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103 pages

English

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Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology engages deeply with visual art, and this aspect of his work remains significant not only to philosophers, but also to artists, art theorists, and critics. Until recently, scholarly attention has been focused on the artists he himself was inspired by and wrote about, chiefly Cézanne, Klee, Matisse, and Rodin. Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery expands and shifts the focus to address a range of artists (Giorgio Morandi, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Ellsworth Kelly) whose work came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century and thus primarily after the philosopher's death. Véronique M. Fóti does not confine her analyses to Merleau-Ponty's texts (which now importantly include his late lecture courses), but also engages directly with the art. Of particular concern to her is the art's ethical bearing, especially as related to animal and vegetal life. The book's concluding chapter addresses the still-widespread rejection of beauty as an aesthetic value.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Plethora of Issues

1. Transcending Profane Vision: The Art of Giorgio Morandi

2. At Vision's Crossroads: Body, Animality, and Cosmos in the Art of Kiki Smith

3. Image and Writ in Cy Twombly's Visual Poetics

4. Resonances of Silence and the Dimension of Color: The Art of Joan Mitchell

5. Plant Drawing, Abstraction, and the Philosophy of Nature: The Art of Ellsworth Kelly

6. Strong Beauty and Structures of Exclusion

Conclusion More Ethereal Bodies

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index of Topics
Index of Persons

