Painting as Habitat – ways and forms of artistic thinking and being
The conference explores painting as a particular mode of thinking and being. What forms of thought, and what ways of experiencing does painting enable? What kinds of situational agencies and networks scaffold artistic practice? What does painting do for us? Why do artists paint?
Programme Wed 29 January
- 10.45 Conference opening Tarja Pitkänen-Walter, Riikka Stewen (Grootenboer intro)
- 11-11.45 Hanneke Grootenboer / University of Amsterdam
An Invitation to Think. Art history in general and the act of interpretation in particular start from the presumption that we, as viewers need to make sense of art works. In this presentation, I would like to raise the question how art works are capable of making sense of us, assisting us in understanding ourselves and the world surrounding us by offering us a site of reflection. A ‘pensive image’ is a work that grasps viewers, past and present, without letting us grasp it. I argue that a pensive image is an invitation to think. Starting from contemporary art practice and artistic research, this presentation will discuss various works of art including 17th century Dutch still life painting which, by resisting interpretation, offer a thought rather than a meaning or a narrative. - Q&A 11.45-12.00 Riikka Stewen, Professor of Art History and Theory, KuvA
- 12.00-13.15 Lunch break
- 13.15 – 14.15 Harri Mäcklin, PhD, Docent in Aesthetics, University of Helsinki: Painting as a quasi-subject: Notes on Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenological Aesthetics The French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne (1910 -1995) is an unknown grandeur of phenomenological aesthetics. According to him, the encounter with a work of art is a special event that reveals something fundamental about the relationship between man and the world. In this presentation, I explore Dufrenne’s conceptions of painting and what the painting does to its viewer.
- 14.15 -15.15 Joel Slotte, MFA, visual artist: on artistic work and ways of thinking in painting
- 15.15-15.30 Coffee break
- 15.30-16.30 Liisa Pesonen, MFA, visual artist, art psychotherapist Painting as an interaction event between the author and the work of art I address the following themes in and through my own artistic work: Painting as a reciprocal and enlivening Other. Is our experience of the subject changing? Painting as a support and guiding phenomenon for thinking?
Programme Thu 30 January
- 10.30 -12.00 Jussi A. Saarinen, PhD, Docent, University of Jyväskylä, Academy Research Fellow 2023-2027 on Situational Mind and Artistic Creativity. Affective Scaffolding and Aesthetic Resonance in Painting Saarinen examines the motives and environments of making art, as well as the feelings and states of mind associated with it. He suggests that painting enables the artist to experience e.g. freedom, revitalization and connection that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.
- 12.15-13.30 Lunch break
- 13.30-14.30 Inkamaja Iitiä, PhD, Researcher in Contemporary Art, Painting as Habitat Research with a grant from Kone Foundation 2024-2025. Painting as Habitat In my research, I try Giorgio Agambeni’s conceptualization of lifeform – use, habit (habit), outfit (habit), dwelling (habitat), inoperability (inoperability) and uninitiated (inappropriable) – applicability to contemporary art phenomena that are oriented from the tradition of painting to e.g. performance art, site-specific and disappearing art, and moving image. The time span of the study is from the 1960s to the present.
I study, among other things, the relationship between performance and the artist’s lifestyle, and the relationship between lifestyle and consumption. I examine the ethos of using materials from previous art (appropriation art versus recycling and appropriateness). I also look into the museum exhibition practices that construct identities in relation to temporary art, such as residencies, which are places where the artist works, lives and exhibits.
Agamben’s thinking can also be used to deconstruct the human-centered concept of species and to outline an ethics that applies to all living beings who co-inhabit the same ecological habitants. - 14.40-16 Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, PhD, Docent Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku: The more-than-human work of painting – In my presentation, I examine the more-than-human work of painting, especially in relation to weaving, ceramics and monumental murals. I ask, for example, how the windows and air quality of the studio, the weather, the times of the year, the cranes and the vichyvesi become the (part)doers of the painting. I will also return to the roots of new materialist and post humanist art research, observing the recently published lectures of Gilles Deleuze in Sur la Peinture: Cours Mars Juin 1981 (Les Éditions de Minuit, 2023).
