Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image

Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand, and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to operate either on the side of those who see, or on the side of those who control the means by which people and things enter into visibility. To be seen, by contrast - when it occurs outside of those parameters of control- is to be at a disadvantage; hence, for instance, contemporary theorist Peggy Phelan's rejection of the idea, central to activist practices of the 1970's and 80's, that projects of political emancipation must be intertwined with, and are dependent on, processes of 'making oneself visible'. Acknowledgment of the vulnerability of visibility also underlies the realities of life lived within increasingly pervasive systems of imposed and self-imposed surveillance, and apparently confident public performances of visual self display.Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image is written against the backdrop of these phenomena, positions and concerns, but asks what happens to our debates about visibility when a third term, that of 'self-showing', is brought into play. Indeed, it proposes a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical, one primarily rooted not in acts of open and non-oppressive seeing or spectating, as might be expected, but rather in our capacity to inhabit both the risks and the possibilities of our own visible being. In other words, this book maintains that the proper site of generosity and agency within any visual encounter is located not on the side of sight, but on that of self-showing - or showing off!

Arts & Photography

Andrews, Jorella

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Academic

The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today?
The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications. 
With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today's much debated concerns about the criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today?The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications. With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today's much debated concerns about the criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.

Painting

Paul Cézanne challenged convention, and proposed new possibilities for modern art. He was remarkable for his ability to perceive and paint everyday places, people, and things in ways that revealed the multiplicity and beauty of vision, while also unveiling the deep, cohesive structures of the visible world. But the intellectual and emotional difficulties of his achievements were considerable. Mainly self-taught, most of his career was plagued by rejection. The critics, and the public, disliked his paintings and, in 1884, Cézanne declared that Paris, the center of the nineteenth-century art world, had defeated him. Repeatedly, he retreated into self-doubt and bad temper. This book follows Cézanne on his extraordinary artistic journey, focusing on his formative discoveries, made not in the flashy, fashionable metropolis but in provincial and rural France and often in isolation. This title is appropriate for ages 14 and up

This is Cézanne

Laurence King Publishing

Rembrandt van Rijn is the quintessential Old Master. His intimately observed, vivid and profoundly atmospheric works are what many museum-goers consider traditional painting ought to be. But in his own lifetime Rembrandt was not always so well regarded. The expressive honesty of his paintings and prints could evoke disdain as easily as admiration. For more than a century after his death his style was dismissed by many academically trained art theorists and critics. In the nineteenth century, however, he was championed by artists fired by the revolution and change of their times. For them, Rembrandt was a kindred, radical spirit, his paintings imbued with a truly modern ethos. Born at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Golden Age of the newly formed Dutch Republic, Rembrandt found early fame and great wealth as a painter, living with the opulence of a rock star. But he spent way beyond his means. When, midway through his career, public taste turned away from him, these combined factors proved ruinous. For the rest of his life he would be destitute, crippled by debt, the loss of patrons and the deaths of loved ones. Nonetheless, he continued to paint with the same passion. The art he produced in his final years is arguably his most enduringly sensitive and open.

This is Rembrandt

Largely due to the linguistic turn that has dominated the humanities since the mid-twentieth century, many contemporary scholars and artists habitually equate works of art with highly coded texts to be deciphered, deconstructed, or otherwise interpreted. Within this quest to consider art differently, Jorella Andrews and Simon O Sullivan pay attention to the asignifying character of art, or simply its affective qualities.Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Visual Cultures As Objects and Affects (Sternberg Press / Visual Cultures As)

O’Sullivan, Simon

Sternberg Pr

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Books by Andrews, Jorella

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Andrews, Jorella. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image

Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image

The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty

The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty

This is Cézanne

This is Rembrandt

Visual Cultures As Objects and Affects (Sternberg Press / Visual Cultures As)