The (de)situated subjective: a cognitive autoethnography of ‘the New York School’

ABSTRACT

In this article I initiate an inquiry into the artistic act and its relation to self-expression in an age of computational virtuality, a time when subjectivity is being subsumed by ubiquity and its requisite social mediation. Starting from my painting practice, I attempt to access the tacit aesthetic prior to the emergence of the algorithmic mediation permeating contemporary culture, by exploring metaphor in precomputational artistic praxis. I examine the entanglement of self and context in a ‘cognitive autoethnography' reflecting on artists' reports from late Modernism, a time when subjectivity found focus in the studio of the individual practitioner, not across networks of digital mediation. I examine metaphors of curiosity and intuition in the creative ‘play’ of artists to offer a qualitative analysis of 10 articles published in ARTnews magazine during the 1950s and 1960s interviewing Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School. I seek the individual in the creative act to relocate myself as a practitioner in our age of distributed subjectivity. The study brings into question presumptions about sampling and interpretation, explores the subjective dimensions of creative praxis and speculates on what we – as artists and humanists – may be losing in the algorithmic transformation of embodied creative intentionality.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative process
• autographic praxis
• visual metaphor
• cognitive autoethnography
• abstract expressionism
• situated cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes on contributors

Suk Kyoung Choi

Suk Kyoung Choi is a Korean artist and researcher working in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. She is currently a PhD student at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and a member of iViz lab (ivizlab.sfu.ca) with PI Dr. Steve DiPaola. Choi's work examines metaphors of process to understand the nature of embodied transformation between experience and knowledge. Her artistic work has been shown in Seoul, London, Calgary, Vancouver, Montréal, Chicago, and Munich.