Art and the Image

Art and the Image: Insights from Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenological Tradition

What is an image? What does an artist do when she creates one? Images are of things. However, there are different ways for one thing to be of another. Names, for example, are of their bearers. But images don't seem to be of things in the same way that names are. Images are likenesses of their objects. Yet not just any likeness of an object will count as an image. An accidental likeness, such as a crack in the rock that resembles a crow, is not an image. Neither is an image an object that is qualitatively identical to another – a stamp bearing the Queen's head is identical with another such stamp, but this does not make one an image of the other.

Images instead translate their objects into different media (a portrait of the Queen translates this flesh and blood person into canvas and paint). An understanding of images requires a grasp of what it is for one object to translate another, and what is involved in this process of translation. This workshop takes Merleau-Ponty's work on the image as the starting-point from which to explore these ideas.

Speakers at the event will be:

Jonathan Hale (Architecture)
Derek Hampson (Nottingham-based Artist)
Aimee Purser (Sociology)
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (Philosophy)