Molitor’s dissertation “Chrononauts in Chromotopia: Toward an Erotics of Abstract Painting’s Materiality in the Works of Lynda Benglis and Katharina Grosse”, contributes to the interdisciplinary field of ‘queer abstraction’ by arguing for an erotics of abstract painting’s materiality. Grounded in an epistemology of sensation, the dissertation centers viewer responses to color and liquidity, painting’s unique material qualities.
Visual pleasure emerges as deeply embedded within Lynda Benglis’s pigmented paint pours and as abundantly spread over Katharina Grosse’s three-dimensional painting fields. Being in sensation with these artworks affords viewers erotic material pleasures: Witnessing the particular materialities at play elicits physical empathy in viewers that binds them to paint and color in intimate, visceral ways.
Benglis’s voluminous pours appear as deep paintings filled to the brim with paint and play with lingering liquidity, thereby conjuring erotic temporalities that hold the viewer in a state of anticipation and suspension. Overpainting walls, windows and imported heaps of soil, Grosse creates vast painting-environments covered in paint and conjures fields of visual painterly pleasure that culminate in eroticized modes of sensory contact: viewers feel the ways in which color intensities relay over objects and expand spatiality as haptic bodily echoes.
These intimate forms of spectatorship account for the kind of queer relationality that unfolds when we let ourselves be sensually moved or ‘acted on’ by an artwork’s material qualities.
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Open Access: https://etd.library.emory.edu
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Abstract: Molitor_Chrononauts in Chromotopia
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Keywords: Abstract Painting; Materiality and Art; Sensation; Vibrant Matter; New Materialist Feminism; Queer Theory; Queer Abstraction
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Table of Contents:
Preface: A Personal Relation – Subjecting Oneself to Paint’s Material Proclivities 1
Chapter I: Introduction 5
Lynda Benglis and Katharina Grosse: Rendering Paint(ing) Three-dimensional & Color Piling Up (in) Space 7
Part I – Queer Abstraction: Bodily Re-Representations and Sensuous Experiences 13
Part II – The Materiality Effect of Vibrant Matter 48
Chapter 2: Asking the Material – Analytic Lenses 56
Chapter 3: Off the Wall and into the Deep – Lynda Benglis 77
I Deep Painting 94
II Jumping Colors and Mobile Viewers 101
III S(us-)pending Time with Flying Paint Pours 107
IV Frozen Gestures and the Temporal Pleasures of Lingering Liquidity 114
V Glow-In-The-Dark: Inside the Green Room 124
Chapter 4: Abundant Materiality and Vast Fields of Pleasure – Katharina Grosse 141
I Vast Painting: Material Fusion 166
II Paint Mist, Time Particles and Scales of Perception 170
III A Painting to Walk Into: Erotic Encounters in Painted Space 176
IV Witnessing Material Abundance: Being Held By Color 188
V Making a Bed with Paint 190
Coda: Chrononauts in Chromotopia 196
Bibliography 208
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