Intellect

Mick Finch's research interests include painting, abstraction as representation, hegemonic structures, materiality of images, pictorial dispositifs, economies of transcription, archives and appropriation. His current research focuses on a discursive field of painting particularly in terms of issues of abstraction, as representation, in relationship to, and as, hegemonic structures. This has constituted his research in terms of his studio practice in paintings made between 1996 2005 but also in the form of a number of published texts.

His writing and the relationship of critical theory to his studio practice is particularly pivoted around a deep knowledge of French post-war painting where the questioning of what painting is, specifically, was linked directly to questions of ideology (particularly in relation to Althusser), a localized French political dimension and a polemicization of Greenberg’s arguably hegemonic reading of medium specificity.

This polemic from the French perspective sees the successive deployment of an alternative structuring of this specificity as the tableau, a conceptual object which counts `painting` as having a `thickness` where in questions of signification are arguably immanent. The notion of the tableau as it appears in discussions around painting in the work of theorists such as Michael Fried, Hubert Damisch, Yve-Alain Bois and the artist Christian Bonnefoi focuses upon the pictorial and material structure of painting (and its extended sense as `tableau`) as being like a `dispositive`, a mechanism within which the work occurs ( as opposed to the support being a surface upon which it happens).

His interest here has been with how such dispositifs can be thought of as rhetorical structures which align themselves with aesthetic formations which are in themselves subtended by ideological formations. Structural ideas such as parallax and projection systems have been important in terms of how the dispositifs can be considered to operate, this interrogation happening both through my studio practice and a number of published texts. Many of these issues were also relevant in Machine Room which was a collaboration which culiminated in a residency at Crate Space, Margate in 2006. The collaboration looked at series of propositions about painting that focused upon its prosthetics. Here a shared preoccupation between a group of painters, who all use material that is projected, traced and transformed as a key aspect of their studio practice, was explored. This was manifested as a workshop where a series of propositions were explored, documented and became the content for a website. A key element of Machine Room is the proximity of pictorial/painting practice to archives. On a pragmatic level he documents his own practice on his website using Dreamweaver. The relationship of the studio to the live content of the website has led him to think into the archive as an active tool of artistic practice both in a reflective and a productive sense. Atlas, a teaching workshop he co-taught at the Ecole des Beaux arts de Valenciennes in 2007, is indicative of the areas of focus that interest him in this field. Of particular interest are: Aby Warburg`s formulation of the Pathos-formula and particularly in relation to Philippe-Alain Michaud`s Aby Warburg and the Image in Movement (Zone Books, USA, 2004), Walter Benjamin`s Arcades Project and also in relation to Susan Buck-Morss` The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , MIT Press, USA, 14 Feb 1990) and the relationship of archives to the work of Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince. Through several series of works (Nevermind, Prosopopeia, Vanishing Point, Taken as Read and Bare Life) the spatialization of shapes, derived from images, has been worked through using different orientations to painterly and pictorial dispositifs (in terms of flatness, depth and thickness). Discursively the development between these series represents an engagement that can be described as an expanded field idea of painting but in proximity to the image (as opposed to sculpture). Here physical spatialisation; in terms of flatness across a surface, in optical terms with depth and in literal separation in terms of relief are, in addition to the space of projection, necessary in the studio at the moment of transcription (a space that perhaps can be considered akin to the infra thin formulated by Duchamp).