Impulse and Strategy in the "Vestiges" Series: A Painting Project Examined
Dissertation, New York University (
1994)
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Abstract
This study was an investigation of the conceptual and the poetic dimensions in the artist's series of paintings entitled "Vestiges." It was begun in 1989 and continued through 1993. The series has had its initial impetus and inspiration from a conceptual, as well as a poetic dimension. ;The artist systematically examined, by sustained critical discourse, the extensive series of her works continually produced for a period of five years. ;The phenomenological analysis of the paintings was derived from Edmund Husserl's model and was the starting point for other methodological approaches included in the conceptual dimension and the poetical dimension. The phenomenological method was designed to indicate the process and the presence of a work as an imaginative experience. ;The conceptual dimension was comprised of the analysis of selected references to art schools/styles such as Impressionism, Minimal and Conceptual art, and personal styles such as Pollock's all-over paintings and Ralph Humphrey's frame paintings. Alluding to these references, the artist combined various concepts, methods and techniques borrowed or appropriated and synthesized them into a postmodernist mode. ;In the poetical dimension a reality was sought that could be independent from the painting arising from the initial formal construction. The poetical dimension was the imaginative experience which was a liberating agent from the conceptual structure of the paintings. The poetical dimension dealt with presence and absence, provoking open ended associations involving different theoretical discourses such as those of George Steiner, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Anne Cauquelin, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva. ;Throughout this research the "Vestiges" series was interpreted in the light of a dialogue between impulse and strategy in a postmodern context, which was the tenet with which the artist was dealing in her research