Seeing Differently

1

Introduction

The Leaking Frame of the Argument on How to See Differently

This book is proposed as a history and theory of identification in the visual arts. It is a rethinking but one that acknowledges past histories of ideas about subjectivity and visuality in general and, more specifically, in relation to visual arts practices widely construed, including performance art. I insist that it is worth rethinking the question of identification through an attention to aesthetics and the visual arts. As Juliet Steyn felicitously puts it, acknowledging alterity through visual representation “prevents complete identification and totalization. That which has been traditionally thought of as aesthetics is reaffirmed as a site in which the limits of the ...