Event overview
Join Jorella, Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone for drinks, conversation and screened extracts from Ellard&Johnstone's film 'For an Open Campus' which is featured in the book.
+++ What does it take to reimagine the world and our place within it?
+++ And how might artistic processes of perceiving, documenting, making, and showing challenge how we think about thought itself?
Some of the questions that Jorella, Graham and Stephen will explore with reference to Jorella's new book and Graham and Stephen's 2015 film 'For an Open Campus', which is discussed in the final portion of The Question of Painting.
More about the book:
Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast - despite its significance as a site for continued artistic experimentation - has all too often been dismissed as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can painting 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 (1908-61). 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, ethical, and indeed scientific possibilities.
Taking an approach that moves between the fields of philosophical and visual culture research, The Question of Painting is organized around a closely focused, chronological account of Merleau-Ponty's 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 - implications that have a productive bearing on the personal, ethical and political challenges facing us today.
Review:
“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
Jorella Andrews trained as a fine artist and worked in media before turning to art theory, aesthetics and visual culture. She lectures in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths. She specialises in phenomenology and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and is the author of two books related to this topic: Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty (Bloomsbury, 2018). She also edits the Visual Cultures as... book series published by Sternberg Press.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 5 Feb 2019 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm |
Accessibility
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