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greg minissale

The University of Auckland, Arts Faculty, Faculty Member

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Professor of Art History, University of Auckland.

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https://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/g-minissale
Address: Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

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Papers by greg minissale

Surrealism and Schizoanalysis

Surrealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2021

In producing radical forms of art, “schizoanalysis” disobeys rules, breaks with convention, and c... more In producing radical forms of art, “schizoanalysis” disobeys rules, breaks with convention, and courts unreason. We see this not only in James Joyce’s “splintering” of language, but also in the art of Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and others, where images of bodies are torn apart and reassembled into bizarre mythopoetic mélanges of heads and limbs, fusing the genitalia of both sexes. These assemblages suggest machine-like orgies of polysexual and androgynous bodies. In this chapter, I argue that this Surrealist technique of disassembling and reassembling is driven by desire and the imagination, and complements aspects of queer theory aimed at deconstructing traditional notions of desire.

Esoteric and exoteric vision in South Asian miniature painting

World Art (Routledge) Vol.11 (3), p.255-27, 2021

This essay focuses on contemporary artworks that hark back to Mughal examples. In particular, the... more This essay focuses on contemporary artworks that hark back to Mughal
examples. In particular, there is an underlying formal arrangement
shared by traditional and contemporary art, which I would like to
suggest has much in common with reading maps. In fact, many of
these artworks actually feature maps that alert us to different ways
of ‘reading’ this tradition of formalism, stimulating different levels of
description.

A Short History of Painting Haptic Vision

The Dialogics of Contemporary Art, 2022

This essay explores the political and aesthetic aspects of haptic sensibility in painting

The Logical and Phenomenological in Martin Creed’s Chairs

Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Martin Creed , 2022

The artist Martin Creed’s work appeals to two apparently contrary tendencies: analytical logic, w... more The artist Martin Creed’s work appeals to two apparently contrary tendencies: analytical logic, which encourages a detached examination of objects, and phenomenal qualities that break down this detachment when the chairs are viewed as comfortable or homely. These two tendencies can be more precisely described by appealing to Martin Heidegger’s well-known series of distinctions between ‘presence-at-hand’ and ‘readiness-to-hand’.

The Psychology of Contemporary Art

The Microphysics of Desire

Rhythm in Art Now in Paperback

Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism, 2021

This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic ... more This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic practice, such as oils, charcoal, brushes, canvas, earth, and sand. Artists often work with intuitive, tactile sensations and rhythms that connect them to these materials. Rhythm connects the brain and body to the world, and the world of abstract art. The book features new readings of artworks by Matisse, Pollock, Dubuffet, Tápies, Benglis, Len Lye, Star Gossage, Shannon Novak, Simon Ingram, Lee Mingwei, L. N. Tallur and many others. Such art challenges centuries of philosophical and aesthetic order that has elevated the substance of mind over the substance of matter. This is a multidisciplinary study of different metastable patterns and rhythms: in art, the body, and the brain. This focus on the propagation of rhythm across domains represents a fresh art historical approach and provides important opportunities for art and science to cooperate.

Deleuzian Approaches to the Corpse

Janus Head, 2011

<jats:p>Whereas memorial culture places the corpse in an aborescent hierarchy of values, De... more <jats:p>Whereas memorial culture places the corpse in an aborescent hierarchy of values, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome undermines this image of thought. The photography of Andres Serrano and Peter Witkin, and Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, are rhizomes: they form a productive network of chaotic, subterranean connections and ruptures 'dismembering' the corpse's traditional semiotics.</jats:p>

Global and Local Multistability in Contemporary Art

While formalism and Gestalt psychology are often used to justify aesthetic unity as a natural pri... more While formalism and Gestalt psychology are often used to justify aesthetic unity as a natural principle, the contemporary works I examine here can be seen to contest this aesthetic tradition by exploring discordant perceptual, political, and cultural problems that disturb the timeless ideals of visual harmony and balance explained by perceptual psychology.

