Pathways of Felt-visuality in the New Wunderkammer: Producing Empathic Engagements with Body Imagery from Contemporary Art and Medicine

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Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Wise, Patricia
Other Supervisors
Keane, Jondi
Year published
2015
Metadata
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This thesis proposes an alternative practice for looking at, understanding, imagining and representing bodies, and a potential context for fostering and realising such a practice. This alternative practice could transform our use of images in order to produce thoughtful, empathic and compassionate responses to bodies. Such a practice, as an ethical and emotional mode of engagement with body images, strives to create connections and reconnections between subject and object, self and other, individual and communal; to reconnect that which is thought, felt and experienced with the materiality of bodies. This dissertation examines ...
View more >This thesis proposes an alternative practice for looking at, understanding, imagining and representing bodies, and a potential context for fostering and realising such a practice. This alternative practice could transform our use of images in order to produce thoughtful, empathic and compassionate responses to bodies. Such a practice, as an ethical and emotional mode of engagement with body images, strives to create connections and reconnections between subject and object, self and other, individual and communal; to reconnect that which is thought, felt and experienced with the materiality of bodies. This dissertation examines the capacity for particular types of body imagery in contemporary visual art to reveal alternative practices of engagement. The bodies that feature in the images discussed reference and/or use the medicalised body rendered as object (drawing on medical and scientific information, practices and imaging-technology). Through these discussions a central paradox is revealed: that the body rendered as object, recontextualised in contemporary art, generates affective intensity and reconnects object with subject.
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View more >This thesis proposes an alternative practice for looking at, understanding, imagining and representing bodies, and a potential context for fostering and realising such a practice. This alternative practice could transform our use of images in order to produce thoughtful, empathic and compassionate responses to bodies. Such a practice, as an ethical and emotional mode of engagement with body images, strives to create connections and reconnections between subject and object, self and other, individual and communal; to reconnect that which is thought, felt and experienced with the materiality of bodies. This dissertation examines the capacity for particular types of body imagery in contemporary visual art to reveal alternative practices of engagement. The bodies that feature in the images discussed reference and/or use the medicalised body rendered as object (drawing on medical and scientific information, practices and imaging-technology). Through these discussions a central paradox is revealed: that the body rendered as object, recontextualised in contemporary art, generates affective intensity and reconnects object with subject.
View less >
Thesis Type
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Degree Program
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School
School of Humanities
Copyright Statement
The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.
Item Access Status
Public
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Subject
Body image in art
Body image and medicine
Feeling and human bodiy
Contemporary art