Time and the Image (Critical Perspectives in Art History) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719058147 ISBN 13: 9780719058141

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2001

Synopsis

This new collection of essays questions the old orthodoxies of the image as a formal object. The contributors take note of the new condition of the image and its intersection with time and suggest new ways of configuring the relationship between them. Ranging widely over philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary studies, as well as art history and media studies, the essays include studies of photography--the idea of a still as bound to a structure of the past haunting the present; sculpture--for example, unpacking a famous piece such as the Laocoon into distinct layers of temporality; painting--for example, through an illuminating discussion of Manet, and a discussion of the merits of a Freudian understanding of blocked or repressed memory against the Prousian/Leibniz model of memory as a crystal image.

About this title

About the Author

Carolyn Bailey Gill is Lecturer in Critical Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Reviews

The intended audience for the 13 essays in Time and the Image is more difficult to predict. An essay by critic Thierry de Duve starts with an explanation of why his piece has been rewritten: "Rereading my original text, I realized I had made it much too elliptical." Considering the opacity of the rewrite, the original is unimaginable and this particular essay is not the worst of the bunch. Studded with untranslated German, ancient Greek, French, and Latin phrases as well as cryptic references to fashionable philosophers, the essays are appropriate only for those with a doctorate and a great deal of time on their hands. Many of the essays can be read like Monty Python sketches: imagine John Cleese uttering Peter Wollen's concluding sentence, "I believe that Goethe might even have appreciated the shower-bath murder in Psycho." The 16 illustrations are not enough to redeem this academic twaddle. Tempus Fugit, with 113 illustrations, is recommended for academic and large public libraries. David McClelland, Philadelphia
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719058147
• ISBN 13: 9780719058141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Gill Carolyn Bailey