In the Gesture: Essay

Introduction

I encountered Gestures (2014) by Vilém Flusser in 2026. The book provided language around concerns I had already been exploring in paintings since 2022, related to how to depict modernist figures using abstraction and a comics-like vocabulary of signs. It also provided a way of looking at the activity surrounding art-making, documentation, presentation, description, and so on, in a more productive light than dreary career necessity. Instead, such actions could be seen as possessing a rich phenomenological component and accompanying philosophical implications. The question arose: would it be possible to transcend the mundane motivations for artist documentation—bookkeeping, marketing, creating content for social media—and turn it into a creative project in its own right in a digital space that belongs to the artist? “In the Gesture” makes the attempt.

That in turn raised the question of what such documentation might include. The answer was anything that felt like it was feeding the art I was working on in the theme of the gesture, captured in the form of text, journal pages, photographs, sound recordings, and video recordings. The journals of Charles Burchfield, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Vincent van Gogh provided inspiration for the effort, but there is no reason in 2026 to confine oneself to written notes. Consequently, the architecture of this site is based on a log of journal entries. Scripts elevate the entries into collections that look standard for an artist website, but come from a different place philosophically.

The Elements of Gesture

Flusser (1920–1991) was a philosopher who wrote in French, German, English, and Portuguese on phenomenology and media studies. Months before he perished in a car crash, he identified a series of essays to be published together as Gestures. Due to the polyglot nature of the source materials, which existed in multiples because of Flusser’s habit of translating his own work, producing an English version of Gesten: Versuch einer Phänomenologie (1991) was a complicated process. Translator Nancy Ann Roth noted the existence of seven versions of one of the essays, written in four different languages. Gestures appeared in English in 2014.

For Flusser, “a gesture is a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation” (Gestures, p. 2). Gestures leave the realm of bodily mechanics, and enter that of interpretation. Such interpretations may be straightforward; if I point, you know to look in that direction. But they needn’t be. Cristian Ciocan noted in “The Chiro-Phenomenology of Vilém Flusser: Exploring the Gestures of the Hand” (2024), “While Husserl and Merleau-Ponty emphasize the hand’s perceptive and kinesthetic aspects, and Heidegger and Levinas explore its ontological dimensions, Flusser’s chiro-phenomenology adds a crucial perspective by shifting the focus toward a manual understanding of gestures.” Ciocan asserts that Heidegger’s gesturing hand traces spatiality, while Levinas’s journeys from pleasure to labor to generosity. In Flusser’s gesturing hand, Ciocan identifies eleven distinct constitutive moments:

1. Perceiving
2. Grasping
3. Comprehending
4. Evaluating
5. Production (actually “pro-duction,” to be understood as “a movement charged with violence: a denial of the object and its primary way of being, by a dominant assertion of the hands in relation to it,” per Ciocan)
6. Investigation
7. Fabricating
8. Creating
9. Tool-making
10. Realization
11. Presenting (Ciocan prefers “releasement,” after Heidegger)

“This last phase of the gesture of making is alterologic in nature,” writes Ciocan, following Levinas.

It is an ethical moment, sharply contrasting with the previous ten moments, which, in their pragmatic endeavor, were all characterized by the force exerted by the hands on the object. In light of this constant forcefulness of the hands, Flusser asserts that the gesture of making can be characterized as a “gesture of hatred [Geste des Hasses].” Now, however, at the end of their journey in the realm of making, the hands abandon their power, abdicating their domineering mission—grasping, encompassing, and capturing the object to modify it, penetrating its ontological core—and open themselves to the other, precisely the being that cannot be captured and dominated. By opening their hands, they embody a “gesture of love [Geste der Liebe],” offering the other not only the object that has become a work but also offering themselves, as hands, to the hands of the other. “As they present their work, the hands offer themselves to another [Indem sie ihr Werk überreichen, bieten sich die Hände den anderen dar].”

