June 2015 – Postgraduate Research

London Look: Views on Political Aesthetics

On 4 June a PGR trip was arranged into London to visit two very different exhibitions, ‘Defining Beauty’ (British Museum) and ‘The Production Line of Happiness’ (Whitechapel Gallery) followed by a professorial lecture held at Goldsmiths University. The following gives a brief account of the exhibitions, along with thoughts and comments from those attending the trip.

The day began with a visit to the British Museum to see the ‘Defining Beauty‘ exhibition. The focus was on the representation of the human body in ancient Greek art (and Roman remodelling). While Egyptian art had sought to cover the body, the Greek aesthetic was to represent the naked human body as both as an object of beauty and a bearer of meaning. At the opening of the show was a marble statue of a naked Aphrodite crouching as she bathes (a Roman copy of a Greek original, 2nd century AD). The statute is placed such that you arrive to see her from behind, with her finger-tips just hovering over one shoulder as if beckoning, making for a somewhat an erotic image. The wall text at the opening also reminds of the relationship made in the ancient Greek period between the human body and demos or democracy. This opening scene immediately set a theme for the day of the political aesthetic.

After the British Museum, we moved onto the Whitechapel Gallery for Christopher Williams’ ‘The Production Line of Happiness‘. The contrast couldn’t have felt much greater. In the mould of the anti-aesthetic, this exhibition while ostensibly a show of photography, is very deliberately staged to reveal its own sense of display. Elements of the previous exhibition held in the same space are visible, walls are brought in from other exhibitions, and elements of the work shown are placed in the foyer as as well as the designated gallery spaces. All in all the exhibition offers a defamiliarisation of curatorial display. However, while deconstructing the gallery setting, it is arguably an environment that is still inward looking – a critique of and for the few, not the many – unlike the human forms that we encountered in the British Museum (though it ought to be noted, the The Whitechapel exhibition was free entry, while the British Museum charged a high premium for an exhibition that was largely put together based on the Nation’s own collection!).

After visiting these two exhibitions, we ended the day at Goldsmiths to hear a public, professorial lecture given by Prof. Sean Cubitt, in the Media and Communications department. His lecture, with the title of ‘Political Aesthetics: Becoming Human’, began by suggesting a need to shift from the typical ‘political’ image (such as we might associated with the Obama ‘Hope’ poster of his 2008 election campaign). Instead, Cubitt placed attention upon a satellite image, looking out to the planet Saturn. This, Cubitt argued, was a deeply political image. We were told, for example, how the fuel powering this device orbiting the earth to bring us the image came from the uranium mines on aboriginal lands in Australia. As a form of cognitive mapping, whereby we need to reestablish an understanding of how we make meaning (and how all meaning is mediated) Cubitt considered not want that internet does as such, but rather what is made of. How it is powered, how it is transmitted, how it is discarded. In all cases, the contents is borne of political-economic condition that precedes it. In effect, the traditional questions of aesthetics about truth, beauty and the good (as we encountered in the British Museum exhibition, and then challenged at the Whitechapel) were recast in Cubitt’s talk to consider a new materialist and ecological take on both politics and aesthetics. We were asked to consider a new ‘human’, or at least a new set of rights for society that incorporations not just the human body, but the interacting ‘body’ of computers and land.

Thoughts & Commentaries

Jane Birkin: Through a survey of his own work, Christopher Williams references the multiplicity of photographies that can be found across a variety of milieus; this exhibition is not about the status of the single image, but the production and deployment of many. Some pictures have the look of those used in advertising, mainstream publications or commercial catalogues; there are indexically captioned plant typologies; and visually perplexing images that reject categorisation. There are layers and back-stories to these images that we are consistently and purposefully not told. A small document displayed on the upper floor playfully suggests that these images have been found and purchased as a ‘job lot’, bringing us forward to the shifting, authorless, decontextualized state of the photographic image today.

Williams presents us with the techniques of photographic production. An immaculate picture of the technical apparatus itself confronts us at the start: finger on shutter, it is a fitting introduction to a display of perfectly rendered images. But there are imperfections within the pictures, including the noticeable inclusion of photographic equipment, that would normally be lost in cropping or other post-production methods: thus we are not looking at the image itself but rather at its making. In a further technological referencing, the green colour that runs through the exhibition is that of the Fuji film carton. This same green dominates the exhibition catalogue, a beautifully constructed publication that contains none of the images from the exhibition. Why would it when there are important discussions that can be had around this work without its re-production?

In any case the catalogue could never replicate the affect of the installation, and it is this installation that is most immediately striking: the photographs are hung somewhat low on the wall, with the detritus of the previous exhibition becoming an integral part of the exhibition concept. The marks and imperfections on the walls, together with the swathes of Fuji green, interrupt the flow of the already disjointed collection of works and parallel the flaws in the images themselves. The installation presents as much of a deconstructed and voyeuristic view of exhibition making as it does of photographic production.

Elham Soleimani: Visiting the exhibition ‘Defining Beauty’ provided me with a space to reflect on my own research and creative practice and, as my work mainly concerns the human body (in particular, the female figure), sexuality and veiling/covering, I believe that all these topics have been greatly explored through ancient Greek art. The human body, specifically its representation and beauty, has indeed received a great deal of attention from all civilizations throughout different eras, however, ancient Greek art explored the representation of the human body not only as an object, but also as a source of meanings. For instance, in one Assyrian scene titled ‘A Chronicle of Cruelty’, nakedness symbolizes failure and dishonor and the sculptures of women’s bodies are covered to represent their modesty and their desire to maintain their reputation.

