Image, medium, body: Towards an anthropological theory of the image.
2014-2017
Director
PhD. Marina Gutiérrez De Angelis
Team
- Gorka López de Munain – Universidad de Buenos Aires- CEISS
- Ander Gondra Aguirre – Universidad de Buenos Aires- CEISS
- Luis Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez – Universitat de Valencia – CEISS
- Carolina Menke – Universidad de Buenos Aires
- Montserrat Morcate Casera- Universitat de Barcelona
- Rebeca Pardo – Universitat de Barcelona
- Greta Winckler – Universidad de Buenos Aires
- Paula Bruno – Universidad de Buenos Aires
- Sofía Manunsis- Universidad de Buenos Aires
This research project aims to advance the development of an anthropology of the image, based on the research carried out by the IRUDI Image Studies team within the Visual Anthropology Area of the UBA. It is a team made up of researchers from both the UBA and foreign universities, from the fields of anthropology and art history. It aims to contribute to the development of a theory of the image that will allow for the expansion and updating of the field of anthropology
Contributions from the so-called iconic turn in Germany, the pictorial turn North American Visual Studies, and the works of Georges Didi-Huberman from the field of Art History, have been key to revitalizing and opening new possibilities for both disciplines regarding the ways of valuing and understanding 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 to think about the image, recovering the concept of “presence” rather than that of “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 semiotic interpretation, based on the regimes of representation 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. La 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 under the name “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 place of the image is the body, the human being. From there, images do not belong to the field of art or aesthetics but to that of anthropology. For Ana García Varas (2011), the central questions of current thinking on the image can be grouped into three axes. The relationship between the universal and the particular, the distinction between image and images and the relationship between the image and language. These axes introduce us to central and open questions of debate present in the study of the image. The possibility of the existence of a general theory of the image is faced with the analysis of concrete and particular cases or groups of images. The multiplicity of phenomena studied and types of images poses an unavoidable methodological challenge for a possible theory of the image.
Research areas
Articles
González, Silvina. Winckler, Greta. “Entre el ocultamiento y la exhibición: el barbijo en la disputa por el rostro”, Artefacto Visual, vol. 5,núm. 9. Madrid: Red de Estudios Visuales Latinoamericanos, 2020.
