Presentation
Organized by Professor Claudine Tiercelin as part of the Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge Chair at the Collège de France, under the scientific direction of Thomas Lévy-Lasne and Marc Molk, the symposium "La Fabrique de la Peinture" will be held at the Collège de France (11 place Marcelin Berthelot, 75005 Paris) on Thursday, October 30 and Friday, October 31, 2014.
Sixteen painters will testify to their practices in forty-minute talks followed by twenty minutes of discussion with the audience. The concern to represent the diversity of practices, aesthetics, careers and nationalities has governed the selection of speakers. The symposium will be held in the Marguerite de Navarre amphitheatre (450 seats). Admission is free, and simultaneous translation will be provided where necessary. They will then be posted on the Collège de France website.
Objectives
As part of the reflections and activities to be carried out in 2014-2015 on the concept of practical knowledge, this colloquium will focus more specifically on the type of knowledge brought into play by pictorial practice.
It may come as a surprise that Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge should take art and its practices as their object of study. Shouldn't the philosophy of art be concerned with aesthetics or art history? Or art criticism or literature? There's no doubt about it. But we also know that art criticism, even when it deals with aesthetics or art history, also provides the market with its share of hermetic press releases. Literature, when it rubs shoulders with the fine arts, in this case painting, more often than not invites the painted image for illustrative purposes. It's also finished paintings that these disciplines most often seize upon. Or when they look further upstream at the very process that led to the creation of such objects, they are quick to mobilize a few hackneyed mythologies of creation, or to confine themselves to the painter's affects, with the solidly anchored prejudice that they are the explanation of everything.
Without denying the interest of such approaches, this symposium would prefer to invite a more in-depth reflection on the process itself and, even more so, on the type of practical knowledge it presupposes. Through a necessarily circumscribed, modest but serious exploration, both technical and procedural, of pictorial practice in its contemporary variations, based on the testimonies of recognized painters, the aim is to identify the specific contours of painters' "field of action" and to clarify what is at stake in the type of knowledge thus brought into play: what is a technique? What constitutes the singularity of a practice? How important is intention? Training, influences, general knowledge, context, conventions, traditions and history? But also to instruments, materials and gestures? In so doing, the challenge will be to probe "the factory of painting", and to draw on this investigation to gain a better understanding of the links that exist between the practical and theoretical aspects (conceptual and symbolic, of course, but also indexical and iconic) of all knowledge, even the most abstract: in a word, to explain why knowing "that..." is almost always, in fact, knowing "how...", but perhaps even more importantly, to understand why the formula also applies, under certain conditions, in the opposite direction.