The subject: blurring

Key takeaways : imprecision, uncertainty, memory, unconsciousness, distancing, composition

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What is a blur? It's a corruption of an image, an assault upon its clarity,the blur serves as a perfect general metaphor for memory, (...)"I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant," he explained. (G.Richter, personal communication).(...)"Their horror," Richter says, "is the horror of the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion." (G.Richter, personal communication,)(...)The pictures, ultra-loaded as they are, reject any attempt to bring their subject matter into focus along perspectival lines of ideology or pathos or transcendence.

McCarthy T. (2011) (1,November,2022) Blurred visionary: Gerhard Richter's photo-paintings, Available at: Available https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/sep/22/gerhard-richter-tate-retrospective-panorama (Accessed: The Guardian, 25th October.2022).

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For Richter this blurring concerns the human incapacity to know reality which for him is always subjective, imprecise, uncertain, transient and incomplete (Ibid.:74). By examining the relationship of Richter’s painting to photography this chapter points to how he has destabilized the photograph as part of his overall effort to reduce our faith in objective reality. (...)“facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic "(G.Richter, personal communication)(...)Richter needs photography in order to work on behalf of painting, the task of which, is to communicate – and the main message Richter most wants to communicate is ambiguity – hence the blur reappears in his abstractions. The photograph is not understood by Richter to be the end of seeing, but the beginning of investigation into what photographs are – and into their demystification. 

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Dr. Gerry Coulter (2013) 'Gerhard Richter’s Use of Photography to Challenge Our Understanding of the Real1', International Journal of Arts and Commerce, Vol. 2 (No. 10), pp. 83.

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The subject: the notion of abjection through literature

Key takeaways :  imagery, the Abject ,  unknown , distancing

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Kristeva explains, is the realisation of disgust and the ability to process something from the point of being disgusting, repulsive, to the complexity of horror. While animals can be repulsed by something—a decaying corpse, in example—their response to such an incident is predicated on disgust more than horror. For the human, horror quickly pushes simple disgust out of the picture: a corpse unexpectedly encountered may be disgusting, but soon the primary raw emotion is one of horror and fear:(...)Kristeva further delineates her view of the abject as “that experience, which is nevertheless managed by the Other, “subject” and “object” push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great modern literature unfolds over that terrain: Dostoyevsky, Lautreamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Celine.”

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Kristeva J. (1984). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, USA:The Columbia University press.

coalhillreview.com. (n.d.). Julia Kristeva’s Abjection: a Lecture on the Powers of Horror – Coal Hill Review. [online] Available at: https://coalhillreview.com/julia-kristevas-abjection-a-lecture-on-the-powers-of-horror/.

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The abject becomes the dark side of narcissism: the ambiguous, the in-between, the unassailable, in other words, all that has had to be repressed for the subject to separate from the mother and to enter into society. (...)Because art comes from the repressed and primal loss of the Maternal, Kristeva proposes that the work of art is at the heart of the Mother.

Art is the mother castrated in the symbolic, but because the Maternal is on the side of the Material, the Mother can be alluded to through the materiality of the work of art.

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Purdue.edu. (2019). Introduction to Julia Kristeva, Module on the Abject. [online] Available at: https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html.

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Kristeva also associates the abject with jouissance: "One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion" (Powers 9 ). This statement appears paradoxical, but what Kristeva means by such statements is that we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject (much as we are repeatedly drawn to trauma in Freud's understanding of repetition compulsion). To experience the abject in literature carries with it a certain pleasure but one that is quite different from the dynamics of desire. Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject, rather, with poetic catharsis: "an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it" (Powers 29 ). 

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Purdue.edu. (2019). Introduction to Julia Kristeva, Module on the Abject. [online] Available at: https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html.