Invited speakers
- Hanneke Grootenboer, Professor of Early Modern Art and Visual Culture at the University of Amsterdam, in her book The Pensive Image – Art as a Form of Thinking (2020), examines painting as a form of thought – what painting does. “I argue that art is a form of thinking, and that painting is capable of offering us a thought, rather than a meaning or a narrative…. The pensive image gives rise to an uneasy and indeterminate state of openness that allows for the unthought to surface.” Her research into the pensive image thus considers the ability of paintings to think and to provoke thought, particularly through 17th-century Dutch paintings.
“A Closer Look” in: In Focus: A Closer Look at Photorealism | Centraal Museum Utrecht | 2024
The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking | UP Chicago, 2021 | paperback 2023
- Riikka Stewen, Professor of Art History and Theory at the Academy of Fine Art Helsinki, serves as a commentator/discussant. Stewen’s doctoral dissertation, Beginnings of Being: Painting and the Topography of the Aesthetic Experience (1995) investigated phenomenological and psychoanalytical theories of the subject and questions pertaining to observation. Her current research focuses on the materiality of memory and the genealogy of performativity in contemporary art.
- Inkamaija Iitiä, Ph.D., researcher of contemporary art, curator of the National Gallery’s Image Collections. The dissertation “Käsitteellisestä ruumiilliseen, sitaatiosta paikkaan: maalaustaide ja nykytaiteen historia” (2008) http://hdl.handle.net/10138/19370 (“From Conceptual to Corporeal, from Quotation to Site: Painting and History of Contemporary Art”) explores the state of painting in contemporary art and art theory since the 1960s.
Her research Painting as Habitat (2024-2025, funded by the Kone Foundation) experiments with the applicability of Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of form of life – use, habit (habitus), habitation (habitat), inoperability, and the inappropriable – to contemporary art phenomena stemming from painting traditions, including performance art, site-specific and ephemeral art, and moving images.
- Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Ph.D., Docent, Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku, senior lecturer in Art History and co-director in the multidisciplinary research project “New Economies of Artistic Labour”(2019-2024, Kone Foundation).
The monograph Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration (Open Humanities Press, 2018) continues their new materialist, art-based work and offers methodological insights on how to appreciate the materialities of art, and embraces new ways of being and thinking that they offer. The co-edited volume New Materialism and Intersectionality: Making Middles Matter, is forthcoming in February 2025.
- Harri Mäcklin, Ph.D., Docent of Aesthetics, University of Helsinki. The dissertation on the phenomenology of aesthetic immersion Going Elsewhere: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Immersion in 2019. Aesthetic immersion is one of the most extraordinary experiences that art can create. But what is aesthetic immersion all about?
Aesthetic Self-Forgetfulness: A Phenomenological Study on Aesthetic Experience and Self-Consciousness (2019-2021), funded by Kone Foundation, exploring the relationship between aesthetic experience and self-consciousness.
Since 2011, he has also worked as a visual arts critic for Helsingin Sanomat.
- Liisa Pesonen, MFA, visual artist, and art psychotherapist.
- Jussi A. Saarinen, Ph.D., Docent, University of Jyväskylä.
Between 2023–2027 Academy of Finland Research Fellow working on a project titled Situated Mind and Artistic Creativity.
Affect in Artistic Creativity – Painting to Feel ( Routledge, 2021):
“Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel.
They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported.”
- Joel Slotte, MFA, artist.
- The public conference is a continuation and culmination of courses held by professor Tarja Pitkänen-Walter at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2023-2024:
Painting as a Form of Life – Aesthetic Resonance, Enlivening, and Affective Scaffolds in Artistic Work (2023);
How My Artworks Are Created in Networks of Being – Material, Sensuous, and Affective Agencies in Painting (2024).
