Cultivating Perception through Artworks

Helen A. Fielding

Description

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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Enacting Ethics
1. Perceptual Ethics
2. The Ethics of Embodied Logos

Enacting Politics
3. Experiencing Public Space
4. Building Different Worlds

Enacting Culture
5. Polyphonic Attunement
6. Decolonizing Reason
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Teaching
• PHILOSOPHY
• Study
• Art

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253059321
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

CULTIVATING PERCEPTION THROUGH ARTWORKS

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Helen A. Fielding
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fielding, Helen, 1963- author.
Title: Cultivating perception through artworks : phenomenological enactments of ethics, politics, and culture / Helen A. Fielding.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021021323 (print) | LCCN 2021021324 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253059352 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253059345 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253059338 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art-Psychology. | Visual perception.
Classification: LCC N71 .F54 2021 (print) | LCC N71 (ebook) | DDC 701/.15-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021323
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021324
Dedicated to the memory of
my grandmother, Marie Zwergfeld
my father, Herbert Fielding
my mother, Bridget Mary Fielding
and my sister, Christine Mary Fielding
From whom I learned the meaning of courage, the importance of doing the right thing, how to see, and how to love.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Enacting Ethics
1. Perceptual Ethics: Rembrandt s Bathsheba
2. The Ethics of Embodied Logos: Joan Mitchell s Abstract Expressionist Paintings
II. Enacting Politics
3. Experiencing Public Space: Anne Truitt s Minimalist Sculptures
4. Building Different Worlds: Louise Bourgeois s The Welcoming Hands
III. Enacting Culture
5. Polyphonic Attunement: Janet Cardiff s Forty-Part Motet
6. Decolonizing Reason: M. NourbeSe Philip s Zong!
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M Y THINKING FOR THIS PROJECT emerges from the intertwining of many motivating strands. I am indebted to my extraordinary teacher, the late Samuel Mallin, who not only opened up the amazing world of phenomenology but also provided me with a practical methodological approach. Dorothea Olkowski, along with her unwavering friendship, support, and an academic lifetime of intellectual debate, read and commented on several chapter drafts, offering sound advice.
There are other dear friends and colleagues who showered me with encouragement and stimulating dialogue, some providing feedback on chapter drafts: Antonio Calcagno, Jonathan De Souza, April Flakne, Rita Gardiner, Erika Lawson, Carolyn McLeod, Mariana Ortega, Mary Rawlinson, Chris Roulston, Kari Townsend, Kim Verwaayen, and Francine Wynn. Other colleagues and friends afforded opportunities for me to present work in progress or publish early versions of chapters: Juan Ardila-Cifuentes, Debra Bergoffen, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Ulrike Kadi, Rajiv Kaushik, Stefan Kristensen, Lawrence Hass, Gabrielle Hiltmann, Luce Irigaray, Leonard Lawlor, Emily Lee, Patricia Locke, Steve Lofts, Rachel McCann, Ann Murphy, Felix Murchadha, Gerhard Unterthurner, and Gail Weiss.
The International Merleau-Ponty Circle has sustained my scholarship from the beginning; I have learned so much from this dedicated group of extraordinary scholars, among them not yet acknowledged are Alia Al-Saji, Galen Johnson, Kym Maclaren, Glen Mazis, David Morris, and Gayle Salamon. The European Feminist Phenomenology Group provided a warm intellectual community of friends; special thanks to Christina Sch es and Silvia Stoller. I am very grateful to NourbeSe Philip, who shared Zong! with my students and invited me to participate in an all-night group reading of her amazing poems. Indeed, thank you to all my students, from whom I have learned so much, in particular those in my undergraduate feminist theory and continental philosophy courses, and in my graduate courses on Merleau-Ponty, feminist phenomenology, and critical phenomenology. I also appreciate the stimulating discussions with my Merleau-Ponty reading group, including Rachel Bath, Eva Cupchik, Kim Dority, Julian Evans, Levi Hord, John Jenkinson, Mary McLevey, Annaliese Pope, and Christopher Viger. Thank you to Dolleen Tisawii ashii Manning for being not so much my student as my teacher and to Kevin Rogers for introducing me to Anne Truitt s sculptures.
