ALISON GOODYEAR

Move me No.1 Septych, 2013


Oil on wood panels: each panel: 10cm(h) x 40cm(w) x 3.5cm(d); combined dimension: 10cm(h) x 280cm(w) x 3.5cm(d)



This work firstly is a painting. It has a sense of abstracted space relating to landscape painted on seven wood panels. Secondly, it is an experiment designed to ask the beholder to recalculate the work. In an “explicit invitation to exercise choice” (Eco, p.1, 1989) the beholder is invited to physically rearrange the seven wood panels horizontally along a shelf. Each choice is one of 5040 horizontal permutations (see 4 permutations of the seven panels exampled above).
Rather than a passive viewing, it is designed to encourage the beholder to reflect on their own aesthetic type experiences and re-position the piece till it answers their requirements, their judgments, simply put, how it suits them best. This piece could be seen as ‘open’, always in flux, often ambiguous, drawing on our natural urge to make sense of the world around us. It attempts to collapse the conventional relationship of beholder/artist, where there is only one acceptable version of aesthetic in the artwork. That there could be many versions, as acceptable, brings the beholder to re-assess their understanding of themselves in that world.

I would hope the non-artist beholder gain greater confidence in their artistic convictions, a personal aesthetic brought about through an autodidactic journey, self-learning prompted by interaction with the piece. On painter to painting relationships, Michael Fried suggests the artist Chardin, through his process found “a natural correlative for his own engrossment in the act of painting and a proleptic mirroring of what he trusted would be the absorption of the beholder before the finished work” (p.51, 1980). He also states that “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (p.164, 1998 [1967]), when an artwork acknowledges the beholder before it. Therefore can this work become an anti-theatrical alternative by creating “work(s) which acknowledge their own literality and thereby construct a beholder capable of acknowledging his own literal presence” Mulhall (p.12, 2001). Can the beholder still lose themselves, and become absorbed?

With this experimental work I am interested in how it could develop through and with the beholder. Will all 5040 horizontal possibilities be explored? Will the way this piece is painted (an original order of connecting imagery) result in a dominant order? Will the traditionally forbidden act of touching an artwork (to maneuver elements of this painting) be overcome? Will it engage a ‘critical agency’ (Foucault)? In asking the beholder to aid in the entropy of the artwork and then its potential rebirth through the shared, temporary language individual to this piece, does the relationship between artist/beholder not become something else? Artist/beholder-artist?

References

Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Fried, M. (1980) Absorption and theatricality: painting and beholder in the age of Diderot Berkeley and London: University of California.

Fried, M. (1998) Art and Objecthood, Essays and Reviews Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Mulhall, S. (2001) Crimes and Deeds of Glory: Michael Fried’s Modernism British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2001.

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