Painting as an embodied act of framing: Toward a phenomenological aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty and Derrida

Contemporary painters employ a wide array of methods, materials, and references. In this paper, I put forward how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of painting, despite being developed in the context of modernist painting, can address the seemingly endless possibilities of contemporary painting. In particular, by further developing Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the role of embodiment in artistic working processes and by rereading Merleau-Ponty through Derrida’s questioning of the “frame,” I put forward an account of painting understood as an embodied act of framing. Derrida’s emphasis on undecidability, and the ambiguities pertaining to what becomes visible and invisible in the work of art, allow me to flesh out how Merleau-Ponty was always already attentive to some of the challenges posed by contemporary painting. I focus on two ways of framing at work in the painterly process, as exemplified by the non-traditional practices of contemporary artists Katharina Grosse and Amy Sillman: the material act of proposing a frame and painting as a critical manner of configuring sense. While keeping in mind the ambiguous essence of painting as a contemporary form of art, I aim to show that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to the embodied working process can help articulate how painting continuously questions painting’s own physical and conceptual borders.