Despite the wonderful masterpieces in this exhibition, one of the most fascinating features was a booklet with tactile images along with braille text, designed for visually impaired “viewers”. I sat there and simply touched the images. I tried to understand the lines and where they were trying to direct me. In fact, these lines introduced me to a new way of understanding and creating images that I am eager to experiment with, as my own creative practice concentrates on graphic illustration, the effect of lines and the emotions and understanding that one might achieve through them.

Cheng-Chu Weng: The first stop: to view the classical sculptures at the British Museum. Practicing, the Chinese idiom ‘讀萬卷書，行萬里路’ , means ‘in order to attain wisdom, it is not enough merely to read books, you must be well travelled as well’. I have been researching the classical body in art through reading, yet inevitably the visit really helped increased my knowledge. It was magnificent that my own body was able to be around the sculptures, they seem so much more alive than photographs and video. From this point of view did there is a link with Professor Sean Cubitt’s lecture: Becoming human-Political aesthetics, given at Goldsmiths University. Two keywords in my research are pixel and body. At the beginning of the lecture Cubitt offered a critical view of the structure of image in hyper-reality, noting how pixels presented in grids of four via the ubiquitous CCD chip. He believes moderns are dominated by pixel and CCD chip. The images produced by high technology are political, such as an image of a faraway planet in the solar system. The reason that images from science or geology can be political, particularly today, is that we economically we rely on data. What we see or believe is through photography and computer screens, which construct data. This may seem to lack the aesthetic of more obvious political images, yet they are able to ‘enclose’ knowledge; again ‘in order to attain wisdom, it is not enough merely to read books; you must be well travelled as well’. Following Cubitt’s explanation of the human body, which could be analysis three types of the body, flesh (physical body), consuming/ labor body and body as the embodiment with technology, they are in the form of the political. Compare this with the classical body, engaged with myth and human desire; although through their display at the British Museum they become a political body as well. In the end, Cubitt left a fundamental, but challenging question: How should we be human?

Oliver Peterson Gilbert: Sean Cubitt’s inaugural lecture, drawing on material archaeologies and the inherent politics of objects, was as alarming as it was insightful. His deconstruction of the eco-political implications of technological matter, from space telescopes to the icons on your computer, demonstrated our total complicity in the destruction of the planet. In particular, Cubitt’s use of Marx’s Grundrisse to reflect upon contemporary post-industrial cognitive-cultural economies and the plight of the digital factory worker was thought provoking and showed the continued relevance of this text in the 21^st century. Despite the ominous nature of his lecture, Cubitt used this public platform as a call-to-arms: presenting the case for a reclassification of the political to include both non-human and human actors, a radical vision which goes someway towards reforming the mankind’s political relationship with the planet.

Walter van Rijn: If we consider the art object as that thing created by an artist and presented to us in a particular context, it is clear that the art object is subject to different forces leaving their mark on the object. The sculptures in the ‘Defining Beauty’ exhibition are prime examples of what I would call institutional objects. Objects determined by the institution. The institution determines not only how they look, but also who can see them, where and in which context they are shown, and what their meaning is supposed to be (Defining beauty of the human, or Greek society?). We might say that these sculptures were created by and to function in Greek society, copied and used as status symbol by Roman society, and commercialised and dislocated within British Society.The exhibition ‘The Production Line of Happiness’ by Christopher Williams looks like a completely different exhibition, but there are important similarities. The art objects are again institutional objects, but this time created by our society. Photographs of objects, despite the subject being human, animal, plant or thing. Photographs of objects created initially to function as an ideal representation of a thing in a publication. Again they are copied or remade and dislocated into this exhibition. This time we are made aware of the dislocation, the procedures of display. The photograph of Buren’s work with green stripes, initially a non-representative, institutional critique work of art in situ, has been used by Williams to determine the green colour and structure of the exhibition space and artist’s book. A green stripe that has become distributed from original to photograph, to context, to artist’s book and art object again. It has become an institutional green, instituted by the artist, validated and consolidated by the art world.

Xiao-yang Li: In a metaphoric sense, The British Museum’s exhibition is an event of human bodies confronting the ideals of a different set of human bodies from an era 2000 years apart. We, dwellers of our technology-obsessed time that worships the robotic and prizes the latest touch screen sensations, have come to witness a period with a special people who dared to understand their own body at its fullest, its most natural, most awkward and most beautiful moments! The Classical world did not just arrive out of nothingness, it followed Mycenaean civilization and the dark geometric era, borrowed iconographies and divinities from a mixture of Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian beliefs, arose from the thousand-fold imperfect and crude Archaic votive figures and with its own gods and rites and Homeric ideologies, come into full blossoming. Here gods and goddesses were sculpted into their monumental splendidness, statues of larger-than-life size bodies were erected against other bodies or attached to an architectural fragment, vivid scenes of brutal killing or mythical rites were depicted on reliefs, and there lies countless broken bodies without an arm or a head or the ‘deep breasted bosom’…

