ePub Creating Our Own: Folklore; Performance; and Identity in Cuzco; Peru by Zoila S. Mendoza in Arts-Photography

Description

Challenging prevailing theories regarding the birth of the subject; Catherine M. Soussloff argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather in the theory and practice of portraiture in early-twentieth-century Vienna. Soussloff traces the development in Vienna of an ethics of representation that emphasized subjects as socially and historically constructed selves who could only be understoodmdash;and understand themselvesmdash;in relation to others; including the portrait painters and the viewers. In this beautifully illustrated book; she demonstrates both how portrait painters began to focus on the interior lives of their subjects and how the discipline of art history developed around the genre of portraiture.Soussloff combines a historically grounded examination of art and art historical thinking in Vienna with subsequent theories of portraiture and a careful historiography of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to human consciousness from Hegel to Sartre and from Freud to Lacan. She chronicles the emergence of a social theory of art among the art historians of the Vienna School; demonstrates how the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka depicted the Jewish subject; and explores the development of pictorialist photography. Reflecting on the implications of the visualized; modern subject for textual and linguistic analyses of subjectivity; Soussloff concludes that the Viennese art historians; photographers; and painters will henceforth have to be recognized as precursors to such better-known theorists of the subject as Sartre; Foucault; and Lacan.