Abstract

Set in Montreal with the advent of Hard-Edge painting and the invention of acrylic paint, this thesis takes a critical look at the relationship between materiality and mattering. The Hard-Edge painters, Guido Molinari, Claude Tousignant and Yves Gaucher undertook a new medium to express their new way of seeing and encountering the world and they did so in a way that was unique from other contemporaneous abstract painters. And that new medium, acrylic paint, contributed to their vision and capability to do so. Examining Hard-Edge paint through the vantage of materiality and materialist frameworks, and considering the role of acrylic paint on a new level, takes advantage of the opportunity to confront the presumption of overt statements of authorial completion and destabilizes the assumption of their statement being solely artist-determined. Unlike some contemporary art, whose materiality is more obviously fluid, Hard-Edge paintings look like they are stable, but they are not. If object-stability is demonstrated to be untrue of Hard-Edge painting, then we have an opportunity to examine the entirety of art’s history through a new lens.
This thesis proposes a new way of understanding the relationship between making, material, epistemology and ontology and proposes that when we understand Hard-Edge painting as object-fluid, we then understand the breadth of art history as a mattering whose “objects” play less of a primary role and whose materiality is instrumental. If making cannot be defined by the ideation of the artist then neither can the “object” that is made. Examining the influence of acrylic paint over this one instance of making in Montreal in the late modern period contributes to an understanding of making and continued mattering that has consequences for Hard-Edge painting, which matters to the late modern epoch of a city and its people and their aspirations, and also to how we classify, sort, narrate, and perpetuate our art. If we continue to put Hard-Edge painting into a finite category we undermine what it is capable of doing now. This thesis highlights the consequence of understanding artworks as the products of ideas and thus materially (object-) stable. I demonstrate that they are object-fluid and that this understanding will help us understand art’s history differently and be better art stewards.