Do Look Back: Affect and the Expectations of Seeing.

The expectation’s of looking and thus the affect of expectation is structured, for painting, in advance by techniques linked at one end to perspective and the other to flatness. Both positions insist on a primacy of viewing that is linked to the singularity of looking. Looking once, maybe a looking in which the eye is guided in advance by the focal point. Or looking once may be all that is necessary because the flat field gives its all, at once. While looking and thus affect are more complicated, most accounts of that complication still privilege the singular act.

The aim of this paper will be to argue, through an examination of a drawing by Dürer and a painting by Breugel that the singular looking can only ever be reductive because a work, for a variety of reasons, is a site of ‘anoriginal’ complexity. While this position holds once what is central is the work of art rather than art as document, it is still possible to argue that there are works whose material presence can be construed as affirmation of that complexity.

Andrew Benjamin, Professor of Critical Theory in Design and Architecture
Associate Dean, Research, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building
University of Technology, Sydney