How to Look: Ad Reinhardt's Black Paintings

This article is a development from a presentation given at the ‘Painting in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ symposium at Art Sonje Centre, Seoul in May 2023. The paper takes Ad Reinhardt's 'black paintings' as the centre of its discussion to explore what it means to see paintings in reproduction to examine some of the implications and problematics in painting's material facture when experienced in different modes. Today paintings are ubiquitously encountered though light emanating handheld devices or personal computers, in contrast to the light reflecting and light absorbing surfaces of paintings encountered in real life. An allusion of geological deep time is discussed in relation to the layers of paint in Reinhardt’s black paintings where paint becomes a vehicle for a temporal thickness of time, which reveals itself through a physical encounter with the work. Different theories of materiality are revisited in response to the dematerialisation ofart objects, including Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which describes ontological relationships between actants, or participants within a network. The title of this paper is in reference to Reinhardt’s satirical series of ‘How to Look’ illustrated cartoons. Published in 1947, the drawings humorously present problems of the art viewing experience, in particular abstraction.