condotta, alberto "Diffracting Painting: 'Mattering' as Reconfiguration of its Making, Understanding and Encountering." PhD
, Birmingham City University, 2017
Keywords/Fields of Study : Aesthetics; Art Theory; Complexity Theory; Deconstruction; Painting; Theory and Practice of Visual Art; Art Encounters; Mattering; Practice-led Art Research; Sense of Self; Agential Realism; Diffraction; Phenomenology of Art; Radical Matter; Homage Art; Phenomenological Analysis of Art; Phenomenology of Painting
Abstract: This practice-led PhD thesis proposes a radical reconceptualisation of painting in dependent of its traditional means of production: painting is the singular multiplicity of material-discursive practices cohering around ‘facing’, which names the intra-active event of‘seeing all at once’. This and other original categorisations (such as ‘work-of-violence’,‘painting-as-a-body’, ‘painting-for-screens’ among others) emerge from analyses of artworks that were produced either during the PhD or personally encountered. They radically reposition the artwork as an event rather than a medium and define ways in which different paintings function in terms of ‘intra-action’ and ‘diffraction’ instead of identity and reflexion. Within the consistently sensuous, non-ontological frame of ‘mattering’, such conceptual propositions are not prescriptive or totalizing. Rather, they are intended as a means for setting the images of painting and art out of equilibrium. That is, in the discontinuous/intense state from which such categories have first emerged. In this respect,the thesis structure aims at rendering the way in which artworks and arguments have cohered in an entangled singularity as research in which sense has performatively informed questions.
By focusing on a discursive method along the methodological lines of Barad, Golding, Lyotard and Stengers, the research contributes to the current debate among continental philosophy, ‘wild sciences’ and fine art by introducing conceptualisations such as ‘slowing up’, ‘artwork-in-potency’, and ‘sense of self’ (intended as the contingent pattern that implicitly embodies normality, thus making a non-directly detectable, yet grounding difference). Further contributions encompass diffractive reconceptualisations, e.g. ‘beauty’as adequate degree of differentiation and ‘homage art’ as a methodology of art reception that is intrinsically one of art production. By moving away from the mainstream understanding of originality as creation ex nihilo and rethinking artistic agency in terms of acoincidence of care and risk-taking not belonging to the artist exclusively, the thesis offers a significant and unique contribution to methods for practice-led research and rethinks art asa non-hierarchical environment for sensuous experimentation.
Department: Birmingham School of Art
, Birmingham City University
Advisor(s): Johnny Golding
