Paul Crowther
Rationality makes humans special but the power of imagination, and the capacity to create visual, verbal, written, and musical images, is just as central to being human. Through imagination we can project what it might be like occupy times and places other than the present , or what it might be like to be other persons. Imagination thus transforms our relation to Being.
I trace how imagination operates as a necessary condition of personal identity, and in the making and experience of art - especially visual modes. My approach is object-based, centering on close phenomenology of artworks (as things made as well as perceived).
My more general approach in aesthetics and philosophy of art is normative - based on the primacy of embodiment. I argue that there are sound objective grounds for judgments of aesthetic and artistic value, and that the phenomenon of art is not some existential luxury but central to being human at different levels. I try to link the analytic and Continental traditions through a method I call 'post-analytic phenomenology'. The attached paper on ' Imagination, Language, and the Perceptual World' describes this.
I've published many books on the aforementioned topics. These are listed elsewhere on my academia.edu entry. Publishers aren't keen on authors uploading books, so where I can, I have attached summaries of the more recent volumes.
I collect Victorian art in collaboration with Mojca Oblak and have posted the catalogue from the first public exhibition of the collection (at the National Gallery of Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia). Our collecting strategy is one intended to develop my own work in iconography and philosophy of art History, and Mojca's practice as an artist.
I trace how imagination operates as a necessary condition of personal identity, and in the making and experience of art - especially visual modes. My approach is object-based, centering on close phenomenology of artworks (as things made as well as perceived).
My more general approach in aesthetics and philosophy of art is normative - based on the primacy of embodiment. I argue that there are sound objective grounds for judgments of aesthetic and artistic value, and that the phenomenon of art is not some existential luxury but central to being human at different levels. I try to link the analytic and Continental traditions through a method I call 'post-analytic phenomenology'. The attached paper on ' Imagination, Language, and the Perceptual World' describes this.
I've published many books on the aforementioned topics. These are listed elsewhere on my academia.edu entry. Publishers aren't keen on authors uploading books, so where I can, I have attached summaries of the more recent volumes.
I collect Victorian art in collaboration with Mojca Oblak and have posted the catalogue from the first public exhibition of the collection (at the National Gallery of Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia). Our collecting strategy is one intended to develop my own work in iconography and philosophy of art History, and Mojca's practice as an artist.
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Lucy Forrest has mystical experiences of the self but these are only brought to fulfilment when she has felt tragedy and love in their very depths, and has learned the secrets of the Colt-Paterson revolver. She first comes upon these in the Falkland Isles but her situation is made all the more explosive on moving to England, where she is involved in a passionate affair that awakens her full sexual potency, and is implicated in a far-reaching political conspiracy with the most deadly outcomes.
After much struggle Lucy achieves self-understanding, only for her new found freedom to be challenged again and again in a climax full of ironic twists and a desperate hunt to the death where the prey at last becomes the predator.
Husserl’s understanding of aesthetic consciousness, namely, its status as mode of valuing
grounded in the realm of sensory and/or phantasy appearance, which involves the
disinterested appreciation of such appearances. A number of comparisons and contrasts are
made with Kant’s aesthetics (with which Husserl’s has some affinity). We then move on to
discussion of the varieties of aesthetic object that Husserl identifies. Part II addresses those
arising from ‘external perception’ most notably the aesthetic consciousness of nature, and
Part III discusses the aesthetics of phantasy as such, and of the spatial arts, and of the
symbolically presented arts of literature and music. In Part IV, we address the interesting
general significance that Husserl assigns to the aesthetic and beauty, and in Conclusion, we
offer a critical review of his theory overall and a further development of one of its most
interesting points.
It might seem that any attempt to define storytelling will be undone by the sheer variety of its formats across different cultures. However, in order for one person to communicate with another (and to do so across language divides) there must be distinct but shared features of experience that are conceptually required in order for communication to take place. In what follows, I will define the scope of storytelling by reference to such features
It may seem that art’s incorporation of material from mass culture and associated productive techniques rules out it having claim to high-art status, but this is not so. Eduardo Paolozzi's 'As Is When' series of silkscreen prints (based on Wittgenstein's life and ideas) involves compositional strategies with a profound and creative relation to philosophical ideas of the deepest kind. Through this, they show how even a popular medium such as lithography can issue in masterpieces. Indeed, one might even claim 'As Is When' to be one of the inaugurating masterpieces of the Postmodern era – created in, and shaping, the very zone of transition from the Modern.
