Mia/Thesis

The cocoon

1. THESIS THEME (see below - what do you see?)

2. 5 CORE TEXTS (OR STARTING POINTS)

• Vilem Flusser: Towards the Philosophy of Photography

Flusser analyses the distinction between technical images, i.e. photographs, and traditional images (such as drawings and paintings). The latter are, according to him, primary abstractions, because we abstract them directly from the concrete world before us. Contrary, technical images are abstractions of third order, because they signify texts, which are abstracted from traditional images which abstract from concrete world. Flusser states that technical images are images, produced by 'apparatuses'. The camera and the person operating it form a complex which directly conditions the outcome. Moreover, the camera acts as a black box – its operator can control its input and knows how to manipulate it to produce specific output, but what exactly happens in-between, remains hidden. The actual encoding of technical images takes place in this very mechanism we cannot fully understand.

• Susan Sontag: On Photography (Chapter Photographic Evangels) + Martin Jay: Photography and the Mirror of Art

Sontag and Jay disclose that photography as a medium is valuable in the context of art because it subverted the very tradition it became a part of. Sontag also touches on painting’s relation to photography, which is reciprocal – the two informed one another in terms of technical, aesthetic, and conceptual influences throughout history. Both Jay and Sontag emphasise photography’s inherently hybrid status in which they find its very potential and value.

• Deanna Petherbridge: The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice The Primacy of Drawing pdf

The book provides an extensive analysis of drawing's fundamentals and its different modes from 15th century to the present. The author shows that drawing is not only an (artistic) medium, but is a way of externalising the first thoughts (the mode of sketch). She touches on its primality, straightforwardness and sensitivity, this instant(aneous) nature of drawing and its position in western art. Petherbridge also analyses the changing role of drawing in relation to contemporary and conceptual practice.

3. Other potential texts

• Philip S. Rawson: Drawing
• Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act
• Hans Belting: An Anthropology of Images - Picture, Medium, Body
• Rosalind Krauss: A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of Post-Medium Condition

First PRE-draft of the thesis outline

File:Thesis outline Mia Paller.pdf