This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 1... more This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, September 2007), on 'Thinking Pictures', guest edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, author of 'The Rhetoric of Perspective' (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 'Image & Narrative' is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology, with essays reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board. The essay addresses contemporary arguments on spectatorship within the philosophy of art. It examines different ways by which internal and external spectators negotiate painting's two perspectives: the absent scene represented by the picture's marked surface and the external point of view of a beholder, standing in real space. The essay argues that if the imaginative engagement provided by an internal spectator (see Wollheim) renders the picture plane transparent, so that we might enter the virtual space of the painting, then in paintings integrated into their architectural contexts the surface plays a semantic role in both connecting and separating different realms. If the picture surface disappears for the internal spectator, then for works integrated into their architectural settings its status is heightened and negated as a threshold separating spatiotemporal realms. The essay challenges semiotic accounts of painting. While linguistic derived semiotic accounts negate a spatial engagement, in Hubert Damisch's proposal that painting is a form of thinking, structure emerges from within the loop of the perspective paradigm. The essay argues, however, that if certain paintings 'think', they do so only in the sense that thought permeates a phenomenological whole where perception and imagination merge. The essay is a development of 'A spatiality of situation', published by Art In-sight, Filmwaves magazine (no. 31, 2006), guest edited with Adam Kossoff. A related paper, 'Levels of Reality', was given at the 'Real Things: matter, materiality, representation' conference at the University of York, 5-8 July 2007.
The adoption of theatrical devices in intermedial art is often characterised in terms of the 'imm... more The adoption of theatrical devices in intermedial art is often characterised in terms of the 'immersiveness' of contemporary installations or assemblages. These are described as 'staged' precisely because they utilise overt scenographic strategies. Claire Bishop, for instance, employs the symbolically-charged term 'dream scene' to characterise a mode of installation resembling an abandoned theatre set, where psychological absorption is achieved through physical immersion. For Bishop, this characterises the 'total' installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. But might we understand 'staging' not merely as scenography (even in its expanded sense) but as a 'bracketing' of the represented world in such a way as to reveal its fictionality through self-disclosure? Drawing upon (1) Juliane Rebentisch's critique of the spatial time of theatrical installation, and (2) Wolfgang Iser's literary anthropology, I consider the 'staging' of autonomy in relation to a work exemplary of Bishop's 'dream scene': Mike Nelson's Mirror Infill (2006). I will explore how its particular form of self-disclosure counters misconceptions of such 'immersive' work as context-independent and reveal how Nelson's work makes available something absent (undisclosed) through representation conceived not as mimesis, but as a performative act.
I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s ... more I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s Trinity to claim that in certain works, integrated into their architectural settings, the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. Here the imaginative engagement is situated. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder enters that part of the fictive world depicted as being in front of the picture surface, the work thus drawing the ‘real’ space of the spectator into its domain. I claim that this distinction mirrors two distinct types of visualization: where a scene is presented as elsewhere, and where it is juxtaposed with an existing reality.
Installed 'Plenum #4', a site responsive work within Butterfield's Arts and Crafts ch... more Installed 'Plenum #4', a site responsive work within Butterfield's Arts and Crafts chapel at Keble College, University of Oxford. Also showed film 'Milky Voids
A light and sound installation by Ken Wilder (in collaboration with Aaron McPeake), within Sigurd... more A light and sound installation by Ken Wilder (in collaboration with Aaron McPeake), within Sigurd Lewerentz's Sankt Petri Church (1962-66), Klippan, Sweden Filmed by Alex Marshall, with sound by Aaron McPeake Performers: Owain Caruana-Davies, Kit Fretz, Aaron McPeake The film documents a light and sound performance within Sigurd Lewerentz's photo-Brutalist church, best known for its idiosyncratic rule that no brick be cut. Circumstantes, taken from the Latin word for encircling, was the term Sigurd Lewerentz adopted for the situation where the celebrants surround the performance of the sacraments. This Lutheran reinterpretation of the mass refers back to the very earliest Christian practices. In Wilder’s work, a collaboration with the artist Aaron McPeake, the term circumstantes is interpreted through three encircling vertical slots of light, which continually sweep the space. The alternating directions of these scanning arcs are determined by Lewerentz’s pattern of slots on...
Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing ... more Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary ...
Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman's writ... more Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman's writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies's performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works 'mean' to the role of the architectural 'score', recast not as a mere 'constraint' but as integral to the creative processes by which architecture establishes an 'artistic statement' and a distinctive 'virtual' realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was...
This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, S... more This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, September 2007), on 'Thinking Pictures', guest edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, author of 'The Rhetoric of Perspective' (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 'Image & Narrative' is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology, with essays reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board. The essay addresses contemporary arguments on spectatorship within the philosophy of art. It examines different ways by which internal and external spectators negotiate painting's two perspectives: the absent scene represented by the picture's marked surface and the external point of view of a beholder, standing in real space. The essay argues that if the imaginative engagement provided by an internal spectator (see Wollheim) renders the picture plane transparent, so that we might enter the virtual space of the painting, then in paintings integrated into their archit...
Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium ... more Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. Both supporters and critics of intermedia drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism’s aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific (and self-referential) ‘object’, and on the other new non-aesthetic ‘practices’ engaging the ‘literal spectator’ within her own space, such that the space of the gallery is drawn into the situational encounter. In her 2003/12 book Aesthetics of Installation Art Juliana Rebentisch challenges this binary characterization of autonomous/non-autonomous art. She argues that aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production, but rather is explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience. And for Rebentisch, while installation art has not led to fundamentally different conditions of reception, it has led to an ideological reject...
A commissioned chapter on the Freee Art Collective (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan). The ... more A commissioned chapter on the Freee Art Collective (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan). The book maps a contemporary resurgence of interest in the manifesto, pairing contributions by creators and analysts from the overlapping fields of performance, philosophy and politics.
This paper considers Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2004 film Cache (Hidden) within the remit... more This paper considers Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2004 film Cache (Hidden) within the remit of Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘constitutive blank’. Haneke’s film exploits the well-known film device of the ellipsis, but goes much further in that the use of the blank is structural. Not only does that which is ‘hidden’ taint human relations throughout the film, but Cache, in its radical indeterminacy, illuminates Iser’s contention that it is through blanks that negations gain their productive force, such that negativity is transformed into an enabling structure. A secondary theme will be to consider Haneke’s particular use of the blank in Cavellian terms, as a ‘staged’ withdrawal of acknowledgment. Here, Cavell’s mechanism of empathic projection is ‘staged’: a laying bare made apparent through Haneke’s foregrounding of the conditions of the films existence (its conditions of access). We are again and again forced to question the ‘staging’ of scenes in relation to a fixed camera po...
The Critical Practice research group at Chelsea undertook an eighteen month research project resu... more The Critical Practice research group at Chelsea undertook an eighteen month research project resulted in PARADE. We collaborated with Polish curator Kuba Szreder to develop a project to explore the diverse, contested and vital conceptions of being in public. In a bespoke, temporary structure designed by award-winning Polish architects Ola Wasilkowska and Michal Piasecki - assembled in public - we produced a landmark event in Chelsea College of Art and Design's Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, with a host of international contributors. The event included both a day of barcamps and a market of ideas. The structure, whcih used over 4000 milk crates, was constructed by members of Critical Practice, with PhD students and students from the MA Interior and Spatial Design Course at Chelsea.
The thesis explores the reciprocal relationship between an artwork and the space of its reception... more The thesis explores the reciprocal relationship between an artwork and the space of its reception. It proposes a distinctive position on spatiality and the virtual. The thesis is submitted in two parts: a written thesis (Part One), and a documentation of my own art practice (Part Two). The artwork that comprises the practice component is not that of a painter, and yet the sculptural installations I present allude to perspectival paintings. Utilising perspectival geometry, these site-responsive works engage the threshold between two and three-dimensional representation in a way whereby implicit and actual beholder’s viewpoints are contrasted or fused. The written thesis focuses on the reception of perspectival painting, rather than on my own artworks. Referencing analytical philosophical arguments on representational seeing, and the reception aesthetics of Wolfgang Kemp, it puts forward a distinctive position that contends that while the visual imagination does not define depiction, ...
