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Modernist Painting and Materiality

The single-authored study Modernist Painting and Materiality stemmed from research that the author had carried out during his Ph.D. The research that was carried out during the period wherein the Doctorate was undertaken was specifically geared towards an understanding of how certain instances of modernist painting was critically reflexive. As a development of and, to a certain extent in contradistinction to the subsequent body of research that evolved out of the Ph.D. thesis developed these ideas by orienting the research process towards a set of debates that centred upon modernist painting’s relationship with certain understandings of materiality. To this end the research imperative was geared towards a re-evaluation of modernist formalist criticism and its proclivity to foreground the work of art through its materiality. Prior to the publication of Modernist Painting and Materiality in 2011, the ideas that informed the research were tested out at conferences. For example, the paper “Notes Towards a Differential Ontology of Painting,” that was delivered at A Future for Modernism?: The Possibilities of Re-inhabiting an Abandoned Critical Position, APT Gallery, Deptford, London, 17 March 2006 a text that on one level sought to explore how historically certain modernist artists had sought recourse to the law of identity was subsequently published in A Future for Modernism?: The Possibilities of Re-inhabiting an Abandoned Critical Position, Manchester: MIRIAD, 2007 9781905476169. Following the text’s publication within the Japanese art journal Rear in 2009, this particular article subsequently formed the basis of one of the chapters of Modernist Painting and Materiality.