An investigation of beauty and contemporary painting: Kant, Greenberg and Neuroscience

Abstract

My motivation for my research stems from my practice as an abstract painter whose interests centre on form, pictorial space, surface quality and beauty in painting. For a long time I have been interested in the need for both freedom and restraint in the production of painting. In my practice I use an unusual material, containing translucent silicon polymers, because it provides a beautiful surface quality for my work. This is difficult to use; it cannot be applied with brushes, and so I developed a simple semi-autonomous machine for producing an image on canvas. The machine enabled me to paint with silicon polymers, to achieve a beautiful surface, but it imposed very severe restraints on the form of the images. This difficulty compelled me to consider the problem of the conflict between autonomy and freedom at a practical level and that in turn led to a reflection on the nature of this problem at the intellectual and emotional level. This thesis is, in large part, my response to this conflict. I begin my enquiry with a critical discussion of Greenberg's essay Modernist Painting in terms of the Kantian authority that he claims for it. I then tum to a critique of that Kantian authority itself. Common to both Greenberg and Kant is systematic argumentation in terms of wholly autonomous entities that makes a resolution of the conflict between freedom and necessity very difficult. In the second half of the thesis I use the concepts and empirical observations of affective neuroscience (which does not deal in autonomous entities) to develop my own theory of the beautiful and to use it as a critical tool in relation to both Kantian aesthetics and my own painting practice.