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The subject: the undeveloped territory of feminist metaphysics

Key takeaways : the symbolism, the unconscious , the understanding of the sublime excluded women 

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The sublime, by contrast, was bound up with a ‘stretching’ of the nerve fibres: with tension and with feelings of terror and infinity generated by power, obscurity, magnitude, difficulty, absences (such as solitude, silence and dark- ness) and impressions of endlessness (146n; 132ff.) (...)Instead, these characteristics were increasingly debarred to women or presented as part of a ‘natural’ condition that women themselves were unable to transcend.(...)For Lyotard what is ‘terrible’ (and wonderful) about the sublime is not the constancy of the self, but its disappearance.(Battersby.2007.p.7).(...)As Lyotard puts it elsewhere in a much-quoted statement: the sentiment of the sublime ‘takes place’ when ‘the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept’ (Lyotard 1982: 78).(Battersby.2007.p.8)(...)Stockhausen’s comments are understandable in a way, in that most of us first learned of the New York tragedy through a series of images on a television screen—and hence through a framework of cinematic expectations that blurs the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, and the ‘actual’ and ‘art’.((Battersby.2007.p.22).(...)There is, however, another, darker, kind of femininity also operative in Eliot’s text: the mask of femininity that is created by the male lover as the object of his desire. As far as everyday life is concerned, Latimer only manages to function normally and stay sane by practising a type of ‘double conscious- ness’ which enables him not to register one of ‘two parallel streams’ of con- sciousness which operate within him (Eliot 1859: 203). For most of the time, Latimer’s relationship with Bertha does not require such a mode of self-decep- tion. This is because his desire ‘thickens’ the veil and prevents him seeing into her soul. Thus, we are told that the reason that Bertha is attractive to Latimer is because she is the one consciousness that is hidden beneath a veil ‘thick enough’ to block Latimer’s view into the ‘truth’ about the other’s thoughts and feelings:(Battersby.2007.p.118).(...)The individual does not represent an aspect of the universal, but is an expression of the universal forces that express themselves through his or her individual existence. What is envisaged is a kind of pan- theism that necessitates a transformation of the matter/spirit and self/non-self divides.(Battersby.2007.p.126)

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Battersby, C. (2007). The sublime, terror and human difference. Abingdon, U.K. Routledge.

Christine Battersby (2007) 'A TERRIBLE PROSPECT', in Christine Battersby (ed.) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference.. TheUK: Routledge, pp. 8..

Christine Battersby (2007) 'A TERRIBLE PROSPECT', in Christine Battersby (ed.) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference.. TheUK: Routledge, pp. 17.

Christine Battersby (2007) 'TERROR, TERRORISM AND THE SUBLIME ', in Christine Battersby (ed.) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference.. TheUK: Routledge, pp. 22.

Christine Battersby (2007) 'OURSELF BEHIND OURSELF, CONCEALED', in Christine Battersby (ed.) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference.. TheUK: Routledge, pp. 118.

Christine Battersby (2007) 'OURSELF BEHIND OURSELF, CONCEALED', in Christine Battersby (ed.) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference.. TheUK: Routledge, pp. 126.

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The subject: the concept of Aura , the theatre 

Key takeaways :   

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By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.(Benjamin,[of II] 1968, p. 4)(...)The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura.(...)It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.(...)To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the (...)theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception. (Benjamin,[of III] 1968, p. 5).(...)The definition of the aura as a “unique phenomenon of a distance however close it may be” represents nothing but the formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of space and time perception. (Benjamin,[of III] 1968, p. 21).

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Benjamin W. The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction: an influential essay of cultural criticism ; the history and theory of art.  New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.

Walter Benjamin (1968) 'II', in Walter Benjamin (ed.) The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 4.

Walter Benjamin (1968) 'III', in Walter Benjamin (ed.) The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 5.

Walter Benjamin (1968) 'III', in Walter Benjamin (ed.) The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 21.

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The term was used by Walter Benjamin in his influential 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin argued that 'even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.' He referred this unique cultural context i.e. 'its presence in time and space' as its 'aura'.

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Tate (2017). Aura – Art Term | Tate. [online] Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/aura.

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Perhaps Benjamin’s best-known work is ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.  This short piece provides a general history of changes in art in the modern age. Benjamin’s insight here is that each human sensory perspective is not completely biological or natural. It is also historical. The ways people perceive change with social changes, or changes in ‘humanity’s entire mode of existence’.

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ceasefiremagazine.co.uk. (n.d.). Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity | Ceasefire Magazine. [online] Available at: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity [Accessed 30 Oct. 2022].

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The space of our primary perception, the space of our (Foucault.1986.p.1)dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space.(Foucault.1986.p.1).(...)The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space.(...)Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. (Foucault.1986.p.6).

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Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces", Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986), pp 01-06.

