Monday, August 16, 2010

A little late night phenomenology...

I thought I might mention some of the theoretical connections I am rather precariously attempting to discover in answering my thesis question...essentially I am trying to find both practical and theoretical connections between collage and assemblage methods and the major concepts explored in phenomenology...this is something that really only commenced as an intuitive sense of things...at times I am sure that i may be pulling a rather long bow with my constructed examples...but for me there is something within the very use of primary surfaces or found materials that is capable of a certain possession of experience that is deeper than any other medium...a visceral immediacy that is capable of allowing you to almost be that object or be that surface...the closest writing that I have found of course is that of Merleau-Ponty...but not necessarily in his most recognised concepts of perception and for the visual artist especially his writings on the arts and on Cezanne... what I have found as the most wonderfully vague connections to our experience of the world exists in his last unfinished manuscripts on the notion of 'flesh'...our very skin as philosophy...our very sense of our physical presence as philosophy...suddenly so many things no longer require explanations...sp    

1 comment:

  1. I consider myself a painter who uses collage and sometimes assemblage and sometimes with no paint- I come at collage and assemblage from my Asian side- with a love of weathered and worn and patinas and textures- wabi sabi-- and the love of placement- like the stones in the Japanese gardens- choosing and moving and placing is like a meditation. your search for the connections is intriguing to me. Some of my Asian collages are decorative because I love the textured papers and scrolls.. but I recently began a new series of collages on identity and memory- looking for deeper meaning and that is why I like to come here and read your posts.

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