Papers by paul collinson
In my brief text Heidegger's Hut: dreaming of the Middle Ages, and The Absolute-a visual essay I ... more In my brief text Heidegger's Hut: dreaming of the Middle Ages, and The Absolute-a visual essay I was presenting an idea of an absolute through Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. It is Meillassoux's 'piety protected from rationality' and his desire for 'absolute truth capable of shoring up the value of faith' 1 that I used in my essay, rather than Heidegger's questing for a God: Heidegger was working within the Kantian finitude of the already present god, although he was 'waiting' for his God to either appear or to not appear. A clue to Meillassoux's god can be discerned in his essay Spectral Dilemma. In this essay his thesis is centred on the non-existence of a religious god-a divine inexistence. Meillassoux asks us to understand that for those dead who we lost so suddenly and tragically-those 'spectres' that we have not had time to properly mourn-for them, posthumously, 'something begins other than their death.' 2 This post mortal 'existence', according to Meillassoux, would depend on some occult law that has not, as yet, been discovered: a law, or laws, that do not demand their necessity to exist (and not exist) and would thereby allow a god to be the contingent effect of Chaos. This boils down to whether we believe the current laws of nature and of the cosmos will be the same in the future as they are now. Here Meillassoux uses Hume's Principle of Sufficient Reason and
A visual essay on Agamben's bare life and the ongoing state of exception in Syria. The painting '... more A visual essay on Agamben's bare life and the ongoing state of exception in Syria. The painting 'Homo Sacer' was a painting without a title (one discarded option was 'Baptism') until I stumbled upon Agamben's text that appeared to express the ideas floating around the artist's head and on canvas. The origin of these ideas though is still the Dreaming of the Middle Ages by Eco and digital feudalism, trans-national nationalism and the irrational.
Templum Merda. A comic tragedy for the modern baroque age., 2019
The constellation of ideas and sources for my recent painting Templum Merda from Walter Benjamin'... more The constellation of ideas and sources for my recent painting Templum Merda from Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Baroque Drama to Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art. A paratactic undertaking.
There is an ongoing obsession with the Middle Ages in Western culture that has coincided with a r... more There is an ongoing obsession with the Middle Ages in Western culture that has coincided with a recent rise of nationalism across Europe, of Neo-Medieval pre-Enlightenment trans-national far-right organisations. These groups are intent on generating conflicts between cultures and ideologies, and promoting isolationism and nationalism to the 'common man' using similar iconography as we've seen before, to create mythologies that are based on crude stereotypes.
There is an ongoing obsession with the Middle Ages in Western culture that has coincided with a r... more There is an ongoing obsession with the Middle Ages in Western culture that has coincided with a recent rise of nationalism across Europe, of Neo-Medieval pre-Enlightenment trans-national far-right organisations. These groups are intent on generating conflicts between cultures and ideologies, and promoting isolationism and nationalism to the 'common man' using similar iconography as we've seen before, to create mythologies that are based on crude stereotypes.
The English landscape in art, as in real life, is contentious, open to interpretations, with the ... more The English landscape in art, as in real life, is contentious, open to interpretations, with the term Picturesque being a visual recycling and improving of the landscape for consumption by various audiences. Ironically a term prevalent in late 18th century Britain as a mediator between Burke’s ideas of the sublime and beautiful, it depended on the roughness and ruin of a certain pictorial view inducing a sentimental and nostalgic response in the viewer of the painted and graphic representation.
I use a photo-real style of painting as an attempt to avoid certain manners in painting that tend to deflect aesthetically from perhaps unpalatable truths about situations behind the image and subject matter: the paintings are rooted in the day to day exigencies and tussle of painting. In his essay for the 1983 Arts Council exhibition Landscape in Britain 1850 – 1950 Ian Jeffrey points out that painters, watercolourists and etchers were more upholders of tradition, worried about not losing their audience and buyers, by holding back from ‘satire and parody and pandemonium’ whilst writers of the times did not. Ruskin uses the phrase ‘heartless’ picturesque, of making a virtue of the observation of poor or low subject matter which ‘adds questions concerning the truth of imitation that are at the heart of the Western tradition’. This may be more about taste and sensibility of the observer and social and political predilections of the times, of the required response of sentimentality and nostalgia for the ruined and lost in the face of improvement. The Tate Britain exhibition a couple of years ago, British Landscape: Photography After the Picturesque presented a counterpoint to its Romantic exhibition at the time, a Post-Picturesque as Nicholas Alfrey put it. This may be recognition of the content on display; the signs of economic tension and decline, the ubiquitous use of the mundane landscape as subject matter, or perhaps a disinterested academic fixation on so called ‘non spaces’.
My picturesque destabilises through ‘surprise and humour, friction rather than rapprochement’ (Robert Smithson 1973) by conflations of site specific views and their actualities, contradiction of tradition with progress. Modernity, loss and change is expressed through the playful ‘bubbleworlds’ of miniature diorama (why go hunting for views when I can make my own). These ‘landscapes’ are then painted in a Photoreal manner. This may smack of the Ruskinian ‘heartless’ picturesque, but I would argue that the Picturesque is, and has always been, more about the dialectical nature of landscape , my paintings continue and expand this discussion through visual language.