Perhaps the Greeks were the first official ‘realist’ artists, their understanding of the human bodies does not only concern with a higher degree of likeness through a more advanced sculpting technique, it also comes with a sense of human drama and errors. Therefore the divine and the mortals were represented side by side, possessing the same errors and beauties, and we watch this drama unfold before our eyes like the opening pages of an Homeric epic. The full confrontation with nature itself gave rise to meanings in a multi-fold dimension. It grants beauty and grace to all godly abductions, to the scene of the killing, to war, and to the translucently flowing draperies of Artemis’ dress that reveals part of her inner thigh in the most erotic manner. For the Greeks life comes with death and rape, virginity is paired with child-bearing and animal-sacrificing, blessings are peppered with curse and agony, concealment never fully shy away from the sensual exposure of playfulness, the absolute beauty arose from the ugliest castration of the universe, femininity only thrives when in tuned with masculinity. Here it seems the aesthetic reigns above all morality, and the beautiful Olympian gods are still busy entertaining themselves with their outrageous deeds that no mortal could understand. From the body, a sense of the divine is associated with a sense of reality, which reminds us of what we are as human beings, but this divinity is never fully real, for it is too idealized, and partially they are too close to nature they are at once very far away from human conducts. What di the Greeks dream? Was it filled with fantasy and sweet utterings? Or was it darkness of a storming night where all living creatures were erased and destroyed? It is difficult to tell, but we might think the Greeks’ dreams were of a strange set of comic tragedy. Their gods, who maintained in a human body, were so hard to please, it makes one wonder if the reality of human beings that the Greeks discovered was one of catastrophe and inevitably fateful existence. The naturalistically depicted gods and goddesses are the very epitome of this reality, in which humans, with their desperate awe towards nature, confront themselves and find that least human part from within. So what do we make of our current era – an era that slips away from this direct confrontation, are we wise to avoid that sense of the reality, that which could be so real that no human beings can bear anymore?

Hazel Atashroo: On being asked, after the event, to respond to Sean Cubitt’s inaugural speech at Goldsmiths last week, I wished that I had had the foresight to take some notes. I foresee that I will have to risk relying on memory, living with my fear that my omissions might outlive me, on a data server, somewhere. A gulf frequently appears between what we initially intend, what actually we do, and the broader consequences.

Sean Cubitt discussed his new research, which returns to the ‘design and materials’ of media technologies and their role in delimiting ‘the political’, how people conceive of and experience ‘politics’ in the digital age. This points towards the issues that have long occupied the area of the social studies of technology in general: the relationship between the ‘socially constructed’ nature of human productive activities, seen in aspects of material choice and design context, and their intended and unintended broader consequences.

The other fundamental part of this relationship is one of feedback in which the products and processes of human invention in turn re-create the human: changes which may occur ‘below the radar’ of our awareness. Ideologies embodied in everyday technologies- can have enabling, as well as powerfully delimiting effects on human life. Cubitt’s discussion appeared to follow in this critical interest, once indicated in Langdon Winner’s call for a ‘theory of technological politics’.Many years prior to this, Günther Anders wrote of humankind’s ‘Promethean Discrepancy’ – the gulf between human ability to create new technologies and the ability to visualize the consequences. Anders identified the need for a ‘moral imagination’ to avoid the kinds of technological developments that made atrocities like Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible, and ecological disaster imminent.

In his speech, Cubitt mentioned the centrality of the data spreadsheet, an unassuming technology upon which life or death decisions are made. This impersonal utilitarian vista dominates the daily experience of workers across the globe. Does the spreadsheet have a ‘moral imagination’?

See also: Anders, G. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Obsolesence of Human Beings](1956; 1980). Bijker et. al. (1994) The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology; Schraube, E. ‘Torturing Things Until They Confess’: Günther Anders’ Critique of Technology (2005); Van Dijk, P. Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders (2000); Winner, L. The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1989).

Sarvenaz Sohrabi: Although I have read in the past about the art of ancient Greece, the opportunity to look at the works shown at the British Museum while currently engaged in my own practice-based research brought to me new understanding of the works. Artworks, regardless of their aesthetic effects, are carrying messages in different fields and at different time of human thought. Hence they are a type of intermediate cognition of the past and present. Significantly, however, although about half of the human population are women, art history is frequently masculine, with women in second place. The lesser role of women in Greek art is visible. Most of sculptures show powerful men with strong bodies. Even romantic stories on urns were designed to illustrate the love story of heroes. Visiting the exhibition made me think again about the gender-bias of gods and religions in different art periods.

Simiao Wang: The sculptures embody religious functions based on Greek mythology, while its copy represents new politico-religious in Roman context, which emphasis on the duties of human instead of God (contributing to the collapsing of Greek culture). Human beings becomes the city culture identity in Roman empire time rather than God and Goddess, who are no longer enjoy the sacrifice dedicated on the shrine, but transfer from the sexual dimension and lustrous motifs to masculinity of warriors, heroes, and beauty of real human beings, from solemn tradition to a luxury art fashion and assumption of bureaucratic and the wealth.

No matter how eagerly the human beings are striving to replace the position of God in religions, the copy is fake but far more a simple intimation of physicality embodiment of figure but a creative methodology to enfranchise the power of body to a mundane, such as A Roman Lady as Venus (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek), which has a personalized face with Venus body in order to make it look like a real Venus from Greek, this sophisticated way of engaging Goddess with mundane features to propagate the victor of human beings, in my perspective of view, loses the beauty of original function in aesthetics and religious, even worse, it is a braggadocio of the omnipotent of human beings.

