Visual Studies, Vol. 17, No.

2, 2002
I
, Routledge
'\
How to "see" with the whole body
JOYCE BRODSKY'
While their work is not explored, this article is
indebted to Maurice Merleoa-Panty's and John
Dewey's theories about perception and embodiment.
In it, I propose that a multi-sensory "whole body"
experience - Merleaa-Ponty's "lived body" - is
engaged in both the making and the viewing of
artworks. In two sections, the first exploring practice
and the second theory, the prevailing mode of inter
preting art works exclusively as representations 10 be
seen and read like linguistic signs is contested. W J
T. Mitchell's works on images and texts, and Martin
Jay's Downcast Eyes are interrogated in order to
critique the "eye/mind/image" model of perceiving
artworks. Ironically. while desiring to advocate for
the power of the visual, both authors still bifUrcate
mind and body in the making and the viewing experi
ence. This separation not only pervades theories
about art in modernity, but is equally present in the
postmodern critique of the "enlightenment" project.
Embodied interaction Is explored in order to discuss
the various models of engagement in play in viewing
traditional art, new genres, and in relation to elec
tronic art and virtual reality constructions.
INTERACTING WITH ARTWORKS
The eye and visual appal"dtus may be intact;
the object may be physically there ... In some
bald sense, the latter may be "seen" ". But
for lack of continuous interaction between the
total organism and the objects, they arc not
perceived, certainly not aesthetically .. , For
to perceive, a beholder must create his own
experience. And his creation must include
relations comparable to those which the orig
inal producer underwent. (Dewey 1980:54)
One of the first conscious experiences of what
encountering artworks with my whole body entails
happened in an exhibition ofthc art ofNancy Spero in
1979.
1
As I entered the room in which her work Notes
in Time on Women was displayed, I saw continuous
paper seroUs surrounding me on all four walls of the
gallery. A large f'gure of Artemis was placed at what
my linear training detennined was the beginning of
the story, followed by typed language and stamped
imagery, So I began that journey I was taught to take
through a typical painting exhibition. As I began to
look I was constantly aware of the imagery
surrounding me, and I frequently turned to see what
was across the room, noticing, for example, that the
stamp of the goddess was repeated many times on the
continuous scroll. I finally broke the progression to
move across the gallery space compelled by her repe
titions of this, and other images of women from
diverse cultures both past and present. My actions in
real time were engendered by the dispersal of
repeated images in Spero's constructed time/space
framework that was anything but linear. The repeti
tion and fragmentation enabled me to intercede at any
place, and meaning expanded as I physically related
part to part at my own discretion. While this form of
viewer participation may only be a heightening of
more nonnative experiences that allows a viewer to
expand awareness by turning at any time to other
discreet works in an exhibition, that is not a conscious
factor built into most artist's practices in modernism
prior to the 1960s. Previously, while aware of other
things in the space they were considered to be "noise"
discounted as enabling distraction from the focus of
looking. Spero's desire to enable the viewer's own
exploration through body encounters is intensified in
later installations. In a wall painting exhibition at the
Smith College Museum of Art in 1990, To Soar Jl,
dancing and flying figures of women were placed at
the top of the wall compelling me to stretch my body
in order to see them; raped and tortured bodies of
women were placed in corners near the floor so that I
was forced to crouch in orderto fully engage them. In
other examples, figures are painted on skylights and
ceilings, and in Masha Bruskina (1993), cut off
bodies of women sink into oblivion at the bottom
cdge of the wall. My physical responses in relation to
the placement of her figures are embodiments of
meaning.
Many of the practices that entail the use of my
whole body during the process of making a work
.Joyce Brodsky Is Professor ofstudto art and conlemporary ,Mary in the or! departmenl ufthe University SaJ'/ta Cruz, H,er !fJSt publication
was on/eminisl art ruslOf')' for /he Oxford Encyclopedia ofAesthetics and site is n0,,:", working on,a,bvok (If Passage: The Pamtfllgs Gee
and Li-lan to be pubhshed by the University of Wamington Pross, Seattie, in relatwn ro an exlubuloll. TIm prvjfxt issues oj1isplacemelff trI the
life and work of(J Cltinese artist mui !tis Eurasian daughter tnar SpaM most oJtlre twentieth century. Joyce fJu:ulsky, LI-lttn: Recent Psmtll'lgs and Pastels,
exh. t:(1i, (Taipei: Lin ami Keng Gallery, 2(01).
ISS}; 1472-5S6XprinIlISSN !412-5818 online!{l2!OI{li)99-i4!\:i 21)02 Taylor&' Francis Ltd
DOl: lO.lostVI472586iYl2I)OOO32189
100 J. Brodsky
remain buried beneath the perceptual level of the
viewing activity. While I no longer make artworks,
my body "remembers" the practitioners experiences.
Some relate to my skill and knowledge as a painter,
some of them the acquired tricks of the trade that
seduces the viewer into a state of admiration akin to
watching magic. However, many, if not most of the
aspects of my perfonnance are related to the complex
ways in which I live at any given moment. These will
always escape the historians' accounts of past events,
but some practices can be recovered. Along with the
individnated experienccs that a viewer brings to her
interactions with art, knowing that Jackson Pollock
painted on large pieces of canvas placed on the floor,
in part, because of his interest at that time in both
Native American Indian sand painting and Mexican
mural arts, changes the perception of the work. What
I see hanging on the wall is now also a factor of what
I know. As I change my perceptions so the work
changes and that dialogue takes place between my
lived body and the embodied work.
A pregnant instance of the subversion of those
whole body practices is just that example of Jackson
Pollock and his floor paintings. Still pervasive in art
criticism is the ubiquitous reading of the Greenber
gian aesthetic about Modern art that paintings, for
example, are essentially two-dimensional pictures
hung on the wall to be encountered as purely visual
things'> Thus, in spite of the legenda!)' example of an
artist pouring paint on to a canvas on the floor and
moving around and into the painting fleld to make it,
museums and galleries, with the collusion of the artist
(and Greenberg), show the work framed and wall
mounted.' Pollock described his painting process in
the late 1940s.
My painting does not corne from the easel. I
hardly ever stretch my canv",' before
painting. r prefer to tack the unstretched
canvas to the hard wall or floor. I need the
resistancc of a hard surface. On the floor J am
more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the
painting, since this way I can walk around it,
work from the four sides and literally be in
the painting. This is akin to the method of the
Indian sand painters of the West. (Shapiro
and Shapiro 1990:356)4
Understandable then that articles about his painting
drips, the result of gravity pulling thinned paint dov.n
the surface of the canvas, should have been mistaken
for the puddles, drips and splatters he actually created
by paint fulling onto a horizontal plane' In an even
more enticing example of an artist Greenberg favored,
Moms Louis probably executed many of his paint
ings by "pour[ing] thinned Magna ... onto a length of
canvas which he had partly stapled to a kind of scaf
folding or support ... and by tilting the scaffold and
manipulating the canvas itself Louis seems to have
been able to control the flow of pigment across its
surface" (Fried 1979:17). That activity is the painting
as much as the color becoming one with the fabric.
And my bodily activity is neeegsa!), in order to
engage the partially serendipitous fluidity of layers of
luminous color in the huge Veils, and to encompass
the corner streams in the even larger Unforleds. His
late vertical Stripes paintings are much smaller and
may have been done on stretched canvas. Even if not,
his process was different, and my activity facing those
works is more directional, restricted and primarily
visuaL While these are painting Cases in which
"seeing" seems 10 be the predominate form of
engagement, even here they highlight the complex
body activity that is operative in the making of most
kinds ofartworks. and in the concomitant response of
the recipient. Artists may argue that the "magical"
affect previously mentioned includes the veiling of
aspects of the process, however, the more probing
encounters unvcils elements of the painting activity
that the artist cannot control anymore than she can
multiple interpretations.
