Corporeal identification in selected works by Berni Searle
- Authors: Taggart, Emma
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Searle, Berni Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 -- Criticism and interpretation Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 -- Criticism and interpretation Women artists -- South Africa Body art -- South Africa Self-portraits
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2434 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004576
- Description: Through a detailed analysis of a selection of works produced between 1999 and 2003 by the South African artist Berni Searle, this thesis explores the need to theorise a corporeal viewer in the process of interpreting art works. Such an approach is particularly necessary when dealing with an artist such as Searle because her work, which deals predominantly with the theme of identity, appeals not only to conceptual but also to experiential and corporeal understandings of identity. Searle incorporates the viewer into an experience of her own identity through a physical identification that the viewer feels in relation to her work. For viewers this means that they are made aware of how their own identity in the moment of interpretation is contingent on visual, mental and physical components. In order to develop this argument the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn on. These two theorists are very useful for an argument of this nature because both interpret identity as a construction involving an enfolding between the mind and, via the act of vision, the body of the subject. Through an inclusion of the corporeal element in interpretation, this thesis also offers a critique of interpretive theories that would reduce analysis to an interaction between eye and mind by analyzing how the viewer's body participates in the act of looking.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Roles : "I am as intently observed as the people photograph"
- Authors: Pelser, Monique Myren
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: Hugo, Pieter Portrait photography Self-portraits Photography, Artistic -- Philosophy
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2457 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007647
- Description: With this dissertation I propose an investigation of how the photographic portrait attempts to construct and confirm identity through the representation of types. Drawing from theoretical texts by Roland Barthes and Robert Sobieszek and engaging with my own process of self-portraiture, as a means of troubling the usual power relations involved between the photographer and the sitter, I will demonstrate the dialectical nature of these roles involved in photographic portraiture. Looking at Pieter Hugo's portraits of judges in Botswana permits me to deal with issues of masquerade and how fashions and uniforms mask an individual allowing him/her to perform roles and stereotypes in society. Referring to another set of Hugo's images from his ongoing series Looking Aside, I will explore the paradoxical nature of the portrait through the dialectic of the 'self 'and 'other' subject and object split through an exploration of notions of skin and prosthetic skin and the relationship to the liminal space 'opened' between subject and object, or viewer and image.
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- Date Issued: 2007