The hand finally becomes a bodily site of ethics. “By situating the hand at the center of a phenomenology of making, Flusser not only enriches our understanding of gestures but also provides a nuanced way to think about human existence itself, where the hand is not merely an organ of interaction but an instrument of existential projection and realization.” And that’s only accounting for the hand. For Flusser, listening to music is a gesture.

Germane to this project, so is painting. In the light of painting, it’s worth keeping the double-entendre of presenting in mind: both display and gift. In that direction lies the power of art to affirm the maker’s humanity. Flusser: “It will be apparent to anyone who has ever made [an aesthetic] gesture that we recognize ourselves in them, and only in them: only in piano playing, only in painting, only in dancing does the player, the painter, the dancer recognize who he is” (Gestures, p. 133). Flusser’s account of painting is far from complete—one wishes he had expanded on it—but it provides a gateway in action that contrasts with Merleau-Ponty’s gateway of perception. Both philosophers were keenly aware of the need to situate experience holistically, and in reading both of them, one is reminded that every point of entry into the holism delivers one directly to the middle.

It would have been too facile to illustrate Ciocan’s eleven categories as if it were a checklist. Nevertheless, my intention for the works of “In the Gesture” is to touch directly or indirectly on all of them.

The Scope of Gesture

Flusser’s idea of the gesture was intimately connected with freedom. Preliminary notes preserved in Gestures record some of the germane thoughts (p. 163):

…the concept of “gesture” may be defined as a movement that expresses a freedom. The gesture, as the movement it is, is in fact determined, as are all other movements, and in this sense completely explainable. But what makes it unique is that, untouched by any of this, it expresses a subjectivity [Innerlichkeit, “inwardness”] that we are forced to call “freedom.” Accordingly, the competence of a general theory of gestures would be the study and ordering of acts of expressions of freedom. It would not be a formal theory, for it would not be concerned with freedom but with its phenomenal, visible expressions.

But in the finished text, Flusser opted for an apophatic definition of the gesture. Ciocan, in an earlier paper distinguishing Flusser’s handling of the gesture with Heidegger’s (“Phenomenology of Gesture Between Heidegger and Flusser,” 2022), called it an “unexpected negative criterion.” But he notes that Flusser was aware of Heidegger’s conception of gesture as including any human movement. Flusser found this too broad, and was moved to establish a razor by which one might distinguish between (to use Ciocan’s examples) rubbing an itchy mosquito bite and rubbing one’s chin while pondering some matter. Even this distinction put an enormous range of activity under consideration. Ciocan: “Flusser finally proposes an extremely broad concept of gesture, in the sense that it corresponds to something like ‘practice,’ ‘way of life,’ ‘type of action,’ ‘mode of activity,’ or ‘kind of doing’—all of which, of course, involve an embodied subject.”

But in characterizing art as erstarrte Geste—frozen gesture—Flusser, according to Ciocan, makes it clear that our interpretive and qualitative evaluations of the gesture are aesthetic in nature, with gesture conveying mood or affect rather than truth in an ethical or epistemological sense. That we’re to be touched rather than persuaded by the gesture is key to understanding its nature.

Of particular interest to me is what this means regarding the depicted gesture. The left hand expressing the king’s astonishment in Rembrandt’s Belshazzar's Feast (c. 1635-38) is comprehensible to us as a felt phenomenon. Yet the painted hand is not embodied, exactly. We seem to be re-embodying it through an act of sympathetic recognition. Are we doing likewise with the hand of God, etching golden Hebrew letters of warning into the wall of the feasting room with His divine middle finger? The painting makes explicit a process that takes place in awareness but occurs across a pre-aware mechanism. How we understand the hands might indicate how we understand painting in general. Rembrandt freezes the gestures into art, and we unfreeze them into an experience. That in turn suggests how we understand one another’s gestures, bodily, as a proto-aesthetic mechanism from which express aesthetics arise.

Work by Yuriko Saito on “everyday aesthetics” suggests such a possibility: “I believe that one of the challenges everyday aesthetics poses is to practice art of living and negotiate daily life by sometimes developing its extraordinary aesthetic potentials, other times savoring the very ordinariness of the familiar…” Flusser, similarly, works from patently aesthetic action (painting, photographing) toward action operating inconspicuously according to aesthetic considerations (smoking a pipe, using the telephone). Gilbert Simondon expressed a related sentiment in 1982:

Aesthetics is not only, nor first and foremost, the sensation of the “consumer” of the work of art. It is also, and more originally so, the set of sensations, more or less rich, of the artists themselves: it’s about a certain contact with matter that is being transformed through work. One experiences something aesthetic when one is doing a soldering or driving in a long screw.

Potential action and mere suitability to purpose were sufficient to inspire Robert Henri’s admiration, as recorded in The Art Spirit (1923):

I love the tools made for mechanics. I stop at the windows of hardware stores. If I could only find an excuse to buy many more of them than I have already bought on the mere pretense that I might have use for them! They are so beautiful, so simple and plain and straight to their meaning. There is no “Art” about them, they have not been made beautiful, they are beautiful.

Art makes apparent an aesthetic process that is already operating throughout much of life, though in a manner that one largely takes for granted without deliberate acts of appreciation. The log component of “In the Gesture” is a record of such acts. In aggregate, the log entries testify to Simondon’s “set of sensations” pre-existing the art.

Ciocan suggests that “Gestures should therefore be circumscribed within the sphere of those movements in which the I is existentially involved.” This supplies a cataphatic definition of the gesture in contrast to Flusser’s apophatic one. Here I invoke Buber’s Ich, and claim that this existential involvement is relational as described in his I and Thou. The witnessed gesture, either depicted or embodied, constitutes an opportunity to step out of the confines of the self and into the flow of the eternal, via the gate that Buber termed Thou, the other regarded with presence. This would partly explain why good art has durable power.

The works of “In the Gesture” depict figures using their bodies in various ways that meet a Flusserian definition of gesture. The same goes for entries in the log, either as subjects or in the act of my recording them. There are many ways to consider artistic freedom; mine, having encountered this philosophical material, has connected to a primordial activity of sight, touch, and movement, personal rather than merely individualistic, and associated with presence as much as expression.

Reclaiming Ontology

Having set down that basis, Flusser suspected that modern peoples of 1991 were so enmeshed in technology, which is methodology in tool form, that they no longer had access to ontology. This manifested, particularly, in work (p. 17):

Our dependence on the apparatus keeps us from posing questions of cause or purpose with respect to apparatuses. “What is the purpose of France?” or “Why industrialize?” (to take just two very typical examples of apparatuses) are theoretically possible but existentially false questions, for they assume a transcendence of apparatuses that we do not have. We are limited to functional questions only, for to us, “living” is functioning in and as a function of an apparatus. So it makes no sense to “free ourselves from the apparatus.” Beyond the apparatus, there is nothing to do. To formulate it as a thesis, the apparatus can do everything; everything human beings can do without it, it can do better. Optimists with a faith in progress paint a picture of machines as slaves that will free human beings’ freedom for creative achievements. Only thanks to cybernetic apparatuses, “creation” is a concept quantifiable by means of information theory. Machines can be shown to be potentially far more creative than any human beings, if they are appropriately programmed by a human being or by another machine.

If, by “getting free of machines,” we mean doing something or other in a space beyond machines, we are challenged by insufficiency. And if by “getting free of machines,” we mean not doing anything anymore, we are challenged by consumption, which is contained in the programs of the apparatuses. This second interpretation is synonymous with “getting free by means of machines.” In short, beyond machines, there is nothing to do, for work in the classical and modern sense has become absurd. Where apparatuses prevail, there is nothing left to do but function.

