Indelible marks: Beth Harland’s absorption

ABSTRACT

The article traces Beth Harland's approach to painting practice in light of her engagement with Michael Fried's interpretation of eighteenth and nineteenth century painting and her fascination with Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The contrast between reflection on phenomena of inner life and a painting’s audience address is explored through a reading of passages from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve and Fried's writing about theatricality and absorption. Harland’s practical and theoretical explorations of the situation and possibilities of contemporary painting, illuminated by her engagement with notions of theatricality and absorption, are then outlined. After considering Hans Belting’s views on seriality and processes of re-working, the article concludes by suggesting that Harland sought and achieved a buoyant working relationship between formational contraries, avoiding both hypostatisation and easy compromise.

KEYWORDS:

• Theatricality
• absorption
• audience address
• sensation
• inner life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In his important book on Proust Leo Bersani describes this imperative simply as ‘the aesthetic mediation of personal experience’, contrasting it with what might be seen a type of literary theatricality characterized by ‘incomplete transformation of certain emotions and attitudes into dramatic situations’ (Bersani 2013, 219). Although of mediocre quality this exposure of an author’s repressed wishes is often popular because it asks little more of a spectator than ‘the indulgence he naturally has for his own fantasies’ (ibid.).

2 For Harland’s penetrating account of her approach to a series of late pieces see her essay ‘Drawing in Atopia: An Exploration of ‘Drift’ as Method’ (2020). She describes her approach as ‘drift’, an idea related to the state of being ‘between’ oppositions discussed below.

3 See, however, Nietzsche’s shrewd observation that an artist’s critical sense (‘taste’) may differ from, or even contradict, her creative sense: Nietzsche 2001, 233–234.

4 See the conference paper, ‘Painting and Theatricality’ (Lancaster University 2017), published here for the first time, upon which what follows draws heavily, and elsewhere in her writing.

5 Harland finds most value in Fried’s art history, not his alleged but better known ‘formalism’. This is not to suggest however that Fried the historian is totally divorced from Fried the critic.

6 Given what modern viewers see as his sentimentality and moralism this seems unlikely. Yet Fried insists that he presents ‘a more urgent and extreme evocation of absorption than can the found in the work of Chardin, Van Loo, Vien or any other French painter of the time’ (Fried 1980, 55).

7 See the critical essays collected in Fried 1998.

8 Arendt’s ‘dark times’ refer to her worry about whether serious ‘opinions’ can now, when ‘the light of the public obscures everything’, be recognised as such, and so function as legitimate political action. She believed, however, that we may still receive illumination not so much from theories and concepts but from the ‘uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle’ (Arendt 1968, ix).

9 Harland had many artist friends and collaborators whose work and insights she valued highly. We are restricted to mentioning only some well-known figures. An important related question which cannot be pursued here is of the historical significance of women painters of Harland’s generation in the context of feminism and postmodernism, both of which, at a formative time in their development, raised questions about the past and the future of painting.

10 Adrian Searle calls Abts’ paintings ‘disturbingly weird’. He goes on: ‘Whenever you think the painting is giving you something concrete, it takes it back, reverses itself, turns itself inside out, in a sort of constant flux and reflux of certainty and doubt’ (Searle 2005).

11 See also Jan Verwoert, ‘Emergence: On the painting of Tomma Abts’ in Buchholz and Muller (2005).

12 See also the texts collected in Michael Phillipson’s Art’s Plight archive. Phillipson (n.d.) illuminates in depth many different aspects of the ‘cultural context of practice across the arts’. Of particular relevance here is the radical disjunction between art’s ‘elsewhere’ or ‘making for art’ and economic and aesthetic ‘valuing’ (see for example Text 14).

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Ian Heywood

Ian Heywood studied painting at Maidstone College of Art and sociology and social theory at Goldsmiths College. His doctoral thesis, completed at the University of York, was published as Social Theories of Art: A Critique. He taught in the studio and in the history and theory of art at Leeds Polytechnic and Lancaster University. He has published widely in the areas of art theory, visual culture, art education and leisure studies.