Christopher Wool

Symposium, 2016

Femmes (Editions Maeght, 1966) is a limited-edition livre d'artiste composed of a selection of paintings by Joan Miró and a text by Claude Simon. This article explores the rich yet somewhat elusive relationship between the writer and painter, as the former writes from, and also with, the works of the latter. An unconventional collaboration, the volume proposes numerous and varied connections between its figural and scriptural dimensions, which I read through a perspective that draws on the concept of territory (and its derivatives, deterritorialization and reterritorialization) developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I argue that the mutability inherent in this conceptual apparatus sheds light on the dynamic reflexivity that exists between the paintings and the text.

re-published in a modified version as The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression in Toward the Postmodern, ed. R. Harvey and M. Roberts (Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, 1993, pp. 2-11). Opposing itself to various other psychoanalytic approaches to art and literature (approaches that Lyotard criticises along the way), the paper argues that because artistic and literary works are laden with figure, which operates according to a different logic than that of language, artistic expression must be understood as having properties different from those of spoken or written commentary. Expression is thus set off from meaning, and is shown to reveal a very specific kind of truth: the trace of the primary process, free for the moment from the ordering functions of the secondary process. Its formative operations not only leave their mark on the space in which artistic works appear, but produce new, plastic, figures. Lyotard argues that the artistic impulse is the desire to see these unconscious operations, "the desire to see the desire." Attention to this function of truth and to the role of artistic space in giving the artwork its "play" brings attention back to Freud's analysis of expression in tragedy and its link to the results of his own self-analysis -and thus to the very constitution of psychoanalysis itself.

In a number of writings that were only narrowly circulated, Richard Wollheim took a stand against two pivotal theses at the centre of aesthetic reflection and, above all, of critical and historical-artistic practices: i) that art is a language (and thus artistic meaning is produced and understood in the same way as linguistic meaning); ii) that art inherently is a form of communication. In Wollheim's view, such theses are the mainstream conceptions shared by disciplines and approaches as diverse as semiotics, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and a significant portion of cognitive science. In this paper, I mainly concentrate on (i) and I reconstruct, discuss and defend Wollheim's arguments against a recent interpretive misunderstanding that deems them inadequate vis à vis Donald Davidson's philosophy. My contention is instead that, at a closer analysis , the latter works in fact as a pivot to Wollheim's aesthetics, especially against the arguments put forth by Nelson Goodman, the most rigorous defendant of (i) and (ii).

2017

This MPhil explores the materiality and non-materiality of art and how this relates to our interpretation in relation to subject and object. It focuses on the visual and the non-visible elements of artworks, considering the conditions and the pre-conditions of the gaze, and its relevance in the moment of perception. Approaching authors in art theory and beyond, writing is discussed as theoretical, fictional and biographical when engaging with the art practices of Gerhard Richter and Hanne Darboven. If the visual does not exist independently, beyond or outside of language, then the visible and the image that art can render, comes as a consequence of being in language. The activity of writing can be used as an instrument to re-approach and re-contextualise the activity of looking at art. It can open dialogues on the spaces between collective and personal thinking and how one relates to this in a creative practice. To engage with our own experiences and cross between the threshold of s...

In a number of writings that were only narrowly circulated, Richard Wollheim took a stand against two pivotal theses often at the center of aesthetic reflection and, even more often, of critical and historical-artistic practices: i) that art is a language (and thus artistic meaning is conveyed in the same way as linguistic meaning); ii) that art inherently is a form of communication. What motivates Wollheim's deep aversion for i) and ii) depends on the progressive liquidation of the experience of what lies at the center of art, i.e. the object intentionally produced by the artist. This is of immense relevance in Wollheim's psychoanalytical conception of the mind because the art-object allows the reparation urge to take place making concrete and externalizing the inner world of the artist. The emphasis on the singularity of the object excludes art from the domain of communication: because (one) communication presupposes a specific audience-a rare circumstance in the case of art; and (two) the emotive content of the work cannot be transmitted via language since emotions do not correspond isomorphical-ly to emotion terms. To diminish the object at the center of the experience of art (or the experience itself) means no less than to abdicate to an essential part of human nature.

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2012

It is with the materiality of language, or Materia Prima, that this article concerns itself, reflecting upon the 'surface' of text, as an image in its own right. The oral or spoken/auditory/acoustic qualities of language have long been held to be aesthetically central to literature and poetry, not material words. The philosopher Richard Shusterman describes this phenomenon as a lack of attention to those instances when the 'visible is visible', this phrase relying upon a distinction between two meanings of the word 'visible'. The first suggests being 'able to be seen', while the second suggests the 'conspicuous' or 'strikingly manifest' aspect(s) of the seen (or passive and active modes of the visible). The printed surface of language, where the 'visible is visible', has traditionally been viewed as irrelevant in philosophical accounts of language, from Plato to Wittgenstein, where, frequently, language is broken down only into 'the sound aspect' and 'the meaning aspect'. However, this article will argue that the knowledge that artists, designers, typographers and illustrators bring is that the material word is a crucial partner in the production of meaning. This article engages with those practitioners whose work interfaces with these concerns, both directly and indirectly.

The Condition of Painting: Reconsidering Medium Specificity (PhD thesis), 2018

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object. This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time. Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry. The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 26 (2020), 2020

Using Craig Owens’ argument about the repression of the discursive in modernist art, the article provides an analytical and theoretical account of the complex and changing relationship between the visual and the textual in American painting since c. 1950. The article focuses on the status of verbal inscriptions on a canvas, their function, meaning and relation to the medium of painting. In the introductory section of the text special attention to the poststructuralist, expanded understanding of such notions as “text” and “writing” and its consequences in visual arts as well as the unresolvable dialectic of looking and reading and its theoretical implications addressed in more recent art theory. The analytical part starts with the discussion of the paradox of Pollock’s drip paintings as both the epitome of modernist autonomy and a figure of “arche-writing” (a potential script); than it focuses on more specific cases of textuality in C. Twombly’s, J. Johns’ and E. Ruscha’s works, and finally deconstructive modalities of “writing in painting” in works by Ch. Wool, G. Ligon, K. Aptekar and M. Tansey become the object of interpretation. In conclusion it is argued that latter artist’s work – Reader – epitomizes the differential superposition not only of painting and writing but also of the modern and the postmodern, the past and the present experience of “reading” images. As a result, the long perspective on the process of the emergence of the textual in painting described in the article does not so much operate with the logic of binary oppositions between modernism and postmodernism or exclusion of text and its subsequent inclusion, as allows us to look at it in terms of layers of signs, always already there, coming to visibility at different historical moments. keywords: painting; image; text; textuality; poststructuralism; American art