V International Conference Cycle ECATI/MCB – 2015: “Art, history and thought”
In one of his interviews, the German visual artist Gerhard Richter made the following statement, comparing the act of painting with the act of thinking: “painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting, to think is to paint”.
Søren Kierkegaard had thought of this relationship with creating from the notion of patience, a word that carries the notion of time, which evokes time as a delaying action, as an act of voluntary extension, but not an act of postpone. Between the creator making and thinking time is inherent and this takes strength for culture in the history.
Art, history and thought are always united. But this union is now increasingly more problematic. We intend not only to present a sequence of discourses or concepts that were used by the different ways of thinking through the ages, in the forms of art making. Nor is it not to see the concept and the creation as something of the past, even if they have marked a possibility of categorization of time, forming in times: the classical, the medieval, the modern or the contemporary. It is rather to see how the creating and the thinking reconfigure, represent themselves in something alive.
The purpose of this cycle is outlined by Hegel’s spirit for whom “the thought, the beginning of an era, is the all-pervading spirit. This spirit has to evolve in its self-consciousness, and such progress is the development of the entire mass of specific totality; and this totality relates to the external, and therefore, to time. Since history […] has to do with pure thought, it is also a science, that is, not an aggregate of knowledge ordered in a certain way, but an unfolding of thought that is itself and for itself necessary”.