Embodying and balancing the European avant-garde movement of the 1920s and the dialectical U.S. neo-avant-garde aesthetics of the 1960s, Robert Breer encompassed various art forms in his painting,...

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the affective relationship among bodies and film technologies in the process of building and using filmmaking instruments, taking as its object the early Rotoscope, a device patented by the legendary American animator Max Fleischer that entailed the projection of live-action film for use as a template in the drawing of animated figures, to which the live-action trace was thought to impart life-like, normative patterns of movement. Drawing from media archaeology, psychoanalytic theories of repetition, projection, and (...) condensation, and object relations theory, this article offers an interpretation of some of the kinds of psychic interactions offered in animated film through traces of the Rotoscope’s production history found in the device’s patent drawings, its patent embodiments, and its published family legend. It is proposed that the device was the locus of a collective fraternal performance, serving as a shared ground for an array of condensations and displacements and enactments of repetition compulsion among the multiple bodies engaged in the production of the device, as well as among the multiple animated and live-action film bodies that crossed its production screens and patent pages. One objective of this article is to shift the interpretive and analytic focus in film studies from the filmstrip and the projected screen image to the relationship between bodies and technologies in the experience of making films, and making the filmic apparatus. A secondary objective of this article is to suggest that the approach to bodily movement embedded in the design of the Rotoscope was hardly normative. The device offered a means to stretch and distort both norms and stereotypes of human expression through movement. The rotoscoped body sometimes performed in ways that pushed the limits of viewer expectations about how a given body will, or should, move, in space or across the screen. (shrink)

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review (...) modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)