Seeing differently: a history and theory of identification and the visual arts

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latterclaim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" worksof art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way. Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identificationas a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved butmust be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art"and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture

• ISBN: 978-0-415-54382-8
• Editorial: Routledge
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 288
• Fecha Publicación: 19/03/2012
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés