Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today?
The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought—an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications.
With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today’s much debated concerns about the criticality of painting
into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.
By:
Jorella Andrews (Goldsmiths University of London UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 508g
ISBN: 9781472574275
ISBN 10: 1472574273
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 25 June 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
"1. Introduction PART ONE 2. ""Nature"" and ""Consciousness"" - Merleau-Ponty's encounter with dualism 3. The Symbolic Forms and the question of integrated being PART TWO 4. Description and the re-education of sight 5. Embodiment, self-perception and reflexivity PART THREE 6. Merleau-Ponty's ""new conception of the being of language"" 7. Visual language and the 'unity' of painting PART FOUR 8. Visibility - the ""flesh"" of the world 9. Intermundane space and the search for depth PART FIVE 10. Painting, Largesse, and Life - A Conversation with Leah Durner Bibliography Index"
Jorella Andrews is Head of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