Professor Sean Cubitt points out three virtues of human beings: consideration, wonder and hope. ‘ The hope is hope for a future that is not this one’, he also proposed that we should ‘ refuse the present and open the gate to the future’; if we make the hypotheses that Greek is the past, Roman is the present, and then what is the future? By putting a head on the tradition of beauty’s body could not be the future, for future is a partial denial of the past by respecting the past as what it was, and behind the head and its copied body, the political, economic and easthetic expenditures of celebrating the omnipotent human sculpture can not be ignored, the ceremonies of tradition still carries on with new fashion of wealth consuming. The beauty, decreased in the sense of pure ideological concept for the connections between human and God are vague and unimportant, while the tradition, or the media works as the bridge. In Roman’s case, the media is the sculpture and could also be the expenditures, the warriors, the craftsman and even the public who are getting involved in the ceremony. As Sean said, ‘ the human activities of massive expenditures in ceremonies of wild joy is the anti-aesthetic design to function instead of beauty pleasure.’

In a larger picture, the sculpture and everything behind the scene of sculpture becomes a geology of meditation, a phenomenon of ecological principle, or the fact of human beings become the minimal components of machinery world of celebrating in a shopping experience on ceremony. Quoted from Sean ‘media is not human, it is a thing.’ A thing without judgment on virtues and sins, but ‘can be more trustworthy than human beings’ for things have non-human being character and things knows things, but we, human beings, do not know each other. And in this media world, we lost the human character (it reminds me of robotic in science fiction) for we are volunteering to be part of the media.

Should we accept the fact that we are media instead of human beings? I think it is challenging to answer the question but the pleasure of appreciating the copy of sculpture of Venus is real, even though the original of Venus lost in 300 BC but we can still imagine there is a beauty once exist rather than not.

Surface, Screen, Space

The Phenomenology and Imagination Research Group held a seminar on 18 May 2015 led by Cheng-Chu Weng, with the title ‘Surface, Screen, Space’. The seminar focused on an article by Bernice Donszelmann, ‘Touch screen‘ (Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol 1, No. 1 2015). In examining how Donszelmann addresses the relationship between screen and body, Cheng-Chu sought to reflect on her practice-based research relating to the sense of loss and love in relation to notions of surface, screen and space, which, in turn, relates to fundamental painting actions of mark and gesture. This article provides notes drawn from the seminar and commentaries from the participants, Yvonne Jones, Yonat Nitzan-Green, Bevis Fenner, Jane Bennett, Noriko Suzuki-Bosco.

Cheng-Chu Weng: The process of research is an isolating activity, which makes me feel that the chance to lead a session, and engage with Phenomenology as a group is really valuable. As a painter, I am interested in presenting the sense of missing through figurative work. For the seminar I offered an account of using Skype to speak with loved ones and also the memory of an earthquake from my early childhood which provided an image of my parents’ shadow as they looked over me and my siblings. This was seen through the sliding panel which connected to the home I was sleeping in. These stories or ‘scenes’ are key starting points for my practice. Engagement with psychological and physical experiences raise questions over what is near and far, the boundaries are of and between forms, or what is inside and outside of an outline (as a demarcation of meaning).

At the beginning of the session, I drew attention to David Reed’s article ‘Jackson Pollock and PieroDellaFrancesca Ride Lonesome’ (2015), which Donszelmann’s article, ‘Touch Screen’ (2015), can be read as a response to. A sense of taking it all in is raised, which I relate to my interest for what lies inside and outside of a line. Both Pollock and Budd Boetticher tried to fill over the space in the limit frames, as Reed explains:

All the scenes take place outdoors surrounded by swirling dust and distant mountains. There is a visual balance between the human figures and the landscape. Neither dominates. This is like the balanced figure/ ground relationship in Jackson Pollock’s overall space and it has the same effect. Watching this movie one is constantly visually alert, scanning the whole landscape and trying to take it all in. When one sees a detail one is always aware how it fits into the whole. (Reed, 2015: 43)

This sense of trying to ‘take it all in’ and being aware of how it all ‘fits into’ presents the limitation of two directional visual experiences, something that not only appears in painting but also cinema and through computer screens. The problematic of space, surface and screen is particular arose in Donszelmann’s article, and I commented on this in my preparatory text for the seminar. The human body ‘inhabits’ space, or as Heidegger’s term would put it, people ‘dwell’, we do certain activities in the certain spaces. The sense of being through the engagement of space is specific to my practice.

The function of Skyping is able to provide a ‘face to face’ conversation, yet the feeling between or literally ‘of’ the participants does not exist. The appearance of my family when I Skype with me is re-configured as image, they are pixel and data. The idea of the re-configured image is similar to Donszelmann’s reference to “multiple modes of being in the flesh and in time” (2015:63). Social websites create multiple-self in hyper-reality, and as a consequence I suggest ‘we’ are under the shadow of the computer screen, yet the pixels of the screen create shadows without shadow. The shadow is the key term in my own practice. Shadow itself contains umbra and penumbra. In painting, shadow and perceptive create illusory space, which might fit into Plato’s theory of illusion, yet what I argue is painting is able to create the real space. A space contains sensation and the painter’s body, especially the large scale of painting is able to include both of painter and viewers body in the painting. In this sense we can think of Donszelmann’s reference to Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, the “ubiquity of body” (2015: 61), to describe the gesture painting and the phenomenon of embodiment in the computer. I believe people are partially embodied in the computer. And the experience of embodiment in the computer or visiting cyber space is to rid of the physical activity and creates a ubiquity of body. I compared this point of view with Agnes Martin paintings. What I tried to emphasize was that painting is able to present or engage the real body, either psychologically or physically, as Cooke, Kell and Schröder cited Linville, “illusions of textures that change as viewing distance change” (2011:201).