We have become more accustomed to regard
multi-sensory and interactive experiences with
artworks as part of conternpora!), viewing practices,
although emphasis on just seeing is still a prime factor
in theoretical discussions about many contempora!),
genres. It is therefore necessary to be reminded of
how all the senses but seeing were concealed in the
discourse about practice and thco!)' from the late
Renaissance through modernism. Renewed emphasis
on vision as the prime mode of engagement is revela
to!), of the histo!)' of the isolated and framed picture
that hangs on the wall, or the isolated sculpture on its
pedestal, detached from its architectural and spatial
context. When paintings, relief, sculpture and the
surnptua!)' arts were part of religious structures and
the domains of secular power, visual things were
supposed to make people have active e"periences be
they purely pleasurable, or religious, social, or polit
ical in kind. People prayed, genuflected, were
awestruck, received a god's or leader's benediction or
disdain, marched off to war, supported or revolted
from the prevailing power. What are now called
artworks were instruments in the perfonnance of
some type of ritual, and artists were artisans who
made them to be used for these purposes. In the shift
from the atelier and workshop to the academy the
training of the artist began to include instruction
about the hierarchy of thematic material and the
finished work considered a representation of
proscribed, generic content. While technical skills
were assiduously perfected, it was primarily the
conceit that counted, and there are many instances of
artists giving over the execution of the work to assist
ants once the subject was blocked out. What was
Haw to "see" with the whole body 101
considered to be a valuable work soon fell into
narrower and narrower categories of things with
painting, sculpture and architecture finally becoming
the preferred fine arts and associated in value with
texts to be seen/read instead of actively engaged.
Collecting art was also instrumental in the change
from viewers' multi-sensory, body practices and
seeing artworks in a more fixated manner. Whether a
collection was more like a Wunderkammer including
many kinds of objects, Or a picture gallery of some
sort, its purpose was usually to highlight the taste andl
or acquisitive abilities of the collector as well as the
power that permits the amassing of things.' A visit in
either case would probably involve the owner
directing the viewer to particularly worthy objects
either by pointing to them or showing them in hand.
While that still entailed some body interactions, espe
cially when the collcction was largc and objects were
shelved or hung from floor to ceiling, a more fixated
looking was the result, and that enabled connoisseur
ship with all its problematic implications.
From Impressionist exhibitions on, and with the
exception of those shows sponsored by governmental
agencies like the annual salons, new strategies began
to be employed that are still ubiquitous, oftentimes in
spite of new genres and technologies. Impressionist
paintings were hung in only two rows with the
smaller ones under the larger, in contrast to the usual
practice of floor to ceiling without considering size
(Rewald 1973:339, fn 9). Proper illumination - in the
case of the first exhibition, daylight like an apartment
- played a part in the choice of the space (1973:313).
Only a few steps remain to the white wall, evenly
spaced, single row of "eye level" paintings of the
modern museum and gallery, and whatever the
content of the exhibition the viewing practice of
looking at each work in turn in preparation for the
anticipated aesthetic experience.
8
In the theoretical
writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell - more recently
Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried - seeing the
pure visual form, particularly in the preferred
medium, painting, entailed the gaze falling on the
isolated work as the mode of encountering. Instead of
the complex meshing of the work and the environ
ment a new kind of ritual emerged: the viewer
moving in a somnambulist parade, his or her pace
often determined by the size of the crowd. Even when
a viewer is able to concentrate on a particular work,
she is supposed to be limited by the frame to exclude
everything but that image. The work is perused so that
the various parts can coalesce around the meaning of
the work in relation to the artist's expressed inten
tions, or more recently re-interpreted in relation to the
viewer's personal desires. Seeing alone is
mental in providing the elements that would arouse
the appropriate internal reaction, and the power of
discourse is such that sometimes having placed
oneself in that viewing condition one actually has just
that experience.
In viewing modernist examples of abstract and
non-objective art, particularly painting, the eye/mind!
image mode of engagement, discussed in the second
part of this essay, has been and remains largely
uncontested. To use one example to counter that ubiq
uity, Mondrian's play with color, shape and line on
the flat plane (sometimes making trial arrangements
by placing tape on the canvas) creates particular
examples of balance. Although the visual perception
of a particular kind of order may be an appropriate
form of response, the viewer reacts bodily to the
balance achieved in each instance. It is probable that
what we call visual order has something to do with
how we physically keep our bodies balanced (Lakoff
and Johnson J999:231). Mondrian's search for a
dynamic equilibrium in each painting results in
tensions in the process of resolution that are perceived
in a synergistic manner. Again it is necessary to
acknowledge that multi-sensory experience may be
limited and the eye primary in the encounter; the
viewer's engagement an intemal process rather than
the extensional one I am emphasizing, However, even
here the viewer is never a "disembodied" eye.
,Vbether placed in a gallery or museum, site
specific, in performance spaces inside or in the
in the mass media or in electrollic space, intended for
political, social andlor aesthetic response, the viewer
moves in a complex fashion sometimes, in, around,
on top of and beneath the work stimulating the syner
gism of hearing, smelling, feeling, as well as looking.
Starting with paintings that began to include real life
objects, like cans and rags and tires that intruded into
the viewer's space, a new kind of participation with
the artwork accelerated in the 1960s and I970s with
Happenings, Fluxus and Situationist events and other
forms ofperformance art, minimalist and site-specific
installations. A kind of interaction was also an
tant ingredient in some Pop art, like Claes
Oldenberg's huge, orange-colored ice bag innaling
and deflating, inducing eroticism through sound and
moyement. Even in conceptual works where language
is often dominant, Mel Bochner, Sol Lewitt, Marcel
Broodthaers, Joseph Kosuth among many others often
executed their art form spatially with complex
systems the dominant mode, and physical activity
necessary in order to decode the works. In morc
re<=ent work. artists not only use new mediums, but
strategies that impact on viewers' bodies and often
require gestural engagement. Smell, even more than
sight, has become a factor in many of these works and
fat, pollen, wax, blood, urine, things decaying,
incense, burning objects, to name only a very few
olfactory stimulants, are ubiquitous. Sound is equally
common, and touching things has become almost
mandatory. What results from this kind of interaction
102 J. Brodsky
is a heightened awareness not only of the process of
constructing the work that amplifies meaning, but
also of the relations between so-called real life expe
riences, and what happens in what was considered to
be the more rarified atmosphere of an art institution.
Some of these factors have always been in play in
encountering artworks.
While it is obvious that there are numerous
distinctions between the making of artworks and the
reception of them, for the pUIposes of my argument
concerning the multi-sensory, bodily involvement in
both activities I am overlooking the differences. I do
so because I want to consider that some of the
complex actions entailed in an artist's practices are
somehow embodied in the work; that the work is the
trace of those activities. If that is the case, it is equally
reasonable to think that in perceiving them some of
those operations will be understood in an embodied
manner, and some may even be performed during the
interactivity. This is not the same as elaiming that the
viewer is expected to replicate the artist's ideas, feel
ings. or particular movements.
Take a simple example like turning the pages of
an artist's book, By doing so I am able to understand,
through my bodily actions, aspects of the process of
forming the book that is manifest in the particularity
of that object. I was enlightened at the Women's
Studio Worla;hop in Rosendale, New York a rew
years ago looking at many artists' books in the place
they were made, in particular the worla; of Tan.
