall its potential to work. The creative component is presented as a site-specific installation. Gathered in this context are the unwanted remainders from construction projects, either artistic or artisanal. Their collective title is: Little No-bodies, Going No-where, Doing No-thing. The creative practice expands and reflects on the genre of still life painting as a site where the no-body becomes embodied – where, for instance, a shadow gathers itself into a gritty and dense pigment or a wall steps out of its purpose to show us a glimmer of what it might be, in itself.