The implications for the present, 35 years later, are unmissable. Some observers, such as Rose Horowitch, following Maryanne Wolf, suspect that we “are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis” as a result of a digital bombardment of short, fragmented texts. (This text is deliberately and contrastingly extensive. If you’re still reading, we are friends.) The ability of artificial intelligence to generate images has driven many artists to outrage. But I would argue that a kind of visual subservience that encouraged feeding images into the machines began with the rise of social media in the 2000s. It was a natural course of events that the machines became full enough of images to make their own. Flusser had a trenchant point here: our sense of insufficiency, captured by the banal incentives of the attention economy, motivated our participation in this process. Doomscrolling the apps while railing against the large language models finds us straddling a line we claim we will not cross.

Nevertheless, ontology has been a concern in technology since the first theoretical work on relational databases, with E.F. Codd declaring in 1970, “Activities of users at terminals and most application programs should remain unaffected when the internal representation of data is changed and even when some aspects of the external representation are changed.” Around the time of Flusser’s death, ontology was an express concern as the need to share knowledge arose with the formation of a World Wide Web over which to share it. Tom Gruber, 1993 (emphases in original): “A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualization: the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them… An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an Ontology is a systematic account of Existence.” The ideas were connected to artificial intelligence, but framed as a problem of data interchange. The desire to enable the machines to think arose with the desire to enable them to communicate. That work implicitly demands that we consider the mechanisms by which humans think and communicate.

Code can be employed in ontological ways. That the large language models are convincing interlocutors reflects an effort to identify patterns among text perceivable to the machines (if one can call it perception) only as sequences of a signal switched on and off. If you live within the apparatus, it is likely true that certain kinds of questions about the apparatus become unavailable or irrelevant. If you can drive the apparatus to an ontological or deontological destination, you may be able to form such questions in spite of your enmeshment.

The core of the documentary effort of this project uses a bespoke ontology to capture gestures in a tree of data nodes. Its branches are <gesture>s, with leaves of <time>, <date>, <text>, <image>s, and other structures which preserve a log of thoughts and actions. The architecture hearkens back to an earlier and arguably better time on the Web, when the priorities were decentralized interoperability and self-hosted digital presence. “The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee in 1999. “It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves.” The theme of freedom recurs in the pursuit of careful ontology. Gruber again: “An ontology should make as few claims as possible about the world being modeled, allowing the parties committed to the ontology freedom to specialize and instantiate the ontology as needed.”

One suspects, pace Flusser, that most people are not given to questions of meaning and purpose, and the barrier to their asking them is neither the tools nor lack thereof. Mencken’s quip comes to mind: “The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.” We opt into sordid panopticons like Instagram instead of cultivating our digital gardens out of abject lack of vision. The apparatus merely insulates one from the immediate consequences of not inquiring about meaning. But the default use of the tools need not dictate the limits of their inspired use.

Flusser might characterize any use as a failure to escape the apparatus. I think that would be too dim a view. Some aspects of the technology promote decentralization and sharing. In that spirit, this site provides an RSS feed. I recognize that this is a quaint gesture, but I offer it expressively, to say that we can use technology freely and generously if we insist on freedom and generosity as values. In any case, markup on all pages contains Open Graph Protocol tags.

Acid-Free Web Development

One of the intentions of this project is to produce a durable digital artist’s record. Most artist sites have a backend, a program connected to a database, each running on a server. Those processes sometimes halt for routine reasons, such as the server restarting. But I have witnessed extraordinary failures. Once in the 2010s, all of my sites disappeared overnight because the service provider began losing his battle with mental illness. An enormous amount of energy and goodwill goes into site reliability. This presents a problem of how to produce a site that survives the artist while requiring the least energy and concern.

Ultimately, nothing is permanent. But the considerations led me to build what’s known as a static site generator. In non-technical terms, I maintain the log in a machine-readable format, then run a program that checks it for errors and then generates HTML pages. (In technical terms, I keep the log in XML files, then run a shell script that checks them against a RELAX NG schema and some additional integrity requirements, then transforms them using XSLT3 sheets into static HTML pages.) That enabled enough automation to maintain the site reasonably. But the future of the site won’t depend on someone knowing how to shell into the server and nohup a script back to life. With no process to stop, static HTML pages continue to serve so long as their server is operational. They can be copied without much loss of fidelity to archive sites or the InterPlanetary File System. The architecture obviates a host of security concerns; it is not straightforward to break into a site with no login page. Nevertheless, the ontological core should provide reasonable development options to survivors who wanted to nurture the site further.