To establish these claims, Part 1 describes Paolozzi’s artistic development, and identifies his basic creative methods. Part 2 offers an account of Wittgensteins’s life and philosophical development. Part 3 addresses Paolozzi’s affinities with Wittgenstein’s life and ideas, and in Part 4, this is developed further through detailed analysis of the 'As Is When' series
of silkscreen prints. In Conclusion, the specific question of Paolozzi’s relation to Postmodern culture is developed in more detail.
In the book, I argue that visual artworks are not simply networks of signs that happen to be visual. Their status as made, assembled, or generated objects (i.e., their material ontology) is crucial.
In the following Introduction I set the scene for this main argument by first discussing the material ontology of the Banksy work that shredded itself immediately after it was auctioned (at Sotheby’s in 2018), and by then considering – in detail - how vision is given its special cognitive character by virtue of the body’s relation to space-occupancy (a relation that each different visual art medium embodies in unique ways).
If you ever wanted to know why vision is so special (and much more than a ‘scopic regime’) this discussion will explain it.
The rest of the Theory of the Art Object book itself analyses the material ontology of pictorial drawing and painting; abstraction; sculpture, assemblage and installation art; land art, architecture, photography, and digital art. As in all my books, the discussion proceeds by discussion of concrete examples.
As an alternative, I offer an evidence-based account, that sufficiently explains the emphasis on flatness and opticality as a side-effect of late nineteenth-responses to technology and urbanisation, and the replacement of the artist-as-spectator, by the artist-as-creative-subject. I show this by means of a phenomenology of late nineteenth-century urban perception
The discussion here justifies why digital art can be regarded as an authentically artistic mode of creation, and considers aspects of its creativity.
This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.
Starting from the nature of political art in the twentieth-century (and working with important insights from Walter Benjamin) I then argue that, in the postmodern era, political art has been systematically neutralized by the neo-liberal establishment, and that the politics of such art should now take place on a more general level – namely winning back the idea of art as an intrinsically liberating power. I defend this idea from the Left-Trumpist mindset of cultural relativism using further ideas from Theodor Adorno. This sets the scene for a larger project which is the main subject of The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming book.
In all my book, I offer a phenomenology of the visual arts which is object based; this means generated from the ontology of the medium itself.
I start from a radical adaptation and revision of theories set forth by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is then explained in detail why – despite its grounding in experiential constants - the sublime only emerges as an overt and sustained feature of aesthetic sensibility from the late eighteenth-century onwards. I then go on to consider why the sublime seems to disappear from European sensibility, only to re-emerge with great force in the postmodern era.
Finally, in Part Three, I argue that the dominant ‘poststructuralist’ dimensions of contemporary ‘oppositional’ thinking are actually deeply complicit with the effects of government policy. Again, I consider some possible objections to this view. My conclusion holds that the independence of higher education is to be justified on the grounds of it embodying that critical autonomy which is the ultimate condition of a free society.
cultural production, its constituencies of reception, and contexts of transmission and the like, render artistic value relative to the time and place of its production.My purpose in this critical discussion, is to move beyond the
restrictions and contradictions of such relativism. I shall argue that art engages with factors that are of universal rather than relative import,and that questions of value are connected to this. In doing so, I will hope, in other words, to subvert the relativist orthodoxy by clarifying art’s reality as art.I shall do so by, in Part One, criticizing and developing one of the great inspirations for relativism, namely Derrida’s notion of différance. In Part Two, I shall use components of that concept, namely difference and iterability to indicate the basis of art’s reality qua art, the justification of canonic work, and, in the course of this, art’s legitimate claim to high-cultural status.
The book’s main theme is as follows.
There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. (These are even found in drawings and paintings done by computers) Such intrinsic meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto. Indeed, the dominant tendency has been to reduce the visual image to models derived from literary theory. This amounts to a kind of existential mutilation of drawing and painting. Some philosophers (notably in the phenomenological tradition) have addressed the meanings of these practices more insightfully, but mainly by assimilating them to their own general philosophies rather than by offering a genuine phenomenology of what is involved in the very making of an image – pictorial or abstract. By explaining and developing this, our understanding of art practice can be significantly enhanced.
