Precarious visualities : new perspectives on identification in contemporary art and visual culture / edited by Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux, Christine Ross.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Lamoureux, Johanne.

Ross, Christine, 1958-

Asselin, Olivier.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Identity (Psychology) in art.

Identity (Psychology) and mass media.

Arts, Modern--20th century.

Arts, Modern.

Arts, Modern--21st century.

Physical Description:

x, 438 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Montréal : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2008]

Summary:

Bringing together the work of international scholars, this anthology examines the transformation of our relationship to images in contemporary visual culture.

Through the study of exemplary media works and practices such as photography, film, video, performance, installations, and web cams, these essays call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disabling of vision in contemporary aesthetic strategies. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity, and place, to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility, to relate to an image that entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses, to be exposed through surveillance devices to the gaze of figures of authority - these spectatorial experiences speak to a finiteness and fallibility of vision in the face of new art and media production. But to speak of the precariousness of visuality is also to bring to light its productive side: what perception lacks in secure opticality, it gains in complexity through the necessary interdependence of the visual and other senses. The precarious nature of visuality also exposes the fluctuating space the spectator occupies between the interrelation of fictional and physical, of body, screen and place, of identification and disidentification. Contributors to this collection investigate the critical and aesthetic possibilities of these uncertain spaces.

Precarious Visualities elaborates a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary and has persistent cultural, social, and political repercussions.

Contents:

Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture / Christine Ross 3

Part 1 "Am I Still in the Picture?": The Unsettling of Identification

1 Self-Portraits / Raymond Bellour 21

2 Ending Myths and the Catholic Outing of Andy Warhol / Johanne Lamoureux 100

3 The Persistence of Spectatorship: The Racialized and Ethnicized Gaze / Monika Kin Gagnon 120

4 "Are We Still in the Game?": David Cronenberg's eXistenZ / Beate Ochsner 136

Part 2 Interfaces of (In)Visibility

5 What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore's Memorial to Missing Women / Claudette Lauzon 155

6 The Threshold of an Interface: Ilya Kabakov's Looking up, Reading the Words (1997) / David Tomas 180

7 The Star and the Prisoner: The Spectacle and Surveillance of the Self on the Web / Olivier Asselin 198

Part 3 The Staging of Hallucination (of Hallucination)

8 Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema / Slavoj Zizek 229

Part 4 Para-Siting Visuality

9 Media Image, Public Space, and the Body: Around Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff / Marie Fraser 249

10 Mediating Place-Identity: Notes on Mathias Woo's A Very Good City / Alice Ming Wai Jim 264

Part 5 The Polysensorialized Screen

11 Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather: Eroticism as Identity Subversion / Julie Lavigne 283

12 Televisual Flesh: The Body, the Screen, the Subject / Amelia Jones 302

13 Real Time, Lived Time: AR Art, Perception, and the Possibility of the Event / Christine Ross 328

Part 6 The Generating Image

14 The Descent of the Image / Eric Michaud 355

15 Resemblance and Identification: The Paradox of Gary Schneider's Genetic Self-Portrait / Helene Samson 380

16 Variations on Genetic Insignificant: Metaphors of the (Non)Code / Thierry Bardini 391.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780773533905

0773533907

9780773533851

0773533850

OCLC:

190965450