Expanded Painting in Context
- Submitting institution
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Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 240983
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- December
- Year of first exhibition
- 2015
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- Three consecutive solo exhibitions were produced from extensive research that tested material and contextual approaches to expanded painting. They were linked through a radical break with previous work in the field that foregrounded testing the ‘norms’ of formalist master narratives to question ‘the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture’ (Greenberg 1960), with social, political and philosophical concerns also driving the aesthetic. To achieve this the work embraced site (the industrial heritage of Ashton), history (the importance of Tim Bobbin, the ‘Lancashire Hogarth’ to the civic collections in Rochdale, and the timing of the final exhibition to coincide with the 50th anniversary or May 1968) alongside the remit of the institution (reinventing Castlefield’s head-to-head format to include a dead philosopher rather than a living artist). The central hypothesis of this project in three parts is to bring together for the first-time essential aspects of what is universally regarded as the current highest-level theoretical discourse around contemporary painting. There have been what Bourdieu (2017) terms a ‘symbolic revolution’: ‘the medium (of painting) in the post medium condition’ (Graw, 2016) has triumphed in subsuming much of the territory that surrounds it (Hochdofer 2015). The expanded field has become a new norm and even non-painterly historical presidencies can now be considered ‘In Terms of Painting’ (Ehninger & Krause Whal 2016). Consequently, expanded painting can position itself within broader theoretical networks (Joselit 2009) without needing to be justified as a challenge to the master narratives that have both defined and limited it. In doing so the work brings together research of leading international figures in the field (Graw, Hochdorfer, Ehninger, Joeslit etc) and develops it in relation to specific contexts to make an original, rigorous, and significant contribution to the field.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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