Image, Medium, Body
The contributions from the so-called iconic turn in Germany, the pictorial turn in American Visual Studies, and the work of Georges Didi-Huberman in the field of Art History have been key to revitalizing and opening up new possibilities for both disciplines in terms of how to value and understand the image. The studies referring to this new way of approaching the image, from the systematization of a science of the image (Bildwissenschaft), have as their founding act the coining of the concept of “iconic turn” or “pictorial turn” by the authors Gottfried Boehm (1995) with his work Was ist ein Wild? and W.J.T. Mitchell with his work Picture Theory (1994). The turn as a concept suggests the shift from the textual paradigm to that of the image. Within this trend, anthropology has been pointed out as the model to follow for thinking about the image, recovering the concept of “presence” rather than “meaning” to refer to it.
This new turn towards images implies a new way of approaching visual artefacts that transcends the field of art and exceeds the semiotic interpretation based on the representation regimes imposed by the linguistic paradigm. An anthropological definition of images proposes to recover their existential condition, exploring them as forms of presentation and not of representation. Bildanthropologie or Anthropology of the Image, has Hans Belting as its main reference thanks to the program that he started in 2000 at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe with the name of “Anthropology and Image: Image – Medium – Body”. Although the concept of anthropology of the image can lead to confusion, Belting rightly points out that it is necessary to understand that the image has the human as its condition.
The study of images and visuality implies the redefinition of the concept of the medium. Each of these three terms – image, medium, apparatus – is defined in different ways by authors in the fields of art history, anthropology, film theory and mass media, as well as by studies on visual culture itself. The term support indicates materials of a diverse nature that make possible the visualization of a specific image, not exclusively mental. The question of the medium is addressed in historically and culturally situated terms, considering the supports as part of these technical-material conditions that contribute to determining the ways in which an image circulates, changes, transforms and is observed within a given cultural context.
The question about the medium is also the question about the image. Like two sides of the same coin, image and medium merge to give meaning and form to the experience. However, as with the notion of image, countless theories and approaches have been poured over the medium, which, at times, far from illuminating the path, have ended up obscuring it. From Aristotelian texts we already find reflections about that intermedial instance that connects us with the world: the space where images and experiences are generated. This consideration of the medium as a “place,” as a space of connection, reappeared in the Middle Ages in the key of Aristotelian exegesis (for example, in the writings of Averroes), but its influence soon began to fade in favor of a more material mediality. Emanuele Coccia has brought this perspective back to the table with what he himself has called “sensitive life”: for the Italian philosopher, this sensitive life is “the way in which we give ourselves to the world, the way in which we are in the world (…) and, at the same time, the medium in which the world becomes knowable, feasible and livable for us”. Recently, the philosopher Emmanuel Alloa, very interested in the medium as a space and place of interaction, has introduced a concept that allows us to approach other possibilities of the media: transparency. For Hans Belting, the medium operates in a coordinated manner with the body to generate the image; it is, therefore, in the interrelation of this conceptual triad (image-medium-body) where what we often call image arises, in an often thoughtless way. Other researchers such as Dieter Mersch or Siegfried Zielinski (with different proposals) seek, on the contrary, to return to an archaeology of the media to study their potential to create knowledge
Publications
Gutierrez De Angelis, Marina, Winckler, Greta. Rostro y máscara: De la antigüedad a la imagen digital. VI Jornadas de Hermenéutica, «Figuras y texturas de Nuestramérica» 11 y 12 de julio de 2019, IEALC/FSOC UBA.
