The Notion of 'Image' and Eurocentrism

2011

In this book the authors investigate how iconology as a field and method, which originated within art history, relates to recent developments in the Humanities such as Anthropology and Visual Studies. The main questions are: How has iconology evolved in the past decennia, could it incorporate Anthropology and Visual Studies towards a new science of images? How have new disciplines profited from iconology and how can they in turn inspire and/or reinvent iconology? These questions are addressed within a wide historical and geographical scope, as we regard the tracing of pictorial meaning throughout time and space an essential characteristic of iconology. The selected specialists of this volume all have a specific involvement with the new tendencies in iconology today. The authors share their lectures, ideas, methods, old and current research for one common goal: the further study and exploration of the making, the meaning and the migration of images in art history.

Social Semiotics, 2000

This paper examines a range of problems centring on the theorization of cultural identity and cultural property by reference to debates about the appropriation of the Maori tattoo, or ta moko, and the authenticity of contemporary Maori tattooing practices. Through a consideration of the relationship between cultural identity and tattooing, and the question of whether tattooing is an effect of a speci® c identity or constitutive of that identity, it addresses the paradox inherent in attempts to protect indigenous, cultural and artefacts from (mis)appropriation: that is, that to re-articulate such non-Western cultural phenomena in terms amenable to their repositioning as property is precisely to render them meaningless or useless, in terms of their contextually speci® c uses and signi® cance. Against the background of these issues, the use of ta moko as a form of signature or authorizing mark of identi® cation is taken to highlight issues concerning the complex relationship between the attribution of certain cultural practices, characteristics or properties, to a certain group, and the notions of authorship and authority that underwrite such designations. In a general discussion about tattooing and social reproduction, Alfred Gell suggests that: As a technical means of modifying the body, tattooing made possible the realization of a particular type of `subjection'¼ which, in turn, allowed for the elaboration and perpetuation of social and political relationships of certain distinct kinds ¼ Tattooing (and conversely non-tattooing where tattooing is expected and normal) is a very speci® c and recognizable way of modifying the body, and, via the body, reconstructing personhood according to the requirements of the social milieu. (1993: 3.) Gell describes the way the tattoo marks both the division and the link between the body and culture. Read as either a sign of af® liation within a social order, or pathologized as an `infantile', `self-destructive ' or `oppositional' manifestation of the interface between the individual and society, the tattoo is often taken as a key to insights into identi® cation and socialization. It marks the body; it inscribes, constructs, and invests it within a variety of psychical, cultural and political ® elds. It may well be, however, that to read the tattoo simply as a metaphor for the inscription of culture or society on the body, as an assignment, impression or shaping of external social and cultural contexts on individuals , is to obscure the

2016

This exegesis accompanies a sub-cultural practice of tattooing that was once only prominent in the ‘street art’ world, but today it is a fast growing practice in the mainstream art industry. This paper aims to understand the cultural and artistic phenomenon of tattooing through historical and cultural research and through case studies that identify tattooing as occupying a space in the contemporary art world, despite its former exclusion from the art world. This paper aims to connect identity with tattooing and in doing so, argue for the importance of tattooing as a language that defines one’s identity, and more generally, the identity of tattooing as a medium of contemporary art. With the help of theories and concepts such as structuralism, postructuralism, phenomenology, identity politics, ‘Dasein’, etc, the paper argues that the role of tattooing in contemporary society can be shifted from being a commercial commodity to an artistic element.

Cultural Studies: Theories and Praxes, 2013

Culture plays an important role in creating the identity and also constructs the meaning of the signs related with that particular cultural tradition. Firstly, in my paper, I have tried to focus on how the culture of tattooing differs from one culture to another. The art of marking the body has often been associated with the idea of controlling the body; here using a Foucauldian discourse I have tried to analyse how in Roman Empire of Constantine and in Nazi Germany (at the time of Holocaust) the art of tattooing has been used politically as a state control mechanism, therefore, located the direct involvement of body in the political field. Secondly, I have presented in my paper, tattoo as a complex cultural sign and how in different tribal and aborigine cultures of Kalinga (New Zealand), Benin (West Africa), and Kondhs (India) the tradition of tattooing constructs the culture specific meaning and how this cultural meaning changes with time. Analysing the tribal culture of Benin I have tried to focus on the complex process of identity formation through the ritual of scarification. Here the idea of the “performance” of gender role of masculinity is identified with that person’s capability of bearing pain silently. Beside this, while analysing the tattoo culture among Kondh tribal people I have focused how they have used tattoo politically to protect the female body from the sexual exploitation of the powerful outsiders and have questioned whether this cultural device of tattooing is used to prevent racial mixing. Thirdly, I have discussed the culture of tattooing in the changed scenario of Globalization. Previously tattooing was considered by the mainstream society as taboo but Globalization has successfully made its entrance in the mainstream society. Here I have used Bhabha’s theory of “Hybridity” to locate how tattooing in its traditional form was never “pure” and have gone through several modifications by the influences of the other cultures and now, how for the sake of Globalization and capitalist economy the “Hybridization” of tattoos has reached its maximum speed and potential. I have also dealt with how Globalization has changed the concept of body and used it like a canvas to use the full potential of body in the capitalist economy. Finally, I have located how the form of tattooing has been appreciated by different sub-cultures. Keywords: tattoo, Foucauldian discourse, state control mechanism, cultural sign, performance, gender identity, Globalization, Hybridity.

