Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 5, "Analogic Seeing" (original) (raw)

Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, opening, preface, introduction

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art. This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use. All comments & questions are welcome!

Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 2, "Psychomachia"

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art. This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use. All comments & questions are welcome!

Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 4, "By Looking Alone"

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art. This chapter covers the history of racial research in the 19th and 20th centuries and the artistic possibilities of pornography. This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use. All comments & questions are welcome!

Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 3, "Cut Flesh"

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art. This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use. All comments & questions are welcome!

Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 6, "Dry Schemata"

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art. This is the 2013 revision. (The last two chapters were not updated in 2021.) The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. All comments & questions are welcome!

Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 1, "Membranes"

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art. This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use. All comments & questions are welcome!

Theorizing the Body in Visual Culture

2011

This article provides a historical overview of attempts within anthropological enquiry to theorize "the body" as a component of visual culture. It charts a paradigm shift from an observationist view of behavior to a conception of the body as a somatic and sensory resource for dynamically embodied action in cultural space/time. I argue that to understand the human body as a bio-cultural resource for the dynamic construction of self, personhood and identity, and as a means for creative expression as well as more mundane skilled embodied practices, requires theorizing across the usual disciplinary boundaries between biological and social being.

The Body and its Representations: Uncanny Embodiments of Modernity

The International Journal of Arts Theory and History, 2013

In this paper, I am investigating the body as an area of the discourse, a site of the multiplicity of events, an object of transference—a space where wills and powers become activated, the historical realities set in motion, and endowed with meanings. I have encountered two types of historical narratives investigating the artistic responses taking form of the grotesque, uncanny, and surreal handling of the body. The first type takes form of the first-person account, and relies on retelling, describing, and elucidating the psycho-physical realities. The second type is told from the point of view of the observing subject. It presupposes clear subject/object division. Through the second type, the attempt is put forward to comprehend the perceived body by giving it unity together with symbolic relevance, and by classifying the multiplicity of perceptual information into categorical groupings that lead towards the understanding of the particular as a segment of the general pattern. Rather than looking into these two types of narratives as enclosed unities, these paper examines “zones of intensity”, and perceptible ambiguities occurring through their representational activation. Keywords: The Body, Conceptual Framing, Power of Representation, Modernity, Ideals, Displacement, Rational and Irrational The International Journal of Arts Theory and History, Volume 7, Issue 1, pp.31-42. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 317.378KB).