Global and Local Art Histories

How can the teaching and learning of culturally and theoretically diverse art histories allow for... more How can the teaching and learning of culturally and theoretically diverse art histories allow for constructive interaction between the global and the local, which is not just an example of one dominating the other? Do the issues of cultural hybridity and diasporas represent an opportunity for art history to rethink traditional assumptions about cultural identity and interactions between cultures? Is it possible for there to be a globally aware, yet locally grounded art history, where the methods and approaches of one kind of art history can enrich the other? How are issues of art history and modernity mediated in global and local contexts? At the outset, then, the

Problem Spaces in the Walters Prize

Why Lefebvre&#39;s concept of the everday is still an important framework for analysing conte... more

Beyond Internalism and Externalism: Husserl and Sartre's Image Consciousness in Hitchcock and Buñuel

Film-Philosophy, 2010

Metaphor and art

The Psychology of Contemporary Art

A SPECTACLE OF ORDER AND METHOD by Annemarie Schimmel, trans. Corinne Attwood

Art History, 2007

Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750

Images of Thought is an entirely new approach to understanding non-Western art. Supported by a wi... more Images of Thought is an entirely new approach to understanding non-Western art. Supported by a wide reading in anthropology, theology and philosophy, it provides an intellectual context for reading the visual language of Indian and Persian miniature art. By decoding artistic conventions, and with searching visual analyses, the book attempts to transform our understanding of art as an illustration of history to art as a reflection of the intellect. Images of Thought should be of interest to the general reader, students and scholars of art and critical theory, as it shows that one of the world's richest painting traditions can offer important insights into issues of visual perception and intellectual production generally.

Emotions in art: seeing is believing?

The Psychology of Contemporary Art

How emotions are perceived in art

A Multidisciplinary Study of Eye Tracking Technology for Visual Intelligence

Education Sciences, 2020

The ability to analyse aspects of visual culture—works of art, maps or plans, graphs, tables and ... more The ability to analyse aspects of visual culture—works of art, maps or plans, graphs, tables and X-rays—quickly and efficiently is critical in decision-making in a broad range of disciplines. Eye tracking is a technology that can record how long someone dwells on a particular detail in an image, where the eye moves from one part of the image to the other, and the sequence the viewer uses to interpret visual information. These MP4 recordings can be played back and graphically enhanced with coloured dots and lines to point out this natural and fluent eye behaviour to learners. These recordings can form effective pedagogical tools for learning how to look at images through the eyes of experts by mimicking the patterns and rhythms of expert eye behaviour. This paper provides a meta-analysis of studies of this kind and also provides the results of a cross-disciplinary project which involved five different subject areas. The consensus arising from our meta-analysis reveals an emerging fie...

Viewing Landscapes Is More Stimulating Than Scrambled Images After a Stressor: A Cross-disciplinary Approach

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Research has demonstrated that nature is beneficial for many aspects of one's health. This pilot ... more Research has demonstrated that nature is beneficial for many aspects of one's health. This pilot study aimed to investigate whether viewing landscape artworks, as a form of representational nature, could improve psychological and physiological recovery from a laboratory stressor. A sample of 30 participants was randomized to one of two conditions: landscape and scrambled. After a laboratory stress task, participants in the landscape condition viewed a series of landscape paintings for 30 min; participants in the scrambled condition viewed digitally scrambled versions of these artworks as a control condition. Pupil size was measured while viewing the images using an eye tracker. Affect, drowsiness and fatigue, and the salivary stress biomarkers, cortisol, and alpha-amylase were measured at baseline, after the stressor, and after the artwork viewing period. After the viewing period, the scrambled condition had increased reports of low negative affect (which contains the variables of sleepy, dull, and sluggish) (p = 0.045, h p 2 = 0.12) and increased reports of drowsiness (p = 0.038, h p 2 = 0.12). Salivary cortisol levels decreased more rapidly while viewing the scrambled images compared to the landscape artworks (p = 0.027, h p 2 = 0.62). Lastly, pupil size while viewing the landscape artworks was larger than when viewing a blank screen (p = 0.025, h p 2 = 0.33), an effect not seen in the scrambled condition. This pilot study suggests that viewing landscape artworks was more stimulating and reduced drowsiness after stress when compared to viewing scrambled images.

Surrealism and Schizoanalysis

Surrealism

Performing relational knowledge

The Psychology of Contemporary Art, 2013

Surrealism and Schizoanalysis

Surrealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2021

In producing radical forms of art, “schizoanalysis” disobeys rules, breaks with convention, and c... more In producing radical forms of art, “schizoanalysis” disobeys rules, breaks with convention, and courts unreason. We see this not only in James Joyce’s “splintering” of language, but also in the art of Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and others, where images of bodies are torn apart and reassembled into bizarre mythopoetic mélanges of heads and limbs, fusing the genitalia of both sexes. These assemblages suggest machine-like orgies of polysexual and androgynous bodies. In this chapter, I argue that this Surrealist technique of disassembling and reassembling is driven by desire and the imagination, and complements aspects of queer theory aimed at deconstructing traditional notions of desire.

