MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE POINT OF PAINTING: Taking notes about the essay about the relation between the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84) and Art History, particularly painting, by Catherine M. Soussloff. -The development of Foucault’s thought, although it has references, is clearly influenced by the paradigms at his time. -Foucault saw painting as evidence and explanation for the transformation of cultures, the evolution of societies. -Serial History, his method to analyse Art History, offers a different approach to history: Instead of perceiving events and art individually, he links moments of transformation with particular paintings from its contemporaries. -Foucault’s essays on painting raise the question of how visual language communicates knowledge. -First example: Paintings by Masaccio in Florence in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. The paintings on the walls are visually ordered and framed for legibility, according to the biblical stories they depict. -His definition of the “Episteme” helps understanding how he perceived painting: The Episteme is the totality of relations that can be discovered between the object being analysed and its discourse at the given period. -Painting’s discursive practice is embodied in techniques and effects, and this is what gives it a theoretical analysis. In Foucault’s words: “In this sense, the painting is not a pure vision that must be transcribed into the materiality of space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty meanings must be freed from subsequent interpretations. It is shot through-and independently of scientific knowledge and philosophical theme - with the positivity of a knowledge.” -Foucault diverged dramatically in his conception of painting from earlier art theorists: he made a distinction between painting as a “savoir”, and the kind of knowledge produced by science and philosophy, the “connaissance”, while the previous theorists had perceived painting as a “connaissance”. -His method is a chronologically structured comparative method. -Foucault's understanding of painting was influenced by Merleau-Ponty's essay "Indirect language and the voices of silence" : How ideas of visual representation change over time, and why oil painting is so relevant and highlighted. -Merlau-Ponty's definition of masterpiece is very interesting - He says that a masterpience is the result of an accretion of knowledge of technique over time - That a true masterpiece makes all the earlier attempts useless and stands out as a landmark in the progress of painting History. -" I can define the modern age in its singularity only by contrasting it with the seventeenth century on the one hand, and with us, on the other hand." This is a method based in contrasts, inspired by Saussure's teachings about signs. Merlau-Ponty explains Saussure's philosophy : "Signs do not signify anything (...) Each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence between itself and other signs." This means that its easier to identify an age, century or culture's aspects when contrasting it with different ages/cultures/centuries. -Foucault's vision is that it is through painting or with paintings in mind that the major concerns of the modern age may be seen and by which they are revealed. -In his four essays on painting, Foucault specialised in realist paintings. Why? 1: Realism indicated a visual and verbal verisimilitude, it is supposed to represent reality, its embbeded in techniques and skills on how to create the illusion of real. 2:It also indicated a significant relationship to historical representation and its political cultural context. As Erich Auerbach explains art's relationship with the moment it is created: "The characters, attitudes, and relationships of the dramatis personae, then are very closely connected with contemporary historical circumstances; contemporary political and social conditions are woven into the action (...)". -Foucault analyses Fromanger's painting process: The artist projected black-and-white snapshot slides or transparencies of contemporary events onto canvas, fixed it there by painting it alla prima, and added the colours later. This process combined the technologies of photography with the time-honoured techniques of oil painting. This method promises a knowledge of events and techniques, visible and known. -Foucault was also interested in how and why painting has been aknowledge, since the begginning of the Renaissance, as the medium that most appealed to the mind through its ability to give pleasure as a result of its beauty. Foucault wrote: "That which gives me pleasure in painting is that one is truly obliged to look. So, that gives me a sense of repose."
-The term "pleasure" is also used by Foucault in his book "The History of Sexuality" (1984). "He explains the history of sexuality as an exploration of the 'arts of existence' by which men 'seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre (job, work, profession, task) that carries certain aesthethic values and meets certain stylistic criteria'". -According to Megill, Foucault's work is underrated and minor because it is anti-disciplinary, his approaches could not be assimilated into the disciplinary canons and approaches of academic history. This is why Foucault's thoughts on painting haven't receive as much acclamation as it should.
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