Kellner,joint director of the studio
In an entirely different form of interaction, with
certain kinds of Impressionist and Abstract Expres
sionist paintings, and a factor in many traditional
kinds as well, I move close to the canvas to see the
individual, indexical marks and move back in order to
experience their inteImingling to fonn an image as
did the artists in painting the works. In a more vivid
series of events, and discounting the mythologies
surrounding him, Michelangelo'S actions in painting
the Sistine Chapel ceiling (different from his body
gestures in painting the Last Judgement wall) arc
implicated in viewing the painting. Visitors assume
the most awkward positions - even lying down on the
floor - as Miehelangelo sometimes must have done
on his scaffold. If he did not actually lay down, at
least his head had to be turned at a sharp angle, and
his arms upwardly extended when painting parts of
the vaults. A ceiling painting is usually intended to be
about what is desired, yet often unattainable ,.
whether spiritual or hedonistic - and the straining of
my body as I look up is the incarnation of that
meaning. 10
While the average viewer cannot recreate the
activity that produced Michelangelo's brush marla; in
most of the Sistine Chapel frescos, the restorer as
viewer can observe the difference in the direction and
pressure of application of each detectable stroke, and
must repeat them in order to properly reconstruct the
work" To eonsider more extreme examples, archeol
ogists can sometimes reconstruct the context for the
work even when they have only a small fragment,
because some aspects of the process of making the
work, and the function and the place for which it was
made are in the work. The position of the subjects in
the remaining fragment, compositional arrangements,
details offeatures, distortions from enface encounters,
discernible aspects of content, among many other
elements are clues that bind together making and
viewing practices. While the archeologist and restorer
are highly equipped viewers, interacting with
artworks necessitates some sort of related capacities.
In most forms of contemporary art the desire to
address the whole body through interactive processes
is manitest in the artist's conscious as well as u n p r e ~
meditated strategies. Artists are way out front in
understanding embodiment and interaction as critical
factors in enabling new social practices, and that is
one of the reasons that Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial
has become so important a model. I am using the
notion of interactivity primarily in conjunction with
the way in which the synesthetic body performs in
perceiving artworks, and suggesting that the viewer's
whole body experience may result in increased
freedom to more fully participate in the forming of
the art event. However, Jam also insisting that bodily
experience is implicated even in art forms considered
(0 be traditional and essentially visual.
Anehoring experience in the making of a work
whieh exists as its trace may seem to fly in the face of
the "death" ofthe author, and the plurality ofinterpre
tations advocated in deconstructive orthodoxies. I am
obviously not championing the return to a decontex
tualized and authoritative explication of any work, but
shifting the balance somewhat to include the process
involved in its execution. The obdurate presence of
the work in space as the result of someone's actions is
an insistent bulwark against interpretations that deny
that aspect of authorship. They also reduce the full
ness of interaction with works whose meanings
partially inhere in their materiality. This factor does
not mitigate against all kinds of diverse perceptions
that particular viewers have, but acknowledges a
significant aspect of the viewing activity that is
always present." Encounters with persons or things
in the world are through the dynamics of bodily
participation; art is only a subset of that phenomenon.
More radical contemporary practices that are
intended to engage the viewer in an interactive
manner have also impacted on exhibition practices
affecting the usual art audience's behavior, and also
resulting in bringing different kinds of people into
the museums and galleries. This is affeeting the ways
in which artists think about audiences, and what
How to "see" with the whole body 103
previously has been deemed proper and improper
behavior in relation to artworks. As the gallery and
museum become environments in which more
diverse viewing behaviors oecur, so the boundaries
between art and other kinds of life experiences
beeome more flexible. In contrast to the still
prevailing notion that art demands a reaction
different from those felt in ordinary life situations, I
think that John Dewey got it right when he eonsid
ered what he called the aesthetic experience a form
of the way we interact with nature and the world.
When artistic objects are separated from both
conditions of origin and operation in experi
ence, a wall is built around them that renders
almost opaque their general significance,
with which esthetic theory deals. Art is
remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut
off from that association with the materials
and aims of every other form of human effort,
undergoing, and achievement. (1980:3)
Making and perceiving art are both "lived experi
ences" of a kind that enables the kind of concentration
that habitual, day-to-day aetivities often prohibit.
They allow for appreciations and forms of critique
that can play back on what is deemed to be ordinary
practices, through heightening the awareness of what
is actually happening in them. The eontroversy over
Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza in New
York is instructive. While most discussions have
centered on heroes, victims, and villains, few have
emphasized the knowledge gained about public art in
public spaees through the intense encounters people
had with the work including urinating against it."
And few highlighted the crucial element that the
event was a paradigm of lived bodies in space in
eonstant interaction. Whatever side one was on, the
push and pull of embodied dialogue resulted in
change.'4
Even in the use of the most recent technologies
like eleetronie and digital imaging, sensitivity to
viewing practices is a first step in understanding the
implications of the medium in relation to social
issues. IS Manipulating images on a computer screen is
a very different activity from participating in many
kinds of multi-media events that are produced with
electronic and digital technology, for example, in the
works of Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Margot
Lovejoy, Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman and
Dara Birnbaum. J6 In relation to manipulating images
sitting in front of a computer, interactivity is often
identified with the activity of hands and eyes with the
viewer clicking on certain pre-designed choices,
proceeding in the same manner as playing computer
games. In a more interactive manner, the player may
follow a more individualized journey as a variety of
choices are built into the program. These kinds of
practices essentially involve viewing in the static
sense and a close relationship is forged between
words and images; eomputer aetivity is eloser to
writing and reading text than to most ways of making
and responding to material artworks.
I! is difficult to predict what the future forms ofthe
technology will look like, but as long as it is necessary
to directly view a sereen and utilize some form of a
keyboard the movements of the makers' and viewers'
actions are and will continue to be curtailed and the
eye the focus of engagement. On the other hand, the
computer is positioned to enhance all kinds of disem
bodied interactivity because it is immediately
responsive to the viewer's input and interchange
between her, the art programmer, as well as many
other participants, happens easily. There is a growing
set of practices in which the artist functions as a facili
tator in order to enable the participant freedom to
create a formidable intertexuality of words and
images. And then there is sound that already extends
the domain of the visual. Computer memory meets the
memory and desire of the player in a dynamic, collab
orative manner that calls for a different model of
Merleau-Ponty's "lived body" now in cyberspace."
Different from, and not a replacement for "live"
embodied experience virtual reality technology now
exists for head and hand motion; for the use of body
characteristies as touch, motion, eye focus, gesturel
speech; and brain waves (Lovejoy 1997) in which the
participant simulates the propulsion of all aspects of
the body through electronic controls that activate
navigation through a constructed space. Even more
advanced are sensors placed in the "real spaee" that
respond to the viewer's body eliminating the attached
gadgetry in order to simulate the virtual space. Previ
ously, einema has used technology to heighten the
responses of the audience, however, in virtual reality
experiences like the above it is the user's body in
conjunction with the technology - the Cyborg - that
actually produces the new reality. While the creation
of a simulation may engender critiques about what is
gained by those kinds of experiences, nonetheless, the
eye/mind/image mode of encountering the world has
met the desire for embodiment even in electronic
space,lS Simulations have succeeded in activating
whole body practices in a constructed world with a
potential for new experiences that are now only
beginning to be fleshed out.
What interactivity in a virtual world may be like
in relation to the whole body as the site of creative
activity remains an open question, partieularly for
matters of social and political import. In the mean
time, embodied experience in real space stimulates
interactive engagement with others that may still be
the most potent form of social intercourse and imple
menting change. In any case, it is my hope that the
shift from an exclusive eye/mind/image model will
104 J. Brodsky
have consequences that will enable better ways for
people to construct their lives with others, even in
cyberspace.
