Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jorella Andrews (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.685kg
ISBN:  

9781472574282

ISBN 10:   1472574281
Pages:   352
Publication Date:   29 November 2018
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Images INTRODUCTION: Painting as Thought Questions Rethinking thought Merleau-Ponty's trans-dimensional investigations An incarnational logic `Digging in the same place' - Merleau-Ponty's broad project PART ONE: Painting - Re-thinking Thought beyond Dualism and Positivism 1 `Nature' and `Consciousness'- Merleau-Ponty's Critical Encounter with Dualism Broken? The problems of rationalism and empiricism The naive consciousness and its reconstructive powers The significance of Gestalt Describing behaviour -- its limitations and scope 2 The Symbolic Forms and the Question of Integrated Being Obstacles The three forms of behaviour Beyond inherited structures PART TWO: Painting - Re-Thinking Thought as Perceptual and Embodied 3 Description and the Re-education of Sight How to start again Embodied perception - our only access to the real? Description: the first philosophical act Into the base of `inhuman' nature 4 Embodied Thought How do bodies think? Peculiar permanence The body in its intentional being Intersubjectivity, intercorporeality and otherness - foundational hospitality PART THREE: Painting - Re-Thinking Thought as `Silence' and `Speech' 5 The Being of Language, Reconceived A new index of curvature Merleau-Ponty and the priority of expression Syntax Language, truth and `universality' 6 Visual Language and the `Unity' of Painting Modern painting and the paradoxes of communication Cultures of display and debate - renegotiating particularity-generality PART FOUR: Painting - Re-Thinking Thought as `Secret Science' 7 Visibility, the `Flesh' of the World The `common stuff ... is the visible' The visible and the invisible Indirect ontology and anonymous visibility Chiasm, illusion, dis-illusion Immersive thought and `having at a distance' 8 Visual Treatises and the Search for Depth Painterly thought as secret science Intermundane space Depth of being and body The painter's effort and the fragility of the real Visual treatises Bibliography Index

Reviews

This meticulously researched book highlights the questioning mode of Merleau-Ponty's thought, outlining the philosopher's interrogations in the realms of the perceptual world and language. Taking a chronological but non-linear approach to Merleau-Ponty's writings, Jorella Andrews brings the philosopher's non-dualistic, inter-corporeal and open understanding of reality into conversation with modern and contemporary art. The Question of Painting shows that Merleau-Ponty's aim to `rethink thought' is still relevant to painting today and to the ways in which art itself can change the world in which we live. * Ariane Mildenberg, Senior Lecturer in Modernism, University of Kent, UK * This important study offers a compelling rethinking of how and why art matters. Andrews develops her case by way of an exceptionally fine exposition of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological understanding of painting as the deeply engaged apprehending of the world and the fabric of our shared existence within it. The refreshingly generous analysis makes newly apparent the value of such an approach for illuminating the ongoing ethical and intellectual significance of sustained artistic commitment to the visual broadly understood. * Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor of History of Art, University of Michigan, USA *

This meticulously researched book highlights the questioning mode of Merleau-Ponty's thought, outlining the philosopher's interrogations in the realms of the perceptual world and language. Taking a chronological but non-linear approach to Merleau-Ponty's writings, Jorella Andrews elegantly brings the philosopher's non-dualistic, inter-corporeal and open understanding of reality into conversation with modern and contemporary art. The Question of Painting shows that Merleau-Ponty's aim to `rethink thought' is still relevant to painting today and to the ways in which art itself can change the world in which we live. * Ariane Mildenberg, Senior Lecturer in Modernism, University of Kent, UK * This important study offers a compelling rethinking of how and why art matters. Andrews develops her case by way of an exceptionally fine exposition of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological understanding of painting as the deeply engaged apprehending of the world and the fabric of our shared existence within it. The refreshingly generous analysis makes newly apparent the value of such an approach for illuminating the ongoing ethical and intellectual significance of sustained artistic commitment to the visual broadly understood. * Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan, USA * With an agile multidisciplinary method, Jorella Andrews navigates the classic paintings of art history and the worlds of cutting edge, inter-cultural contemporary painting. Her deep scholarship articulates the intricacies of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic thinking and nondualistic ontology, with breathtaking range and freshness, forwarding it into our times. The Question of Painting is a tour de force of unanticipated juxtapositions of texts and images that show the power of painting, visual art, and philosophy to arrest and re-shape the social and political landscape. I have enjoyed it and learned very much from it. * Galen A. Johnson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Rhode Island, USA *

This meticulously researched book highlights the questioning mode of Merleau-Ponty's thought, outlining the philosopher's interrogations in the realms of the perceptual world and language. Taking a chronological but non-linear approach to Merleau-Ponty's writings, Jorella Andrews brings the philosopher's non-dualistic, inter-corporeal and open understanding of reality into conversation with modern and contemporary art. The Question of Painting shows that Merleau-Ponty's aim to `rethink thought' is still relevant to painting today and to the ways in which art itself can change the world in which we live. * Ariane Mildenberg, Senior Lecturer in Modernism, University of Kent, UK *

Author Information

Jorella Andrews is Head of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

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