Full Description
On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images—photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings—from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision.
Contents
Introduction Frances Guerin Part I: Images that Don't Look 1. Not Looking into the Abyss: The Potentiality to See Daniel Sack 2. The Rest is Noise: On Lossless Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin 3. The Men in the Bathroom: Reflections on William E. Jones' Tearoom James Polchin Part II: The Privilege of the Other Senses 4. Peripatetic Sculpture: The Exhaustion of Looking in the Presence of Richard Serra's Promenade Frances Guerin 5. Burrowing Under the Apparent: The Blindfold Drawings of Claude Heath Craig G. Staff Part III: Not Looking at Bodies and Cultures on the Margins 6. ©AMOUFLAGE Alessandra Raengo 7. The Horizon to Come: Planetary Aesthetics in William Kentridge's Felix in Exile and Galileo Galilei's Moon Drawings Sonja A.J. Neef 8. Between Looking and Not Looking: Race, Spectacular Scenes, and Counter-Spectacular Effects in Paul Pfeiffer's Long Count Series Elizabeth Adan Part IV: Institutions Overpower Images 9. Looking At the West Looking Away: Khmer Rouge, Western Blindness, and Documentary Images Stéphanie Benzaquen 10. The "Coffin," the Camera, and the Commodity: Visualizing American Military Dead at Dover Rebecca A. Adelman 11. Lessons from the Life of an Image: Malcolm Browne's Photograph of Thich Quang Duc's Self-Immolation Øyvind Vågnes
