2019/04/01 by Daniel Neofetou · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Catholicism and Religious Studies #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Artistic and Creative Research
paper · doi:10.1386/jcp.5.1.147_1
openalex publication_date 2019/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In his essay on Barnett Newman in Painting as Model, ‘Perceiving Newman’, Bois accounts for the appeal of Newman’s address by positing that the artist’s work invokes ‘a world-for-us, neither the “objective” world described by mathematics or physics nor a kind of mythic space that one could [...] thematise with symbols and ideographs’. However, in this article it is contended that this ‘world-for-us’ is prefigured through the experience of decisive otherness. While Bois cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early opus Phenomenoloy of Perception in ‘Perceiving Newman’, in this article Merleau-Ponty’s late writing is read via the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno to discuss how the in-itselfness of Newman’s art bindingly engages elements of experience that capitalism dismisses in favour of profit as the fundamental determinant of everyday life.