This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 1... more This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, September 2007), on 'Thinking Pictures', guest edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, author of 'The Rhetoric of Perspective' (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 'Image & Narrative' is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology, with essays reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board. The essay addresses contemporary arguments on spectatorship within the philosophy of art. It examines different ways by which internal and external spectators negotiate painting's two perspectives: the absent scene represented by the picture's marked surface and the external point of view of a beholder, standing in real space. The essay argues that if the imaginative engagement provided by an internal spectator (see Wollheim) renders the picture plane transparent, so that we might enter the virtual space of the painting, then in paintings integrated into their architectural contexts the surface plays a semantic role in both connecting and separating different realms. If the picture surface disappears for the internal spectator, then for works integrated into their architectural settings its status is heightened and negated as a threshold separating spatiotemporal realms. The essay challenges semiotic accounts of painting. While linguistic derived semiotic accounts negate a spatial engagement, in Hubert Damisch's proposal that painting is a form of thinking, structure emerges from within the loop of the perspective paradigm. The essay argues, however, that if certain paintings 'think', they do so only in the sense that thought permeates a phenomenological whole where perception and imagination merge. The essay is a development of 'A spatiality of situation', published by Art In-sight, Filmwaves magazine (no. 31, 2006), guest edited with Adam Kossoff. A related paper, 'Levels of Reality', was given at the 'Real Things: matter, materiality, representation' conference at the University of York, 5-8 July 2007.
The adoption of theatrical devices in intermedial art is often characterised in terms of the 'imm... more The adoption of theatrical devices in intermedial art is often characterised in terms of the 'immersiveness' of contemporary installations or assemblages. These are described as 'staged' precisely because they utilise overt scenographic strategies. Claire Bishop, for instance, employs the symbolically-charged term 'dream scene' to characterise a mode of installation resembling an abandoned theatre set, where psychological absorption is achieved through physical immersion. For Bishop, this characterises the 'total' installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. But might we understand 'staging' not merely as scenography (even in its expanded sense) but as a 'bracketing' of the represented world in such a way as to reveal its fictionality through self-disclosure? Drawing upon (1) Juliane Rebentisch's critique of the spatial time of theatrical installation, and (2) Wolfgang Iser's literary anthropology, I consider the 'staging' of autonomy in relation to a work exemplary of Bishop's 'dream scene': Mike Nelson's Mirror Infill (2006). I will explore how its particular form of self-disclosure counters misconceptions of such 'immersive' work as context-independent and reveal how Nelson's work makes available something absent (undisclosed) through representation conceived not as mimesis, but as a performative act.
I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s ... more I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s Trinity to claim that in certain works, integrated into their architectural settings, the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. Here the imaginative engagement is situated. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder enters that part of the fictive world depicted as being in front of the picture surface, the work thus drawing the ‘real’ space of the spectator into its domain. I claim that this distinction mirrors two distinct types of visualization: where a scene is presented as elsewhere, and where it is juxtaposed with an existing reality.
Installed 'Plenum #4', a site responsive work within Butterfield's Arts and Crafts ch... more Installed 'Plenum #4', a site responsive work within Butterfield's Arts and Crafts chapel at Keble College, University of Oxford. Also showed film 'Milky Voids
A light and sound installation by Ken Wilder (in collaboration with Aaron McPeake), within Sigurd... more A light and sound installation by Ken Wilder (in collaboration with Aaron McPeake), within Sigurd Lewerentz's Sankt Petri Church (1962-66), Klippan, Sweden Filmed by Alex Marshall, with sound by Aaron McPeake Performers: Owain Caruana-Davies, Kit Fretz, Aaron McPeake The film documents a light and sound performance within Sigurd Lewerentz's photo-Brutalist church, best known for its idiosyncratic rule that no brick be cut. Circumstantes, taken from the Latin word for encircling, was the term Sigurd Lewerentz adopted for the situation where the celebrants surround the performance of the sacraments. This Lutheran reinterpretation of the mass refers back to the very earliest Christian practices. In Wilder’s work, a collaboration with the artist Aaron McPeake, the term circumstantes is interpreted through three encircling vertical slots of light, which continually sweep the space. The alternating directions of these scanning arcs are determined by Lewerentz’s pattern of slots on...
Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing ... more Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary ...
Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman's writ... more Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman's writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies's performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works 'mean' to the role of the architectural 'score', recast not as a mere 'constraint' but as integral to the creative processes by which architecture establishes an 'artistic statement' and a distinctive 'virtual' realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was...
This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, S... more This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, September 2007), on 'Thinking Pictures', guest edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, author of 'The Rhetoric of Perspective' (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 'Image & Narrative' is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology, with essays reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board. The essay addresses contemporary arguments on spectatorship within the philosophy of art. It examines different ways by which internal and external spectators negotiate painting's two perspectives: the absent scene represented by the picture's marked surface and the external point of view of a beholder, standing in real space. The essay argues that if the imaginative engagement provided by an internal spectator (see Wollheim) renders the picture plane transparent, so that we might enter the virtual space of the painting, then in paintings integrated into their archit...
Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium ... more Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. Both supporters and critics of intermedia drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism’s aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific (and self-referential) ‘object’, and on the other new non-aesthetic ‘practices’ engaging the ‘literal spectator’ within her own space, such that the space of the gallery is drawn into the situational encounter. In her 2003/12 book Aesthetics of Installation Art Juliana Rebentisch challenges this binary characterization of autonomous/non-autonomous art. She argues that aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production, but rather is explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience. And for Rebentisch, while installation art has not led to fundamentally different conditions of reception, it has led to an ideological reject...
A commissioned chapter on the Freee Art Collective (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan). The ... more A commissioned chapter on the Freee Art Collective (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan). The book maps a contemporary resurgence of interest in the manifesto, pairing contributions by creators and analysts from the overlapping fields of performance, philosophy and politics.
This paper considers Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2004 film Cache (Hidden) within the remit... more This paper considers Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2004 film Cache (Hidden) within the remit of Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘constitutive blank’. Haneke’s film exploits the well-known film device of the ellipsis, but goes much further in that the use of the blank is structural. Not only does that which is ‘hidden’ taint human relations throughout the film, but Cache, in its radical indeterminacy, illuminates Iser’s contention that it is through blanks that negations gain their productive force, such that negativity is transformed into an enabling structure. A secondary theme will be to consider Haneke’s particular use of the blank in Cavellian terms, as a ‘staged’ withdrawal of acknowledgment. Here, Cavell’s mechanism of empathic projection is ‘staged’: a laying bare made apparent through Haneke’s foregrounding of the conditions of the films existence (its conditions of access). We are again and again forced to question the ‘staging’ of scenes in relation to a fixed camera po...
The Critical Practice research group at Chelsea undertook an eighteen month research project resu... more The Critical Practice research group at Chelsea undertook an eighteen month research project resulted in PARADE. We collaborated with Polish curator Kuba Szreder to develop a project to explore the diverse, contested and vital conceptions of being in public. In a bespoke, temporary structure designed by award-winning Polish architects Ola Wasilkowska and Michal Piasecki - assembled in public - we produced a landmark event in Chelsea College of Art and Design's Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, with a host of international contributors. The event included both a day of barcamps and a market of ideas. The structure, whcih used over 4000 milk crates, was constructed by members of Critical Practice, with PhD students and students from the MA Interior and Spatial Design Course at Chelsea.
The thesis explores the reciprocal relationship between an artwork and the space of its reception... more The thesis explores the reciprocal relationship between an artwork and the space of its reception. It proposes a distinctive position on spatiality and the virtual. The thesis is submitted in two parts: a written thesis (Part One), and a documentation of my own art practice (Part Two). The artwork that comprises the practice component is not that of a painter, and yet the sculptural installations I present allude to perspectival paintings. Utilising perspectival geometry, these site-responsive works engage the threshold between two and three-dimensional representation in a way whereby implicit and actual beholder’s viewpoints are contrasted or fused. The written thesis focuses on the reception of perspectival painting, rather than on my own artworks. Referencing analytical philosophical arguments on representational seeing, and the reception aesthetics of Wolfgang Kemp, it puts forward a distinctive position that contends that while the visual imagination does not define depiction, ...
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