Research Interests

Painting:abstraction as representation, hegemonic structures, materiality of images, pictorial dispositifs, economies of transcription, archives and appropriation.

Current Research

My direct research interests, for some time now, position me in a discursive field of painting particularly in terms of issues of abstraction, as representation, in relationship to, and as, hegemonic structures. This has constituted my research in terms of my studio practice in paintings made between 1996 2005 but also in the form of a number of published texts. 

My writing and the relationship of critical theory to my studio practice  is particularly pivoted around a deep knowledge of  French post war painting where the questioning of what painting is, specifically, was linked directly to questions of ideology (particularly in relation to Althusser), a localised French political dimension and a polemicization of Greenberg’s arguably hegemonic reading of medium specificity.  This polemic from the French perspective sees the successive deployment of an alternative structuring of  this specificity as the tableau, a conceptual object which counts `painting` as having a `thickness` where in questions of signification are arguably immanent.   The notion of the tableau as it appears in discussions around painting in the work of theorists such as Michael Fried, Hubert Damisch, Yve-Alain Bois and the artist Christian Bonnefoi focuses upon the pictorial and material structure of painting (and its extended sense as  `tableau`) as being  like a `dispositive`, a mechanism within which the work occurs ( as opposed to the support being a surface upon which it happens). 

My interest here has been with how such dispositifs can be thought of as rhetorical structures which align themselves with aesthetic formations which are in themselves subtended by ideological formations. Structural ideas such as parallax and projection systems have been important in terms of how the dispositifs can be considered to operate, this interrogation happening both through my studio practice and a number of published texts.   Many of these issues were also relevant in Machine Room which was a collaboration which culiminated in a residency at Crate Space, Margate in 2006.  The collaboration looked at series of propositions about painting that focused upon its prosthetics.  Here a shared preoccupation between a group of painters, who all use material that is projected, traced and transformed as a key aspect of their studio practice, was explored.  This was manifested as a workshop where a series of propositions were explored, documented and became the content for a website.  A key element of Machine Room is the proximity of pictorial/painting practice to archives.  On a pragmatic level I document my own practice on my website using Dreamweaver.  The relationship of the studio to the live content of the website has led me to think into the archive as an active tool of artistic practice both in a reflective and a productive sense.  Atlas, a teaching workshop I co-taught at the Ecole des Beaux arts de Valenciennes in 2007, is indicative of the areas of focus that interest me in this field.  Of particular interest are: Aby Warburg`s formulation of the Pathos-formula and particularly in relation to Philippe-Alain Michaud`s Aby Warburg and the Image in Movement (Zone Books, USA, 2004), Walter Benjamin`s  Arcades Project  and also in relation to Susan Buck-Morss` The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , MIT Press, USA, 14 Feb 1990) and the relationship of archives to the work of Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince.  Through several series of works (Nevermind, Prosopopeia, Vanishing Point, Taken as Read  and Bare Life)  the spatialisation of shapes, derived from images, has been worked through using different orientations to painterly and  pictorial dispositifs (in terms of flatness, depth and thickness).  Discursively the development between these series represents an engagement that can be described as an expanded field idea of painting but in proximity to the image (as opposed to sculpture).  Here physical spatialisation; in terms of flatness across a surface, in optical terms with depth and in literal separation in terms of relief are, in addition to the space of projection, necessary in the studio at the moment of transcription (a space that perhaps can be considered akin to the infra thin formulated by Duchamp).

The areas of interest outlined above are currently being put together as a book for a series entitled How Art Thinks to be published in 2010 by the International Centre for Fine Art Research in London and the research centre of ZHdk in Zurich. 

Another project entitled Insidious,is a curatorial collaboration with the French artist Guillaume Paris and is scheduled as an exhibition at the Galerie Thermale in Nancy, France for March 2010.  The works in this exhibition consider the question of power and its representation, in close relationship to the rise of mass culture (and the cultural industry at large). As such, the exhibition addresses both the problem of the autonomy of the work of art and that of the aestheticisation of politics.