If aesthetics is to re-establish its philosophical importance a change is needed. Instead of engaging with art mainly through the crude notion of expressive qualities, or making it speak through the voice of ‘authorities’, we need a Copernican turn. This means a re-orientation of aesthetics towards i) those experiential needs which give rise to art, ii) the way they are articulated through artistic creation, and iii) a clarification of the unique effects consequent upon this creation.
In the present discussion I offer an approach to all these issues. My starting point is the origin of art. This question is usually approached from an ontogenetic or phylogenetic viewpoint. However, my approach is different – centring on why human beings need to create art in the first place. This has ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications, but as expressions of a greater experiential whole - where the need for art can be seen to emerge from factors conceptually basic to self-consciousness as such.
Part One, accordingly, outlines the horizonal basis of our experience of time and space, and then four key cognitive competences which are necessary to this experience. Emphasis is given to the importance of the aesthetic in its narrative form, as a further necessary feature emergent from these competences. Part Two outlines how literature, music, and pictorial art engage with this narrative feature in unique ways on the basis of their distinctive individual ontologies. They transform the aesthetic narrative of experience by embodying it in a more enduring and lucid form than can be attained at the purely experiential level. In this way, art embodies self-becoming, i.e. the developing of one’s own individuality in relation to others, and symbolic compensation for things otherwise lost in the passage of time.
(This is a much extended and revised version of a paper on The Need for Art, and the Aesthetics of Self-Consciousness done a s a keynote address at the European Society of Aesthetics annual conference, Dublin Institute of Technology, 11th June, 2015)
The structure of argument in “Art and Space” is cryptic and elusive even by Heidegger’s standards. The comparatively small amount of relevant literature tends to focus on the paper’s role within Heidegger’s own oeuvre (as an expression of changes in how he conceived space as a philosophical concept). There is a certain irony in this; for Heidegger’s main thematic in the essay is not the problem of space as such, but the way in which it is overcome in the sculptural work.
This is a quite surprising position, since, by virtue of its three-dimensional character, sculpture seems to be a spatial medium, par excellence. Since Heidegger’s approach is so counter-intuitive, his argumentative strategy invites especially close scrutiny.
In this paper, therefore, I attend closely to the structure of Heidegger’s argument, with the aim of understanding, re-thinking, and then developing his most important insights (using some ideas that he himself might not have found congenial). My ultimate aim is to show the subtle, but radical points which are at issue in Heidegger’s arguments, and to put them to work in the clarification of sculpture’s key philosophical significance.
Lucy Forrest has mystical experiences of the self but these are only brought to fulfilment when she has felt tragedy and love in their very depths, and has learned the secrets of the Colt-Paterson revolver. She first comes upon these in the Falkland Isles but her situation is made all the more explosive on moving to England, where she is involved in a passionate affair that awakens her full sexual potency, and is implicated in a far-reaching political conspiracy with the most deadly outcomes.
After much struggle Lucy achieves self-understanding, only for her new found freedom to be challenged again and again in a climax full of ironic twists and a desperate hunt to the death where the prey at last becomes the predator.
Husserl’s understanding of aesthetic consciousness, namely, its status as mode of valuing
grounded in the realm of sensory and/or phantasy appearance, which involves the
disinterested appreciation of such appearances. A number of comparisons and contrasts are
made with Kant’s aesthetics (with which Husserl’s has some affinity). We then move on to
discussion of the varieties of aesthetic object that Husserl identifies. Part II addresses those
arising from ‘external perception’ most notably the aesthetic consciousness of nature, and
Part III discusses the aesthetics of phantasy as such, and of the spatial arts, and of the
symbolically presented arts of literature and music. In Part IV, we address the interesting
general significance that Husserl assigns to the aesthetic and beauty, and in Conclusion, we
offer a critical review of his theory overall and a further development of one of its most
interesting points.
It might seem that any attempt to define storytelling will be undone by the sheer variety of its formats across different cultures. However, in order for one person to communicate with another (and to do so across language divides) there must be distinct but shared features of experience that are conceptually required in order for communication to take place. In what follows, I will define the scope of storytelling by reference to such features
It may seem that art’s incorporation of material from mass culture and associated productive techniques rules out it having claim to high-art status, but this is not so. Eduardo Paolozzi's 'As Is When' series of silkscreen prints (based on Wittgenstein's life and ideas) involves compositional strategies with a profound and creative relation to philosophical ideas of the deepest kind. Through this, they show how even a popular medium such as lithography can issue in masterpieces. Indeed, one might even claim 'As Is When' to be one of the inaugurating masterpieces of the Postmodern era – created in, and shaping, the very zone of transition from the Modern.
