How do human beings’ experience of pictures, such as individual artworks or cultural styles of pictorial representation, shape the ways in which people see the natural and social world beyond pictures? It has been argued that things in the world — objects and states of affair — come to resemble pictures of them that people have already seen in the past. Objects, then, become partly “depictured”: A real landscape might become Cézannesque when shaped by one’s viewing of pictures of Provence by Paul Cézanne.
Led by Whitney Davis, the NOMIS project Depictured Worlds: The Perceptual Power of Pictures will study depicturation from historical, theoretical, anthropological and psychological perspectives, identifying likely art-historical cases of depicturation in the history of modern Western arts in their global dissemination, and building additional examples from indigenous, ancient and/or non-Western arts. This research could impact fields ranging from education and clinical psychology to social behavior and ethics, marking a significant shift in how we understand the relationship between pictorial art and visual perception.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024 | 18:30 | Kunsthaus Zurich, Chipperfield Building