Social Sciences Research Network/ESA Lisbon 2009

The interest in body images alongside a concern for their reception and repercussions on the viewer has an exceptional innovative dimension - one that echoes the program conveyed by contemporary theory through which a new significance of the World Image and World Knowledge is launched. It gathers not only Art Theory, Image Criticism, Body Interpretation but also Narrative Perspectives. Making this position explicit, our conception of body image criticism begins with the analysis of the form, which articulates the authority attributed to the medium in which it is located, the narratives problematic, as well as the nature of the body’s immediacy in the world, consequently producing a new paradigm which is essential to a better understanding of the images. To make mediation a formal problem, it is necessary for an individual to realize how absolutely impossible it is to explain visual content and its effects, whether in the realm of arts and technology, science or politics without a discussion of their contexts, forms, and histories. In visual culture, it becomes history by drawing attention to the visual object’s nature, rather than the role of the viewer/critic, or the embodied subjectivity of the author or subject. This second approach to visual images claims the importance of identity in the sense that every interpretation differs according to the subject position. “Far from suggesting that an explanation follows from a particular identity according to some essential or defining characteristic, this [approach] assumes that subjectivity is always in a state of flux and that while all knowledge is situated, it is never fixed” (Haraway, 1988). Virtually or aesthetically speaking, body imagistic and cultural knowledge are located and never permanent. Expressive bodies, arts and sign languages achieve (im)possible readings due to volatile subjectivities. Given that the human figure has always been artistically exploited in its formal and anatomic visions. We will than present a template sign for the meanings and dominant interpretative paradigms of body’s visual image, approaching the implicit diversity and fragmentation in postmodern narrative perspectives and their communicative accomplishments.

in This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 205-235

Surfaces

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

The paper explores the agency of the photographic source image in relation to a series of paintings by glad fryer. Taking Badiou's idea of a 'truth procedure' and Merleau-Ponty's idea of 'flesh' to explore How we live with these images, including moral and political implications.

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2018

In September 2015 the international conference titled Image, Racialization, History was held at the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK), Singidunum University in Belgrade. Two years later this volume, edited by Marina Gržinić, Aneta Stojnić and Miško Šuvaković, represents a materialization of the event and an expanded collection of ten precise analyses, intersecting with each other and unfolding the links between historical and present status of what is known as the politics of the image. The volume traces theoretical, cultural, social, political and artistic discourses on the image and, vice versa, how all these listed discourses are embodied within images. Or, put differently, this volume presents a transdisciplinary and transdiscursive platform that confronts the regimes of in/visibility and intervenes into them by analyzing and contextualizing the role of images within violent colonial/racial processes of dehumanization of the past and present. The outcome is a process of unmasking the (colonial) "gaze" (historically as well as presently) that occupies the central role in "systematic procedure of discrimination, differentiation, seizure, and closure by capital" (13). From a wider angle, this volume is deeply indebted to Gržinić's own theoretical corpus as well as a tribute to her more than 30 years of video-media artistic practice done in collaboration with Aina Šmid. The volume opens with the theoretical-political interventions drawing upon Gržinić's theory of the image. By introducing the image-time-space-form-subject genealogy (following the "evolution" of modes of capitalistic reproduction), Gržinić exposes, what she names as the "racialized unconscious" of today's images (since today's colonial/racial divide operates from inside of every term 1). She starts from Deleuze, advancing to what she calls the virtual image and then posits the trophy image (e.g. Abu Graib selfies depicting "trophy bodies" of the prisoners, the "non-human")