INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
I began my research with the conviction that art presents the nature of our Being either as a lived and shared contemporary moment or an imagined past/future. I reasoned that the most ubiquitous modality of Being is to “be” in and through a body. Being is experienced through the organs of sensation, and through the nebulous and problematic matrices we variously call mind, consciousness, spirit, or soul. Any term identifying the mental nature of Being carries with it a legacy of thought, belief and, hypothetically, traces of that legacy should be discernable in images of the body. This effort is, of course, deliciously complicated by the manifold problems of representation; do images merely represent Being, or do images configure versions of lived existence? Foucault’s theories on the metamorphosis and myopia of representation and the question of visibility introduced by Ranciere present but two of the many representation-based arguments my research must accommodate.
To sustain the hypothesis that images of the body reflect and construct larger political, cultural, and spiritual contexts within a manageable scale, my argument focuses upon the relation of mind to body and text to image within a specific territory of representation. I argue that the tension between evanescent consciousness and physiological substance finds graphic representation throughout the history of anatomical illustration. Within medical representations of the body, the search for visual regimes corresponds with the search for a precise and objective nomenclature. Just as, I argue, systems of artistic representation periodically negotiate degrees of formal austerity and moments of hybridized license between words and pictures. By cross referencing images from the visual arts and anatomical illustration, I contend that the verbal and visual descriptions of anatomical and aesthetic bodies co-locate and withdraw in rhythms symptomatic of larger philosophical trends; particularly, conceptions of mind to body and text to image relations abroad during the epoch of their creation.
In New Column Focusing on Student Research, Christopher Lonegan, Fourth-year IDSVA Student, Discusses His Dissertation.
I began my research with the conviction that art presents the nature of our Being either as a lived and shared contemporary moment or an imagined past/future. I reasoned that the most ubiquitous modality of Being is to “be” in and through a body. Being is experienced through the organs of sensation, and through the nebulous and problematic matrices we variously call mind, consciousness, spirit, or soul. Any term identifying the mental nature of Being carries with it a legacy of thought, belief and, hypothetically, traces of that legacy should be discernable in images of the body. This effort is, of course, deliciously complicated by the manifold problems of representation; do images merely represent Being, or do images configure versions of lived existence? Foucault’s theories on the metamorphosis and myopia of representation and the question of visibility introduced by Ranciere present but two of the many representation-based arguments my research must accommodate.
To sustain the hypothesis that images of the body reflect and construct larger political, cultural, and spiritual contexts within a manageable scale, my argument focuses upon the relation of mind to body and text to image within a specific territory of representation. I argue that the tension between evanescent consciousness and physiological substance finds graphic representation throughout the history of anatomical illustration. Within medical representations of the body, the search for visual regimes corresponds with the search for a precise and objective nomenclature. Just as, I argue, systems of artistic representation periodically negotiate degrees of formal austerity and moments of hybridized license between words and pictures. By cross referencing images from the visual arts and anatomical illustration, I contend that the verbal and visual descriptions of anatomical and aesthetic bodies co-locate and withdraw in rhythms symptomatic of larger philosophical trends; particularly, conceptions of mind to body and text to image relations abroad during the epoch of their creation.