Beth Harland

Abstracting the Set: Monet’s Cathedrals and Stable Mental Concepts from Serial Pictorial Artworks

The ability to form stable mental representations (or concepts) from a set of instances is fundamental to human visual cognition and is evident across the formation of prototypes, from simple pseudo-random dot patterns through to the recognition of faces. In this paper we argue that the cognitive and perceptual processes that lead to the formation of stable concepts are also important in understanding spectatorship of a certain class of serial artworks that are composed of multiple discrete but related pictures. This article considers the processes that enable the formation of stable mental representations in relation to a series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral by Claude Monet. The implications of understanding these processes for the spectatorship of this class of serial artworks are discussed.

Warholian Repetition and the Viewer's Affective Response to Artworks from His Death and Disaster Series

In his Death and Disaster series, Andy Warhol repeated gruesome images of suicides and car crashes. The artist’s use of repetition has been discussed extensively but not in terms of its direct impact on the viewer’s perceptual and cognitive processing. This article considers the viewer’s affective experience resulting from repeated exposure to negative images in artworks from the Death and Disaster series. The authors put forward an account of the potential affective experience of Warholian repetition based on existing experimental findings and by way of the artist’s own remarks on the relationship between repetition and affect.

A fragment of time in the pure state; painting in search of haptic time

Abstract The paper re-presents aspects of a practice-based Ph.D. in which notions of temporality within painting are researched and placed into a relation with digital imaging. The research constructs a means of theorizing process through an engagement with various conceptualisations of duration, alongside the mapping of process derived from studio notes. It proposes an approach to paintings temporality aligned with Proustian ‘time regained’ and the Deleuzian ‘time image’, and argues that a dialogue with digital imaging offers contemporary painting an expanded topography and contributes to its ability to ‘think’ time in these terms. Paintings time is viewed in relation to haptic visuality and filmic time, moving towards the proposition of a form of haptic time. These reflections are linked to various conceptions of the actual/virtual to suggest that it is through a folding of time that painting, via the digital, might make an approach to pure duration; Prousts ‘fragment of time in the pure state’.