Teorie della rappresentazione - I modulo

Teorie della rappresentazione e dell'immagine

Prof. Elisabetta Modena A.A. 2019/2020

Unità A – Performing Images. Agency in Visual Arts

Lesson 1 Part I – Performing images in visual arts

Since the last decades of the last century, theorists and anthropologists of images started to give attention to the active images, able to deal with us and provoke emotionally and even physically reactions such as fear, excitement, hate, desire, etc. The theme of the relationship between image and spectator, between an object and our gaze, had been investigated among others by the phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argued that in sensible experience, entities look at each other and they are spectator and spectacles at the same time. Of course, there were some important moments before that came this period. For instance, let’s think about Aby Warburg’s statement in his young writings, "you live and do me no harm," referring to this kind of power of images.

More recently, we could quote a very famous essay written by Roland Barthes, "La chambre claire, Note sur la photographie," translated into English in 1981 and published a year before, in which are defined two main themes related to the analysis of the photographic image: the studium and the punctum, that is a sort of puncture that goes from the image to us. An anthropological approach to these themes is made by David Freedberg in "The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response," published in 1989; in this ambitious book, he enumerated different emotional reactions in which the distinction between art and life is disregarded. Art is actually just a part of the analyses that include many examples from visual culture and popular images, such as religious icons or erotic images. That is to be understood as a sort of a first history of images, and not only a history of art, that will be continued by visual culture’s scholars a few years later. A different anthropological approach is held by Alfred Gell in "Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory," published in 1998. Gell here shows how objects embodied agency and intentionality.

In different ways, scholars, like the German art historian Horst Bredekamp, have studied the capacity of images to affect and influence human reactions.

Changing the point of view from power to desire

W.J.T. Mitchell, in "What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images," published by UCP in 2005, analyses the images as if they were animated subjects with a personality. Scholars and critics have questioned this thesis by arguing that images lack any will of their own, but this analysis remains particularly challenging in contemporary art, the area in which we will analyze some specific cases linked with this theme of the desire for the images themselves, and their almost human nature.

So, let’s start from describing the Unit A, which analyzes the theme of contemporary representation of the image in visual arts, and in particular its agency through the studies and the works of both contemporary artists, art historical and visual cultural theorists. For this reason, the course will deal with the production, circulation, fruition of images in contemporary visual arts of the last few decades, with a particular focus on their performative dimension in analyzing many different case studies.

At the same time, these three different levels define also three different ways of analysis of the image’s agency, and in particular of artworks:

• How contemporary artworks are designed in relation to their ability to transform the way we look at the world by including us within it and focusing on the topic of installation art;
• What images and artworks do to us, how they can deal with our desires and fears, leading us sometimes also to act against them. We will focus on the theme of iconoclasm, first of all, by introducing the concept and then by analyzing cases of censorship, destruction of contemporary works of art, but also iconoclastic acts made by the artists themselves;
• Finally, what and if artworks and images aim and want while circulating and during their life?

Unit B – The Image-Self. Subjectivity in Media Dispositifs

Unit B, held by Giancarlo Grossi and entitled "The Image-Self. Subjectivity in Media Dispositifs," focuses on the problem of the construction of the subject by cinematographic and media images, with particular attention to the meta-psychological theory of Apparatus.

This unit investigates the processes that shape and model subjectivity in media dispositifs. Firstly, it will focus on how cinema arises at the end of the XIX century as a technique to exteriorize and share the inner world of the mind. From its early application in psychiatry to emergencies of movies in which the film screen is explicitly depicted as a mechanical projection of conscious and unconscious processes.

The first systematic film theory, "The Photoplay," by the German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, looking for a specific aesthetic identity for cinema as art, finds it in the possibility to exteriorize mental processes: attention, memory, dream states. A specific attention will be devoted to the problem of the disposition of film’s spectators and the production of their own subjectivity. In this direction, the Apparatus theory of the '70s, inspired by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic approach, will be analyzed to answer a peculiar question: is cinema an ideological machine that shapes our identities?

Following Lacanian approaches in film theories, we will deal with the question of the cinematic gaze: is the gaze the attribute of a voyeuristic, male spectator or is it rather inside the film screen, observing us, as an un-objectivable reality?

