“I wish there would be a nonconservative turn away from the habits of looking and making that new popular conceptual art has introduced. I think there should be a turn to visual art. The move has got nothing to do with current fake polarities in art world posturing. For example, the trendy thing to say at the moment is that you are interested in subtle art as opposed to loud art, which in effect only means you are interested in posturing of one kind as opposed to posturing of another kind. But when I talk about “visual art,” I mean dropping posturing altogether.
The visual in art is always philosophical. Nothing is visual in a void. To be interested in substantially visual art at this point in time doesn’t mean rejecting conceptual art in any real or serious way, just the label conceptual as it’s currently applied and the posturing that typically goes with it.
Really, all visual art is abstract in that its abstract values are what makes the rest of it worth having. The contexts of the forms that historical art comes up with -the context of social background, artist biography, and so forth- matter only if you want to find out about what matters in the first place, which is form itself, the richness of the look of the thing. This is rare and meaningful and constitutes a way of communicating something about the world that is worth attending to.
If it weren’t art, it really would be mad to think like this; it would be a form of blindness in which only the seeable registers, as if what you see were ever divorced from meaning, designation, language, names, concepts, morals, and so on. Form in art, and the means by which artists who are genuinely visual arrive at new combinations of forms, are in fact philosophical. To think visually is to think philosophically.”
Matthew Collings, “Chris Ofili and Beauty: Thinking Philosophically About Visually Great Stuff.” Modern Painters, April 2010
