Petra Kuppers: The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, body, contemporary art, medicine, performance art, technology, visual culture
“Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging—and the bodily access they imply—to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another’s bodily experience and the effects—physical, emotional, and social—of medical procedures.
In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O’Reilly; films like David Cronenberg’s Crash and Marina de Van’s In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.
At the heart of this work is the scar—a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816646538, 9780816646531
259 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-8-12)
Comments (3)Sean Cubitt: The Cinema Effect (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digital cinema, film, film history, film theory, image, post-cinema
“It has been said that all cinema is a special effect. In this highly original examination of time in film Sean Cubitt tries to get at the root of the uncanny effect produced by images and sounds that don’t quite align with reality. What is it that cinema does? Cubitt proposes a history of images in motion from a digital perspective, for a digital audience.
From the viewpoint of art history, an image is discrete, still. How can a moving image–constructed from countless constituent images–even be considered an image? And where in time is an image in motion located? Cubitt traces the complementary histories of two forms of the image/motion relationship–the stillness of the image combined with the motion of the body (exemplified by what Cubitt calls the “protocinema of railway travel”) and the movement of the image combined with the stillness of the body (exemplified by melodrama and the magic lantern). He argues that the magic of cinema arises from the intertwining relations between different kinds of movement, different kinds of time, and different kinds of space.
He begins with a discussion of “pioneer cinema,” focusing on the contributions of French cinematic pioneers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He then examines the sound cinema of the 1930s, examining film effects in works by Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, and Hollywood’s RKO studio. Finally he considers what he calls “post cinema,” examining the postwar development of the “spatialization” of time through slow motion, freeze-frame, and steadi-cam techniques. Students of film will find Cubitt’s analyses of noncanonical films like Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as enlightening as his fresh takes on such classics as Renoir’s Rules of the Game.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262033127, 9780262033121
456 pages
PDF (updated on 2021-1-29)
Comment (0)Scott Lash: Critique of Information (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · critique, information, information society, media theory, technology
This penetrating book raises questions about how power operates in contemporary society. It explains how the speed of information flows has eroded the separate space needed for critical reflection. It argues that there is no longer an ‘outside’ to the global flows of communication and that the critique of information must take place within the information itself.
The operative unit of the information society is the idea. With the demise of depth reflection, reflexivity through the idea now operates external to the subject in its circulation through networks of humans and intelligent machines. It is these ideas that make the critique of information possible. This book is a major testament to the prospects of culture, politics and theory in the global information society.
Publisher SAGE, 2002
ISBN 0761952691, 9780761952695
234 pages
Key terms: phenomenology, Husserl, conceptual art, semiotic, information society, Heidegger, media theory, Derrida, Dasein, exchange-value, metanarratives, intellectual property, critical theory, dualism, intersubjectivity, ethnomethodology, ontological, reflexive modernization, dead zones, technoscience
PDF (updated on 2013-4-16)
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