The plain design and the lack of in-browser behavior of inthegesture.art reflect informed choices (in some cases, painfully informed choices) to refrain from introducing elements vulnerable to decay. Paper scientists had to isolate and preclude acidic components that would degrade the substrate; the need turns out to be general.

Crucially, this takes place at a persistent digital address owned by the artist. For all the problems of site durability, the other principal option, to post work on social media sites, is worse. The visibility of artist social media accounts is not much better than a standalone presence, in most cases. The apps defy any vision of presentation that reflects the philosophy of the work. They encourage shallowness, frivolity, noise, and performative gestures like the slow reveal. The interactivity they offer is superficial. The artist gains almost nothing by accruing ♡s. Flusser did not deal with the insincere gesture, but the behavior that the apps prompt—particularly on the platforms that favor video, which is all of them now, forcing art objects to pretend to performance to hook the algorithms—suggests philosophical overlap between Flusser’s work on gesture and Harry Frankfurt’s on bullshit. The apps may in fact be artistically corrosive. Not only could the digital form be metaphorically acidic as above, so could the digital content.

The Way of the Artist-Diarist

My work takes inspiration from 20th-century figurative modernism, and Charles Burchfield is an important touchstone for me. I long imagined Burchfield as an ecstatic who literally saw halos around trees. I later spent time with his collected journal entries, published as The Sphinx and the Milky Way in 2023. That moved me to acquire the 700-page edition of his journals, The Poetry of Place (1992). Even that represents a tiny fraction of the dozens of volumes he penned over several decades.

The truth of the man was more prosaic. If anything, he was a little morose. Life disappointed him regularly. While he had a job, he hated it. But he knew the names of the blossoms and the insects down to the monkey flowers and the Eyed Click Beetles. He noticed the weather and the light. Noticing would sometimes transmute into wonder. Ecstasy would grace him. From a cold February in 1931:

Never before has the great star we call the sun seemed so much like a star as today—Shining from such a depth of blue, with little mist or atmosphere to obscure it, it cannot be seen as a sphere, but only as a diamond-shaped burst of dazzling light—even its color is like starlight—cold and remote—I walk along in ecstasy—

In bad times, he would lecture himself in his meditations, as did Marcus Aurelius. From a 1939 entry:

You are weak and cowardly in your present state of mental depression. Remember, you are never without problems. Those seasons when you seem to be, are the result of a strong spiritual courage—the troubles are there just the same, but you have forgotten them in the ecstasy of faith and creative effort.

“In the Gesture” works out how to record the creative process in a way that feels meaningful to the artist. Progress photographs might be interesting in themselves, but I decided that they retained more value, and maybe conveyed more value, if they were integrated into a timeline that included other acts of noticing. I maintain a small wooded property, where I garden vegetables, deracinate trees, buck logs, and the like. Activities like those sometimes enter the work as subjects (I have thought to call my art rural cubism) but more often bring a woodworking or groundworking ethos to the act of building a picture. Burchfield declared in his 1911 diary, “There is nothing in nature that will ever fail to interest me.” Even Robert Smithson, who professed to have little interest in nature as such, said in an interview, “One pebble moving one foot in two million years is enough action to keep me really excited.” Rackstraw Downes praised the landscape imagery of Neil Welliver as “a determined interest in the unnoticed.” The world provides an infinitude to notice, and noticing a tree or a caterpillar is existentially situating in a way that pouring soul down digital attention drains is not. “Read not the Times,” admonished Thoreau. “Read the Eternities.” This isn’t just an individual concern. Artistic compositions survive on their being existentially situated.