Unit C – The Life of Images Between Agency and Performativity

Unit C, "The Life of Images Between Agency and Performativity," will concentrate on the idea that images are able to affect and even transform the beholder observing them, and will focus in particular on the notion of agency from a theoretical point of view. Since the end of the XIX century and especially in the last decades, it has been more and more common to refer to images as living beings. Sharing the same theoretical effort, contributions in different fields of image studies have affirmed to no longer classify images as exclusively visual objects but to see them as living beings, marked with all the stigmata of personhood and intentionality, quoting Mitchell. But is the idea of a life of images just a metaphor, a manner of speaking, or shall we really attribute animation to inorganic objects, and even personhood to non-human entities? Can this be considered a form of animistic belief?

In different ways, scholars have sought to highlight the capacity of images to affect and to influence human reactions, but also to stare back at us and even to perform acts. We will focus in particular on Bredekamp’s book, in which he has developed the theory of image acts, and we will examine whether the images can be categorized as actions and how.

Lesson 1 Part II – Installation art – The Dream Scene

This lesson will be dedicated to installation art. This very first part of the unit discusses a theme strictly linked with those contemporary art practices that can be grouped under the category of installation art. This is also the title of a book written by Claire Bishop, a British art historian critic, author of books and essays, known as one of the central theorists of participation in visual arts and performance. This book is not specifically dedicated to art and agency, such as the ones we introduced in the first part of the lesson, but we aim to understand how we could consider contemporary art practices such as installation art, concerning the representation and image theories, and in particular to what we use to call the agency. Nowadays, in fact, referring to contemporary art we are asked not to simply look at an artwork such as a painting or a sculpture, but more and more often we are asked to enter physically into an artwork.

Starting from the 90s, installations became more and more spectacular and bigger, and we refer to them as immersive environments. Historical avant-gardes of the first two decades of the XX century radically changed our way to look at art and to consider what art actually is.

In this comic cartoon, drawn in 1946 and published in the PM magazine in New York, by the artist Ad Reinhardt, the goal is to explain the abstract art to the general American audience. It is important to us to side this didactical example because we will focus in particular on forms of representation that are not traditionally figurative, just like those that are introduced in the series of the cartoon entitled "How to Look and Design."

Abstract art produces a crisis of the Platonic theory of image in the sense of imitation, mimesis. If you look at the first watercolour of Kandinskij (1910), what does it represent? There is no reference to something that exists outside the image itself.

In this cartoon, created by the same artist, we learn how to look at a cubist painting. What challenges cubism and what Reinhardt illustrates here is the crisis of Renaissance perspective, which presupposes a construction of a single point of view in front of which the viewer is supposed to look at what is represented within the painting and inside the frame.

So, what is installation art? We could read these definitions of installation by two of the most museums of contemporary art of the world, the MoMA in New York and the Tate:

In her book, Claire Bishop coined this definition of installation and installation art. For her:

Here we can see what is considered one of the first art installations, the Merzbau by the German artist Kurt Schwitters. The Merzbau, a term composed of a nonsense term, Merz, and Bau, the German world for “building,” was one of the most important artworks and movements in modern art. It was a huge collage of objects such as newspapers, old furniture, broken wheels, dead flowers, mirrors, and other stuff. Built in Kurt Schwitters’s house in Hannover, it was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943, during WW2. As we can see, it was a real environment, a space into which you could enter.

Bishop also refers to another artwork among the precursors of contemporary installations, the Pronuneraum by El Lissitzky, a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, and architect. As Bishop argues, it was not at all about decoration, nor an exercise in using interior design and sculpture, but a blueprint for activating and engaging the viewer in everyday life and politics.

As we can understand from these definitions and these very first two examples, there is a very important topic that we have to underline. In these artworks, there is no frame at all. The frame used to rule the relationship between reality and art; it is a medium, an intermediate medium. Its middle position between art and reality has a very important function.

Bishop argues that:

• At the center of this reflection emerges the concept of experience, which produces the division into four different types of installations, and chapters presented in this book: the dream scene, heightened perception, mimetic engulfment, activated spectatorship.

Bishop also adds two key concepts to understand the role of the viewer in these different types of installations. First, the activation of the viewing subject and, second, the concept of the decentered subject:

Chapter one is organized around the model of the subject as psychological or more accurately psychoanalytical, referring to Freud’s writings. Here we’ll see artworks that put the viewer into psychologically absorbing, dream-like environments. "The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment" is an installation realized in 1984 by the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov. The viewer enters the installation through a single door and is invited to visit the separate rooms. This sculpture is also a story; it tells the story of one of the residents who built a catapult-like construction to shoot himself through the roof – we can see the hole in the ceiling – and vanishes into space. In the room, you can look at scientific drawings and diagrams. The wall is covered with wallpaper composed of all Soviet propaganda posters. A diorama of the town on the floor shows the man's suspecting projecting path into space. This artwork had centrally political reasons. The miserable room suggests the reality behind the Soviet utopia.

