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Taking a position: visuality and sensation in the work of Andrew Leslie by Carolyn Barnes |
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Taking a position: visuality and sensation in the work of Andrew Leslie In 1967, Sol Le Witt dismissed the role of the visual in art by claiming ‘what the work of art looks like isn’t too important’. The statement’s source text, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, drew a line between the tradition of art works that appealed to the eye and a growing body of art critical art directed to the mind. Charles Harrison argues this stark philosophical divide prompted minimal and conceptual artists to develop diverse strategies to attack all conventions of art spectatorship based on visuality; notably aesthetic relations, material form, personal style and manual mastery. Serial and industrially fabricated works challenged the place of individual aesthetic invention and manual facility in art while subverting traditional categories of studio production. The production of works for a specific time and place destabilized modernist principles of aesthetic plenitude and independence, especially when shown as entangled in complex social and institutional effects. Language, not perceptions or feelings, became a principle frame of reference for art, many works taking the form of words and various other ephemeral and non-material states of being. |
Leslie’s works often cover entire walls, investing interior space with a combination of sensory data capable of producing intense, complicated experiences. For example, while he actively incorporates architecture into his works the coloured light they cast on the supporting wall erodes its material presence. Conversely, the combination of repeated components, the large scale, the puzzle of what the substance of the work might be and where the visual effects come from create a strong push and pull effect on the viewer, resulting in a heightened consciousness of the body’s position in space and of perceptual processes. The general appearance of the paintings is also reminiscent of architectural screens and mechanised billboards, pointing to a culture in which the exchange of forms and ideas between art and design is profligate and bound to an immediate need to create maximum visual and emotional impact. For many radical artists of the twentieth century, the dimension of visuality in visual art was compromised by its problematic connections to the politics of taste and the practice of connoisseurship. Recent research in human computer interaction and cognitive science suggests the brain evaluates aesthetic information—like all incoming sensory data—in terms of like-dislike in around 50 milliseconds, affording humans no conscious access to the process and suggesting concepts of critical judgment are rationalizations after the fact. To increase the impact of consumer products, services and experiences it is likely culture industries will take this information and raise the level of affective relations in what they produce to full throttle. The immediate and pervasive visuality that characterises Andrew Leslie’s work underscores the collapsing distance between sensation and significance in the surrounding culture, achieving a socially resonant painting practice, but one in which the central challenge for the viewer is to maintain a critical consciousness. ------------- Notes 1. S. LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum International, Vol. 5, no. 10, 1967, p. 79. 2. C. Harrison, ‘Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder’, Essays on Art and Language, Cambridge, Basil Blackwell, 1991, pp. 29-61. 3. For a discussion of this aspect of Buren’s work see B. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962 - 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October 55, Winter 1990, p. 139. 4. See G. Lindgaard, G. Fernandes, C. Dudek and J. Brown, J., ‘Attention Web Designers: You Have Fifty Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression!’ Behaviour and Information Technology, 25, 2006, pp.115-126; T. W. A. Whitfield. ‘Feelings in design: A neuroevolutionary perspective on process and knowledge’, The Design Journal, Vol. 10, No. 3 2007, pp. 3-15. Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, where she leads a range of research projects investigating the role of art and design in public communication. |
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