On the other hand, I believe our modern visual appetites have been increased by the moving images, which makes me doubt question how people prepare themselves in front of a piece of work. What is the relationship between the artist, the work and the viewer? How does the phenomena or the environmental effect the process of ‘feeling’? How to open our five senses to absorb the phenomena? In addition, I referred to the phenomenon Walter Benjamin labels ‘aura’, which cannot be found in the re-presentation, copy, and digital data. Following above issues, how to attract the viewers’ eyes are not only appear in painting but also the other form of artwork. This problem seems to extend from the philosophical issue, what is being? To address this issue, I have changed the form of my practice from painting to installation. Each practice not only evokes the question of being but also the question: What is inside and outside of the outline? This question may relate to the issue of the relationship between two- dimensional and three-dimensional, yet what concerns me is further than that, which includes psychological issues and visual experience. I believe the relationship between practice and phenomenology is able to interrupt. The idea that Phenemonology “can be practiced” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945: Vill), gives a positive view for me as a practice- based PhD student. This phrase acts like a glue between my practice and the written thesis. Moreover, Donszelmann’s article provides a phenomenological reading of the painting ‘surface’, but also addresses the relationship between body, flesh and computer. I am particularly interested in the method of addressing Merleau-Ponty’ theory, especially the idea of an eye without a body, which presents the emergence of the physical body, as well as magnify the issue of screen, as Donszelmann puts it:

[…], the human body is presented as in danger of atrophying via the medium of the screen and its ubiquity. These presentations are suggestive of a form of visuality detached from its corporeal grounding: an eye without a body, realized either technologically or in fantasy (the voyeur). This is a radicalization of a possibility that suggests itself already in many analyses of the nature of vision itself as the sense with the greatest predilection to being conceived in terms of an independence of subject and object⁴ and allowing scope for a too easy conflation of eye and mind. (2015:59)

The above sets out some of the themes and issues explored during the seminar, which might be encapsulated with four keywords repeated in our discussion: aura, sensation, intentionality and ubiquity of body. As one ambiguous response to these concepts is for me a technique of ‘blurring’. Blurring for me is both a sensation and the presence-loss of aura, so creating distance, and perhaps critical distance. A sense of distance is increasingly a part of my practice, and through installation a dynamic of ‘movement’ is allowed which potentially decreases the distance between viewer and works. In some cases the viewer completes the work, particularly my piece, Shoji, made up of small elements of tissue paper arranged in a grid, reminiscent of a shoji sliding panel. As the viewer walks past this work the delicate airflow of the passerby results in the small sheets of paper lifting, as if recording their movement, like a sine wave. This creates a ‘partnership’ between the artist, material and the viewer. Although ‘viewing’ the work typically comes only afterwards as you look back over your shoulder to see the paper just return to their original static position. This creates a delayed sense of the ubiquity of the body, to quote Melville:

[followingLevi-Strasuss and Merleau-Ponty] the opening of the world, the birth of the work, is at once the founding and foundering of a subject that finds itself only as a certain folding of the world on itself. This is the core of the “anti humanism” associated with this body of thought, as also of its theses on “the death of the author.” In this form, it is bound to a notion of work that presumably will have consequence at the level of such things as composition-the terms through which a work holds itself together and makes itself visible. (2001:7)

Following Melville’s view, in the Roland Barthes account of ‘the death of the author’, the author is not really dead, the author just shares the part of creation to the viewers. On the other hand, it evokes the research question: What is inside and outside of the creative attempt to mark out something, to make meaning? Is the viewer the creator or the artist is the creator? Commenting on Shoji, Noriko suggested ‘the paper movement is like the effect of perfume!’ This is a poetic description of the practice. The tissue paper make the invisible dynamics visible, which creates a lingering sensation of something that has just passed, just as we might notice all too briefly perfume of a person who has then left us behind.

Yonat Nitzan-Green: How to open our five senses to absorb the phenomena of painting? Cheng-Chu’s question is located within the wider discussion of how to think about painting in the age of screens (both computer and cinematic screens, in her text ‘Surface, Screen, Space’ May 2015). In her experience of Skype there is an ambivalence, as she writes: ‘I am able to see and hear my family through the computer screen, but they are not able to give me the feeling of them.’ This ‘split’ of the senses leads to a feeling of loss. In her paintings Cheng-Chu re-creates the sense of failure to transform the image from the computer’s screen to the plywood in her painting, which echoes the failure in communicating real feeling through the mediation of a screen. On the one hand, the screen’s surface disappears when an image appears, in the cases of photography, cinema or computer. Painting, on the other hand, is unique, as it offers both an optical illusion and a material surface. Bernice Donszelmann writes: ‘… the question of surface, if we begin with painting … is inseparable from the question of the human body … A surface was once … accessible to touch.’ (Donszelmann, ‘Touch Screen’, p. 55).