To establish these claims, Part 1 describes Paolozzi’s artistic development, and identifies his basic creative methods. Part 2 offers an account of Wittgensteins’s life and philosophical development. Part 3 addresses Paolozzi’s affinities with Wittgenstein’s life and ideas, and in Part 4, this is developed further through detailed analysis of the 'As Is When' series
of silkscreen prints. In Conclusion, the specific question of Paolozzi’s relation to Postmodern culture is developed in more detail.
In the book, I argue that visual artworks are not simply networks of signs that happen to be visual. Their status as made, assembled, or generated objects (i.e., their material ontology) is crucial.
In the following Introduction I set the scene for this main argument by first discussing the material ontology of the Banksy work that shredded itself immediately after it was auctioned (at Sotheby’s in 2018), and by then considering – in detail - how vision is given its special cognitive character by virtue of the body’s relation to space-occupancy (a relation that each different visual art medium embodies in unique ways).
If you ever wanted to know why vision is so special (and much more than a ‘scopic regime’) this discussion will explain it.
The rest of the Theory of the Art Object book itself analyses the material ontology of pictorial drawing and painting; abstraction; sculpture, assemblage and installation art; land art, architecture, photography, and digital art. As in all my books, the discussion proceeds by discussion of concrete examples.
As an alternative, I offer an evidence-based account, that sufficiently explains the emphasis on flatness and opticality as a side-effect of late nineteenth-responses to technology and urbanisation, and the replacement of the artist-as-spectator, by the artist-as-creative-subject. I show this by means of a phenomenology of late nineteenth-century urban perception
The discussion here justifies why digital art can be regarded as an authentically artistic mode of creation, and considers aspects of its creativity.
This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.
Starting from the nature of political art in the twentieth-century (and working with important insights from Walter Benjamin) I then argue that, in the postmodern era, political art has been systematically neutralized by the neo-liberal establishment, and that the politics of such art should now take place on a more general level – namely winning back the idea of art as an intrinsically liberating power. I defend this idea from the Left-Trumpist mindset of cultural relativism using further ideas from Theodor Adorno. This sets the scene for a larger project which is the main subject of The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming book.
In all my book, I offer a phenomenology of the visual arts which is object based; this means generated from the ontology of the medium itself.
I start from a radical adaptation and revision of theories set forth by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is then explained in detail why – despite its grounding in experiential constants - the sublime only emerges as an overt and sustained feature of aesthetic sensibility from the late eighteenth-century onwards. I then go on to consider why the sublime seems to disappear from European sensibility, only to re-emerge with great force in the postmodern era.
Finally, in Part Three, I argue that the dominant ‘poststructuralist’ dimensions of contemporary ‘oppositional’ thinking are actually deeply complicit with the effects of government policy. Again, I consider some possible objections to this view. My conclusion holds that the independence of higher education is to be justified on the grounds of it embodying that critical autonomy which is the ultimate condition of a free society.
cultural production, its constituencies of reception, and contexts of transmission and the like, render artistic value relative to the time and place of its production.My purpose in this critical discussion, is to move beyond the
restrictions and contradictions of such relativism. I shall argue that art engages with factors that are of universal rather than relative import,and that questions of value are connected to this. In doing so, I will hope, in other words, to subvert the relativist orthodoxy by clarifying art’s reality as art.I shall do so by, in Part One, criticizing and developing one of the great inspirations for relativism, namely Derrida’s notion of différance. In Part Two, I shall use components of that concept, namely difference and iterability to indicate the basis of art’s reality qua art, the justification of canonic work, and, in the course of this, art’s legitimate claim to high-cultural status.
The book’s main theme is as follows.
There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. (These are even found in drawings and paintings done by computers) Such intrinsic meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto. Indeed, the dominant tendency has been to reduce the visual image to models derived from literary theory. This amounts to a kind of existential mutilation of drawing and painting. Some philosophers (notably in the phenomenological tradition) have addressed the meanings of these practices more insightfully, but mainly by assimilating them to their own general philosophies rather than by offering a genuine phenomenology of what is involved in the very making of an image – pictorial or abstract. By explaining and developing this, our understanding of art practice can be significantly enhanced.
