Seeing differently
Subtitle: identification, contemporary art, and visual culture
By: Amelia Jones
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Abingdon, Oxon [England]; New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9780415543828; 9780415543835; 9780203146811
Subjects: Modern Arts; Identity (Philosophical concept) in art; Visual perception in art; Modern Aesthetics
Other titles: Identification, contemporary art, and visual culture
Description: "Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.

The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.

Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. The leaking frame of the argument on how to see differently; title: Art as a binary proposition; identity as a binary proposition; title: Fetishizing the gaze and the anamorphic perversion : "the other is you"; title: Multiculturalism, intersectionality, and "post-identity"; title: Queer feminist durationality : time and materiality as a means of resisting spatial objectification; title: Seeing and reconceiving difference, concluding thoughts, without final conclusions.