In the experience of screens the sense of touch becomes redundant. (Even in a ‘touch-screen’ this sense is reduced to the functional level.) Conventionally, as viewers we are not allowed to stroke a painting. However, in the close proximity between the viewer’s body and the painting the eye can stroke its material surface in a haptic way. Laura U. Marks writes: ‘Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze …’. The haptic image is associated with a ‘sharpness that provoked the sense of touch’ (Rosa Lee, ‘Threads’ in Rosemary Betterton (Ed.), Unframed, 2004, p. 124). Today’s technology can produce a high quality screen-image where details which are not visible to the eye are clearly visible on the screen. Yet, despite the sharpness of the image’s texture our sense of touch is numb. Laurie Carlos describes performance as ‘an experimental laboratory’ where ‘… artists from different disciplines interconnected’ and ‘… certain ideas in a painting or sculpture … often originated in some sort of performed action.’ (Laurie Carlos ‘Introduction’ in RoseLee Goldberg Performance, 2004, p. 9). Cheng-Chu shifted her practice from painting to installation, thus opened a performative, action-space. As such, the installation allows a de-construction of painting.

One question arising in this discussion is how to understand ‘material’ in relation to and the context of the sense of touch, installation and painting? Eugene Minkowski’s phenomenology suggests that ‘the essence of life is not a “feeling of being, of existence,” but a feeling of participation…’. Minkowski theorised the ‘retentir’ as ‘a new property of the universe: reverberation’. Gaston Bachelard writes about the poetic image and by extension, the artwork, the following: ‘… the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own … it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation … that … we can find the real measure of the being of a poetic image.’ (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994, p. xvi). In this understanding people, screens and painting, as well as the distance between them may be perceived as a changeable flow of reverberations. This action-space, as oppose to the illusion-space, expands to include virtual and actual spaces, bodies and things interact and participate in different ways.

Bevis Fenner: Cheng-Chu began by discussing some of the issues involved in translating her studio practice into theory or in negotiating the two. She described her reason for coming to phenomenology as a way to mediate practice and theory as it is a philosophical technique ‘between’ both. There seems to be a parallel between this process of mediation and the artist’s mediation of lived experience and memory through, or rather in spite of, representation. Cheng-Chu began her doctoral studio practice by painting from photographic images of her family taken from Skype. She describes how painting became a better way of representing memory than photography: “You can’t remember like a photograph. We remember in a fog”. However, this “fog” does not mystify like the silent lamentation of the analogue photograph. Instead of narratives of loss and the impossibility of retrieval, memory presents us with a pregnant absence into which fragments of Being loom. The screen of a Skype conversation is a literal barrier to this coming of Being. Yet its illusion tells us otherwise. Unlike the digital photograph, where there seems to be an acceptance of image as transient representation (Murray, 2008) – an object of exchange rather than and one of contemplation – the screen and digital interface of online communications such as Skype pose more illusive problems for the image. We seem to have a greater sense of ‘the real’ in the moving screen image and yet we are still dealing with flat representations. For Benjamin, the moving image camera allows us to penetrate the heart of reality to such an extent that we identify with the camera and not with the person presented to us on the screen. He uses the difference between two types of healer – the surgeon and the magician – as an analogy to describe the difference between our experience of ‘aura’ in painting and that of the moving image.

The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician – who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him (Benjamin, 1968: 233).

Through our own proprioceptive understandings of the body and its projection in space via the relationship between embodiment and mimesis, we are able to understand the space behind the screen as real and embodied by the those we communicate with. Likewise, this understanding of embodiment through projection or what Merleau-Ponty (1964) terms ‘a ubiquity of the body’, we are able to perceptually embody virtual spaces. We look at our friends and relatives who may be on the other side of the world and we can survey the spaces around them and follow the movement of their bodies through perception of own. Through the screen we can peruse the books in the background and perhaps see the objects that surrounded us as children. And yet this understanding of virtual space as real space doesn’t hold up. We cannot touch anything in front of us and the images we see are those of the past; they are – as Cheng-Chu suggested in the seminar – “ghosts”, not only because our understandings of those spaces come via memory but also, in a literal sense, the time delay means that the moments no longer exist. Such illusion is problematic as it presents us with a false window onto reality. The screen becomes a kind of trompe l’oeil through, which we think we can penetrate, perspectival, illusionary space. As Cheng-Chu also highlighted there is not only a mis-recognition of embodied reality in screen relations but also other forms of ontological inauthenticity online representations. We are fully aware of the process of mediation and use it to produce new representations of the self which can include manufactured authenticity and the hyperreal body. Indeed Baudrillard’s notion of a constructed or simulated ‘aura’, with no link to an original, holds true in the ‘selfie’ and other mimetic self-objectifying representational practices. In his blog All The Noose That Is Knot: Art, Culture, Para-Theory, Stanley Wrzyszczynski gives an interesting perspective on technological mediation of the ‘aura’ through digital representations. He suggests that, in hindsight, Baudrillard brings and entirely new perspective to Benjamin’s notion of technological reproduction of the ‘aura’ as a kind of aestheticisation or primitivisation of the enlightenment ideal of (re)producing or transferring meaning through society as ethical knowledge. He argues in the light of this that Benjamin’s mechanically reproduced aura relates to a very different understanding of the word ‘medium’ from its role in communications:

The word medium, for Benjamin, probably did not have the same connotations it does for us. After McLuhan, the word medium has a much more sterile, generic connotation (like a telephone wire, radio wave, or digital code- capable of carrying any signal, i.e. signifier). With Benjamin, it is tied to the understanding of aura, that is, a medium embodies or transfers the aura. I also came at all this AFTER reading a lot of Baudrillard who established an understanding of the possibility of a culture “grounded” on signifiers with no signified (the emphasis on potlatch, where the original, and the power of the original, is wasted on purpose in order to display “real” power). With Benjamin, there is still recognition of the “power of the original” which somehow is transformed with the technological copy… So for Benjamin, there was the intuition that technological society was, in a sense, becoming primitive, but not in the Enlightenment sense (where it is the opposite of intellectual “enlightenment,” i.e. ignorance), rather in the sense of how the power of the original is transferred or found in the copy, the technological reproduction, as a form of knowing (Wrzyszczynski, 2009).