A publication will be edited based on the conference speeches.
Programme Wed 29 January
- 10.45 Conference opening Tarja Pitkänen-Walter, Riikka Stewen (Grootenboer intro)
- 11-11.45 Hanneke Grootenboer / University of Amsterdam
An Invitation to Think. Art history in general and the act of interpretation in particular start from the presumption that we, as viewers need to make sense of art works. In this presentation, I would like to raise the question how art works are capable of making sense of us, assisting us in understanding ourselves and the world surrounding us by offering us a site of reflection. A ‘pensive image’ is a work that grasps viewers, past and present, without letting us grasp it. I argue that a pensive image is an invitation to think. Starting from contemporary art practice and artistic research, this presentation will discuss various works of art including 17th century Dutch still life painting which, by resisting interpretation, offer a thought rather than a meaning or a narrative. - Q&A 11.45-12.00 Riikka Stewen, Professor of Art History and Theory, KuvA
- 12.00-13.15 Lunch break
- 13.15 – 14.15 Harri Mäcklin, PhD, Docent in Aesthetics, University of Helsinki: Painting as a quasi-subject: Notes on Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenological Aesthetics The French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne (1910 -1995) is an unknown grandeur of phenomenological aesthetics. According to him, the encounter with a work of art is a special event that reveals something fundamental about the relationship between man and the world. In this presentation, I explore Dufrenne’s conceptions of painting and what the painting does to its viewer.
- 14.15 -15.15 Joel Slotte, MFA, visual artist: on artistic work and ways of thinking in painting
- 15.15-15.30 Coffee break
- 15.30-16.30 Liisa Pesonen, MFA, visual artist, art psychotherapist Painting as an interaction event between the author and the work of art I address the following themes in and through my own artistic work: Painting as a reciprocal and enlivening Other. Is our experience of the subject changing? Painting as a support and guiding phenomenon for thinking?
Programme Thu 30 January
- 10.30 -12.00 Jussi A. Saarinen, PhD, Docent, University of Jyväskylä, Academy Research Fellow 2023-2027 on Situational Mind and Artistic Creativity. Affective Scaffolding and Aesthetic Resonance in Painting Saarinen examines the motives and environments of making art, as well as the feelings and states of mind associated with it. He suggests that painting enables the artist to experience e.g. freedom, revitalization and connection that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.
- 12.15-13.30 Lunch break
- 13.30-14.30 Inkamaja Iitiä, PhD, Researcher in Contemporary Art, Painting as Habitat Research with a grant from Kone Foundation 2024-2025. Painting as Habitat In my research, I try Giorgio Agambeni’s conceptualization of lifeform – use, habit (habit), outfit (habit), dwelling (habitat), inoperability (inoperability) and uninitiated (inappropriable) – applicability to contemporary art phenomena that are oriented from the tradition of painting to e.g. performance art, site-specific and disappearing art, and moving image. The time span of the study is from the 1960s to the present.
I study, among other things, the relationship between performance and the artist’s lifestyle, and the relationship between lifestyle and consumption. I examine the ethos of using materials from previous art (appropriation art versus recycling and appropriateness). I also look into the museum exhibition practices that construct identities in relation to temporary art, such as residencies, which are places where the artist works, lives and exhibits.
Agamben’s thinking can also be used to deconstruct the human-centered concept of species and to outline an ethics that applies to all living beings who co-inhabit the same ecological habitants. - 14.40-16 Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, PhD, Docent Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku: The more-than-human work of painting – In my presentation, I examine the more-than-human work of painting, especially in relation to weaving, ceramics and monumental murals. I ask, for example, how the windows and air quality of the studio, the weather, the times of the year, the cranes and the vichyvesi become the (part)doers of the painting. I will also return to the roots of new materialist and post humanist art research, observing the recently published lectures of Gilles Deleuze in Sur la Peinture: Cours Mars Juin 1981 (Les Éditions de Minuit, 2023).