Esoteric and exoteric vision in South Asian miniature painting

World Art (Routledge) Vol.11 (3), p.255-27, 2021

This essay focuses on contemporary artworks that hark back to Mughal examples. In particular, the... more This essay focuses on contemporary artworks that hark back to Mughal
examples. In particular, there is an underlying formal arrangement
shared by traditional and contemporary art, which I would like to
suggest has much in common with reading maps. In fact, many of
these artworks actually feature maps that alert us to different ways
of ‘reading’ this tradition of formalism, stimulating different levels of
description.

A Short History of Painting Haptic Vision

The Dialogics of Contemporary Art, 2022

This essay explores the political and aesthetic aspects of haptic sensibility in painting

The Logical and Phenomenological in Martin Creed’s Chairs

Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Martin Creed , 2022

The artist Martin Creed’s work appeals to two apparently contrary tendencies: analytical logic, w... more The artist Martin Creed’s work appeals to two apparently contrary tendencies: analytical logic, which encourages a detached examination of objects, and phenomenal qualities that break down this detachment when the chairs are viewed as comfortable or homely. These two tendencies can be more precisely described by appealing to Martin Heidegger’s well-known series of distinctions between ‘presence-at-hand’ and ‘readiness-to-hand’.

The Psychology of Contemporary Art

The Microphysics of Desire

Rhythm in Art Now in Paperback

Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism, 2021

This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic ... more This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic practice, such as oils, charcoal, brushes, canvas, earth, and sand. Artists often work with intuitive, tactile sensations and rhythms that connect them to these materials. Rhythm connects the brain and body to the world, and the world of abstract art. The book features new readings of artworks by Matisse, Pollock, Dubuffet, Tápies, Benglis, Len Lye, Star Gossage, Shannon Novak, Simon Ingram, Lee Mingwei, L. N. Tallur and many others. Such art challenges centuries of philosophical and aesthetic order that has elevated the substance of mind over the substance of matter. This is a multidisciplinary study of different metastable patterns and rhythms: in art, the body, and the brain. This focus on the propagation of rhythm across domains represents a fresh art historical approach and provides important opportunities for art and science to cooperate.

Deleuzian Approaches to the Corpse

Janus Head, 2011

<jats:p>Whereas memorial culture places the corpse in an aborescent hierarchy of values, De... more <jats:p>Whereas memorial culture places the corpse in an aborescent hierarchy of values, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome undermines this image of thought. The photography of Andres Serrano and Peter Witkin, and Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, are rhizomes: they form a productive network of chaotic, subterranean connections and ruptures 'dismembering' the corpse's traditional semiotics.</jats:p>

Global and Local Multistability in Contemporary Art

While formalism and Gestalt psychology are often used to justify aesthetic unity as a natural pri... more While formalism and Gestalt psychology are often used to justify aesthetic unity as a natural principle, the contemporary works I examine here can be seen to contest this aesthetic tradition by exploring discordant perceptual, political, and cultural problems that disturb the timeless ideals of visual harmony and balance explained by perceptual psychology.

Global and Local Art Histories

How can the teaching and learning of culturally and theoretically diverse art histories allow for... more How can the teaching and learning of culturally and theoretically diverse art histories allow for constructive interaction between the global and the local, which is not just an example of one dominating the other? Do the issues of cultural hybridity and diasporas represent an opportunity for art history to rethink traditional assumptions about cultural identity and interactions between cultures? Is it possible for there to be a globally aware, yet locally grounded art history, where the methods and approaches of one kind of art history can enrich the other? How are issues of art history and modernity mediated in global and local contexts? At the outset, then, the

Problem Spaces in the Walters Prize

Why Lefebvre&#39;s concept of the everday is still an important framework for analysing conte... more

Beyond Internalism and Externalism: Husserl and Sartre's Image Consciousness in Hitchcock and Buñuel

Film-Philosophy, 2010

Metaphor and art

The Psychology of Contemporary Art

A SPECTACLE OF ORDER AND METHOD by Annemarie Schimmel, trans. Corinne Attwood

Art History, 2007

Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750

Images of Thought is an entirely new approach to understanding non-Western art. Supported by a wi... more Images of Thought is an entirely new approach to understanding non-Western art. Supported by a wide reading in anthropology, theology and philosophy, it provides an intellectual context for reading the visual language of Indian and Persian miniature art. By decoding artistic conventions, and with searching visual analyses, the book attempts to transform our understanding of art as an illustration of history to art as a reflection of the intellect. Images of Thought should be of interest to the general reader, students and scholars of art and critical theory, as it shows that one of the world's richest painting traditions can offer important insights into issues of visual perception and intellectual production generally.

Emotions in art: seeing is believing?

