Return to search

Grids : painting in a dialogue with the digital

The thesis is a body of work (paintings) and its contextual analysis. Together they constitute a method that aims to 'update' conceptions of the grid for painting, using digital media and poststructuralist philosophy/ theory. The thesis attempts to move beyond Rosalind Krauss' seminal text on the modernist grid, to re-assess its continued in contemporary painting practices. I argue that notions of the grid in painting expand beyond the tenets of modernism* marking a shift in meaning for the grid in terms of its relationship to the visual languages of painting and digital media. The grid is re-assessed under the terms 'emblem', 'sign' and 'metaphor', which appear in Krauss (1986). I then consider the grid as 'device', exploring its use in the construction of the submitted work, the written account of which demonstrates the flexibility of the grid in the production of painted images and the transformation produced by introducing digital media to the imagemaking methodology. I discuss work by Stephen Ellis, Alexis Harding and Sarah Morris, as examples of contemporary practice that use the grid to produce work that engages painting's relationship to the photographic, the digital - and the sheer materiality of the medium. I consider concepts located in poststructuralist work by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattan (1980) and on postmodernism, by Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard (1979). These critical paradigms are used for their deconstructive strategies and critical accounts of technology, to which digital media is integral. Introducing digital media to the methodology of the work has developed a discussion on aesthetics in relation to perception, specifically in terms of the material qualities of the work's surfaces in relation to the haptic. The architectonic structures, methods and processes - at work through the grid in painting - are located in the corporeal experience of touch and vision, considered in relation to the aesthetic conditions of the digital.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:503265
Date January 2008
CreatorsKey, Sarah R.
PublisherLoughborough University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

Page generated in 0.0182 seconds