Contemporary painting as an embodied act of framing: Toward a phenomenological aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty
According to phenomenology, the world we perceive is neither a chaos of sensations, nor does it have a predetermined order. Instead, we perceive the world in light of bodily possibilities and habits. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception and painting, I discuss how contemporary painting can present an interruption of habituated ways of perceiving the world. That is, I articulate how painting gives expression to a situated, embodied lifeworld, by means of which it can make us perceptive to different ways of configuring sense. I show one way in which phenomenology can help account for the artistic possibilities of contemporary painting, and how it allows us to understand art’s socio-political critical potential. As an embodied act of framing, what is made visible, and what is rendered invisible in painting constitutes its potential to give expression to a particular way of making sense of the perceived world.