Recent research

Solo exhibitions

• 2008: Taken As Read, Moments Artistiques, Paris.
• 2007: Point de fuite / vanishing point, gallery 33 , Berlin, Germany, November 2007.
• 2007: LAS galerie, ‘Trisquare – Closer Than You Think, peintures 1996-98’,
• Paris, February 2007.
• 2006: 'Prosopopoeia', gallery 33 at FON, Berlin, Germany, October 2006.
• 2005: ‘Nevermind’, Galerie Pitch, Paris, France, November, 2005.
• 2005: ‘Sublimey 1’, Galerie Pitch, Paris, France, January, 2005.

Group exhibitions

• 2008: Constellation, oeuvres sur papier, Louisa Minkin - Gérard Diaz - Florim Hasani - Mick Finch - Julie Lorinet - Régis Rizzo - Franz Ackerman, Las galerie, Paris.
• 2008: ‘Spitting Distance’, Mick Finch and Guillaume Paris, Five Years, London. Exhibition documentation.
• 2007: Las galerie @ se0ne, London, Mauren Brodbeck, Philippe Fabian,
• Mick Finch, Regis Rizzo, Claude Temin Vergez.
• 2007: 'Doubleuse', The Nunnery gallery , Bow Arts Trust, London, with Pavel Büchler, Moyra Derby, Mick Finch, Jane Harris, Gerard Hemsworth, Louise Hopkins, Richard Kirwan, Sadie Murdoch, Katherine McKee, Ben Ravenscroft, Caragh Thuring, Amikam Toren & John Wilkins.
• 2006: ‘Mickey dans tous ses états’, Artcurial, Paris, with Anger, Arroyo, Basquiat, Bury, Cartiser, Castelbajac, Combas, Condo, Dalek, Dion, Earnshaw, Errò, Finch, Galloway, Haring, Huart, Interduck, Khazem, Khimoune, Kliaving, Lafay, Lavier, McMillen, Mendras, Murakami, Ospina, Pavlos, Pennec, Pensato, Pras, Rancillac, Reip, Ru, Saul, Schmid, Schmidt, Shallit, Spiller, Tianbing, Van Caeckenbergh, Van Der Sterren, Ultra Violet, Yoshida, Ziwei.
• 2006: ‘Abstract Mode’, Fosterart, London, with Olivier Gourvil, Jane Harris, Richard Kirwan , Monique Prieto, Danny Rolph, Gary Simmonds, Daniel Sturgis,Claude Temin-Vergez .
• 2006: ‘Trendmarks’, galerie Suty, Coye-la-Forêt, France.
• 2005: 'Mythomania', suppléments temporaires au LAAC, (Lieu d'art & action contemporain), Jardin de Sculptures, Dunkerque. Amikam Toren, Jane Harris, John Wilkins, Katherine McKee, Louise Hopkins, Mick Finch, Moyra Derby.
• 2005: 'Mythomania', The Metropole, Folkestone, England.

Projects

• 2006: Machine Room : a blueprint for painting, research group (Mick Finch, Beth Harland, Louisa Minkin & Claude Temin-Vergez) engaged with questions of painting and its contexts, workshop project, Crate Space, Margate, U.K., July – September.

Project website:  www.cratespace.co.uk/machineroom/

Published writing

• 2009: Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2Writing on Practice” edited by Mick Finch and Chris Smith including an article `Studio notes: Closer Than You Think, Ply- series,  Riposte, Sublimey and Nevermind.`
• 2009: Review of the exhibition `The Russian Linesman`in artcritical.com.
• 2009: Review of the exhibition, Figures du corps - une leçon d’anatomie aux Beaux-arts at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, in artcritical.com.
• 2007: Article, 'Insidious' by Guillaume Paris & Mick Finch with Cécile Dazord, for the internet journal /seconds.
• 2005: Review (written under the name of "James Pinson") of a solo exhibition of MichelPaysant's 'Inventari(a'), Musée des Beaux-arts, Mulhouse, France, Contemporary Magazine.

Further information:

Mick Finch

BAFA, 2D Pathway Leader
School of Art
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
University of the Arts London
107-109 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0DU
Untited Kingdom.

Tel. +44 (0)20 7514 7234

Email:  m.finch@csm.arts.ac.uk.

Personal website: http://www.mickfinch.com/