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. 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. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. 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. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. 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. 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. This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. 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. 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. 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 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. And in so doing, the networks on which both social and artistic form are produced can also be recognised. This dissertation investigates the often overlooked connections between new media art and its history in Minimalist and dematerialised practice (from the 1960s to present day). Yet whilst such collaboration is materially innovative, the concepts driving new media works often operate as a development of more established art historical discourse, theories and practice. The recent combination of scientific innovation and artistic production into works like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Subtitled Public marks a new form of art-making that is separate from the past in many ways. The development of distributive networks of information, as well as earlier developments within the industrial realm of mechanical reproduction, has affected attitudes towards art-making and its procedures of production in so doing, new creative practices have emerged. Although the incorporation of technology into new media works is significant, there are various ways in which such integration is achieved. Use of the term ‘new media’ as a way of defining an area of creative practice is in itself problematic it refers to a huge variety of art-making techniques without clarifying their differences. The unmistakable interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art continues to provoke investigations of categorisation.
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