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Lin, Autumn
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Fall 2024
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2024-12
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Loxton_Thesis.pdf
Adobe PDF, 3.19 MB
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In my paper, I will explore how entropy and accretion serve as catalysts in
contemporary painting through Georges Bataille’s concept of l’informe (the formless),
first published in 1929 in the Surrealist journal Documents, and further developed by
Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in the 1990s. While entropy—the inevitable
dissolution of matter into disorder—and accretion—the gradual accumulation of matter
into sedimentary layers—seem antithetical, I will argue that their tension, in relation to
l’informe, has played a generative role in art since the birth of Modernism and continues
to reverberate in artmaking today. How can painting function both as an indexical mark
and as an expressive collaboration with the forces that shape our world and beyond?
What slippages, or gaps, remain to be explored by engaging with these phenomena in
painting today? Over the course of a month-long residency in Northern Italy, I
discovered an unexpected link: dust, as a pervasive, unifying accumulation, and its
specific effects on the paintings I made there.
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