My Berlin community nourished me with the best of friendship, conversation, and wonderful meals over two sabbatical years of writing; my gratitude, in particular, goes to Coco Gediehn, Marc Kurepkat, Milena Schaeffer-Kurepkat, Theresa Kurepkat, Luise Kurepkat, Olaf Trenn, and Christoph Graf Vitzthum. My brother, Paul Fielding, and his family-Jenn Thomas, Harley Fielding, Zander Fielding, and Cocoa-provided the best of distractions along the way, along with lots of love and support.
Thank you to Dee Mortensen, senior editor at Indiana University Press, for her enthusiastic support for this project from the beginning and to Ashante Thomas, assistant acquisitions editor, for her encouragement and seeing it through to the end. I am grateful for the invaluable feedback from the anonymous reviewers and to Emily Monaghan for preparing the final manuscript with her careful reading and thoughtful suggestions, as well as to Amelia Walford for her guidance. Finally, I can only express immeasurable gratitude to John Spencer, who read and edited countless chapter drafts. More than that, he has shared my love of art and my life.
Some of the research was supported by funds received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. Nascent versions of some chapters have appeared previously, including A Phenomenology of The Other World: On Irigaray s To Paint the Invisible, Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty s Thought 9 (2008): 233-248; Multiple Moving Perceptions of the Real: Arendt, Merleau-Ponty and Truitt, Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 518-534, and Touching Hands, Cultivating Dwelling, in Luce Irigaray: Teaching , ed. Luce Irigaray and Mary Green, 69-79 (London: Continuum, 2008). In all cases the papers have been extensively rewritten and expanded for this volume.
CULTIVATING PERCEPTION THROUGH ARTWORKS
Fig. I.1 Zineb Sedira, Silent Sight , 2000. Still, single-screen projection, 16 mm film, 4:3 format, 11 min 10 sec. Sound by Edith Marie Pasquier. Production: Westminster Arts Council Artsadmin, London. Collection: The mumok-Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien collection. Zineb Sedira / DACS, London. Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris/London.
INTRODUCTION
T HE FIRST TIME I SHOWED Zineb Sedira s powerful short film Silent Sight (2000) to my senior feminist theory students, I found myself watching them watch the film. 1 Or, rather, I watched them not watch the film. They were able to expertly glance back and forth between their laptops and the screen at the front of the classroom, keeping an eye half open for whatever information they thought they should take in while engaging in other tasks their digitally structured lives had on offer. I was captivated. Clearly, this was not a matter of one or two disengaged students. It was an almost unanimous response from bright and motivated young people who have learned how to usefully navigate the world in this age where we have forgotten how to trust our senses. Instead, we tend to rely on efficient frameworks that often do not actually touch on the world we live. Unlike the regulatory systems that belong to this age, perceiving bodies are inherently open, which means they are also open to the same systems that close them down. Thinking alongside artworks that speak to embodied perception is one way of opening up our thinking and putting it in touch with alternate ways of experiencing and living the world.
The second time I showed Sedira s film, I asked the students to close their laptops and pay attention to their experience of viewing. During the first viewing, they had been able to swiftly calculate with the odd glance at the film that nothing as such was happening. The second time they actually watched the film. This time they did not know what to expect because I had asked them to reflect on the experience of perceiving: on how they perceived and how that shaped what they perceived. This time they paid attention to their own perceptual encounter to experience what the film had to show them. They encountered a woman s eyes that spanned the screen for the entirety of the eleven-minute black-and-white film, often looking directly at the viewer (see fig. I.1 ) but also intermittently looking over to the side or down. The eyes are lively and engaged. Even closed as they are for the first minute, they still move visibly beneath the veil of eyelids (see fig. I.3 ).
Accompanying this visual is the atonal twang of a bow on a piano string and a voice-Sedira s own. According to the narration, as a child when she and her mother arrived in Algeria from France, her mother immediately put it on. 2 Never naming the Algerian veil, or haik, which is suggested by the bands of white space framing the eyes in the film, Sedira recounts the anxiety she felt fearing she would lose her mother, that she would confuse her mother with someone else, that her mother would not love her anymore. 3 She describes missing her mother s soft skin, recalls feeling angry and upset, and notes that it wasn t fair. Her voice falls silent. After what seems a long moment, a tear wells up in t