From Apes to Zeitgeist: An A to Z of Conceptual Painting

Abstract

Arguing for the relevance of painting’s criticality amongst other image and image-based platforms is a project based on recuperation. It is the recuperation of historical ideas, conceptual tactics, reflexivity and agency beyond the canvas that allows for a further teleological critique of our perception and reception of an image-saturated world. Examining the conceptual strategies internal and external to the medium of painting, in order to investigate other visual platforms, forms the basis of my thesis and creative work. I am interested in the practical matter of the image as a site for theoretical and visual manipulation into a painting. In this paper, I wish to show how conceptual painting has the capacity to infiltrate and comment on the networks and systems that reside outside of paintings discourse, as well as those within it. Here I am making the argument that painting is still a diverse and open-ended medium, operating in a space of slippage and ambiguity, and in this way carries the conceptual legacy. Constructed in the lexicon of alphabetical order, this paper allows the reader to pass from one chapter to any another; there is no set order for reading. I retrace painting’s previous conditions as a way to define its critical position within today’s economy of images and image-making, and frame the category of painting through an expansion of certain materialist traditions, contemporary theory debates and advances in scientific knowledge in order to address the visual challenges that bind the artist to the medium of painting and allow the medium of painting to continue as an open-ended site for critical investigation and the production of meaning.