Models of attention

Abstract

Published in the Journal of Contemporary Painting Volume (5): Issue (1) 2019, Models of Attention, was developed from a paper presented at the “Painting as Remodel: Revisiting ‘Painting as Model’" symposium, Camberwell College of Art, UAL, 21 June 2018, that responded to Yve-Alain Bois’ seminal text ‘Painting as Model’, and opened by a keynote by Bois. The JCP volume publishes newly translated texts by Bois alongside articles generated by the symposium. In 'Models of Attention' the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’ (1990) is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuropsychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. Painting as Model argued for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This article proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting. Yve-Alain Bois’ text Painting as Model, first published in 1990, is still cited as a key collection of essays, positioning painting as being both a conceptual and a material enquiry. The symposium and Journal edition responds to Bois's position that one must concentrate on both the formal elements of a work of art and its physical qualities to fully understand its totality and makes a significant contribution to contemporary discourses on painting.