Redefine and reterritorialise: painting as an interdisciplinary form

Any examination of painting as a practice or discipline must necessarily analyse the philosophical underpinning of formalist modes of thinking. Although contemporary practices are not as driven by the inherent rules of the discipline, they are still dependent upon the theoretical foundations within which they work, and effectively this leads to a retention of medium and material specificity.

In contrast, a different methodological approach potentially changes the way in which painting can be thought and is explored within the thesis. The proposition of a particular type of methodological investigation challenges painting, attempting to change its alignment with different mediums or disciplines, by locating the relationship of theoretical models and their direct paradigmatic constraints on practice.

In contrast to an Hegelian philosophical approach, embedded within the formalist critique, Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is present throughout the thesis as a catalyst for re-negotiating both the spaces of theory and the realisation of a painting practice that shares a commonality with Bergsonian and Deleuzian motifs of the `virtual' rather than the boundaried rule-based and medium-specific limitations of previous formalisms. The notion of interdisciplinarity stems from this particular philosophical investigation, and proposes painting as an intrinsically interdisciplinary practice.

The motivation is to locate the relationship of different theoretical and philosophical models - including the fold, the notion of `technique', memory, the virtual and duration - in order to establish new ways for thinking concerning painting, and importantly how it can operate in an interdisciplinary manner. In particular the idea of `change' and `the new' in relation to Deleuzian `becomings', in contrast to Hegelian dialectics, drives the theoretical investigation, and how this challenges the idea of painting now.

The research thinks through these integral component elements in terms of painting and analyses various examples of artworks and architectural projects (stemming from Deleuze's ideas including Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache), incorporating a new alignment with notions of spatiality and duration, which in turn constitutes a reterritorialisation of both painting and thinking as practices.