Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T21:48:52.271Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Aesthetics of Presence: The Landscape Paintings of Peter Holbrook

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Get access

Extract

Since its inception in the mid-1960s, photorealism has been criticized by those who viewed it as a naive perpetuation of pop art, but it has received the praise of those who have recognized the contributions of photorealism and their relevance to the intellectual climate of opinion of the last few decades. Photorealism challenges our conception of reality by raising questions about the way we see things.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 381.Google Scholar

2. Arthur, John, Realism at Work (New York: Watson/Guptill, 1983), 43.Google Scholar

3. Arthur, John, Richard Estes: Paintings & Prints (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art, 1993).Google Scholar

4. See Rajchman, John, “Foucault's Art of Seeing,” 10 44 (Spring 1988): 89117.Google Scholar

5. See the chapter “On the Vision and the Riddle,” in Nietzsche, Frederick, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Penguin, 1978), 155–60.Google Scholar

6. Holbrook, Peter, Personal correspondence with Tehranian, Katharine Kia, 05 1992.Google Scholar

7. Sherman, J. K., “Chicago Artists Wander Up Own Paths of Discovery,” Minneapolis Tribune, 08 1, 1965, 10.Google Scholar

8. Holbrook, , Personal correspondence Tehranian, 05 1992.Google Scholar

9. In his essay, “Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight” (in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. Levin, David Michael [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 143–85)Google Scholar, Martin Jay summarizes the essence of the argument in “Eye and Mind” by Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (in Primacy of Perception [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 169).Google Scholar In this famous essay, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the painter paints with his mind and body, and thus the self revealed in the act of painting is “not a self through transparence, like thought, which only thinks its object by assimilating it, by constituting it, by transforming it into thought. It is a self through confusion, narcissism, through inherence of the one who sees in that which he sees”. Martin Jay appropriately refers to this state of being as the “narcissism of sight”.

10. The term “élan vital,” the dynamic origin of life, is from Verse une Cosmologie by Minowski, Eugene, as quoted in Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994), xvi.Google Scholar Referring to Tymieniecka, Anna Teresa's book Phenomenology and ScienceGoogle Scholar, Bachelard concludes that, for Minowski, the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.

11. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 223.Google Scholar

12. Holbrook, Peter, Interview with Katharine Kia Tehranian, 08 1994.Google Scholar

13. The term “coded ancient messages” is used by Holbrook, Peter in his Artist's Inventory (unpublished pamphlet), 1994.Google Scholar

14. See Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea (New York: New Directions, 1964)Google Scholar; and Barthes, Roland, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).Google Scholar

15. Holbrook, , Artist's Inventory.Google Scholar

16. Holbrook, , Interview with Tehranian, 08 1994.Google Scholar

17. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (New York: Random House Vintage, 1973), 39.Google Scholar

18. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977).Google Scholar

19. Holbrook, , Artist's Inventory.Google Scholar

20. Ibid.

21. Elliot, David, “These Three Artists Paint Modern Visions”, Chicago Sun-Times, 03 14, 1982, 22.Google Scholar

22. Holbrook, , Interview with Tehranian, 08 1994.Google Scholar

23. On this subject, see Derrida, , Truth in PaintingGoogle Scholar; and Bal, Mieke, “His Master's Eye,”Google Scholar in Levin, , Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision.Google Scholar

24. The term “unconscious historiography” is used by Theodore Adorno in conjunction with the truth content of artwork (see Zuidervaart, Lambert, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991], 42, 117).Google Scholar

25. On this topic, see Lukacs, Georg, Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).Google Scholar

26. Holbrook, , Personal correspondence with Tehranian, 03 1995.Google Scholar

27. Roland Barthes argues that a photograph, by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to constitute a message without a code (Barthes, , Image, Music, Text [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], 17, 43).Google Scholar

28. See Artner, A., “Photographic Artist Who Makes the Magic”, Chicago Tribune, 03 12, 1982, sec. 3, p. 10.Google Scholar

29. Barthes, , Image, Music, Text, 44.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., 18.

31. Holbrook, , Artist's Inventory.Google Scholar

32. Holbrook, , Personal correspondence with Tehranian, 03 1995.Google Scholar

33. See Wipple, Barbara, “Peter HolbrookAmerican Artist 48 (03 1984): 6065.Google Scholar

34. Holbrook, , Interview with Tehranian, 08 1994.Google Scholar

35. Holbrook, , Personal correspondence with Teharanian, 05 1992.Google Scholar

36. See Wipple, , “Peter Holbrook”.Google Scholar

37. Holbrook, , Interview with Tehranian, 08 1994.Google Scholar

38. See Merleau-Ponty, , “Eye and Mind”, 166.Google Scholar

39. Foucault, Michel, “The Eye of Power”, in Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Gordon, Colin et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 146–65.Google Scholar Also see Michel Foucault, introduction to Ganguilhelm, Georges, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Fawsett, Carolyn (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1978), xii.Google Scholar