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In 1984, Barthes wrote an essay called Leaving the Movie Theatre which would become an indispensable part of almost every cinephile’s reading list. Like most of Barthes’ writing, the essay is dense and discursive. He talks about how the images projected on the big screen are crucial for psychoanalytical investigations and he also confesses that he finds film theatres to be extremely sexy. A lot of it is shrouded by academic abstractions but the essay has become a cultural artefact because when it does provide clarity, that clarity is blinding. 

Leaving the Movie Theatre isn’t a significant advancement in film scholarship, it doesn’t talk about anything that the oneiric theory of cinema hasn’t covered before. Its description of the theatre as a heterotopic space isn’t special, Michel Foucault described theatres as such in his essay which predates Barthes’ reflections in Leaving the Movie Theatre. Consequently, Barthes agrees with Foucault’s observation: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”

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faroutmagazine.co.uk. (2021). Remembering Roland Barthes and why we have left the cinema. [online] Available at: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/roland-barthes-why-we-have-left-the-movie-theatre/ [Accessed 10.Nov. 2022].

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The subject: the undeveloped territory of feminist metaphysics

Key takeaways : the symbolism, Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. 

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Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.

The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness.

jungcurrents.com. (n.d.). Contact Support. [online] Available at: https://jungcurrents.com/carl-jung-symbolism-water [Accessed 5.Nov. 2022].

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According to Jung, people form their personality by identifying with imagos, usually images of a parent, that emerge from the collective unconscious.(...)The maternal quality of water is consistent with the nature of the unconscious because water could be the mother-body or mother-image in which we are sustained unseen and from which we are born (Jung, CW 8). (...)Latimer says, in a passage that draws directly on the imagery of Rousseau in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, but also on German Romanticism: (...)My least solitary moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me since my mother’s love had vanished out of my life....I looked up at the departing glow leaving one mountain-top after another, as if the prophet’s chariot of fire were passing over them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the white summits were all sad and corpse- like, I had to push homeward . . . .(pp. 189–90; and see Rousseau 1782: 85). (Battersby,[of OURSELF BEHIND OURSELF, CONCEALED, 2007, p.117).

Christine Battersby (2007) 'OURSELF BEHIND OURSELF, CONCEALED', in Christine Battersby (ed.) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference. London; New York (N.Y.): Routledge., pp. 117.

Battersby, C. (2007). The sublime, terror and human difference. London ; New York (N.Y.): Routledge.

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The subject: the ideas of black and blue, the memory, the relation of black and blue, the colour of bruise

Key takeaways : 

-The metaphor of wound is black and blue.

-These are colourso of the night, the ocean , the eyes, the shadows, the places of mystery and beauty.

-The ideas of black and blue represent the womb.

-Relationship with colour from my paintings ; blue and black: in terms of psychological aspect

- looking into what I choose the same tone of colour?

- the elements in my painting : forest, dark and light , water , moon (it might be associated with the colour of white , dark green, blue, purple)

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“First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts . “ (...)chaPter 1(...)“ Elegy of Milk, in Black and Blue: “ (...)“First Things: Two Black and Blue Though Things ;This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. (p.contents p13).(...)Ceci est l’histoire d’un
homme marqué par une(...)image d’enfance.(...)—Chris Marker, La Jetée “ (...)Black (and Blue) memory.(Mavor, 2012, p.2.introduction)“Hailing the womb, black can be archaic.2”(...)“I feel more or less certain that I remember being inside the body of my mother, inside this first home, a “dark continent” (Freud)3 in which no more could be seen than saturated blue-blacks, violet blue-blacks, and crimson blue-blacks, despite the fact that my not-yet born eyes were wide open. To be inside is to be blind. Likewise, my fetal ears heard the shallow breath of my mother. I heard the sound of her heartbeat: a crushing, cush- ioning thumping, not unlike the sonorous palpitation which pounds its way through the black underground cavern of La Jetée, Chris Marker’s film of 1962.” (Mavor, 2012, p.2.introduction)

Black is the womb-like bedroom where Proust wrote most of the Re- cherche, covering the windows to suppress all light, lining the walls with soundproofing cork, reversing his hours so as to turn day into night: in sum, living in a darkroom, developing his detailed pictures of life in black- ness.(Mavor, 2012, p.27.First things).

