Avisuality in visual arts. Selected issues

Avisuality in the visual arts sounds like a paradox, yet we find a lot of evidence for this tendency. The course provides students with a short story of overcoming the paradigm of visuality and focuses on various aspects of avisuality in art (relativisation of the place of sight among the senses, approach to phenomena that cannot be represented, career of minimalism in modernity, etc.). The main goal of the lectures is to allow to identify actual changes in art and recognise artistic strategies of negotiating the boundaries of representation.

1. Beyond the ocularcentrism

- cultural aspects of privileging the sense of sight in Western culture

- the notion of ocularcentrism

- sight as a sense of distance, control and domination

- contemporary critique of ocularcentrism

2. Contemporary iconoclasms

- the (im)possibility of a representation

- the aesthetics of the sublime and negative representation

- the darkness and silence as a matter of art

- non-representability of the Holocaust

3. The affective turn in art and art theory

- emotions vs affects

- the idea of a total work of art

- theoretical background of contemporary opening of art to other senses

- contemporary synesthesia

- affective antimonuments

4. Towards a mental image

- the concept of the interior landscape

- the notion of imagination in art

- mental images - perceived, remembered, dreamed

5. The lack as an aesthetic category

- amor vacui

- “Less is more” as a creative principle

- the lack as a new ornament (according to Marta Leśniakowska)

Basic readings:

Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in spite of all: Four photographs from Auschwitz, translated by Shane B. LillisChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Jay, Martin. “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism.” Poetics Today 9, no. 2 (1988): 307–26.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. University of California Press, 1993. (selected fragments)

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Sublime and the Avant Garde.” Paragraph 6 (1985): 1–18.

Pursey, Tom & Lomas, David. Tate Sensorium: an experiment in multisensory immersive design, “The Senses and Society, Volume 13, Issue 3 (2018)”: 354-366.

O'Sullivan, Simon, “The aesthetics of affect: Thinking art beyond representation.”, Angelaki Journal of Theoretical Humanities, December 2001, 6(3):125-135.

Sholette, Gregory, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise. Culture. London: Pluto Press, 2010 (selected fragments)

Taylor, Julie, ed. Modernism and Affect. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Tye, Michael. “The Picture Theory of Mental Images.” The Philosophical Review 97, no. 4 (1988): 497–520.

The student understands the dangers of privileging the sense of sight and is able to point out the reasons why many artists want to overcome this domination. He/she understands the essence of the concept of oculocentrism, is able to identify and interpret works that show this tendency and point out various paths beyond the visual paradigm.

Lectures 15 hours

Own work with literature approx. 50 hours

Preparation of presentation approx. 25 hours

TOTAL approx. 90

ECTS 3

Course grading:

The semester end’s with a student’s 20-25 minute long illustrated presentation

on a selected theoretical issue related to the quistion of avisuality in art (For second-cycle students, the presentation should include an element of the student-led debate).

The attendance and active participation in classes will be also taken into

consideration

not applicable