The contending shapes of sameness and
difference in any possible futore are at stake
in the unfinished nalTdtive of traffic across
the specific cultural, biotechnical, and polit
ical boundaries that separate and link animal,
human, and machine in a contemporary
global world where survival is at stake ...
From this field ofdifferences, replete with the
promises and terrors of cyborg embodiments
and situated knowledges, there is no exit.
Anthropologists of possible selves, we are
technicians of realizable futures. (Haraway
1991 :229-230)
THE WHOLE BODY CONFRONTS
EYE/MIND/IMAGE PARADIGMS
Space is not what it was in the Dioptrics, a
network of relations between objects such as
would be seen by a third party, witnessing my
vision, or by a geometer looking over it and
reconstructing it from outside. It is, rather, a
space reckoned starting from me as the null
point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see
it according to its exterior envelope; I live it
from inside; I am immersed in it. After all,
the world is around me, not in front of me.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964a:138)
Experience is the result, the sign, and the
reward of that interaction of organism and
environment which, when it is carried to the
full, is a transformation of interaction into
participation and communication. Since
sense-organs with their connected motor
apparatus are the means of this participation,
any and every derogation of them, whether
practical or theoretical, is at once effect and
Cause of a narrowed and dulled life-experi
ence. (Dewey 1980:22)
In the first part of this paper experiences of embodi
ment were explored in the making and reception of
artworks. In this section, less personally experiential
and somewhat more analytic, I am addressing the still
normative eye/mind/image model of being in the
world in order to understand its persistence and exclu
sivity. In this endeavor, use of Martin Jay's excellent
book, Downcast Eyes, and some of the very provoca
tive texts of W. J. T. Mitchell, is twofold. They both
lay out the history of the normative model, and more
importantly for my purposes, are themselves contem
porary examples of its persistence. In contrast, the
theories of perception in the works of John Dewey
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty form the subtext. I do not
intend to explore their notions about embodiment in
this paper, however, their "old" works remain exem
plars. At the end of my writing I briefly discuss a few
of their ideas about bodily experience that boldly
confront the eye/mind/image model.
A typical example of how that model is utilized in
interpreting artworks is Velasquez's Las Meninas. It
is probably one of the most theorized paintings in
postmodernism. Las Meninas has been transformed
into a metaphor for the classic formulation of the
knowing subject in relation to the world as object."
This manner of engagement isolates the work in order
to "see" it as a text. V cry different concerns emerge
when Velasquez's painting is actually approached in
the Prado. There, interaction with a huge oil-painted
surface that radiates and absorbs light in a certain
way, occurs. Directional marks form rhythms that
suggest a variety of physical movements and reac
tions in the empathetic viewer. Other paintings,
objects and people, and the elements that constitute
the space of that room in the museum make the
painting itself a relational object. How the painting
was viewed in its original context, and how a c o n t e m ~
porary perceiver interacts with the work now in the
Prado is, as James Clifford puts it, to "...enter the
domain of spatial practices in particular places. Being
there is the crux of the matter because a space is not
one ... until it is practiced by people's active occupa
tion, their movements through and around it"
(1997:54). This phrase could also have been written
by Dewey or Morleau-Ponty.
In contrast to whole body engagement, and at least
since the Renaissance, a founding myth about percep
tion is that visual experience is primarily an act of
looking at things in a static manner, the scientific,
photographic/cinematic, and now digital encounter as
representative. Postmodern critiques of this tyranny of
the "Ye have resulted in an equally m}1hic entity, the
infamous gazer.' In both cases it is as if the body was
nonexistent. As evident from the first section, my
desire in this essay about artworks is to uncover how
they are experienced by the whole body, and engaged
in ways different from seeing them as images and
reading them like words in a system of signs and
representations? What is entailed is the slippery issue
of embodiment. While reading a text, for example, the
body is usually static and vision the prime sense
utilized. Yet what One reads may stimulate a meta
phoric spatiality that actually activates the senses, just
as the encounter with material things in the spatial
realm often shifts from multi-sensory stimulation to
metaphor. Memory, no matter how constructed, may
produce bodily sensations of so acute a kind that
suppression of the initial experience may result." For
the moment, and however tenuous the distinctions, a
vital difference is that bodily movement in space
How to "see" with the whole body 105
results in engaging in a physical reciprocity with
things that is extensional rather than primarily,
inward directed. This is more like the way we live
with things and others in the day-to-day world.
Perhaps acknowledging this connection (one of the
most important tenets of Dewey's Art As Experience,
1980) will prepare us not only for encounters with
visual things produced in our own culture, but with
those made in other societies and cultures in which
looking seems not to be the primary mode ofresponse.
Now, to the matter of artworks. It is difficult to
explore interactions with art in an atmosphere in which
the separation between the conscious making of
artworks from other image-making activities is denied,
both kinds subsumed under the current discourse of
visual culture." Many people who make things that
they consider to he art, however historically, socially,
or politically constructed that concept is, believe that
they are producing something different from what is
usually meant by the term "image" within the context
of cultural repreBentations,23 This is the case whether
they are involved in art practices that are rooted in
tradition, or categorized as new genres, or the products
of new technologies. To affirm a practice of art is not
to disavow that there is constant interchange between
all those actions that result in the production of images
that are designed for diverse purposes, and those that
are artworks, The distinctions between these forms
will continue to blur through the exchanges made
possible by the mass-media and its world-wide distri
bution. The erasure of boundaries is also occurring
through the utilization of what were previously consid
ered non-art strategies by artist, who want their work
to have particular social and political consequences,
and by those whose exploration of new technologies
leads them to venues outside of the art world."
At the present time art is very much alive and
kicking. It is primarily in theoretical discourse that the
existence of art is denied in spite of the enormous
institutional framework that enables il.
25
The denial is
at best presumptuous in relation to the growing
numbers of people all over the globe who believe that
they are making art. While the designation of some
things as art has been primarily a Western preoccupa
tion since the late Renaissance, it has become an
international concept, with particular application in
different places. It is extremely important to distin
guish the traditional artifacts made in certain societies
and cultures for purposes other than what art histor
ical discourse of the past two hundred years has
erroneously labeled art, from contemporary work
made by people in the same cultures and societies that
they consider to be just thal.
2
The conscious desire to
make art introduces the problem of intentionality in
interpreting art works. N; a reaction to modernism
and in relation to the "death of the author", post
modern theory denigrated the individual artist's
intentions. It is ironic that the "father" of postmodern
art, Duehamp, and his readymades enable intention
ality to once again become a central issue in aesthetic
!heoty, see, in particular Danto's The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace (1981), Lucy Lippard's Mixed
Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990)
examines kinds of art in which intentional practice is
a primary concept. It is particularly urgent to affirm
when the work of artists that have been under-repre
sented are engaged; intentionality as political and
social critique is often what their art is all about My
turn to intentionality is not only tied to the artist's
making of the work, but to !he system or cultural field
that he or she enters in and for which things are made.
