An uncertain practice : visual ambiguity as an index of uncertainty in selected painters’ work

M.Tech. (Fine Art)Abstract: This study is concerned with investigating the uncertainty experienced by a painter during the art-making process and how this uncertainty might be indexed by visual ambiguity. I argue that moments of visual ambiguity identified within selected paintings occur as a result of their being “the physical manifestation of a cause”, and thus become a trace of that cause (Krauss 1977:59). The cause, in this case, is the uncertainty of the artist which functions as a generative strategy. The research topic for this study has been generated from my experience as a painter: my erstwhile sense of control which I now wish to question through embracing uncertainty during the art-making process. Within this dissertation I examine and expound this experience in several ways. I locate the precursors of contemporary uncertainty as historical moments during the early twentieth century. This is in an attempt to understand and position Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings and artistic approaches as responsive to these uncertain conditions. Having established a broad historical context for uncertainty, I then show that such doubt becomes a fundamental feature within postmodernism as exemplified by selected works and painterly processes of Francis Bacon. Furthermore, I demonstrate the continuation of this doubt into the metamodern paintings of South African artist Frikkie Eksteen. Through visual analyses I attempt to establish moments of visual ambiguity identified in these selected works as indices of the uncertainty experienced by these artists. The notion of the uncanny is employed here in support of this discussion. My analyses of these selected works underpins an explication of my own work, which is supported by entries from journaled experiences of doubt during my embodied and immersive painting practice. I frame these analyses within Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray’s writings on phenomenology which position perceptive experience within the body and mind. I am thus able to argue for the agency of the index as I triangulate my argument between critical textual analyses, visual analyses and the statements of the artist. This forms a foundation for the evidence provided in my three chapters; that is, historical uncertainty..