This suggests that there is an aesthetic knowledge, which is more powerful and pervasive than that guided by the calculation of and adherence to moral absolutes. Indeed Benjamin’s consideration is an ethical one because he foresees the dangers of the technological transfer of ‘aura’ in ‘establishing controllable and transferrable skills under certain social conditions. This results in a new selection, a selection before the equipment from which the star and the dictator emerge victorious’ (Benjamin, 1968: 247).

In Heideggerian terms, the screen image, which carries the reproduced ‘aura’, unlike painting, cannot be experienced directly in ways that enable us to witness truth as unconcealment of Being. Likewise, the transmitted image, in which even the photographic surface is absent, fails to produce a truth of negation – an impenetrability or concealment – which produces a clearing for the unconcealment Being (Heidegger, 1978). Instead, ‘the relationship between what exists as surface and as projection no longer constitutes a drama in relation to which the body has a material place, even as negated’ (Donszelmann, 2015: 57). For Cheng-Chu, the retrieval of the body from screen relations is ontological rather than political but it is easy to see how both are intertwined. By retrieving the body from the screen we are separating ontological body from spectacular body; pulling the real from the illusionary. In imagination we are able to go, as Yvonne suggested, “through the looking glass” into the world beyond, where memory and imagination are more truthful than the already mediated forms we take to be real. In my response to Cheng-Chu’s session I have chosen to focus on very specific concerns, however, for me the key theme that emerged from the session was one of the artist as mediator, whether that is through the body and the brush – as in painting – or via the struggle to draw out truth of Being from the materials – in contemporary art practice, often the mediating technologies themselves – we have set out before us.

Jane Bennett: One of the strands that came out of Cheng-Chu’s presentation was the distinction between viewing painting / the computer screen / the cinema screen. The experience of cinema is usually a passive role for the viewer who has to enter into the temporal and illusory space contained by the film. The ‘surface’ is irrelevant in this case, but not the context. The computer screen places the viewer in an apparently active role, with choice to view or not to view but the virtual image has no substance in material or sensory terms for the viewer. When we view a painting in real time and space we are exposed to the materials it is made from, we can see the way in which those materials have been applied and take pleasure from that, and we sense the physical space it takes up in front of us. But we have had to learn to sense these things, and learn how to read the illusion of space in paintings – how to encode them. As well as the dual properties Cheng-Chu identified in its surface/space, painting has affect beyond the frame (see Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the ‘parergon’ of painting: The Truth in Painting (trans. 1987).

In spite of all these concepts around it, the distinguishing property of a painting is that we could actually reach out and touch it, should we be so permitted. This is what is missing from the Skype conversations Cheng-Chu has with her family. You can’t give someone a hug in a Skype conversation (not yet!). And yet you have the illusion of being in their presence. This is a different experience of the screen to viewing film or text. Perhaps we can use Svetlana Alpers’ distinction between Renaissance perspectival painting and C17^thNorthern European painting to think about these different experiences of the screen – the former style being comprised of narrative and interpretation, a contained scene that clearly positions the viewer as separate, whereas the latter is a partial view that represents the seen world and invites the viewer to enter that imaginary space.(S Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983) With video we are positioned outside, with Skype we are part of the experience. And yet, as someone pointed out, it is still not like really being in the same space. It is still a framed space that becomes all the more evident when you feel the need to make continuous eye contact (which is never quite eye-to-eye).

According to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, video offers painting ‘another surface to which to refer…one which is brighter than any that preceded it, unimaginably thin – describable only as an exterior when viewed as an object, a surface without depth – and continuous by definition. Everything that painting is not: an uninterrupted surface born of pure reason. What (provided one is not Heidegger) could be more seductive?’ (Cabbages, raspberries, and video’s thin brightness, Painting in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (ed D Moos) A&D 1996) Which perhaps sheds light on why it is so difficult to make paintings today.

Noriko Suzuki-Bosco: Cheng-Chu’s session raised many interesting questions around the concept of ‘space’ that surrounds the art work (painting), the artist and the viewer. Cheng-Chu summarises Jason Gaiger (2008:27) and notes the ‘qualities’ of painting is the painter’s view, which is the consequence of the creativity. To experience the inside of the painter’s world, not only require eyes but also the body. Cheng-Chu asks, how do people prepare themselves in front of a piece of work? What is the relationship between the artist, the work and the viewer?

As a painter, the triangular relationship of the artist, the art work and the viewer is of vital importance and I have always felt it necessary to produce work which offered ‘space’ for the viewer to access allowing for personal interpretation to be brought into the work to create further meaning. I wanted my paintings to create a shared environment where the relationship between the artist and the viewer was reciprocal.

