A Picture’s Gesture: Regarding Jeff Wall’s “Gestus” (original) (raw)

Gesture and Space: Sacrifice of Performance and the Victory of Image

Nostalgia Movements, 2024

This article uses photography series by Edward Steichen, Krešimir Tadić, and Zlatko Kopljar, and aims to examine the relationship between body gestures and spaces in which performances took place. Different authors are quoted in their readings of gesture in photography, which leads to understanding certain spaces as a whole. Spaces lose authenticity over time, and are left empty because those who inhabited them or visited them are no longer there, or cannot experience them auditorily. The performance protagonists, now in photographs, remain merely faint figures of abandoned places, which served as spaces of art. Each of the three examples, although primarily different in their photographic tendencies, in a way acts as a witness of the photo conquering over the performance itself. If the chosen examples cannot tie the bodies to certain spaces, which are crucial to understanding the performances,then photography is doing the same, twice removed.

Photography as Gesture: How Photographs Make Things Happen

National Gallery of Canada Review May 2018, Vol. 9, pp. 22-35, 2018

This paper explores photography not simply as an image or document of an event, but an event in its own right. The photograph, inscribed as gesture, prompts movement outward, demanding to be held, exchanged, and manipulated. Within albums and personal displays of remembrance, it entangles the subjectivities of those it encounters. The photograph, set in motion through interpersonal relationships and consumer economies (tourism, celebrity), creates imagined communities of shared experience. Albums, often a product of women's domestic labour, demonstrate how photographs actively create communities. A portrait of its assembler's desires, the album retains not simply images, but traces of events initiated by the photographic act, revealing rich relations between photographs and users.

Gestures, Attunements and Atmospheres: On Photography and Urban Space

Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2021

Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes’s Belarmino and Jeff Wall’s Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. The second section discusses Husserl’s thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a “photograph” of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser’s philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall’s Mimic.

The role of the artist's gesture in the perception of art and artistic style

2011

The perception of art is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. One obvious aspect in perceiving and appreciating a work of art is the recognition of its representational content, either figurative or non- figurative. A second and no less important aspect is the assessment of its graphic or plastic qualities. Assessing these qualities is part of our understanding of the process in which the work has been produced. Many artists testify that this process is not primarily an activity carried out by the mind, but rather “[...] a bodily activity, one that is an expression of the lived-body’s way of being in the world.” (Wentworth, 2004: 15) The perception and appreciation of works of art therefore involves the understanding of its coming into being on the basis of the artist’s gestures. In this contribution, these two related ideas are elaborated on the basis of a number of phenomenological insights. First, the Husserlian idea that in the perception of cultural objects their coming into...

AGENCIES OF ART AS GESTURE: RESISTANCE, PERFORMANCE OR EVENT

Hfbk Hamburg, 2021

This paper explores works of art as a gestural event. What charac- terizes gesture, and which agencies in latter art and aesthetics can perform those characters? If we examine artworks by their gestural condition, what differences do they make from the modernist reading? Since contemporary art is increasingly becoming participatory and the realization of a piece complete with beholders intervention, accompa- nying expressive qualities, performative disposition of the work in the site, tempus and cultural strain became integral. Gesture converges artworks interiority towards its context and the recipient. With Vilém Flusser’s sense of gesture as metaphoric and metaphysical, Georgio Agamben’s idea of gesture as a pure medial condition and Walter Benjamin’s gestural arrest as technical reproduction, I will discuss how different aesthetic apparatus cultivate gesture as a performance of the artistic event. Reading a work of art as a gesture is –– essentially op- posing the modernist project of obscuring an event with its reduction- istic causal analysis, hence I claim an act of resistance.

Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Gesture

Performance Philosophy, Special Section 'Towards an Ethics of Gesture', ed. Lucia Ruprecht, 2017

The introduction to this special section of Performance Philosophy takes Giorgio Agamben’s remarks about the mediality and potentiality of gesture as a starting point to rethink gesture’s nexus with ethics. Shifting the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, it defines gestural ethics as an acting-otherwise which comes into being in the particularities of singular gestural practice, its forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements and calls for response. Gestural acting-otherwise is illustrated in a number of ways: We might talk of a gestural ethics when gesturality becomes an object for dedicated analytical exploration and reflection on sites where it is not taken for granted, but exhibited, on stage or on screen, in its mediality, in the ways it quotes, signifies and departs from signification, but also in the ways in which it follows a forward-looking agenda driven by adaptability and inventiveness. It interrupts or modifies operative continua that might be geared towards violence; it appears in situations that are suspended between the possibility of malfunction and the potential of room for play; and it emerges in the ways in which gestures act on their own implication in the signifying structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, on how these structures play out relationally across time and space, and between historically and locally situated human beings.

Emerging and Revealing - Gestures in Theory, Language and Art (2023)

Σύγκριση, 2023

The figure of the gesture appears in all sorts of artistic fields and scientific research. While passing through different types of material – physical material like the body, intellectual material like language and visual material like the drawing – what these different gestures unites are certain forms of resistance to a system of meaning. They express forms of being-in-a-medium itself rather than restaging or conveying artistic matters. By that, gestures become figures where the abyss between the pleasure of experiencing art and the impossibility to decode meaning become tangible. Besides containing a (pleasurable) art experience, what they reveal are specific forms of an aporetic character that open up into a field of emergence, where patterns are formed, re-formed and renewed without getting to the point of becoming stable or self-contained. In its hybrid role between material(ity) and (non)meaning, the gesture keeps form itself non-saturable and thus enables not just pleasurable contemplation but a trace towards the enfolded knowledge hidden within art.

Minor Gestures: Slow Writing and Everyday Photography

Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2018

This piece incorporates multiple forms of creative, arts-based research. Photographs are placed alongside a series of poetic statements: together they illustrate and build upon Erin Manning’s theoretical concept of the “minor gesture.” For Manning, minor gestures are subtle movements that occur around us as the world constantly continues to unfold. As such, the photographs included here depict evolving street art from several neighborhoods in Detroit; they are from an ongoing research project that involves how local residents communicate through everyday images, folk art, and graffiti. I offer these images not as evidence to analyze or interpret, but as visual experiences that have provoked and stayed with me. They have made me think differently about what research is, when and where it happens, and how it might be written. The first three pairings of images and text work within a 55-word limit (to keep within the boundaries of flash fiction). In tandem with the next two pairings, they examine how minor gestures encourage us to slow down, wake up, read more, and listen and respond to everyday environments. These practices have the potential to increase researchers’ awareness of images that surround, such as the object-based assemblages, graffiti, and unexpected texts pictured above. Through slow approaches to research and writing, therefore, images potentially offer insights into how people communicate through everyday visual interventions.