In this rich, highly illustrated book, Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and ...artistic practice. Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think - as artists and writers - about our own creative work.
The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life ...sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emphasis on museums. Engaging with celebrated cases of vanished species such as the quagga and the thylacine as well as less well-known examples of animals and plants, these essays explore how representations of recent and ancient extinctions help advance scientific understanding and speak to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.
Can poem and picture collaborate successfully in a composite art of text and design? Or does one art inevitably dominate the other? W.J.T. Mitchell maintains that Blake's illuminated poems are an ...exception to Suzanne Langer's claim that "there are no happy marriages in art-only successful rape." Drawing on over one hundred reproductions of Blake's pictures, this book shows that neither the graphic nor the poetic aspect of his composite art consistently predominates: their relationship is more like an energetic rivalry, a dialogue between vigorously independent modes of expression.
W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry.
Originally published in 1978.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Illegalized immigration is a highly iconic topic. The public perception of the current regime for mobility is profoundly shaped by visual and verbal images. As the issue of illegalized immigration is ...gaining increasing political momentum, the authors feel it is a well-warranted undertaking to analyze the role of images in the creation of illegalization. Their aim is to trace the visual processes that produce these very categories.The authors aim to map out an iconography of illegalized immigration in relation to political, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. They discuss the need to project new images as well as the dangers of giving persons without legal papers an individual face. Illegalization is produced by law, but naturalized through the everyday use of images. The production of law, on the other hand, is also driven by both mental and materialized images. A critical iconology may help us to see these mechanisms.
According to Mitchell, a “color-blind" post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against claims that race is an outmoded construct, he contends that race is not simply something to be ...seen but is a fundamental medium through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it.
Cloning terror Mitchell, W. J. T; Mitchell, W. J. T
2011., 2011, 20110101
eBook
The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell ...argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.
Poetic Justice: 9-11 to Now Mitchell, W. J. T.
Critical inquiry,
2012, Letnik:
38, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Mitchell discusses a number of crucial qualitative differences between the event of 11 September 2001 and the moment in May 2011. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that the later moment clearly ...marks the symbolic end of the so-called global War on Terror that was launched a decade earlier. Even more than the election of Barack Obama, which produced a renaming of that war to Overseas Contingency Operations but not a real end to the military occupations conducted in its name, the death of Osama bin Laden marks the end of an era or, more precisely, a kind of nonevent that registers as a signal of an ending that has already taken place.
Mitchell investigates Derrida's notions of terrorism. Derrida's focus is on the phantasmic, spectacular and mediated character of terrorism, and his argument is that the real terror is the ...exploitation of the image of terror by it's target.
From the standpoint of the visual arts, there are several directions one might take in approaching the topic of art and the disciplines or art as a discipline. One would be to reflect on the ...traditional sense that the arts are themselves disciplines, that there are skills, methods, tools, and a whole array of problems to be solved, along with a genealogy of master-apprentice relations that involve long training before one can become an artist. Here, Mitchell emphasizes that this line of thought could then expand into a consideration of its boundaries (the phenomenon of the outsider artist who refuses the conventional disciplines of craft and the social organization or institutionalization of recognized artistic guilds, academies, and so on) or its centers (exactly those schools, academies, and guilds that are so important to the institutionalization of art as an ongoing social and material practice).