But why record any of it? Flusser offers an answer:

Forming the record works one’s personal culture as weeding and composting works soil. The salient image is the harvest, a phenomenon utterly dependent on both nature and human action. Art is a kind of harvest. I hope to produce a good work of art in the same spirit that I hope to pull a good carrot. It’s largely not up to me, but without churning amendments into the dirt with a shovel, sowing seed intelligently, then weeding and watering for weeks, no carrots are on offer in the forest. One can’t really aspire to ecstasy, but delight is not so unusual in a life lived with cultivation.

Simondon again, paraphrased: Aesthetics is the set of sensations, more or less rich, of the artists themselves: it’s about a certain contact with matter that is being transformed through work. Documentation in the form of a log like the one for “In the Gesture” enlarges the set for the benefit of the viewer, and perhaps deepens the accompanying sensations.

The log subsumes a journaling practice that takes place on paper. My work in comics poetry entails a brush script that I practice (in the sense of Japanese dō, “way”) using a brush pen on Docket Gold writing pads. Those sheets of paper appear in the log. It is important that aspects of this project remain tethered to physicality—once more, in a certain contact with matter. Flusser’s articulation of thinking is pertinent here as signposts on a path of creation. But the chief concern is making, about which Flusser says, “the understood object is understood between the two hands” (Gestures, p. 37). Through work, notions become manifestations. There’s an old argument in art between proponents of form and proponents of ideas. My view is that form precedes ideas just as existence precedes essence, and for largely the same reasons. As Sartre described it, “We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself.” The gesture of writing articulates thinking because writing is slower than thinking, and it is slower because it is physical. The gesture of art conveys feeling because it is slower than feeling, and it is slower because it is physical.

Picturing Pictures

Process photographs are unnatural interruptions of process. Many artists report enormous frustrations trying to document what they’re doing as they do it. To an outsider, it might seem like a small thing to snap a photo of work in progress, especially given the ease of phone cameras. But the act sets off an avalanche of self-consciousness. Flusser, on photography:

To photograph creation, the artist must leave the flow of creation to become an observer for a moment. The flow is not so easily obtained; one might leave it at will, but it may not be there upon return. Indeed, the process may not bear this scrutiny. How much manipulation will the subject of making withstand without perverting it into another kind of activity? Performance creeps into what ought to be private movements. Flusser’s second aspect, manipulation, is inseparable from the first, positioning. “What does this look like while I’m making it?” inevitably becomes “What do I look like while I’m making it?” Even if the artist is not in the picture, he is situated somewhere in relation to the subject, hence present, like it or not.

Then, under what circumstances does the artist publish the photo? He might not, but then he might never refer to it again. He could post it on social media, but then he implicitly invites a host of onlookers into the studio who have no business being there. Philip Guston, recorded in I Paint What I Want to See:

When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you—your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.

And now the would-be social media poster has done the opposite. The artist was journeying toward pure manifestation, and he turned his back on his aim and started walking the other way. Will he remember to face the summit once more? What kind of absurd climb is this anyway?

To thunder with all this, the artist might say—I’ll photograph the work when it’s done. Now begins a chore of arranging, lighting, shooting, editing, comparing, all to produce an ersatz expression. It takes less effort than you might expect to discern individual pixels in a bitmap image; that we see them as continuous is as much a product of habit as display quality. The RGB color gamut is painfully deficient in orange. Light emitted from the screen is somehow flatter than a flat surface. We moderns are used to looking at pictures of pictures, but it is like accepting a menu listing in lieu of the meal we can’t eat.

Let’s try to salvage this unfortunate situation. First, the logical conclusion of the exercise of slowness indicated in the last section is to freeze time and motion entirely. Conceived this way, photographing work fits into the scheme of cultivation offered in journaling. We don’t expect the journal to perfectly capture the work. Expecting the photograph to do only what the journal does, to indicate something about the work from a point in the past via another medium, relieves it of the responsibility of perfect capture.

Second, recall that Ciocan encourages readers to understand the gesture of presentation as a gift. This presentation of working images leading to final images extends the scope of the gift that is the work itself. One of the recipients of that gift is the artist. If contained within the artist’s site, it is not a plea for attention, but acknowledgment of the existence of certain objects and documents. That could contribute to comprehension of the work that wouldn’t be available had the artist not taken the trouble to form the record.

