Seeing Whole : Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn, introduces a new ethical horizon distinct from, but in continuous interaction with ,conventional ethics. Spanning a great variety of media forms – from painting and photography to film, video, literature, fashion, graffiti, and installation art – this interdisciplinary collection offers a thorough reconceptualization of the relation between the aesthetics and the ethics of images and represents an innovative addition to the field of visual culture studies. Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction / Mark Ledbetter and Asbjørn Grønstad Tropes of globalization /Jillian Sandell Ideological mappings of gendered bodies, nations, and spaces in Louis Chu's 1961 Chinatown novem, Eat a Bowl of Tea / Jean Amato Public and private in light of lingerie: images wtihin images / Lucy Bowditch Street art as "exerciser for vision:" Hamburg graffiti writer Oz and the Community of Smileys / Natalia Samutina Nature as image in Olafur Eliasson's at: a media ecological perspective / Synnøve Marie Vik In/visible disability, stare theory, and video's ecologies of seeing/seeing whole: Bill Shannon in perspective(s) / Susan G. Cumings Defying description: ambiguous bodies in Victorian discourse about disability / Darby Jean Walters "Lost in space: the 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is' or The Blind Men and the Elephant" / Mark Ledbetter Painting that "holds the eyes and moves the souls of its spectators:" vision and response in Leon Batista's Renaissance treatise On Painting / Theresa Flanigan Performing painting: on the time of embodied vision / Robert R. Shane The "art of seeing" in Bruegel's paintings / Jean-Louis Claret Seeig red: Bergman's Cries and Whispers / Brigitte Peucker Contributors. "Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn, introduces a new ethical horizon distinct from, but in continuous interaction with, conventional ethics. This interdisciplinary collection offers a thorough reconceptualization of the relation between the aesthetics and the ethics of images and represents an innovative addition to the field of visual culture studies."--Dust jacket