In turn, those particular arenas of determination
partially govern the anticipations and actions of the
recipient. In this formulation I am indebted to Pierre
Bourdieu's Distinctions (1984). Differentiating the
making of art from other kinds of production can be
accomplished without returning to aesthetic theories
that elevate certain kinds of endeavors to a higher
realm, or to posit some exclusive notion of value that
senres as an instrument of exclusion,
If art is so alive in a material sense, then how did
artworks, with even more insistence now than in the
past, tum into images to be read like words? A tum
towards the historical story may provide some of the
answers. Whether literal or metaphoric, and for a
large part of the Western tradition, images formed in
the mind were the means hy which encounters with
the world were recorded. Ideas were the tr-d1Jslation of
this primarily visual representation. Martin Jay, in
Downcast Eyes, succinctly describes that history in
order to critique it:
What might be called the alternating tradi
tions of speculation with the eye of the mind
and observation with the two eyes of the
body provided fertile ground for the varieties
of oeulareentrism that has so deeply pene
trated Western culture. In fact, if we divide
them further, we can discern still other oppor
tunities for privileging the visual. Speculation
can be construed as the rational perception of
clear and distinct forms with the unclouded
eyes of the mind or as the irrational and
ecstatic dazzlement by the blinding light of
God, the "vision" of the seer. (29)
MyoId Webster's New World Dictionary (as well as
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) particu
larizes Jay's concise summation by defining vision as
seeing with the eyes, seeing supernaturally, having a
mental image, having visions. It defines an image as a
representation, copy, imitation, portrayal, reflection,
mental picture, a type, a figure of speech. When I
click on the thesaurus on my new computer most of
the synonyms for vision are visionary ones with a few
106 j. Brodsky
words about speculation and seeing thrown in. In
every case, with the possible exception of terms like
effigy, idol and mannequin, vision and image are an
instance of mind over matter.
In the writings of W. J. T. Mitchell a history of
the eye/mind/image mode of encountering the world
is also explored, now in order to distinguish between
words and images. It is fascinating to follow his
seductive discourse only to emerge once again caught
in concepts about visual things as representations.
However, Mitchell tells a succinct and informative
story of how pervasive was, and still is, that model of
engagement. In leana/ogy: Image, Text, Ideology,
Mitchell compresses almost all of the mind/image
references cited above into a diagram with branches
stemming from likeness, resemblance and similitude
to five categories in which the image is scrutinized:
graphic aspects in art history; the optical side in
physics; the perceptual in the above disciplines plus
physiology, neurology and philosophy; mental
images in psychology and epistemology; and verbal
meanings in literary eriticism (1986:10). Mitchell's
intention is not 'O to open up for inquiry the ways
our 'theoretical' understanding of imagery grounds
itself in social and cultural practices, and in a history
fundamental to our understanding not only of what
images are but of what human nature is or might
become" (1986:9). As an example, Mitchell cites the
battle between the Iconoclasts and the lconodules
over religious imagery in the eighth and ninth centu
ries of the Byzantine Empire, which was not so much
about misplaced idolatry, but about the struggle for
power between the emperor and the clergy (1986:7).27
In each one of Mitchell's designated disciplines,
struggles between mind and matter abound. If we take
the category of an, in formulations about graphic
images or icons an historians have plotted that history
between periods in which the idea as image dominates
the representation (Greek Classical, Renaissance, Neo
Classical) often followed by ones in which emotions
are affected through sensory stimulation (Hellenistic,
BaroqueIRococo, Romanticism)." The conflict in the
early nineteenth century between the limners and the
colorists is another instance of the image war and, as I
will suggest below, is the contention between post
modem theories of representation and the positing of
aesthetic transcendence in modernist doctrines. In
tion to optical, perceptual and psychological studies,
while it is now an accepted fact that light trsvels from
the object to the eye and that mirrors, microscopes,
telescopes and other like instmments expand our
knowledge/vision of the universe, what we see and
how it is made intelligible still enables hot debate. In
the work of the noted, but still controversial psycholo
gist James J. Gibson, perception is an activity that
engages both the visual world (multi-sensory and
''natural'') and the visual field (fixated and anificially
structured)." For most of the time since theories of
perspective were developed in the Renaissance, the
latter mode of engagement was considered the basis of
knowledge; for a shon time in early twentieth-century
modernity, phenomenology empowered the former
mode of perception. In most postmodern formulations
where language rules and knowledge is always
c{)nstructed, the visual field theory is again fuvored.'.
This power of language at a given time determines
action in the present that is often established through
usage in the past. The battles over images partially
originate in the fact that the Greek word theoria comes
from the verb to see, to look, or to contemplate, and in
Plato's desire to cleanse "ideas" of their sensory
source. As well, in Aristotle's De Anima III.7.43Ia,
''Now for the thinking soul images take the place of
direct pereeption . .. Hence the soul never thinks
without a mental image", the fundamental philosoph
ical issue emerges that continues to shape normative
theories of mind. In a diagram Mitchell shows:
.. .how classic divisions of Western meta
physics (mind-matter, subject-object) trsnslate
into a model of representation, the relation
between visual images and the objects they
stand for. Consciousness itself is understood as
an activity of pictorial production, reproduc
tion and representation governed by
mechanisms such as lenses, receptive surfaces,
and agencies for printing, impressing, or
leaving traces on these surfaces. (1986: 16)
Depending upon the prevailing ideology, image as
likeness, resemblance or similitude could either be the
cause of ideas in the mind, or the ofcorruption
to be expunged in order to properly engage the world.
In both cases, however, there are mental images to be
represented or repressed.
Ihe connation of words and images, panicularly
in contemporary theory, further alienates the made
object from bodily encounter. This is the result even
when Mitchell attempts in leon%gy to preserve the
domain of visual images and verbal ones while
bringing them together, and acknowledging their
analogical relationship (1986:19). In the later
Picture Theory (1994), Mitchell introduces the figure
of the imagetext which embodies the confusions and
contradictions over words and images as the basis of
new relationships. Central to the idea of the imagetext
is the notion that human beings are both language and
image-making creatures. In joining them together
neither is undermined and each is shown to be the
necessary counterpoint to the other so that the relation
between pictures and discourse replaces ..... the
predominately binary theory of that relation with a
dialectica! picture, the figure of the 'imagetext'''
(1994:9). In the realm of representations this is an
interesting strategy, but in the end, even in this
How to "see" with the whole body 107
dialectical figure, Ihe image part of Ihe conflalion
remains in the domain ofthe purely visual, and, as a
result, it is a simple matter to transform that image
into a readable sign. While I think Mitchell is right in
demonstrating the complex interrelationships between
words and images, I also think he participates in the
same kind of discourse about ideas and images that he
is trying to critique, because he is seeing pictures as
images transformed into rcpresentations.
31
This becomes even more apparent in Mitchell's
essay entitled "MetaPictures" in which he wants to
show that pictures might be self-referential, that is
provide their own metalanguage different from that
which governs linguistic formulations (1994:38). He
acknowledges the more than obvious bind that theo
ries about pictures are formed in language, a semiotic
system with its own structure and conventions. In
spite of the bind, and with no other choiee, Mitchell
provides a classic example of the metapicture in the
duck/rabbit, because like the im.getext it is not either
or, but a curious, wild hybrid that critiques the idea
that images in the mind represent the real duck or
rabbit (1994:57). So far so good. The issue, however,
lies in Mitchell's statement that "Any picture that is
used to reflect on the nature of pictures is a metapi
cture" (1994:57). Indeed, any picture can be made to
reflect upon the nature of pictures. That is exactly
what has been done to Las Meninas. If that is so then
metapictures are really creatures of discourse and the
wildness of the pictorial paradox yields to the logos."
What happens when one starts instead with expe
riencing things? John Dewey wrote Art as Experience
in 1934. While there are many issues about aesthetic
unities and formal structures in art that may seem no
longer pertinent, his insights about experience, and
experiencing artworks, are invaluable. While French
theory has dominated the academy, Dewey's work
has, for the most part, remained unread in spite of the
currency of many of his ideas. The primacy of inter
action as experiential encounter with things in the
world is fundamental to his as well as Merleau
Ponty,S philosophy. In a pregnant quote Dewey
differentiates embodied knowing in an encounter with
remembering it afterwards.
