Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism

This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic practice, such as oils, charcoal, brushes, canvas, earth, and sand. Artists often work with intuitive, tactile sensations and rhythms that connect them to these materials. Rhythm connects the brain and body to the world, and the world of abstract art. The book features new readings of artworks by Matisse, Pollock, Dubuffet, Tápies, Benglis, Len Lye, Star Gossage, Shannon Novak, Simon Ingram, Lee Mingwei, L. N. Tallur and many others. Such art challenges centuries of philosophical and aesthetic order that has elevated the substance of mind over the substance of matter. This is a multidisciplinary study of different metastable patterns and rhythms: in art, the body, and the brain. This focus on the propagation of rhythm across domains represents a fresh art historical approach and provides important opportunities for art and science to cooperate.

Acknowledgements; List of figures; Introduction: a rhythm analysis of art; Part I. Rhythms of Mind and Matter: 1.1. Philosophical approaches; 1.2. Henri Bergson; 1.3. Recent mind and matter complications; 1.4. The matter of the brain; 1.5. The matter of sensation; 1.6. Anton Ehrenzweig: daydreaming matter; Part II. Rhythms of the Brain and Matter Outside of It: 2.1. Buzsáki; 2.2. Metastability across brain, body and art: Pollock; 2.3. The aesthetics of mind wandering; 2.4. Mind wandering and creativity; 2.5. Metastability and emotion; Part III. Rhythm, Dirt, Art: 3.1. Emergence; 3.2. Henri Matisse; 3.3. Cubism; 3.4. Surrealism; 3.5. Abstraction; 3.6. Informel; 3.7. Andre Masson; 3.8. Jean Fautrier; 3.9. Jean Dubuffet; 3.10. Antoni Tàpies; 3.11. Alberto Burri; 3.12. Zen and abstraction; 3.13. Further developments in dirty rhythm; 3.14. Earth art and trends in contemporary art; References.

Gregory Minissale is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He specialises in philosophical and psychological approaches to art, and is the author of The Psychology of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, 2013).