The Presence of Absence

Exhibition and gallery talks

St John’s College, Oxford – Exhibition Galleries

The exhibition (free entry) is open 2-6pm on Feb 16-Mar 8 (not Sundays)

The gallery talks (free but registration required) will take place at 6-7pm on the following days:

Monday 19 February: Niall Gildea (Lancaster and York St John), ‘Starting with Wollheim’

This introductory talk will give an outline of Richard Wollheim’s work aimed at a non-specialist audience and those coming to it for the first time. I will adumbrate some of the ways in which Wollheim explores what it means, and what it is, to live the life of a person. Wollheim’s ‘critical existentialism’ unites (if it doesn’t necessarily unify) his fictional and philosophical texts.

Friday 23 February: Elisa Galgut (Cape Town), ‘Wollheim on Pictorial Expression’

One of the reasons we are moved to look at paintings is that they are expressive of deep and often complex emotions. But philosophers have found this puzzling – works of art do not, literally, possess psychologies, so how do they acquire their expressive properties? Richard Wollheim’s answer to this puzzle is to posit that the artist projects her mental states on to her artwork, and we, the spectator, in turn ‘read off’ the projected mental states from the painting. In this talk, I’ll explore Wollheim’s account of expressiveness in art, with a nod to the ways in which physicality can capture some of our deepest feelings that we may struggle to express in language.

Monday 26 February: Denise Cullington (Psychoanalyst in Private Practice), ‘Grief, Reparation and Creativity’

Philosophers need to understand not only cognitions, but meaning, emotions that can so often be experienced out of conscious mind, in images, emotions and the body. Richard Wollheim argued that without it, philosophy is thin. At the same time, in my view, in his explications he did not convey the rich complexity of analytic ideas in understanding our human selves. There is projection as evacuation, but not of it as a necessary part of our development and communication (with a receptive other); of our internal world, made up of so many experiences not only repressed, but dating from a time before we had words in which to “think”. Psychoanalysis has so much to say on what an artist is doing when he or she plays with images – and in such a way that it speaks to us, we feel an emotional resonance. Not that it offers the ultimate answer, but that it offers a rich structure; different layers, in which to make sense and think.

Wednesday 28 February: Ela Gorkay (Film-maker), ‘The Presence of Absence’ (film)

Friday 1 March: Vanessa Brassey (King’s College London), ‘What Makes a Picture Sad? (The Presentation of Absent Emotion)’

Pictures have always fascinated artists, historians, and philosophers. While artists like Vincent van Gogh and art historians like Neil MacGregor might focus on a picture’s content, background, or various interpretations, philosophers tend to ask more general questions. For example, ‘How can a two-dimensional (flat) surface with marks on it represent three-dimensional objects?’ In other words, how do images come into existence? A second related question is: ‘How can a picture, which doesn’t have a mind, convey emotions (which require a mind)?’ Or, more simply, ‘What makes a picture sad?’

In this talk, I’ll introduce the main rival theories that attempt to explain what makes a picture sad, using the shorthand ‘Feelists’ and ‘Lookists’. Feelists believe that a picture is sad if it makes you feel sad. On the other hand, Lookists argue that we can recognize a sad picture without necessarily feeling sad ourselves; for them, what matters is that the picture LOOKS sad. Both are problematic. Feelists get the location of the emotion wrong (in YOU rather than in the picture). Lookists seem to kick the can down the road or back to those working on the first question ‘How do flat surfaces come to look like things we can see face to face?’ So, who should we believe?

I’ll explore Feelism and Lookism using Patrice Moor’s moving collection ‘The Presence of Absence’. And I’ll conclude by revealing which one I believe is most credible and how a nuanced understanding of it helps us appreciate aspects of Moor’s work that might otherwise remain inexplicable.

Monday 4 March: Janet Sayers (Kent), ‘Wollheim and the Psychoanalytic Aesthetics of Adrian Stokes’

In her talk, Janet Sayers (author of Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes) focuses on the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim and art critic Adrian Stokes. She begins with examples from Stokes’s account of looking at pictures before turning to Stokes’s role in introducing Wollheim to Melanie Klein and her version of psychoanalysis. Sayers follows this with the very different attitudes of Wollheim and Stokes to abstract expressionist painting; and with the publicity accorded Stokes’s work by Wollheim’s 1972 book, The Image in Form. The talk ends with the relation of Stokes’s objection to abstract expressionist painting to Wollheim’s account of what he described as the ‘two-foldedness’ of ‘seeing-in’.

Wednesday 6 March: Louise Braddock (Independent Scholar), ‘Why Wollheim? Why Collage?’

In Wollheim’s psychoanalytic theory he picks out certain states of mind as ‘iconic’; they present as if what they are about is real. Dreams are the obvious example but Wollheim includes also certain sorts of memory and imagination. From his art theory we learn how and under what conditions a painter tries to produce an image that is, again, ‘iconic’.

Patrice Moor’s collages can be viewed in this light: they are made by a process that the artist can describe or show to us but they are also an image of the process captured at a certain point. Thus, they give us and the artist a window into the process and how it is experienced by the artist at the time of making; a picture, that is, of the process.

In the talk I will bring together these two perspectives to explore how the concept of iconicity extends to collage, and whether collage offers us a further insight into the formation of the iconic state of mind.

Friday 8 March: Ellie Roberts (Training and Supervising Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist), ‘Memories, Dreams and Collage: Emotions in Image’.

Dreams and their symbol-making are often thought to capture something about collage as a form of art. But do they explain, or do they supply, the artistic form of collage or, is it the other way around? Do collages open up a window on the mind’s work of symbolisation more generally? The discussion brings together what Wollheim says about iconic image-making and the expression of emotion in art, and emotional growth through symbolisation in therapeutic work with a four-year-old girl.

Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com. Registration is necessary as the venue for the talks may change.

Please confirm your status as academic (includes students), mental health practitioner, or other (please specify). A confirmation email with further details about the venue will be sent to attendees.