This black and blue book is sad and short. Sadness is new to me. But sadness is not the opposite of pleasure: it is its lining. My earlier books were a mix of things: the heft of nostalgia, the clouds of flight, girlish excess, boyish unstoppability. They were more blue than black. My relatively happy books (medium sized and, even, quite fat) certainly have endpapers of sadness. But this book is sparser with its ingredients. (...)“…feel the hurt of war, of love, of time like a bruise. (One meaning of bleu in French is bruise.) After watching La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour, a tenderness remains, though we may have forgotten how the bruise got there. If our skin is black, the bruises may not show at“…famous director put a light inside the glass of milk because he wanted it to be “luminous,” which curiously made it seem “poisonous.”28 As a result, “Hitchcock . . . produced a kind of anti-light, with properties normally asso- ciated with darkness. A cold, wet, colorless light, which hid more than it made visible” (Peter Blegvad).29 …” (Mavor, 2012, p.13.SPARSER part)

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Mavor, C. (2012) Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, Sans Soleil and

Hiroshima mon amour. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Carol Mavor (2007) 'introduction', in Christine Battersby (ed.) Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 2.

Carol Mavor (2007) 'First things', in Christine Battersby (ed.) Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 13.

Carol Mavor (2007) 'First things', in Christine Battersby (ed.) Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 27.

Carol Mavor (2007) 'SPARSER part', in Christine Battersby (ed.) Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 13.

The subject: The conceptual relationship of emotional or physical reaction for colours 

Key takeaways : 

The notions of perception for colour ,

The perspective of colour from philosophers and scientists associated with

The development of theories for colours

Discussion of contemporary perspectives for colour 

The perception of colours historically and physically

The discussion of contemporary perspective for colour

How to react for colour

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It can leave an intolera-ble and “powerful impression” and result in a type of visual incapaci-tation that, he suggests, “may last for hours” [3]. Exposure to blazing light—“red” or “white” light, as the fictional character cries—in real life can result in blinding after- effects; (Colour mad LEONARDO, Vol. 47, No. 5, pp. 460–465, 2014 461).

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The perceptional systems of colours

Whether aesthetics or taste, illusion or hallucination, our re- sponses to color run a gamut. Color perception, however, can also elicit intense sensory responses. Colour mad LEONARDO, Vol. 47, No. 5, pp. 460–465, 2014 461

like Matisse, Massumi uses the term “vivacity.” Going beyond synesthesia or cross- sensory responses, Massumi argues that color perception is a “self-activity of experience,” an “ingressive activity” .(Colour mad LEONARD,Vol. 47, No. 5, pp. 460–465, 2014 461).

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White

 for example, walking out of a dark corridor into a bright, sun-lit room. Occurrences of such illu- sions or optical “whiteouts,” which are momentary and do not last as long as Goethe suggests, make Marnie’s hallucinatory condition
palpable, and her delusory state resonates with our percep- tional systems. (Colour mad LEONARDO, Vol. 47, No. 5, pp. 460–465, 2014 461).

Blue

The intensity of the blue gives rise to what Henri Matisse called the “vivacity” of color, or intense “retinal sensa- tion.” Color, as the early avant-garde artist suggested, produces a physiological liveliness that potentially can jump across the senses and invoke tactility or cause palpitations. He compares such trembling to the “‘vibrato’ of the violin” ([4]. Colour mad LEONARDO, Vol. 47, No. 5, pp. 460–465, 2014 461)

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The contemporary perspective of the colour

More specifically, Hering’s ideas led to insights regarding color constancy and explanations per- taining to visual illusions such as color afterimages. (p. 464 Miller, “He” Had Me at Blue )

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Miller, B. L. (2014) ‘“He” Had Me at Blue: Color Theory and Visual Art. (cover story)’, Leonardo, 47(5), pp. 460–465

The subject:  the materiality of paints for paintings, colour.

Key takeaways : Silke Otto-Knapp , the relationship of painting materials and canvas. 

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I looked at this book to explore how to adopt painting materials like oil, acrylic, gouache and watercolour paints on canvas with a range of methods and brushstrokes. There are some interesting artists who discuss the material nature of paintings and how they directly relate to the subject matter.

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Schwabsky, B. and Phaidon Verlag Gmbh (2016). Vitamin P2. Berlin Phaidon.

Melick, T., Morrill, R. and Rattee, K. (2019). Vitamin P3 : new perspectives in painting. London: Phaidon Press Inc.

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