An experience has a unity that gives it its
name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of
friendShip ... a single quality ... pervades the
entire experience in spite of the variations of
its constituent parts. This unity is neither
emotional, pl"dCtical, nor intellectual, for
these terms name distinctions that reflection
can make within it. In discourse about an
experience, we must make use of the adjec
tives of interpretation. In going over an
experience in mind after its occurrence, we
may find that one property rather than another
was sufficiently dominant so that it character
izes the experience as a whole. (1986:37)
In grounding experience in the fullness ofbeing present
be lays the foundation for the differences between
extensional embodiment and the discourse ofafter.
As I mcntioned earlier, it is not my intention to
suggest that images cannot be perceived as represen
tations and as signs have power over the body. It is
rather to understand the way in which extensional
embodiment is different in kind and has been almost
entirely negated by theories about visual representa
tions; being there seems no longer to be a factor in
understanding perception. As an example close to
home, and illustrative of Dewey's insight, it is impor
tant to consider that when I write theoretical texts
about artworks, reproductions or memories of the
works are used in order to remind me of what I have
seen. I am in an entirely different perceptual situation
than being with Las Meninas in the Prado, It is almost
impossible to articulate that embodied experience
when 1 write about it. The results of transforming
synergistic relations into words in the case of
sensuous objects results in a condition of loss and
absence with only the eyeimindlimage in play. Like
many forms of photography, the already happened is
intrinsic to both creative activities, The perpetual
antagonism between most artists and critics partially
stems from this fact. As I have experience in both
roles, I know that making artworks and being in their
presence as a viewer, and writing about them are
entirely different kinds of experiences,
From within postmodemism there have been
negative reactions to this predominance of the eye
particularly in contemporary Western culture. Martin
Jay, in his compendium of theories about perception,
Downcast Eyes, features authors who are scopo
phobic. He explores historical and contemporary texts
in order to position them in a binary discourse, in his
terms either ocularcentrist or antioculareentrist. Like
Mitchell he also cites the Byzantine battle over
images, and the Hebrew's prohibition against
picturing, now, however, as historical examples of the
antiscopie in a primarily ocular history of Western
thought. His main investigation is in twentieth-century
theory and the writings of French authors." He
contends that these primarily scopophobic writers are
examples of an obsession that" ... has turned in a nega
tive direction, as an essentially ocularphobic discourse
[that] has seeped into the pores of French intellectual
life" (15). These postmodem writers, and their disci
ples, have so empowered language over the visual that
the result is the virtual destruction of the "modem
project of enlightenment" (589). While I think that he
has got the first part right, it is his obsession with
enlightenment that defines his concept of the visual.
108 J. Brodsky
If one peruses all the texts Jay discusses from
Plato's dialogues lauding vision to the postmodern
works of Jean-Francois Lyotard, in which the eye is a
source of disruption, the metaphor of the eye (inner or
outer) as the keyhole to the mind is ubiquitous. If we
attend to the few writers included in Jay's encyclo
pedia of the ocular who mention the body as a site of
encounter, it is usually the other of mind. From the
Renaissance on the theory of vision located in the
monocular eye".. .led to a visual practice in which the
living bodies of both the painter and the viewer were
bracketed, at least tendentiously, in favor of an exter
nalized eye above temporal duration" (55). Even Henri
Bergson while positing the body"... as an instrument
ofaetion" (193), the multi-sensory lived body prior to
contemplarion, bodily experience was "of action only
[whieh] in no degree, in no sense, under no aspect,
does it serve to prepare, far less to explain, a represen
tation" (193). For Bergson sensuous, bodily
experience is again consigned to actions that make no
sense; the body now severed from the mind.
For Jay, as for me, Merleau-Ponty comes closest
to viewing the body in a manner that seems to dislodge
the EyelMindilmage paradigm. In the Phenomenology
ofPerception (1992), while visual encounters with the
world provide a primal foundation for intellectual
descriptions, Merleau-Ponty's understanding of seeing
is multi-sensory " ... because my body is a ready-made
system of equivalents and transpositions from one
sense to another. The senses translate each other
without the need of an interpreter, and are mutually
comprehensible without the intervention of any idea"
(I 992;235). Instead of observing the world from an
objective distance as a being apan, the lived body is in
the world and " ... the world is all around me, not in
front of me" (Merleau-Ponty 1964a;138). In the essay
the "Eye and mind" (1964a), Medeau-Ponty models
the way the lived body is in the world on the activity
of the painter. In the latter text because, "The painter
'takes his body with him,' ... Indeed we eannot
imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his
body to the world that the anist changes the world into
paintings" (I 964a; 162). This kind of unity does not
imply mystical joining with nature because perception
also demands a kind of separation analogous to wbat is
necessary in order to act as a painter: ". " . for to see is
to Iw.ve at a dis/ance" (1964a;166). The whole body
behaves like a Gibsonian viewer moving between the
visual world and the visual field.34
The irony is that postmodern theoretical practices
that denigrate the visual have not explored diverse
modes of encountering, but stilI equate looking at art
through the eye/mind/image model with the photo
graphic, cinematic and now electronic, the paradigm
mediums of the gaze.
AB text-bound critics, deconstroctive practitioners
validate seeing as just as prime as in theories of
Modern art, if for different reasons. If in the laller,
seeing leads to aesthetic transcendence, in the former
it transcends the visual to become the readable. While
Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes is certainly rigbt that
most postmodem theoreticians denigrate vision. it is
not because they do not think that it is the primary
mode of encountering, but that seeing is a diseased
fonn and needs to be cleansed by linguistic surgery.
The penetrating gaze disintegrates the object in its
spatial realm and my perception of that obdurate other
is once more relegated to reflections; no longer trans
fonned to images, but constructed through language.
Seemingly, in contrast, Jay's desire is to resurrect
the power of seeing.
Representation and theory in their traditional
guises may be under assault, surveillance and
the spectaele may be widely decried, but the
power of visuality has certainly survived the
attack ... The invisible, hermeneutic harmony
of Pan ... that Serres claims now reigns in
"The age of the message" is still a long way
off. And happily so, I would add, for vision
and visuality in all their rich and contradic
tory variety can still provide us mere mortals
with insights and perspectives, speculations
and observations, enlightenments and illumi
nations, that even a god might envy" (594)
In defense of the visual, we are once again the
enlightened subjeet gazing at the world from a pano
ptic viewpoint; the "Godlike" eye united with the
mind, and severed from its lowly body. When down
cast eyes are opened they still do not see the stuff of
the world. It is no wonder that MerIeau-Panty and
Dewey linked their views of experience to the visual
arts. They understood what many artists know in their
bodies. toot the eye/mind/image model ofperception
onlv minimally illuminates the ways in which we
engage with the world."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am beholden to Judy Genova, Nathan Knobler,
Vivian Sobchack, Elizabeth Stevens, Andrea Hesse
and Cathy Soussloff for their careful reading ofone of
the several drafts of this essay. The usual stipulation
about assuming total responsibility for the content is
hereby noted.
NOTES
(11 For the works discussed see Bird, Isaak and Lotringer
(1996). The book ineludes interviews with the artist and
articles on her work by Jon Bird, Jo Anna isaak, Syl'vere
Lotringer and others.
[2] \\'bile some paintings are intended to be purely visual a ~ d
the eye the most powerful agent of encounter, even In
Optical pain1ing the visual sensation causes physical
responses 'b<:ause of the color and pattern juxtapositions.
By extension that is probably the case for all viewing
experiences.
(3) See the now infamous photographs Namuth took of Pollock
in the process of painting, in Namuth (19S0).
