After I had collected enough references to language is practitioners interviews and critics texts in newspapers I realized the only way to push my reflection forward was to embrace a research for more consistent art journal articles or even philosophy books. I aimed to find material on the areas related to hermeneutics, aesthetics and an analysis of the problems that emerge from these to see if I was going to find support material or on the contrary ideas I had to “fight against”. I found two published papers that synthesized my worries and backed me up in my approach to theory versus practice, conceptual versus sensuous and the formal.
The first, called Inseparable Insight: Reconciling Cognitivism and Formalism in Aesthetics, is an essay about the inseparability of form and content in art and aesthetic cognitivism.
The thesis of inseparability states that (1) it is impossible to have the same content in two different forms; and (2) it is impossible to have the same form in two different contents. […]
Aesthetic Cognitivism and Aesthetic anti-cognitivism can be defined as opposing responses to two questions: (1) Can art provide knowledge? And, if it can, (2) how is this aesthetically relevant?

Thomson-Jones, J. of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Fall 2005), p.375 / 376

In this article it is argued that Cognitivism is compatible with the inseparability thesis in a rigorous and consistent way. The content of this article didn’t just help me clarify ideas about the theoretical approach I have to these problems but it also helped me understand and change my perspective on painting and installation. I thought initially (while writing appendix 2) that painting was the sensuous media par excellence and installation the conceptual cerebral media. After I read this essay I realized the opposite happened in my practice. Because painting was a self sustained process (not requiring any political ideals to influence the process of production which is still the traditional one) it started developing a cerebral and almost aseptic structure in the content I put into it. The murals are a good example of this but there is even more recent work where the same is happening. The opposite happened to what I felt in my installation work. I understood that my initial motivation was an intuitive response to the objects and that meant a formal / plastic approach to start working. After this first interaction happened the content easily found its place and importance in the work due to the politically based process of making and the meanings the found objects carried with them. These usually triggered a response in me that led to a title or a certain idea being enhanced later on.
This made me think that none of these media was more conceptual or formal then the other even if at a certain point I thought a new formalism might be erupting in my 3D work. Because these two components are present in all the media I work with I started questioning if this conflict between practice / theory, aesthetic experience / hermeneutics, art / language was universal or not? Being useful or not, it was quite obvious to me it was this “Friction” that made “art works work”. At this point of my research I found an article called: Aesthetic F(r)iction: the conflicts of visual experience. In this article the “formative role” of this same conflict I was thinking about is sustained by an accurate philosophical analysis of hermeneutics and its interactions with art.

First: Aesthetic experience both situates and, indeed, emerges from a conflict between art’s material (practical) dimensions and its conceptual (theoretical) dimensions. Second: aesthetic experience marks such a site because it is hermeneutical in nature: i.e. it is occasioned by a productive friction between, the sensuous and the intellectual. Third: the productive friction between the practical and the intellectual components of an artwork offers an explanation of how art works work, that is, actively engage, enthral or distress us. Such conflict is fundamental to such work insofar as the task of an artwork in above all to make something appear. Such appearances, I shall argue, are born of conflict.

Davey, Journal of Visual art Practice, Volume 4 Numbers 2/3 2005, p. 135

I had a double feeling about this article. On one hand I was happy there was a recent paper published with the exact same ideas I was exploring, on the other hand I felt a bit frustrated because I didn’t do it quickly enough to be bale to compare my results to Davey’s.
Like Keith Sonnier said in the interview mentioned above in a much simpler and less rigorous way:
Such a theorization of the hermeneutical element with aesthetic experience raises a fundamental question concerning the relation of aesthetic experience to language. Insofar as individual aesthetic experience is linguistically mediated.

Davey, Journal of Visual art Practice, Volume 4 Numbers 2/3 2005, p. 136


What I need to ask now is: why was I arriving to the same worries and conclusions as an academic philosopher researching hermeneutics? Is it because I was theorizing my experience and researching its relevance when compared to other practitioners? Was it just because I was researching pure theory instead of some practical properties of my work? To give the best answer to these questions I need to be completely honest and say that there is nothing more practical and relevant in my fine art practice than to understand the essence, the processes and the origin of the work and everything related to it. Interpretation and the conflicts I approached as problems ended up proving to be my best allies in the pursuit of a more confident practice. Any true philosopher would say praxis is one of the most relevant consequences of the philosophical engagement.
It was wonderful to be able to read Heidegger pointing out Art’s properties, stating crucial thoughts ob the work of art, what he believes to be its origin. The full exploration / exploitation of these areas is for me more relevant then any technical or more linear analysis of my work.
The vocabulary I developed during this exploration had a correspondent intellectual and artistic development. When one becomes familiar for the first time with the sensuous, the formal, the aesthetic, the visual and plasticity as concepts distinct from each other but still related, one can say there was an improvement. When finally we feel our awareness expanding and undergoing an exploration of the super sensuous and its historical relation to the sensuous, first with Plato’s “mimesis attack” and then with Nietzsche’s denial of that same theory and valuing the sensuous above the super sensuous, we know we’ve changed. According to Heidegger one can extract Five Statements from Nietzsche’s thoughts:
1. Art is the most perspicuous and familiar configuration of will to Power.
2. Art must be grasped in terms of the artist.
3. According to the expanded concept of the artist, art is the basic occurrence of all beings; to the extent that they are, being are self-creating, created;
4. Art is the distinctive counter movement to nihilism […]
5. Art is worth more than “the truth”.
Heidegger, Five Statement on Art, p.75

I’m not sure if I agree with Nietzsche (or what Heidegger extracted from his work) but I know I agree with the critical view he has on Platonism, Catholicism and Nihilism when he uses Art as the ultimate “weapon” against these. I realized this reflective journey was (and will be) only relevant because of the combination of an historical approach and a critical attitude. Even if these two concepts (historical and critical) are apparently contradictory when they are in the same sentence, they are also obviously complementary in what concerns the understanding of the conflicts inherent to Art.

Short Conclusion

More important than arguing in favour of a certain media, or making sure that my fine art practice is informed by more relevant research, is (ironically) to undergo the experience of reflecting about language and its importance in our own work. What I extracted from this project was a journey that will come through in the studio work and possibly even influence the observer.

To undergo an experience with something […] means that something befalls, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of “undergoing” an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making: to undergo here means to endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it.

Heidegger, The Origin of the Art Work, p.