Projective Space: Structuring a Beholder’s Imaginative Response
type: CreativeWork
description: The thesis explores the reciprocal relationship between an artwork and the space of its reception. It proposes a distinctive position on spatiality and the virtual. The thesis is submitted in two parts: a written thesis (Part One), and a documentation of my own art practice (Part Two). The artwork that comprises the practice component is not that of a painter, and yet the sculptural installations I present allude to perspectival paintings. Utilising perspectival geometry, these site-responsive works engage the threshold between two and three-dimensional representation in a way whereby implicit and actual beholder’s viewpoints are contrasted or fused. The written thesis focuses on the reception of perspectival painting, rather than on my own artworks. Referencing analytical philosophical arguments on representational seeing, and the reception aesthetics of Wolfgang Kemp, it puts forward a distinctive position that contends that while the visual imagination does not define depiction, it plays a pivotal role in supplementing perception in works where the spectator attends to and/or imagines away the threshold separating the real and fictive realms. After Merleau-Ponty, I call such an imaginative engagement seeing-with, which describes a particular use to which painting is put. In providing a strongly felt pictorial depth, I argue that such an implied pictorial space incorporates the space between painting and spectator position. I investigate two categories of works where such imagining facilitates a distinctive access to the picture’s content: (i) paintings containing what Wollheim refers to as an ‘internal spectator’; and (ii) paintings integrated into their architectural settings, where the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder…
abstract: The thesis explores the reciprocal relationship between an artwork and the space of its reception. It proposes a distinctive position on spatiality and the virtual. The thesis is submitted in two parts: a written thesis (Part One), and a documentation of my own art practice (Part Two). The artwork that comprises the practice component is not that of a painter, and yet the sculptural installations I present allude to perspectival paintings. Utilising perspectival geometry, these site-responsive works engage the threshold between two and three-dimensional representation in a way whereby implicit and actual beholder’s viewpoints are contrasted or fused. The written thesis focuses on the reception of perspectival painting, rather than on my own artworks. Referencing analytical philosophical arguments on representational seeing, and the reception aesthetics of Wolfgang Kemp, it puts forward a distinctive position that contends that while the visual imagination does not define depiction, it plays a pivotal role in supplementing perception in works where the spectator attends to and/or imagines away the threshold separating the real and fictive realms. After Merleau-Ponty, I call such an imaginative engagement seeing-with, which describes a particular use to which painting is put. In providing a strongly felt pictorial depth, I argue that such an implied pictorial space incorporates the space between painting and spectator position. I investigate two categories of works where such imagining facilitates a distinctive access to the picture’s content: (i) paintings containing what Wollheim refers to as an ‘internal spectator’; and (ii) paintings integrated into their architectural settings, where the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder…
author: Wilder, Ken
language: en
identifier: Wilder, Ken <https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/view/creators/Wilder=3AKen=3A=3A.html> (2009) Projective Space: Structuring a Beholder’s Imaginative Response. PhD thesis, University of the Arts London.
date published: 2009-03
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:00:35Z
provider: University of the Arts London
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of the Arts London