A second example is the International Surrealist Exhibition, increasingly sighted as one of the first environmental installations. The exhibition was set up in 1938 and included a series of artworks by different artists immersed in a completely transformed space. The asses corridor featured 16 man-cans dressed as many artists. The floor was covered with sand and that leaves, and on the ceiling hang 1200 bags of coal by Marcel Duchamp. All the senses of the spectator were involved in this installation. In the central room of the exhibition, the poet Benjamin Péret installed a coffee roasting machine. For the opening night, the exhibition was held in darkness. We could read a review of this extraordinary exhibition by the French graphic artist Georges Hugnet.

The installation then comes out of the frame, let in the work detonates in the space. Allan Kaprow, the artist considered the inventor of the happenings in the 50s highlights the link between this aspect and Jackson Pollock’s drippings.

According to Kaprow, Pollock’s contribution to art was significant for three reasons:

• His all-over paintings, made on the floor and worked from every angle, ignored the frame in favor of a continuous going in all directions simultaneously;
• Pollock's action painting was performative and ritual itself;
• The space of the artist, the viewer and the other world became interchangeable; the viewer himself must feel the physical impact of these markings.

There’s more and more need for reality, a desire to place the viewer in the center of narrative experience but real. "Room #1" by Lucas Samaras comprises a reconstruction of the artist’s bedroom, installed in New York in 1964. In the room, visitors could see his stuff like books, clothes, papers, etc. For Samaras, the room was authentically real in that it has real things and you can walk around, walk around, sit down and make laugh. This last work by Lucas Samaras, such as many others of this period, involves an emphasis on real materials, rather than on illustrations. This brings us back, for instance, to Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, which was built in the very studio of the German artist. In this one, we can see an emphasis on real materials rather than illustrations.

Here we can see an installation made by the German artist Gregor Schneider. As with Schwitters, his home is the site of an ongoing work of art, but the rooms are replicable elsewhere, in galleries, museums, and private collections. It was Schneider’s home, which originally belonged to his family. Purged of natural light and colors, the rooms are obsessively lined and relined.

On the other hand, the work made by the English artist Mike Nelson seems to be close to Kabakov. He presents for the viewer a series of corridors and rooms to explore, each of which appears to belong to someone recently departed. Here there is a picture of "The Coral Reef," a complex installation made of many different rooms that seems to allude to a different subcultural social group. The spaces were not labeled and therefore required a degree of detective work by the spectator.

As Bishop argued, Nelson’s work is paradigmatic of the dream scene type of installation art, that has been put forward in this chapter. Such work is characterized by psychological absorption and physical emotion. The viewer does not identify with the character in a scene but is placed in the position of the protagonist. As a consequence, this form of installation art is often regarded as being related in some way to the absorptive character of painting, reading, and cinema. These analogies are all valid since there is a strong narrative element to many of the installations discussed here. Yet because the installations seek to trigger fantasies, individual memories, or cultural associations in the viewer’s mind, the symbolically charged dream scene provides the richest model of comparison for our experience of this work.

To conclude, we could say that these environments where the spectator physically enters act as machines to assist the spectator elsewhere in other dimensions, dreams, or other lives, placing him or her in the center of the experience that we could call real. Their agency puts them (the viewers) at the center of the space of a story elsewhere.

Lesson 2 Part I – Installation Art: Heightened Perception

In the last lesson, we were discussing the installations that Bishop calls the ones of the dream scene. We concluded our last lesson by saying that these environments, where the spectator physically enters, act as machines to assist the spectator elsewhere, in other dimensions, in dreams or other lives, placing him or her at the center of an experience that we could call real. Their agency puts them at the center of the space, of a story, elsewhere. In this lesson, we are still following Claire Bishop in describing the second kind of installations she identifies, the ones that create in the spectator a sense of heightened perception.

One of Carsten Höller’s works, "Light Wall," consists of a wall with thousands of light bulbs that switch on and off according to a precise rhythm with a hallucinatory effect on the viewer. The aim is to disorient and to provoke alteration of consciousness in the visitor. The visitor is, in this sense, part of the artwork because, as Höller argues, these artworks are machines or devices intended to synchronize with the visitors in order to...