Third, the performance aspect of making art may be redeemable. Plastic art differs from theater and music in that it arrives whole in the viewer’s experience. In an attempt to unite them phenomenologically, Mikel Dufrenne called painting and the like an art in which the performer is the creator, in contrast to the actor who reads a script. If so, then what is being performed? Having ruled out the existence of a prior, ideal image, Dufrenne contends (in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, originally 1953):

That is, the work of plastic art performs itself into existence. It might not be excessive to claim that the work and the artist co-perform into being. Recall Flusser: “…only in piano playing, only in painting, only in dancing does the player, the painter, the dancer recognize who he is.” This distinguishes a form of phenomenological performance, necessary to painting, from a performance of persona that isn’t. In that context, the photographic record of the creation of the still artwork reopens a sense of the artist’s becoming. This is potentially more evocative than the mere documentation of an intermediate state of the artistic process.

Furthering the idea of performance: In Working Space (1986), Frank Stella credited Caravaggio with discovering that vital space-making required a theatrical conception of the studio.

The discovery affected how artists henceforth understood the nature of the studio.

The metaphor shifts subtly from the theater, where plays are performed, to the cathedral, where rituals are performed. The latter is closer to Dufrenne’s sense of performance—invocations intended for discovery and revelation, undertaken in a state of grace. The theater wants an audience. In the cathedral, adepts may practice ritual without one; some rituals may be inappropriate for the eyes of the layman. But when congregants gather, they too are both performers and spectators, like Caravaggio’s models stepping in and out of the scene. That Stella characterizes all this involvement as self-containment implies that the witnessing of the work is one with the work. Photographing the art need not be an adulterant or a misrepresentation. It can instead belong to the system that instantiates the art.

“In the Gesture” finds ways to put these considerations into action. Images of works in progress are part of the log, next to entries of other kinds, with no hierarchy. In the ontology, an image must contain a file (so it can be turned into a web page) and a caption. It may contain a tag set indicating one of the works in a separate record, works.xml. The tags are toward, as if to say, “this image is a gesture toward that work.” The ontology distinguishes between images and figures, which also sit flatly in the log, but contain a work tag set, also indicating one of the pieces in works.xml. The build script gathers images of and toward a particular work on the page for that work. A work’s dedicated page serves as a filter of the log, from the standpoint of that work.

I experienced an important shift of perspective in working on this project. Previous efforts at developing my professional website assumed that it was a digital portfolio to open and show to curious onlookers. “In the Gesture,” in sharp contrast, labors to concretize Stella’s cathedral of the self. The stakes are higher, and the principal beneficiary is my studio practice, as it should be. This will inform future development of my main site.

Living In the Gesture

In 2024, I realized that art theory as it actually manifested in the 1980s and later had cut off possibilities for understanding art that might have been suggested by the early phenomenologists, if not for the literary density of their writings and the protracted time it took for them to be translated into English. Phenomenology is having a resurgence after the collapse of what is usually called postmodernism. Its surviving tendency, critical theory, has proved unable to address problems of consciousness, perception, and ontology in the face of human-like artificial intelligence. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty, especially, supplied a framework for comprehending the perceptual mechanics of figurative modernism. Reading Flusser showed me that the subjects of my paintings, who for the most part are quietly living their lives, are engaged in existentially significant activity. Drawing from that well clarified that I was not thinking deeply enough about documentation. “In the Gesture” set out to remedy that, to make the documentation better reflect life in the studio and around it, to place philosophical demands on it in addition to practical ones.

Having undertaken this intellectual and creative adventure, I have come to regard my studio in a new, energizing way. My adaptation of Stella’s cathedral of the self employs a humbler metaphor, derived via Flusser: the studio as a workshop of gesture. The point is not to erect a monument to selfhood (Stella didn’t mean that anyway), but to situate the enacted self in meaning, appreciation, and perceptual openness. In that state one may receive grace.

