What Philosophy Wants from Images

by D.N. Rodowick

In recent decades, contemporary art has displayed an ever increasing and complicated fascination with the cinema—or, perhaps more accurately, as D. N. Rodowick shows, a certain memory of cinema. Contemporary works of film, video, and moving image installation mine a vast and virtual archive of cultural experience through elliptical and discontinuous fragments of remembered images, even as the lived experience of film and photography recedes into the past, supplanted by the digital.
            Rodowick here explores work by artists such as Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and others—artists who are creating forms that express a new historical consciousness of images. These forms acknowledge a complex relationship to the disappearing past even as they point toward new media that will challenge viewers’ confidence in what the images they see are or are becoming. What philosophy wants from images, Rodowick shows, is to renew itself conceptually through deep engagement with new forms of aesthetic experience.
 

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

David Norman Rodowick is the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including The Virtual Life of Film and Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine.

Reviews

[Val · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Quite interesting insight into the relationship between art and philosophy. However, I feel like something is lacking about this book that has yet to fully push the points to the answer it seeks to reach. Towards the end, most of the reasonings are drawn from Deleuze and his book "What is Philosophy?"(and some from Cinema I), which I think could be accompanied by more arguments by the author to make it not only a series of quotations but somewhat providing further substance to the existing points of his sources.