Sujets

Film

Visual culture

Philosophy

Película fotográfica

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781438478043
Langue	English

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Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery
Questioning Art beyond His Reach
Véronique M. Fóti
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Fóti, Véronique M., author
Title: Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery: Questioning Art beyond His Reach | Véronique M. Fóti, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438478036 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438478043 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Reiner Schürmann and Louis Comtois
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Plethora of Issues
Chapter 1 Transcending Profane Vision: The Art of Giorgio Morandi
Chapter 2 At Vision’s Crossroads: Body, Animality, and Cosmos in the Art of Kiki Smith
Chapter 3 Image and Writ in Cy Twombly’s Visual Poetics
Chapter 4 Resonances of Silence and the Dimension of Color: The Art of Joan Mitchell
Chapter 5 Plant Drawing, Abstraction, and the Philosophy of Nature: The Art of Ellsworth Kelly
Chapter 6 Strong Beauty and Structures of Exclusion
Conclusion More Ethereal Bodies
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index of Topics
Index of Persons
Acknowledgments
W hen this book was as yet little more than an idea, I visited Kiki Smith’s exhibition, Sojourn , at the Brooklyn Museum. As it was a day of torrential, wind-driven rain, I gave up on carrying documentation, a notebook, or any purchased materials. Later on I contacted the museum in a quest for information, mentioning my inchoate book project. I received the most gracious and helpful reply from a staff member whose name I have unfortunately lost, but to whom I still wish to express my appreciation.
I also wish to thank Ravi Sharma of Clark University for taking time out from his academic schedule to help me with computer issues involved in getting the manuscript into final form. At Pennsylvania State University, Monique Yaari has extended similar help, as has Dale Silliman, Senior Research Programmer, who walked me long-distance through some thorny computer problems. Finally, yet importantly, I wish to thank Leonard Lawlor, my colleague at Penn State, for his sustained support of my work.
Introduction
A Plethora of Issues
The transcendence of the thing obliges us to say that it is plenitude only in being inexhaustible, which is to say, in not being fully actual under the look. … The senses are apparatus for making concretions in the inexhaustible … there is a precipitation or crystallization of the inexhaustible, of the imaginary, of symbolic matrices.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Transcendence of the Thing and Transcendence of the Phantasm”
M erleau-Ponty’s sudden death, in May 1961, not only deprived philosophy of a thinker whose work was incisive and profound as well as wide-ranging in the scope of its intellectual engagements, but it also foreclosed any continuation of his intensive studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual art, and of the challenges it posed to philosophy. Just the summer before his death, he had written L’œil et l’esprit (“Eye and Mind”) at Le Tholonet in Provence, and he was intensely engaged in writing The Visible and the Invisible , now extant only in its fragmentary form. The art that, due to his death, remained immediately beyond Merleau-Ponty’s reach was that of roughly the second half of the twentieth century, a century whose artistic innovation and complexity remain, so far, unrivaled. This foreclosure of Merleau-Ponty’s own access to recent and contemporary art has given rise to a widespread and somewhat unfortunate tendency among scholarly commentators to focus predominantly on the very same artists or artistic movements with which he himself engaged: prominently Cézanne, followed by Klee, Matisse, Rodin, and the challenges faced and posed by postimpressionism and cubism. His own focus may also have been somewhat culturally restricted, in that he did not consider contemporary movements in Italian art, such as Futurism, arte povera (poor art), or pittura metafisica (metaphysical painting), nor yet German Expressionism or, finally, the postwar rise and quick ascendancy to international fame of American abstract painting. The scholarly tendency just criticized has further been paired with a proclivity to concentrate on the issues that the philosopher himself discusses in his aesthetic writings, rather than engaging directly with artworks and the practices of artmaking, bringing them into dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.
Fortunately, however, some recent scholarship has, to a significant extent, overcome these scholarly restrictions. In The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics , Galen A. Johnson carries out in-depth analyses of Cézanne, Rodin, and Klee, in relation to Merleau-Ponty, linking them critically with a discussion of Barnett Newman’s rejection of beauty in favor of sublimity, and further with Jean-François Lyotard’s exaltation of the sheer event. 1 In Art, Language, and Figure in Merleau-Ponty: Excursions in Hyper-Dialectic , 2 Rajiv Kaushik explores Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “autofigure” in the context of his understanding of a “figured philosophy.” He situates Cy Twombly’s art (particularly his early “graffiti” pieces) at the site of an intersection between figuration and erasure, and between interiority and exteriority, which he also studies in relation to Klee’s graphism. Mauro Carbone, in The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty between Painting and Cinema , 3 and in many of his other writings, has investigated the philosophical import of Merleau-Ponty’s sustained interest in film. Anna Caterina Dalmasso’s recent work, Le corps, c’est l’écran: La philosophie du visuel de Merleau-Ponty , 4 offers not only a rich discussion of the philosophy of cinema and of the technologies involved in contemporary visual culture, but also an in-depth analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 lecture course at the Collège de France, “Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression” (The sensible world and the world of expression), 5 showing that it initiates his late ontology. In 2012, Saara Hacklin defended a doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki titled “Divergencies of Perception: The Possibilities of Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology in Analyses of Contemporary Art,” in which she focused chiefly on contemporary Finnish artists. 6 Finally, although David Morris’s profound and challenging new book, Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology , 7 does not directly address Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of art, but rather the emergence of sense or meaning within material and energetic nature itself, it establishes a standard and frame of reference with respect to which phenomenological studies of artistic practices and visuality will need to situate themselves.
Taking part in this scholarly conversation with a clear focus on visual art, this book seeks to interpret the work of a selection of artists in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Although these artists (who are American, with the exception of Morandi, but also introduce a more international perspective in that Mitchell and Twombly were expatriates, with Twombly being also a restless and intercontinental traveler) can roughly be dated to the second half of the twentieth century, no exact temporal delimitations can be established. Thus, for instance, Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) outlived Merleau-Ponty by just three years, but Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly lived and worked into the twenty-first century, and Kiki Smith is a living artist whose future work cannot be foreseen.
Given that no guiding principle of selection interlinks the chosen artists (or, to put it autobiographically, this book took its start from the writer’s fascination with certain artistic practices and issues, rather than from a philosophical agenda to which art would be subservient), a measure of heterogeneity prevailed. Heterogeneity is of course a key characteristic of twentieth-century art, and the artists discussed here have often embraced it and integrated it into their work, along with contingency (this is strikingly true of Smith, Twombly, Mitchell, and Kelly). Morris, moreover, points out the radical contingency of philosophy itself, particularly of phenomenology, which, he writes, “can be rigorously empirical only to the degree that it understands its very own concepts and sense as radically contingent on radically contingent being.” 8 Nonetheless, to allow heterogeneity and a certain contingency to inform the very structure of a philosophical work is to risk a lack of theoretical coherence that, as the writing of this book took shape, was a concern.
Somewhat surprisingly and utterly refreshingly, however, it quickly became clear that practices of artmaking as heterogeneous as Morandi’s still lifes, Smith’s complex and sculptu