The pensive image
— research project
Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrecht, The Reverse Side of a Painting (c. 1670, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)
The pensive image is a research project on thinking images. This project studies the extent to which images (painting, photography, cinema etc.) are able to philosophize on the status of their own representation, and on the nature of vision.
Description
Following Hubert Damisch and Roland Barthes, The pensive image aims at formulating a theory as to how images “think” about vision through a study of images that “look back” at us, viewers. To this extent, this project intends to rethink the notion of the gaze as extremity (Starobinski) by looking, for instance, at the difference between the photographed and the painted gaze in historical and contemporary portraiture (Kracauer), animal gazing (Derrida), representations of single-eye vision and blindness, etc. as well as the various modes of looking such images solicit. The pensive image claims that such representations have a double investment in the visual as agent as well as representation of vision. As such, they may form the foundation of an alternative, reciprocal model of vision, initial ideas which have been developed, among others, by Merleau-Ponty in his idea of the flesh, by Lacan with his schism of the eye and the gaze and by Foucault in his dyad of seeing/being seen, and the visible and the articulable (Deleuze).
Advice
The pensive image is an initiative of Hanneke Grootenboer, advising researcher in the Theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie. She runs the project and advise the research group. Hanneke Grootenboer’s research concentrates on the history of vision. Author of The Rhetoric of Perspective; Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting (2005, University of Chicago Press) she is currently writing Treasuring the Gaze on (miniature) portraiture and a history of vision (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press).
Application
Art historians, cultural theoreticians and artists are invited to submit proposals to participate as researchers in this project. Selected candidates gain the position of researcher at the Theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie. For more information on the practical side of your application, financial questions, and other matters, please consult the website or contact the academy via Leon Westenberg, leon.westenberg@janvaneyck.nl, telephone +31 (0)43 350 37 24.
Research questions
For more information on The pensive image in general, please consult Hanneke Grootenboer, A.J.S.Grootenboer@uva.nl
The pensive image is made possible with support of Provincie Limburg.
The issue of Image[&]Narrative on 'Thinking pictures' edited by Hanneke Grootenboer as part of the Pensive image project is now available online at: http://www.imageandnarrative.be
Among others with contributions by Jan van Eyck (ex) researchers: Anthony Auerbach, Nikolaus Gansterer, Sönke Hallmann, Benda Hofmeyer, Antony Hudek, Ils Huygens, Tom Van Imschoot and Charlotte Mott.
Following Roland Barthes’ remark in Camera Lucida that a photograph is most subversive when it is pensive, when it thinks, this semester, the Pensive Image research project will focus on the notion of pensiveness in photographs by reading some classical texts on the theory of photography. In addition to questions about the nature, function and meaning of the photograph, we will also touch upon notions of the gaze, the image’s demand, the (im)maturity of the image, and time and chance.
Time: Every first Wednesday of the month, from 14:00 till 16:00
Location: Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Texts on the reading list can be consulted in the library. PDFs will be mailed in advance if available.
Antoine Wiertz, “Photography”, in: Art in Theory 1815-1900 (Blackwell, 1998), 654-55
Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography” (excerpt), in: Art in Theory 1815-1900 (Blackwell, 1998), 666-68
Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography”, in: One-Way Street and Other Writings
(Note: Change of day: Seminar with Dominiek’s CliC group on two texts by Kaja Silverman on the gaze)
Kaja Silverman, “The Gaze”, in: The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge, 1996), 125-161
Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan”, chapter 3 in: Male Subjectivity in at the Margins (Routledge, 1992), 125-156
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography”, in: The Mass Ornament (Harvard University Press, 1995), 47-64
Hubert Damisch, “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image”, in: October, Vol. 5, (Summer 1978), 70-72
Wednesday, 4 June – Photography As The Only Form of Revolution
Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Books, 1983)