Models of attention

In this paper the question, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’(1) which opened Yves Alain Bois's essay 'Painting as Model' is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuro-psychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. ‘Painting as Model’ argues for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This paper proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed, and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting. (1) Bois, Yve-Alain, Painting As Model, MIT Press, 1990. Yve-Alain Bois’ seminal text Painting as Model, first published in 1990, is still cited as being an extremely important collection of essays that looks at painting as being both a conceptual and a material enquiry. This conference responds to Bois's position that one must concentrate on both the formal elements of a work of art and its physical qualities to fully understand its totality