Cultivating Perception through Artworks

Phenomenological Enactments of Ethics, Politics, and Culture

Helen A. Fielding

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253059321
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Teaching Art

What are the ethical, political and cultural consequences of forgetting how to trust our senses? How can artworks help us see, sense, think, and interact in ways that are outside of the systems of convention and order that frame so much of our lives? In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Helen Fielding challenges us to think alongside and according to artworks, cultivating a perception of what is really there and being expressed by them.

Drawing from and expanding on the work of philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fielding urges us to trust our senses and engage relationally with works of art in the here and now rather than distancing and systematizing them as aesthetic objects.

Cultivating Perception through Artworks examines examples as diverse as a Rembrandt painting, M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry, and Louise Bourgeois' public sculpture, to demonstrate how artworks enact ethics, politics, or culture. By engaging with different art forms and discovering the unique way that each opens us to the world in a new and unexpected ways, Fielding reveals the importance of our moral, political, and cultural lives.

INDEX

abstract expressionism, 17, 81n7; colors as conceptless, 69–70; encounter with cognitive-linguistic region of existence, 62, 68–69, 71; logic level in, 65. See also Mitchell, Joan

abstraction: of legal system, 198; from perception, 8, 35–36

actualization, 16, 161, 165, 171

aesthetic objects, artworks as, 28, 39, 51, 124, 133, 135, 164–166

aesthetics: Enlightenment rationality supported by, 33–34; human, 202; political dimensions of, 18, 23n65; as social technology, 34

affect, 7, 13, 99, 118n72; and abstract expressionism, 62; affective region of existence, 48, 50; and color, 74, 106–107; embodied, 28–29; and music, 154–159, 165–166, 171; sentiments of the things themselves, 62–63; and touch, 128, 148n83

African Americans, 102–103, 105, 118nn80, 85, 209n152

Africans, enslaved: closure of subjectivity to, 19, 103; denial of being to, 19, 183–184, 191–198, 201–204; as figures in artwork, 33, 55n39; triple loss, 200. See also Zong!

Agamben, Giorgio, 119n87, 163–166

agency, 18–19, 22n46, 85n96, 119n105, 176n74, 203; and racist idealities, 107, 109–110; and singular subject, 185; under total terror, 98

Algerian war, 125

“Algeria Unveiled” (Fanon), 143

Alpers, Svetlana, 46

Al-Saji, Alia, 57n66, 105, 110, 120n142, 143

alterity, 184–185; acknowledging of, 17, 71, 80, 148n83; appropriation of, 53, 71–72, 75, 80, 137; in Bathsheba, 31–32; foreclosure of encounters with, 132, 144, 185; fourfold of, 132–134, 136, 139, 188; openness to, 70–71, 187; and proximity, 137–138; relations with, 49, 52, 62, 75; responding to without appropriation, 17, 62, 70–72, 77–78

analytic attitude (intellectualism), 9, 64, 128–129

Anderson, Keith, 174n25

anonymity, 68, 76, 129, 140–141, 147n33

appearance, 7–8, 111; and alterity, 132; bringing into, 14–19, 31–35, 41–44, 70–71, 75, 80, 105; coming ...