If aesthetics is to re-establish its philosophical importance a change is needed. Instead of engaging with art mainly through the crude notion of expressive qualities, or making it speak through the voice of ‘authorities’, we need a Copernican turn. This means a re-orientation of aesthetics towards i) those experiential needs which give rise to art, ii) the way they are articulated through artistic creation, and iii) a clarification of the unique effects consequent upon this creation.
In the present discussion I offer an approach to all these issues. My starting point is the origin of art. This question is usually approached from an ontogenetic or phylogenetic viewpoint. However, my approach is different – centring on why human beings need to create art in the first place. This has ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications, but as expressions of a greater experiential whole - where the need for art can be seen to emerge from factors conceptually basic to self-consciousness as such.
Part One, accordingly, outlines the horizonal basis of our experience of time and space, and then four key cognitive competences which are necessary to this experience. Emphasis is given to the importance of the aesthetic in its narrative form, as a further necessary feature emergent from these competences. Part Two outlines how literature, music, and pictorial art engage with this narrative feature in unique ways on the basis of their distinctive individual ontologies. They transform the aesthetic narrative of experience by embodying it in a more enduring and lucid form than can be attained at the purely experiential level. In this way, art embodies self-becoming, i.e. the developing of one’s own individuality in relation to others, and symbolic compensation for things otherwise lost in the passage of time.
(This is a much extended and revised version of a paper on The Need for Art, and the Aesthetics of Self-Consciousness done a s a keynote address at the European Society of Aesthetics annual conference, Dublin Institute of Technology, 11th June, 2015)
The structure of argument in “Art and Space” is cryptic and elusive even by Heidegger’s standards. The comparatively small amount of relevant literature tends to focus on the paper’s role within Heidegger’s own oeuvre (as an expression of changes in how he conceived space as a philosophical concept). There is a certain irony in this; for Heidegger’s main thematic in the essay is not the problem of space as such, but the way in which it is overcome in the sculptural work.
This is a quite surprising position, since, by virtue of its three-dimensional character, sculpture seems to be a spatial medium, par excellence. Since Heidegger’s approach is so counter-intuitive, his argumentative strategy invites especially close scrutiny.
In this paper, therefore, I attend closely to the structure of Heidegger’s argument, with the aim of understanding, re-thinking, and then developing his most important insights (using some ideas that he himself might not have found congenial). My ultimate aim is to show the subtle, but radical points which are at issue in Heidegger’s arguments, and to put them to work in the clarification of sculpture’s key philosophical significance.
The link is http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/painting/awakeningbeauty/index.html
The collection has been built and developed so as to understand the iconological basis of Victorian art, and to utilize philosophical as well as empirical analytic methodes. (In terms of the latter, it deploys a kind of forensic iconography - made possible by the use of web resources.)
The collection includes work by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle (notably drawings by Burne-Jones), the Victorian classicists, Ruskin-influenced landscapists, and masters of historical genre.
The collection also includes work by the contemporary Slovenian artsist Mojca Oblak. She is involved in acquiring images for the collection, and for working alongside them to find ideas for her own work.
Looks at Wollheim, Heidegger on painting and sculpture, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Dufrenne. I attach an outline of the book.
Critique of Deleuze, discussions of Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, theory of modern and abstract art, conceptualism. I attach an outline of the book.
Includes discussions of Riegl, Cassirer and Panofsky, and a lengthy chapter identifying those categories which are philosophically fundamental to art historical analysis
Instead of treating Kant's aesthetics as the problem to be solved, this book looks to develop Kant's aesthetics as a means of solving aesthetic problems. The pure aesthetic judgment, the theory of fine art, and Kant's approach to the sublime are discussed in detail, and shown to have applicability even to avant-garde modes of art
This book separates relativism from its over-emphasized connection to contemporary society. I argue that the postmodern cultural world can be analysed in terms of a more universal standpoint which focuses on postmodernism’s continuity with tradition, whilst at the same time acknowledging what is new and distinctive about it. To carry out this task, I make use of criticism and constructive analysis. In relation to the former, for example, Chapter 1 offers sustained critique of Derrida’s inadequate understanding of meaning and subjectivity. The rest of the work builds up in this positive way by linking the creation and enjoyment of art (and other aesthetic phenomena) to constant factors in perception and self-consciousness. I also explain the importance of the artwork’s historical significance and positioning in relation to questions of merit and value.