Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture

by Asselin, Olivier; Lamoureux, Johanne; Ross, Christine

• ISBN13: 9780773533905
• ISBN10: 0773533907
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-07-30
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ Pr

Summary

Bringing together international scholars from various disciplines,Precarious Visualitiesexamines the transformation of our relation to images in contemporary visual culture. Through the study of exemplary media arts works and practices-photography, film, video, performance, installations, webcams, etc.-, these essays call attention to the precarious attachments of contemporary spectatorship. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that keeps oscillating between visibility and invisibility; to be interpellated by screen-images that have ceased to mirror, resemble or refer in that their power lies exclusively on their simulating, hallucinating, blinding or generating function; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed-through surveillance devices-to the gaze of new figures of authority, unanticipated Others: the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity and interrelatedness. Attentive to these precarious attachments,Precarious Visualitiesprovides a new understanding of spectatorship, as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, yet persistently prolific in its cultural, social and political effects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture	p. 3
"Am I Still in the Picture?": The Unsettling of Identification
Introduction	p. 17
Self-Portraits	p. 21
Ending Myths and the Catholic Outing of Andy Warhol	p. 100
The Persistence of Spectatorship: The Racialized and Ethnicized Gaze	p. 120
"Are We Still in the Game?": David Cronenberg's eXistenZ	p. 136
Interfaces of (In)Visibility
Introduction	p. 151
What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore's Memorial to Missing Women	p. 155
The Threshold of an Interface: Ilya Kabakov's Looking up, Reading the Words (1997)	p. 180
The Star and the Prisoner: The Spectacle and Surveillance of the Self on the Web	p. 198
The Staging of Hallucination (of Hallucination)
Introduction	p. 227
Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema	p. 229
Para-Siting Visuality
Introduction	p. 245
Media Image, Public Space, and the Body: Around Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff	p. 249
Mediating Place-Identity: Notes on Mathias Woo's A Very Good City	p. 264
The Polysensorialized Screen
Introduction	p. 281
Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather: Eroticism as Identity Subversion	p. 283
Televisual Flesh: The Body, the Screen, the Subject	p. 302
Real Time, Lived Time: AR Art, Perception, and the Possibility of the Event	p. 328
The Generating Image
Introduction	p. 353
The Descent of the Image	p. 355
Resemblance and Identification: The Paradox of Gary Schneider's Genetic Self-Portrait	p. 380
Variations on Genetic Insignificant: Metaphors of the (Non)Code	p. 391
Author Bios	p. 417
Index	p. 421
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