Purdom, Judy (2000) Thinking in painting : Gilles Deleuze and the revolution from representation to abstraction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production
that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an
ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting
resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters
representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the
movement of matter.
In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a
philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a chapter on Bergson
and Merleau-Ponty. Here I introduce the notion of 'thinking in
painting' and argue that, while in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of
art painting is a pedagogical investigation of the pre-human, chaotic
and invisible 'depth' of a lived visible world, Deleuze takes Bergson's
commitment to the possibility of moving beyond the human seriously
and reverses the order of perception in order to seize the non-human
virtual that eludes actualization. For Deleuze, the task of painting is
therefore not to reveal the ontogenesis of the actual and the lived, but
to extract the virtual and to embody it as a monument to that event.
In abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of
perception to the work of paint, and in the subsequent chapters on
Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon I explore specific practices and
their peculiar logic of sensation. In Mondrian we see the strange space
of virtuality unleashed when the line is not constrained by the closure
of the punctual system, and in Pollock's explosive "all-over" paintings
identify that space not as a chaos but as a chaosmosis or machinic
heterogeneity. I argue that by understanding these modulating and
rhythmic compositions as haptic spaces, we break through the
distancing of visibility and can begin to think at the level of expressive
matter. I then turn to Klee, and using the famous image of "taking a
walk with a line" explore the notion of the emergent figure in the
context of Klee's aim to "render visible". What we find is an art where
space and the form of expression works on the plane of composition
and refers only to the unfolding rhythms of the abstract line. In the
final chapter I discuss Bacon's portraits and look at how the
multiplicity of the event that is maintained in the diagrammatic
composition is drawn into the recognizable face. I conclude that the
embodiment of the non-human event forces thought to confront the
possibility of the emergent identity that is realized in the abstraction of
"thinking in painting".

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) N Fine Arts > ND Painting
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995 -- Criticism and interpretation, Painting -- Philosophy
Official Date:	September 2000
Dates:	Date Event September 2000 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Philosophy
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Battersby, Christine, 1946-
Sponsors:	Arts and Humanities Research Board (Great Britain) (AHRB)
Extent:	vii, 299 leaves
Language:	eng

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