Pictorial Rationalities, Radical Description, and Thinking from Below,

In ‘The Institution of a Work of Art’ (part of a 1954-55 lecture series called 'Institution in Personal and Public History'), the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduced his students at the Collège de France, Paris, to the idea of pictorial rationality: “… there is a pictorial rationality as there is a rationality of a painter’s work,” he stated, “rationality not of completion but of ‘investigation’.”

In this talk, I draw on Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'pictorial rationality' and explore two practices of my own—'radical description' and 'thinking from below'—to distil the insights from art practice, visual culture, and phenomenology that have had the greatest practical and strategic importance for me as a researcher, teacher, and arts- and environmentally-focused community worker.