[41 I am indebted for this reference to AmeJia Jones whose
book Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998) 1 read afulr
completing this artiele. Her work is cieady related to mme
and I am now using her text in a course on co1Iaboration and
interactivity.
r51 It is obviously my contention that involvement with the
process of making a work, whenever that knowledge is
available, is erueial in that it allows for certain kinds of
interpretations to emerge. This is not meant to sanction the
search for the true one, bUl to bring some elements to light,
and to provide a model for the elimination of ones that are
clearly false. When that knowledge is unavailable dose
scrutiny of a work may Jead to experiencing it with attention
to the methods offabrleation that are embodied,
[6] The prolifemtion of all forms of mechanieal deviees for
reproducing the real that centered on static vision is contem
porary with this shift. Lawrence Wechsler's article in the
New Yorker (2000) on Davjd Hoekney's theory about the use
of these devices by many Renaissance artists to aid them in
copying objeets and peopie is also about the power of the
eye/mind/image paradigm. If Hockney is right, contemporary
artists who use all sorts of oopying deviees are now free of
the negative eomparisons to the historical giants who
edly made aU their drawings freehand, While we know about
the use ofthese devices by Durer and that many artists
probably utilized them is partieularJy i.nteresting,
[7] See the delightful exploration of a contemporary
Wunderkammer in LawrenCe Wechsler'S Mr. Wilson's
Cabinet o/WQnders (1996).
[8) In a recent exhibition of computer generated art (Spring,
200 J). Btl Streams: Art in the Digital Age, at The Whitney
Museum of Ameriean Art, almost all the works were either
mowtted on the wall or centered in the space like sculpture.
There were few pieees that generated new viewing strate
gies. Even in installation spaees where the gallery context
seems more important than the single works, fixated seeing
is still the prime form of encounter in the white cube.
[9] Handling the books there put me in closer c()ntact with the
processes involved in making them. Morc recently, at an
exhibition in New York MOMA of the editions ofParkett, a
periodical that commissions artists to produce work for a
particular issue, handling the "pull out" pages and other
kinds of insertions illustrated how the activity of looking at
artists' books has become an even more physieaJ activity.
[10] Most art historians know that. many ceiling paintings from
the seventeenth century onwards were made on canvas, or
other kinds of fabric, and painted on the floor or the waH
before they were fixed in position, In those cases artists had
to use those tricks of the trade mentioned previously in
order to make the images convincing when 1 look up at
them, Again,1 am not suggesting that I repeat many, orcyen
most of the actions in the practice of making the work, only
that the work manifests the intentions of the artist in relation
to the place for which she makes the work, and I respond to
that as part of the meaning of the work.
[11] For a detailed discussion of restoration procedures see
Marei, Hall (1993).
[l2J This is not the place to discuss what else differentiates art
reception: the nenvork of social practices that Pierre
Bourdieu in The Field ofCultural Production (1993) teuns
the "habitus." See also Bourdieu's earlier book Distinctions
(1984). The nexus of determinations that arise from one's
economic situation and class; gender. sexual preference,
How to "see" with the whole body 109
ethnic background. education etc., play dominant parts in
viewers' participation in viewing artworks.
r13J The artist David Hammons was photographed doing just
that I have been unabJe to find the souree of that image that
I saw in slide foun,
[14] See the Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 54/1 (Winter
1996), that contains several articles about the Tilted Arc
controversy.
[15J Vjvian Sobchack has done that in differentiating, for
example, seeing a film in the cinema and watChing it on
video at home, See her book, The Address 0/ the Eye: A
Phenomenology ofFilm E.xperience (1992),
[16] See the catalogue Video Spaces: Eight Installations (1995),
for recent works by Hill and Viola, among others; for Paik
see Dieter Reuke et al. (1982); for AnderSOn sec Stories
from the Nerve Bible Retrospective 1972-92 (l994). Margot
Lovejoy in Postmodern Currents ([997), presents a good
overview of the history of inter-media and djseusses many
artists involved with new technologies. In 1993 I partici
pated in a multi-media event orchestrated by Joel Slayton
and Cass Lehman of CADRE (Computers in Art and
Design, Research and Education. a graduate program at San
Jose State University, San Jose, California), with a host of
other collaborators. They created an interaetive, multi
media event Do What Do that began the very moment ears
drove up the ramp to the roof ()f a parking garage in
town San Jose. With the aid of eomputers, a complex
program of words. images on large screens, musie and live
performance was activated that often enabled the erasure of
boundaries between aetors and audience.
[17] The issues surrounding embodiment and disembodiment are
hot topics, particularly in relation to eleetronie media. What
embodiment may mean in a post-human world is fast
becoming one of the m()st interesting issues in aeademia,
See, f()rexample, Katheryn N. Hayles (1999).
[1 S] Vivian Sobebaek's The Address a/the Eye (1992) is one of
the few texts I have read in the arts that parallels my own
concern to explore the works of Merleau-Ponty in order to
ground perception in budily activity. To "",rite this essay
while reading her address is "' ... to aHow for my existential
particularity in a world I engage and share with others,"
The pleasure of writing and reading is thereby exponenHally
increased (1992:xv,), On pages 300.-303 she raises serious
questions about electronic imaging in distinction to film, as
a space that dis-embodies, "The
dimensional, two dimensional, and
binary superficiality of eleetronic space transfouns what, in
the cInema. becomes a world of imaginative and potential
bodily habitation" (1992:302). While this may follow rrom
her analysis of films embodiment, 1 am not convinced that
virtual space is prcempted ftom imaginative and potential
bodily habitation. These are just the issues I am thinking
through. and as electronic imaging is reiatively new { am
not sure tbat the lime is ripe enough for dismissive judge
ments. Human beings seem to have the ability to inhabit
what at first seems humanly impossible, like traveling in
outer space.
[19]
Michel Foucault's The Order o/Things (1994) starts with
visuaJ play on Velasquez's Las Meninas and that provides
critics and aestheticians with a source for complex
lions about who is where in relation to the viewer in the
painting. See Jay's Downcast Eyes (402, fn 84) for a listing
of over seven commentaries on Foucault's play.
[20]
I acknowledge the role of critical theory in isolating the
power of the gaze to subjugate and victimize. However, like
issues of representation. once the social and political ranllfi
cations are acknowledged it is necessary to broaden the
II 0 J. Brodsky
critique before it solidifies into another form of ideology.
That is not to say that the battle should be relinquished, but
only that other kinds of strategies are now necessary thai
include the complexity that is denied by a construction like
the gaze. There are many interesting texts to cite that pursue
interpretive diversity, The periodical October for Winter
1998 has several essays in which the relations between the
body and the gaze arc Vivian Sobehaek's
previously mentioned The Address of/he Eye (1992), is an
important contribution to destabilizing monolithic notions
about the gaze,
[21] W.1. T. Mitchell, in his section "t':arrative, memory, and
slavery," in Picture Theory (1994:201), discusses the nega
tive power of memoty "... to produce all too vividly an effel
de reel and take the narmtor 'back in memory' to a place he
cannot endure,"
[22] Visual culture has been the fastest growing area of eultural
studies. W. 1. T, Mitchell's Picture Theory (1994), for
example, posits a paradigm shift ftom the postmodem
based culture to one based upon images, He presents
neared theories about the relations between words and
images., yet suH separates complex activities intQ singular,
sensory notions. A broader notion of visual eulture must
cmerge in postmodern art theQry that more fully embraees
material culture in relalion to both the production of the
object. and its rc(:eption, In contrast, sociological (and
anthropological) theory", .. invojves discussing, representing
and theorizing the materiaL,," (quotation from a reviewer's
notes sent to me by Jon Prosser, editor of Visual on
18 June 2002). The reviewer also referred to sociological
works in visual culture where embodiment is a prime
concern, for example, Identity and Difference, edited by
Kathryn Woodward in association with Sage {1997}. He or
she also refers to Foucault's Panoptielsm in which a prisoner
internalizes the gaze as an example of embodiment While
Discipline and Punish is one of my favorite texts, 1 believe
that notion ofembodiment is like and different from the one
I am proposing about experiencing art works. I need to think
hard about embodiment from these perspectives, and I want
to thank the reviewer for bringing them to my attention.
