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WRAP THESIS Purdom 2000
Thinking in Painting: Gilles Deleuze and the Revolution from Representation to Abstraction
A Warwick dissertation on painting, sensation, abstraction, and Deleuze's attempt to move beyond representational thinking.
Archive condition
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Core idea
Purdom asks what painting can do once it is no longer understood as representation. The thesis frames abstraction and sensation as ways of breaking with human-centered models of vision and opening art onto impersonal forces.
It moves through Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Cezanne, Mondrian, Bacon, and Deleuze to show how painting thinks by composing sensation rather than illustrating ideas. The argument builds through examples of line, color, movement, and the diagram.
This matters for the Warwick section because it captures one of the key crossovers between philosophy, aesthetics, and nonhuman perception in the local scene. It helps explain why the archive could treat art writing as a serious conceptual laboratory.
How to read this text
Use the introduction and chapter headings to orient yourself, then read the sections on sensation and the diagram. They provide the clearest bridge into the later artist-specific chapters.
Track where the thesis shifts from interpretation to method. The strongest thread is the attempt to make painting itself into a form of thought rather than an object waiting for commentary.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 9
I argue that the move to abstraction in painting resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the movement of matter. In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a chapter on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty.
Definition · paragraph 9
ABSTRACT The theog of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took an from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theog of thought without image. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968a: 276) Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an ontology of becoming.
Definition · paragraph 24
INTRODUCTION Deleuze aligns with Pollock as an example of a painter who refuses the representational model of painting as a window on the world, Pollock creates surfaces that are a diagram or "an opaque grid of information" produced by its own inflective radiating action (1993a: 27).
History · paragraph 2
THINKING IN PAINTING Gilles Deleuze and the Revolution from Representation to Abstraction by Judy Purdom A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Continental Philosophy University of Warwick, Department of Philosophy September 2000
Method · paragraph 9
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968a: 276) Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the movement of matter.
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.