Speculative scholarship: Between text and image

Abstract

This experimental text considers the application of painting as a philosophical practice through an inquiry of what it actually means to have knowledge of an artwork. That is, what does it mean to think materially, in Hubert Damisch’s words, ‘what does it mean for a painter to think?’. Within this context emerges a dialogue between the cognitive, the analytic and the poetic, seeking to embody and offer a picture of the experience of the visible. This grows from an interest in the philosophy of perception, specifically engaging current approaches in embodied cognition and blending theory, considering vision and visual perception as an ontologic process. The text presented below seeks to explore the possibilities of carrying over this philosophical terrain to questions of received language, ideas of originality and problems of authorship. This is a painter’s task – an approach to ‘text as image’ – and is not only about devising and exploring a specific format to speak about how painting works but also about staging a compositional technique and textual act of re-production between experimental writing and the material practice of painting. Presenting unorthodox academic writing seeks to situate ideas not only within scholarship but also in how that scholarship might be transmitted effectively.