Fundamentally, paintings offer the viewers a ‘visual’ experience. I have been questioning for a while whether simply offering the viewers this form of experience was good enough. It relates to Cheng-Chu’s question around the bodily phenomena of the surface of the painting and the digital screen. How does one bring the body into the experience? As a way to incorporate a more phenomenological approach, I have been increasingly engaged in creating works that invite, and depend on, the viewer’s direct physical involvement in the process of the making. The interactive orientation also implies an art experience that extends over time and this durational aspect is something I have found it hard to achieve by simply presenting a painting to the viewer.

Since the rise of conceptualism, the visual status of the work of art has not only been challenged but also the way in which the viewer relates to the work has been brought into question. Conceptual artist Susan Hiller has commented in her interview with Yve-Alain Bois, ‘I’ve increasingly allowed space for the participation of the viewers in the creation of meaning’. (Susan Hiller, Tate Publishing, 2011, p.31) The direct involvement of the viewer brings the art work into a social and discursive realm of shared experience, dialogue and physical movement.

Artist Stephen Willats also notes, ‘a pre-requisite for an art work that manifests a counter-consciousness is that the separation which existed between the artist and the audience is closed, that they become mutually engaged, to the point where the audience become the rationale in both the making and reception of the work.’

Grant Kester has argued that in order to engage in ‘dialogical aesthetics’ we need to understand a work of art as a process of communicative exchange rather than a physical object. (Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces, University of California Pres, 2004). Although I value the reciprocal relationship between the artist and the viewer in a collaborative environment and believe that empathetic connection with others can, perhaps more so, be encouraged by working together, the ephemeral nature of the project where the focus is purely on the process is something that I have a slight problem with. As a painter (and a maker), the visual experience is as important as the bodily experience and for this, I am reluctant to let go of the end physical object. To create a situation where the artist and audience are mutually engaged, as Stephen Willats has pointed out, but to have a physical outcome that still offers lasting space for people to connect with is a challenge that I am still working on.

Yvonne Jones: The session led by Cheng-Chu stimulated much discussion and a width of questions. For me the step-by-step ‘straight speak’ explanation of her practice process was refreshing and gave access to her research. The work was opened up for me at that point, offering both a haptic and theoretically experience, arising from this ‘key’ offered by Cheng-Chu. In turn this widened questions with regards to Art Research and what it is?

It seems the perspectives shift along a spectrum of definitions. The approach of SAR through their online journal of artistic research (JAR) is one of ‘exposition’. Here the work itself gives access and understanding to the underlying research, this form of research is encompassed by some academic universities, not by others. Most familiar (to me) is the requirement that the work be twinned with written words that both underpin the visual and unpick the visuals in order to prove rig our within the research and to establish through examination that the artist researcher has in fact generated new knowledge. This being the criteria for having a PhD bestowed.

The question was asked in the session, what is the difference between artists and art researchers? My response is that while maybe some artists can be accidental researchers, art researchers begin with a question and pursue it through art practice. Are art researchers artists, or merely using a visual means to illustrate a theoretical base? When a piece of art ‘touched’ the viewer it is the reverberation of the poetic image (Bachelard), that of itself moves within the viewer. Such a work may reveal to the viewer a new experience, or reawakening an inner knowledge, a sense of Being, in communion with the work and the artist who drew out the poetic moment. While others may the orise on the work, this creator and the viewer may not be so inclined, accepting instead the humanness embedded in the work. Such a work may well develop in the process of art research, and contradicting the above, there will in this case be a relating theoretical structure. Within Art Research the methodology is primarily visual art practice, Art Researchers are indeed artists first and foremost, it is the visual work that creates and develops the thinking-developing-questions, ideas, and theoretical positions, through curiosity; in my experience the work does however stand in its own right as an artwork. It will have formal visual structure, even when the rules are broken, it relates to the viewer through visual structures of form, shape, colour, line, direction, tensions, texture, scale and site. In research it is not enough for work and viewer to hold a silent experience, it has to be rooted within a theoretical framework. The methodology of this having developed out of science’s quantitative methodology, into a structure of qualitative methodology, which fits where it touches! This qualitative methodology requires to be expressed through the most common form of social engagement, that of the symbols that create words. Words can be formed either by the sounds that make up speech, or as here, in an academic environment, drawn (written) as the shapes of an alphabet.

So much was generated by the session, that there is only time and space to select an area, here, that of Art Research itself and to suggest that an Art Researcher does need to offer a key, whether a word or a thesis, to accessing the research, even when the work itself holds an experience for the viewer, it cannot be left as the work alone to meet the criteria of research. An artist offers the work of itself, a stand alone, as an experience.

References

Cooke, L., Kelly, K. and Schröder, B. (eds.) (2011) Agnes Martin, New York: Dia Art Foundation.

Donszelmann, B. (2015) ‘Touch screen’ in Journal of Contemporary Painting Volume 1 Number 1, pp.55-64.

Melville, S. (2001) Counting As Painting in Armstrong, P., Lisbon, L., Meliville, S. (ed.) As painting Division and Displacement, Camridge: MIT Press, PP.1-26.

Reed,D. (2015)‘Jackson Pollock and PieroDellaFrancesca Ride Lonesome’ in Journal of Contemporary Painting Volume 1 Number 1, pp.41-53.