The Psychology of Contemporary Art

How emotions are perceived in art

A Multidisciplinary Study of Eye Tracking Technology for Visual Intelligence

Education Sciences, 2020

The ability to analyse aspects of visual culture—works of art, maps or plans, graphs, tables and ... more The ability to analyse aspects of visual culture—works of art, maps or plans, graphs, tables and X-rays—quickly and efficiently is critical in decision-making in a broad range of disciplines. Eye tracking is a technology that can record how long someone dwells on a particular detail in an image, where the eye moves from one part of the image to the other, and the sequence the viewer uses to interpret visual information. These MP4 recordings can be played back and graphically enhanced with coloured dots and lines to point out this natural and fluent eye behaviour to learners. These recordings can form effective pedagogical tools for learning how to look at images through the eyes of experts by mimicking the patterns and rhythms of expert eye behaviour. This paper provides a meta-analysis of studies of this kind and also provides the results of a cross-disciplinary project which involved five different subject areas. The consensus arising from our meta-analysis reveals an emerging fie...

Viewing Landscapes Is More Stimulating Than Scrambled Images After a Stressor: A Cross-disciplinary Approach

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Research has demonstrated that nature is beneficial for many aspects of one's health. This pilot ... more Research has demonstrated that nature is beneficial for many aspects of one's health. This pilot study aimed to investigate whether viewing landscape artworks, as a form of representational nature, could improve psychological and physiological recovery from a laboratory stressor. A sample of 30 participants was randomized to one of two conditions: landscape and scrambled. After a laboratory stress task, participants in the landscape condition viewed a series of landscape paintings for 30 min; participants in the scrambled condition viewed digitally scrambled versions of these artworks as a control condition. Pupil size was measured while viewing the images using an eye tracker. Affect, drowsiness and fatigue, and the salivary stress biomarkers, cortisol, and alpha-amylase were measured at baseline, after the stressor, and after the artwork viewing period. After the viewing period, the scrambled condition had increased reports of low negative affect (which contains the variables of sleepy, dull, and sluggish) (p = 0.045, h p 2 = 0.12) and increased reports of drowsiness (p = 0.038, h p 2 = 0.12). Salivary cortisol levels decreased more rapidly while viewing the scrambled images compared to the landscape artworks (p = 0.027, h p 2 = 0.62). Lastly, pupil size while viewing the landscape artworks was larger than when viewing a blank screen (p = 0.025, h p 2 = 0.33), an effect not seen in the scrambled condition. This pilot study suggests that viewing landscape artworks was more stimulating and reduced drowsiness after stress when compared to viewing scrambled images.

Surrealism and Schizoanalysis

Surrealism

Performing relational knowledge

The Psychology of Contemporary Art, 2013

Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism

Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism, 2021

This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in arti... more This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic practice, such as oils, charcoal, brushes, canvas, earth and sand. Artists often work with intuitive, tactile sensations and rhythms that connect them to these materials. Rhythm
connects the brain and body to the world, and the world of abstract art. The book features new readings of artworks by Matisse, Pollock, Dubuffet, Tàpies, Benglis, Len Lye, Star Gossage, Shannon Novak, Simon Ingram, Lee Mingwei, L. N. Tallur and many others. Such art challenges centuries of philosophical and aesthetic order that has elevated the substance of mind over
the substance of matter. This is a multidisciplinary study of different metastable patterns and rhythms: in art, the body and the brain. This focus on the propagation of rhythm across domains represents a fresh art historical approach and provides important opportunities for art and science to cooperate.

Global and Local Art Histories

Global and Local Art Histories

How can the teaching and learning of culturally and theoretically diverse art histories allow for... more How can the teaching and learning of culturally and theoretically diverse art
histories allow for constructive interaction between the global and the local,
which is not just an example of one dominating the other? Do the issues of
cultural hybridity and diasporas represent an opportunity for art history to rethink
traditional assumptions about cultural identity and interactions between
cultures? Is it possible for there to be a globally aware, yet locally grounded art
history, where the methods and approaches of one kind of art history can enrich
the other? How are issues of art history and modernity mediated in global and
local contexts?
At the outset, then, the

Embodied Approaches to Art

The Psychology of Contemporary Art, 2013

It is the body that allows us to be physically situated in the world, and to combine internal and... more It is the body that allows us to be physically situated in the world, and to combine internal and external resources effortlessly and fluidly. 'Embodied' approaches in psychology, phenomenology and art emphasise the role of the body in constituting thought, even highly abstract thought. I review the relevant literature and evaluate its importance for our understanding of modern and contemporary art.

Analogical processes in Viewing Art

The Psychology of Contemporary Art, 2013

An examination of the cognitive psychology involved in creating analogies, and how this research ... more