Presentiments enquires into functions used during the act of interpretation on seeing a work of art. The tradition of Art History in the West has foregrounded the intellectual appreciation of art and approaching this through understanding through the use of interpretation and a set of intellectual functions to derive ‘appreciative meaning’ from that act. Presentiments was a first attempt to look at that set of functions and the potential of deriving a new visual and aural grammar, by playing with an image and then interjecting various sound and visual acts to see if a sense of foreboding could be generated in the viewer – from elements that themselves had no currency outside of their use. Later in Flaxton’s work he returns to this enquiry when challenging some of Baudrillard’s ideas in his 1989 work: The Inevitability of Colour and the successive work from 2009 ‘Who Are We to Imitate God’.
