A review of A Becoming on the line: Painting and the genesis of form

Abstract

This piece of written thinking both fascinates and frustrates me. The subject is interesting and the premise is ambitious, satisfyingly complex and plausible. I am captured and convinced by the author's passion and belief and the seductive glimpse into an artist's creative process: "In front of my eyes painting opens a vertical gaze into the genesis of form" (95). As with most art, I do not understand it all, especially the opening sections, where the language and theoretical claims are sometimes mystifying, redolent with implication and rich in vocabulary. References are allusive. My expectations of prose's reasoning are thwarted. The artist goes on, however, to explain taking an idea and a work and pushing it further with other media, technology and processes and how one thing becomes another and how experimentation allows new works to emerge as an artistic methodology; a methodology of becoming born of Deleuze and physics with indirect nods to Kant. This is a form becoming. It might be an art work, it might be a piece of creative writing. It is not a conventional expository essay. It is thinking emerging in words.