engleski

W.J.T. Mitchell

W. J. T. Mitchell, a longtime American professor at the University of Chicago, came to the forefront of public attention with his book Picture Theory in 1994 in which he presented his insights into the field of visual culture to the general academic public, such as in the famous essays “Pictorial Turn” and “Metapictures” as well as several others on the relationship between literature and visual arts. The early 1990s were a time when the search for a new, more comprehensive theory of the image and visuality had already seriously shaken the position of art history as a former “master discipline” in the field of art and images in general. In the German- speaking world, Hans Belting published his landmark book Bild und Kult in 1990 (Belting 1990) (translated into English in 1997 as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art) in which he significantly deviates from the traditional art historical axiological narrative. Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal published the influential text “Semiotics and Art History” in 1991 (Bal and Bryson 1991) as probably the last call for the discipline of art history to modernize its own paradigm, at least through belated reactions to the (post)structuralist season. What distinguished Mitchell from a series of similar attempts was his belief in the power and relevance of all images, not just artistic ones, and not only those we see but also those we can only imagine. We begin our review of Mitchell’s remarkable work with a concept that gave him a planetary visibility, a concept that has become an epitome of an entire society at the turn of the century and whose consequences are inexorably spreading.

W.J.T. Mitchell, image science, critical iconology, bio-pictures, cultural symptomatology

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