Patrick Bryson
Paintings
© 2023 Essays written by Patrick Bryson and Gisli Bergmann
The Morality of Attention
"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way." Iain McGilchrist author of The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.
(1) The materialist tradition in Western philosophy begins with Greek philosophy in the 5th century BCE. According to Democritus, the world consists of nothing but atoms in empty space…
https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy/History-of-materialism
(2) How East and West think in profoundly different ways
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in-profoundly-different-ways
(3) “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.”
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions
and the Unmaking of the World.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things
'Attention as a Moral Act' Iain McGilchrist in Conversations on Remaking the World
- Perspectiva series of dialogues with a range of thinkers and intro to Ian McGilchrist.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YHUGuUhB1c4
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/matter-with-things/
https://thejollysociety.com/mcgilchrist-attention-is-a-moral-act/
(4) “The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
Marcel Duchamp
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/23/the-creative-act-marcel-duchamp-1957/
(5) Simulacra and Simulations
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press
https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html
(6) New Materialism
https://globalsocialtheory.org/topics/new-materialism/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13265
There are no things only relationships
“We cannot understand reality by disassembling it and examining its parts.
The whole is more than the sum of the parts” - Iain McGilchrist - author of
'The Matter with Things' on why the world is made of relationships, not things.
1 https://iai.tv/video/why-the-world-is-in-constant-flux-iain-mcgilchrist
2 https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2019/11/19/what-is-new-materialism/
3 For the discussion on agency, see p57, in pp49-57, in ‘Thinking Through Painting’, Isabelle Graw, et.al. Sternberg Press, 2012
Isabelle Graw: The Economy of Painting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JDthDEcmAs
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumanism
© 2023 Curated and written by Gisli Bergmann & Patrick Bryson