I refer to Robert Smithson’s essay Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape in Artforum 11, Feb1973, cited in Robert Smithson and the Anglo-American Picturesque Martin, Timothy D 2011, also Cosgrove, Denis Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea UCLA.
Conference Presentations by paul collinson
TANK: Painting as neither use nor ornament, 2024
A paper presented on the occasion of Hull Artist Research Initiative's exhibition Counter+Points ... more A paper presented on the occasion of Hull Artist Research Initiative's exhibition Counter+Points at the University of Hull, May 2024. My paper proposes that the proper philosophical place of painting in our world is as neither use nor ornament.
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Papers by paul collinson
I use a photo-real style of painting as an attempt to avoid certain manners in painting that tend to deflect aesthetically from perhaps unpalatable truths about situations behind the image and subject matter: the paintings are rooted in the day to day exigencies and tussle of painting. In his essay for the 1983 Arts Council exhibition Landscape in Britain 1850 – 1950 Ian Jeffrey points out that painters, watercolourists and etchers were more upholders of tradition, worried about not losing their audience and buyers, by holding back from ‘satire and parody and pandemonium’ whilst writers of the times did not. Ruskin uses the phrase ‘heartless’ picturesque, of making a virtue of the observation of poor or low subject matter which ‘adds questions concerning the truth of imitation that are at the heart of the Western tradition’. This may be more about taste and sensibility of the observer and social and political predilections of the times, of the required response of sentimentality and nostalgia for the ruined and lost in the face of improvement. The Tate Britain exhibition a couple of years ago, British Landscape: Photography After the Picturesque presented a counterpoint to its Romantic exhibition at the time, a Post-Picturesque as Nicholas Alfrey put it. This may be recognition of the content on display; the signs of economic tension and decline, the ubiquitous use of the mundane landscape as subject matter, or perhaps a disinterested academic fixation on so called ‘non spaces’.
My picturesque destabilises through ‘surprise and humour, friction rather than rapprochement’ (Robert Smithson 1973) by conflations of site specific views and their actualities, contradiction of tradition with progress. Modernity, loss and change is expressed through the playful ‘bubbleworlds’ of miniature diorama (why go hunting for views when I can make my own). These ‘landscapes’ are then painted in a Photoreal manner. This may smack of the Ruskinian ‘heartless’ picturesque, but I would argue that the Picturesque is, and has always been, more about the dialectical nature of landscape , my paintings continue and expand this discussion through visual language.
I refer to Robert Smithson’s essay Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape in Artforum 11, Feb1973, cited in Robert Smithson and the Anglo-American Picturesque Martin, Timothy D 2011, also Cosgrove, Denis Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea UCLA.
Conference Presentations by paul collinson
I use a photo-real style of painting as an attempt to avoid certain manners in painting that tend to deflect aesthetically from perhaps unpalatable truths about situations behind the image and subject matter: the paintings are rooted in the day to day exigencies and tussle of painting. In his essay for the 1983 Arts Council exhibition Landscape in Britain 1850 – 1950 Ian Jeffrey points out that painters, watercolourists and etchers were more upholders of tradition, worried about not losing their audience and buyers, by holding back from ‘satire and parody and pandemonium’ whilst writers of the times did not. Ruskin uses the phrase ‘heartless’ picturesque, of making a virtue of the observation of poor or low subject matter which ‘adds questions concerning the truth of imitation that are at the heart of the Western tradition’. This may be more about taste and sensibility of the observer and social and political predilections of the times, of the required response of sentimentality and nostalgia for the ruined and lost in the face of improvement. The Tate Britain exhibition a couple of years ago, British Landscape: Photography After the Picturesque presented a counterpoint to its Romantic exhibition at the time, a Post-Picturesque as Nicholas Alfrey put it. This may be recognition of the content on display; the signs of economic tension and decline, the ubiquitous use of the mundane landscape as subject matter, or perhaps a disinterested academic fixation on so called ‘non spaces’.
My picturesque destabilises through ‘surprise and humour, friction rather than rapprochement’ (Robert Smithson 1973) by conflations of site specific views and their actualities, contradiction of tradition with progress. Modernity, loss and change is expressed through the playful ‘bubbleworlds’ of miniature diorama (why go hunting for views when I can make my own). These ‘landscapes’ are then painted in a Photoreal manner. This may smack of the Ruskinian ‘heartless’ picturesque, but I would argue that the Picturesque is, and has always been, more about the dialectical nature of landscape , my paintings continue and expand this discussion through visual language.
I refer to Robert Smithson’s essay Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape in Artforum 11, Feb1973, cited in Robert Smithson and the Anglo-American Picturesque Martin, Timothy D 2011, also Cosgrove, Denis Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea UCLA.