[23] In partieular, many artists from so-elassed Third World
cultures are producing secular works that are often
tions of traditional cult objects for themselves and for the
tourist trade. They are also producing origina] works, some
with awareneSS of other cultural forms. As in the West,
being an artist effects status for the particular artist as weI!
as his or her country, Westerners often denigrate these
artists for not bejng contemporary without any awareness of
the context of their production,
[24] I would cite Jenny Holzer's use of advertising teclmology
and electronic media in the publie arena as an eMmple of
both concerns. See Margot Lovejoy (1997:181-183. 233)
for discussion of Holzer's work in these areas,
[25] Arthur Danto's book, After the End of Art (1997). is a
reworking of the "end of art" discourse he: has been formu
lating after laying the groundwork in The Transfiguration 0/
the Commonplace (19&1). For Danto art has become theory
and now in post-hlstory because there are no longer
the grand narrntives that were accepted (by whom?) as
natural; mimesis and art for art's sake were the gods in
historical narrations of progress. For Danto pluralism rules
today and cannot be the subject ofa grand narrative. WhiJe it
may seem 10 him that anything goes, there are directions
the body and Interaetivity may be one that emerge out of
predominant coneerns at a given time. There is a great deal
of space in which to produce wk between "grand narra
tives" and a free..for...all, More importantly, contemporary
notions about narration replace progressive stories with ones
in whjch the avoidance ofbeginnings and endings are central
to the taJe, The plurality ofstories that existed in the past are
acknowledged as having been erased by the dominant
tives construeted by historians. My major critique of Danto's
thesis is that it appears to be predicated upon the wholesale
aeeeptance of these academic narratives as "the" ones.
[26] See James Clifford 098-8, 1997) for important discussions
of these issues,
[27J In relation to a more contemporary instance. is the struggle
for the domination of the text over the image what accounts
for the equation of the visual image qIJa representation with
every form of lnequity in recent academic disooucse? And if
Mitchell is right and we are now entering the age of the
"pictorial tum<, then one anticipates that the battles in thc
academy wHl become ferocious as visual studies begins to
preempt the domain of the text,
[28] Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
the Beholder in the Age ofDiderof (1978) is a prime text in
this kind of binary methodology. Theatricality is essentially
equated with periods of pieture making in which the story is
obvlQusly addressed to the viewer, in eontrast with those
periods in which the viewer is positioned as distaneed and
must intellectually (aesthetically) respond to the work.
Fried's defense of "cool" or abstraction is at
the heart of his preference for the latter part of the binary.
[29] See James 1. Gibson (l9S0:26A3). Gibson's theories are
related to thosc of Dewey and and there is a
study that needs to be done with that theme in mind.
PO] In psychoanalytie theory the battle is also vigorous.
According to Freud, dreams and memories are usually
depicted as richly pictorial, and often enabling (when not
crippling) creativity in all dimensions (Freud 1965). In
contrast, Lacanian thcory empowers the realm of the
symbolic (phallic/language) over the imaginary (illusion!
image) in order to enable socialization (Lacan 1977).
[31] In a review of MitcheU's book Piclure Theory (I 994), Fred
erick N. Bohrer rightly concludes that while Mitchell seems
to argue for a notion of the visual as distinct from the
textual, in his conception of the imagetext words and
images are so tightly interwoven that " .. .it places in ques
tion the very existence of a distinct realm of the visual" that
has seemed tQ be Mitchell's concern to establish in all his
writings (1997:559).
[32] .Foucault's dialectic of the visible and the sayablc in This is
Not a Pipe (1982) provides another kind cf metapieture as
an exeiting model for Mitchell's theory of the imagetext (64
ff.). However. Foucault's deploying of Rene Magritte's
paintings, and in particular the two paintings that give the
small bock its title, is to- render the spaces between words
and images unbridgeable. In the dizzy battle of equals he
orchestrates, both are players taking particular positions in
changing episremes of power and knowledge. Again,
Foucault's text and MagriUe's pictures are explorations of
the sayable and the visible in which words and things are
again only representations. even jf different in kind. While
they implicate the viewer as the obje<;t of the gaze, as the
site of perplexities that disturb the natural world where
images depend upon real things and words have stabile
meanings, nonetheless they exist only on a flat space of the
page or plane, not in the spaeious place whieh is the domain
of the viewer in the flesh,
[33] [n Downcast Eyes (1993) Jay discusses Gecrges Bataille.
Andre Breton. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault,
Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce lrigary.
Emmanuel Levina:>, Lyotard, Roland Barthes
and Jacques Derrida among many other authors.
How to "see" with the whole body JII
[34) However, Jay contends that in Merleau-Pomy's late work,
for example, '"The Child's Relations with Others" (1964b)
and under the influence of Lacan, he began to embrace the
notion ofJanguage as the structure ofthe unconseIOUS and in
the mirror stage the negative side of the specular. Sec The
, Primac),o/Percepfion (Edie, 1964:96-155). So the being in
the world and the intersubjeetivity that (he delirium of
carnal vision brings in to play gives way to the power of
language, "In a sensc tbe whole of philosopby, as Husserl
says. consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of
meaning. or a wild meaning. an expression of experience by
experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain
of language" (Merleau-Ponty 1968; 155). In the end, for Jay,
even Merleau-Ponty takes his place on the side ofthe scopo
phobic in the battle between seeing and saying, While this is
not the place to exrend the argument, sufficient for the
moment is to note that for Merleau-Pomy whatever changes
1n his views about language it always emerges from
embodied perception. Categorizing his late work as anti
ocular is to misread his always present desire to situate the
lived body in the world through perception. The above
quote continucs with an extended meaning of language that
is embooied, "And in a sense ". language is e"'eryihing.
since it is the voice of no one, since it is the vcry voice of
the things, the waves, and the forests." Joseph Margolis
argues in and Postmodernism" (1992:144)
that had narrowed his entire effort,
approaching the end of his life, to the task of muminating
the subterranean source of all discovery and the legitima
tion thereby of discovery that takes a discursive fonn." In a
quote from the The Visible and the Invisible (1968:245),
plays on themes philosophically continuous
withPhenomenti[ogy, about the lived body: ".,.my body is
made of the same flesh as the world (it is perceived)," and
on page 215 " .. .like the chiasm of the eyes. the [chiasm] is:
also what makes us belong to the same world - a world that
is not projcctive, but fonns its unity across
ties such as that of my world and the world oftbe other."
[35] Happily. not only for artists, embodied experience is also
central to feminist pmctice and theory and to other fonns of
inquiry. some of which once again engage Maurice
philosophy of perception (see Sobchack
1992; Jones t998)< In the latter work early perfonnance and
body artists like CaroJee Schneeman. Yayoi Kusama,
Hannah Wilke, Mary Kelty and others are discussed with
MerelauwPonty in mind. Work in the psychology of percep
tion and the cognitive sciences are also putting mind and
body together once again, The work in cognition by George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example. Philosophy in the
Flesh: The Embodied Mind and as Challenge to Western
Thought (1999) raises aU sorts of important issues about
mind and embodiment. My thanks to Nathan Knobler for
calling my attention to that text, and for the many other
suggestions that have strengthened this one.
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