Invited speakers
- Hanneke Grootenboer, Professor of Early Modern Art and Visual Culture at the University of Amsterdam, in her book The Pensive Image – Art as a Form of Thinking (2020), examines painting as a form of thought – what painting does. “I argue that art is a form of thinking, and that painting is capable of offering us a thought, rather than a meaning or a narrative…. The pensive image gives rise to an uneasy and indeterminate state of openness that allows for the unthought to surface.” Her research into the pensive image thus considers the ability of paintings to think and to provoke thought, particularly through 17th-century Dutch paintings.
“A Closer Look” in: In Focus: A Closer Look at Photorealism | Centraal Museum Utrecht | 2024
The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking | UP Chicago, 2021 | paperback 2023
- Riikka Stewen, Professor of Art History and Theory at the Academy of Fine Art Helsinki, serves as a commentator/discussant. Stewen’s doctoral dissertation, Beginnings of Being: Painting and the Topography of the Aesthetic Experience (1995) investigated phenomenological and psychoanalytical theories of the subject and questions pertaining to observation. Her current research focuses on the materiality of memory and the genealogy of performativity in contemporary art.
- Inkamaija Iitiä, Ph.D., researcher of contemporary art, curator of the National Gallery’s Image Collections. The dissertation “Käsitteellisestä ruumiilliseen, sitaatiosta paikkaan: maalaustaide ja nykytaiteen historia” (2008) http://hdl.handle.net/10138/19370 (“From Conceptual to Corporeal, from Quotation to Site: Painting and History of Contemporary Art”) explores the state of painting in contemporary art and art theory since the 1960s.
Her research Painting as Habitat (2024-2025, funded by the Kone Foundation) experiments with the applicability of Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of form of life – use, habit (habitus), habitation (habitat), inoperability, and the inappropriable – to contemporary art phenomena stemming from painting traditions, including performance art, site-specific and ephemeral art, and moving images.
- Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Ph.D., Docent, Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku, senior lecturer in Art History and co-director in the multidisciplinary research project “New Economies of Artistic Labour”(2019-2024, Kone Foundation).
The monograph Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration (Open Humanities Press, 2018) continues their new materialist, art-based work and offers methodological insights on how to appreciate the materialities of art, and embraces new ways of being and thinking that they offer. The co-edited volume New Materialism and Intersectionality: Making Middles Matter, is forthcoming in February 2025.
- Harri Mäcklin, Ph.D., Docent of Aesthetics, University of Helsinki. The dissertation on the phenomenology of aesthetic immersion Going Elsewhere: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Immersion in 2019. Aesthetic immersion is one of the most extraordinary experiences that art can create. But what is aesthetic immersion all about?
Aesthetic Self-Forgetfulness: A Phenomenological Study on Aesthetic Experience and Self-Consciousness (2019-2021), funded by Kone Foundation, exploring the relationship between aesthetic experience and self-consciousness.
Since 2011, he has also worked as a visual arts critic for Helsingin Sanomat.
- Liisa Pesonen, MFA, visual artist, and art psychotherapist.
- Jussi A. Saarinen, Ph.D., Docent, University of Jyväskylä.
Between 2023–2027 Academy of Finland Research Fellow working on a project titled Situated Mind and Artistic Creativity.
Affect in Artistic Creativity – Painting to Feel ( Routledge, 2021):
“Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel.
They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported.”
- Joel Slotte, MFA, artist.
- The public conference is a continuation and culmination of courses held by professor Tarja Pitkänen-Walter at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2023-2024:
Painting as a Form of Life – Aesthetic Resonance, Enlivening, and Affective Scaffolds in Artistic Work (2023);
How My Artworks Are Created in Networks of Being – Material, Sensuous, and Affective Agencies in Painting (2024).
A publication will be edited based on the conference speeches.