Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts

by Amelia Jones

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way. Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.

Genres: Art, Art History

284 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

About the author

Amelia Jones is an American art historian, art critic and curator specializing in feminist art, body/ performance art, video art and Dadaism. Her written works and approach to modern and contemporary art history are considered revolutionary in that she breaks down commonly assumed opinions and offers brilliantly conceived critiques of the art historical tradition and individual artist's positions in that often elitist sphere.

Amelia Jones studied art history at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Phd from UCLA in 1991.

Jones has taught art history at UC Riverside and is currently the Pilkington Chair of the art history department at Manchester University.

Jones received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000.

Amelia Jones is the daughter of Princeton Psychology professor Edward E. Jones.

Reviews

[Braden Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impressive introduction and chapter on fetishism, but overall, the book seems like a haphazard attempt to document bad art for the sake of radical potentiality. This seems more like the work of a communications professor. I hope that my favorite art historian simply became Montréalicised, and that I will read another amazing text such as Self/Image in the future. This book is still better than most anything on my shelves, so perhaps my expectations were too high.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book because it's on-point. We are certainly not "post-identity", but I wonder, do we ever have to be? It's not to say that people should be minimized to identity markers, but just that identity markers should bear no inherent "good" or "bad" moral or social currency. Which I guess would make the world much more boring, if we all didn't have each other's terrible taste in clothing or tattoos to snarkily mock, and the newspapers wouldn't have any race-riots to sell their papers.