Idiom Post-medium: Richter Painting Photography

The Dialectic of Truth and Appearance in Lacan’s Reading of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted-from-photographs

One of the most important contemporary theoretical approaches that can be used to analyze works of art is the theories of Jacques Lacan (1901-1980), a French post-structuralist psychoanalyst. By combining psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, he analyzes the world of the human subject’s mind in a series of intertwined and extensive cultural and social relationships.This art...

LYOTARD’S DANCE of PAINT

I recently experienced a difficult creative block, which led me to switch my painting medium from acrylic to watercolor. For many years I had poured acrylic paint as part of a processoriented method of making paintings. That is to say, the use of the human hand was minimized, the paintings allowed to “grow” on their own. But I had become bored with this method and felt limited by my technique. ...

Disco as Operating System, Part One

When exactly did the era of the medium dissolve? Like most cultural phenomena, the dissolution of the medium and its attendant auras—painting, fi lm, music, photography, the novel—is hard to pinpoint. So it’s useful to turn from the PowerPoint lectures of art history, with their virtual-poetic implications, and look for sensory clues on the dance fl oor of the seventies, regarded as an operatin...

Painting (and Photography)

Volume 5 Number 2

painting, which plays with color and form. It appears that criticism has learned very little in a century. Although we can accept, understand, and excuse the mother who disgustedly remarks that she has a 6-year-old daughter who can paint better than "that," it is depressing to find an intelligent, educated critic asking "what an abstract photograph is of" and arguing that "in photography the su...