I leave the last word to Flusser:

References

Berners-Lee, Tim: Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web, by its inventor, Harper San Francisco, 1999, https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872.

Buber, Martin: I and Thou, 1923, translated into English 1937, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.61530/.

Burchfield, Charles: Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend, State University of New York Press, 1992, https://archive.org/details/charlesburchfiel0000burc_w9y2.

Burchfield, Charles: The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield, edited by Ben Estes, The Song Cave, 2023, https://the-song-cave.com/products/orion-and-the-moon-selections-from-the-journals-of-charles-burchfield-edited-by-ben-estes.

Ciocan, Cristian: “Phenomenology of Gesture Between Heidegger and Flusser,” Dialogue, No. 61, 2022, pp. 575-599, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217322000191.

Ciocan, Cristian: “The Chiro-Phenomenology of Vilém Flusser: Exploring the Gestures of the Hand,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2024, pp. 456-483, https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2024.2427588.

Codd, E.F.: “A relational model of data for large shared data banks,” Communications of the ACM, Volume 13, Issue 6, 1970, pp. 377-387, https://doi.org/10.1145/362384.362685.

Downes, Rackstraw: Nature and Art are Physical: Writings on Art, 1967-2008, Edgewise Press, 2014, https://www.edgewisepress.org/ep28.

Dufrenne, Mikel: The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 1953, published in English by Northwestern University Press, 1989, https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810105911/the-phenomenology-of-aesthetic-experience/.

Flusser, Vilém: Gestures, translated by Nancy Ann Roth, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816691289/gestures/.

Frankfurt, Harry: On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005, https://archive.org/details/onbullshit00fran.

Gruber, Thomas R.: “Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing,” Technical Report KSL 93-04, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, republished in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 43, Issues 5–6, 1995, pp. 907-928, ISSN 1071-5819, https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1995.1081.

Guston, Philip: I Paint What I Want to See, Penguin Random House, 2022, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/710720/i-paint-what-i-want-to-see-by-philip-guston/9780241525715.

Henri, Robert: The Art Spirit, 1923 with multiple editions afterwards, https://archive.org/details/artspirit0000henr.

Horowitch, Rose: “The End of Reading Is Here,” The Atlantic, July 8, 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: The World of Perception, 1948, published in English by Routledge, 2008, https://www.routledge.com/The-World-of-Perception/Merleau-Ponty/p/book/9780415773812.

Saito, Yuriko: Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making, Oxford University Press, 2017, https://academic.oup.com/book/11785.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.

Simondon, Gilbert: “On Techno-Aesthetics,” translated by Arne De Boever, Parrhesia, 14:1-8, 2012, https://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia14/parrhesia14_simondon.pdf.

Smithson, Robert: Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996, https://www.ucpress.edu/books/robert-smithson/paper.

Stella, Frank: Working Space, Harvard University Press, 1986, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674959613.

Thoreau, Henry David: “Life Without Principle,” The Atlantic, October 1863, https://archive.ph/54McS.

Colophon

“In the Gesture” is produced by a static site generator. A bash script validates a hand-written XML log against a RELAX NG schema and transforms it with XSLT 3.0 into HTML. I wrote it in collaboration with Claude (Opus 5.x) between June and October 2026, editing in Emacs.

The source is public.

• Log
  • 2026-06.xml
  • 2026-07.xml
  • 2026-08.xml
  • 2026-09.xml
  • 2026-10.xml
• Data
  • nav.xml
  • works.xml
• Schema
  • gestures.rng
• Stylesheets
  • assemble.xsl
  • common.xsl
  • gestures.xsl
  • rss.xsl
  • works.xsl
• Build
  • build.sh
• Generated
  • rss.xml
  • gestures.xml

Code ©2026 Franklin Einspruch, released under the MIT License. All other contents ©2026 Franklin Einspruch except where credited to other authors.

Set in self-hosted DM Sans in #F4D06A, #E8C25A, and #B98F2E on #14110A.