Models of attention

Abstract

In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’ (1990) is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuropsychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. Painting as Model argued for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This article proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting.