DESINFECCIÓN QUÍMICA

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This research originates in the desire to investigate ways in which painting can provide new critical ways of thinking and understanding the world. I use the phrase ‘new ways of thinking’ to denote both new ways of thinking in detail, about specific subjects, but also to denote new

methods of thinking. If the hermeneutic model is accepted, we are dependent on dialogue – the exchange of views with others – to extend both specific understandings and methods of thinking. Hermeneutics raises the problem that thinking is not possible without a method of thinking, but that these methods are always limited by their history and character. This suggests that thinking would not be possible outside the limitations of traditional understandings were it not for the fact that new technologies, like photography, and artists, provide new modes. History is the process of developing those initially uncertain methodologies until they are fully revealed over time. New technologies, however, also (eventually) suffer from the limitations deriving from their particular features or ways of operation. While they are useful in providing new ways of understanding for a time, they are always constrained by the inherent limitations of their make-up. A problem with systems generally is that they tend to be oriented towards the creation of certainties and thus neglect the potentially productive liminal ground that doubt and enquiry inhabit. Their advantage is that they establish the clear familiar common language (the mutually understood cultural conventions) that facilitates dialogue. Familiar paths are needed to explore those that remain unknown.

The paintings in Pictures of the Body attempt to negotiate a path between familiar and new ways of looking. They attempt to maintain the possibility of dialogue by referencing traditions but simultaneously liberate the viewer from the limitations of each, by offering two alternative ways of looking simultaneously through the painting / photography hybrid. Because this hybrid is not yet fully independent or articulated, and because the two ways of looking are so different, and each separately so useful, the ground between them is fertile territory for exploration. Hybrids are most importantly hybrids of the discourses that constitute the way of thinking that each separate discipline utilises. The notion of the photograph as index is one such attendant discourse which introduces the possibility of documentary. The idea of fiction is, again, only one

discourse amongst the many contained within the tradition of painting. All these primary adjectival discourses are, in turn, dependent on many more ancillary discourses that derive from the history that precedes the new technology. The advantage of new hybrids is that they are not yet automatically inhabited by already defined discourses which have become ideologies. The reader cannot find standardised precedents that enable easy, formularised, ways of (not) processing the subject matter. The combination of modes and the conflicting discourses they invoke, not only widen the vocabulary able to be applied to the subject matter, it also places reliance on the reader’s experience and locates the subject within their own horizons.

My use of the general terms ‘norms’ and ‘standard’ apply to modes of communication and understanding both inside and outside specialist areas of thinking and practice. Grant Kester (in Conversation Pieces) develops the idea of established or traditional ways of thinking in saying:

We are constantly framing our experience of the world through representational systems. To interact with others we require a shared language, and even our visual experience involves a kind of literacy as we learn to interpret the conventions associated with photographs, cinema, paintings, street signs, and so on. These systems are necessary but also dangerous. They lead us to believe that the world is a fixed and orderly place and that we occupy a privileged position of stability and coherence within it.40

Even specialist knowledge such as that applying to painting comes in the form of particular modes or genres through which particular meanings can be communicated. The genre painting of the 17th century allowed the subject of bourgeois life to be both examined and celebrated – similarly cubism, expressionism, abstraction, minimalism, collage and many other painting modes allow and open particular conversations. ‘Painting’ is a very broad category incorporating innumerable ‘dialects’ and has a tradition of colonising new areas of conversation. This requires new modes. Pictures of the Body is just such an attempt to wrest from photography the exclusive right to discuss such issues as current affairs.

The normal channel for communication about the site that Pictures of the Body explores is news media photography. Direct reference to current affairs is not yet standard in painting. Previously, Collage allowed a contemporary and political reference through incorporating contemporary traces but it makes documentary reference directly by using photographs. This corroborates the particular authority that photography claims.

Grant Kester points out that the role of art is to upset conventional modes of expression and ‘understanding’. Referring to the challenge of the avant-garde he says:

This tendency is based on the assumption that the shared discursive systems (linguistic, visual, etc.) on which we rely for our knowledge of the world are dangerously abstract and violently objectifying. Art‘s role is to shock us out of this visual complacency, to force us to see the world anew.41

While the avant-garde of the early Twentieth Century saw its role to ‘…frustrate the existing norms and expectations so completely, as to render it utterly unpalatable to the appropriative powers of consumer culture’.

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A carefully fashioned hybrid can become the sort of nonstandard

My research aims to frustrate expectations within the framework of horizon linking.

43 _{mode that has the capacity} to surprise and give a jolt to the viewer. This helps to precipitate the ‘fresh look’ I talked about previously. In keeping with its subject matter Pictures of the Body is not simply a subtle variation on a standard form. It is nonstandard as painting, photography, documentary, fiction, figuration and abstraction. It also offers different modes of perception from those of the originating discourses. In painting, modular repetition, aggregation as an installation and systematised manufacture, are all nonstandard. The research highlights hybrid spaces between dexterity and the rudimentary. It is nonstandard to photography in being mediated by hand rather than machine, and it rejects the authority paradoxically granted by (entropic) detail. It is also nonstandard even as a conventional photograph / painting hybrid in that it refuses, as a painting, to resemble a photograph44

The intention of the artwork is to promote interpretation, through encouraging a fresh look at the subject matter presented. Interpretation is partially instigated is through the activation of delay. Delay is the suspension of the resort to formularised (non) cognition. In Pictures of the Body this inability to find resolution is first created by the multiple hybrids operating, then, by the lack of those features that confer the authority that each mode relies on – the absence of usual signs . The installation does, however, identify itself as an installation of paintings. In doing so it gives clear direction as to the (imaginative) mode of thinking it advocates when considering this particular subject matter. The source news photographs should induce an empathetic response directly since they are stories about significant trauma, but they do not. Pictures of the Body challenges photography’s place as the leading documentary medium by making a counter claim that painting can tell us much more about ourselves, and the stories around us, by presenting less detailed information.

of painterly virtuosity and the lack of visual information of the photograph. The installation also undermines conventions through the juxtapositions of enjoyment and grim subject matter, of figuration and abstraction and the orderliness of hard edged divisions with the instability of optical confusion. A further volatility derives from the fact that the pictures become like photographs from a distance but become abstractions with proximity.

The point should also be made that interpretation itself is a nonstandard perceptual response. As I have intimated, the narratives presented are not the only subject of the work. More important is the capacity of the work to instigate interpretation as a response to an environment of increasingly dominating and totalising discourses that over-simplify the complexity of global existence exemplified by the tendency of increasing alienation from the other and polarisation around competing discourses. Some news media images of conflict and violence do increase our exposure to others, but often also inure us against any imaginative identification with their particular plight. We are required to be very selective about our instigation of interpretation simply because we are provided with too many situations when it might be applied. Through the practise of delay, interpretation enacts (Rancière’s) ideas of emancipation from ‘the visible, the thinkable, and the possible’ as defined by ‘the Police’. ‘The Police’ (I repeat) are those ‘forces [that] conspire to maintain things as they are – maintaining the boundaries between disciplines, maintaining the order of the ‘known’...’45

A further departure from normal formats occurs through the way these paintings are hung to manipulate spatial features of the gallery through repetition. Each of a series of hangings tried to make different meanings available, both through the impact of the collective as an installation within the architectural space and through the differing associations between individual paintings. Two different, but equally affective hangings were presented during the public exhibition at Aratoi Museum of Art and History in 2010 under the title 45 Pictures of the Body. All 45 paintings of the series appeared at some time during a suite of constantly changing arrangements. Since the hangings were formularised it was possible to remove and replace individual works in order to change the associations between them. Each arrangement was able to be seen as provisional (40 displayed at one time in the grid arrangement and 37 in the linear format), emphasising the continuing fluidity of the subject matter and the unpredictability of the historical events the exhibition focuses on. This experimentation with presentation was carried further in arrangements explored at The Engine Room at Massey, Wellington, in December 2010.

Reception, Comprehensibility and Pleasure