Visibility, Representation and Agency in the Visual Arts: the Body in Question

Abstract

The issue of visibility presents itself in a most pressing way in the visual arts for various reasons. The body is a prerequisite for social visibility in the sense that its material existence is what makes me visible or at least what allows me to become perceptible to others — who may choose to acknowledge my presence or ignore it, as discussed in Chapter 2. The neo-phenomenological approach² in relation to which I have positioned my discussion of invisibility in Chapter 2 implies that while my existence as a human being comes first and takes precedence over some pre-defined essence — or as JeanPaul Sartre put it ‘l’existence précède l’essence’ (existence precedes essence) (Sartre, 1996, 29)³ — this needs to be acknowledged by others, failing which my existence fails to materialize into a fully-fledged social existence. In other words, the fact that I come across as being materially present through my body is not enough for others around me to grasp the complexity of my existence as a human being, nor even that of my body whose materiality creates an illusionary sense of ‘thingness’.

It may seem less than entirely coincidental that at the very moment that the white, heterosexual male body ceased to hold the standard of the Universal Ideal, the very question of the body’s image was discarded by avant-garde art […] My purpose is not to denigrate modernism. But it is important that one particular form of representation, such as abstraction, should not continue to hold the mantle of being considered more ‘radical’ in both artistic and political terms than any other.

(Mizoeff, 1995, 8)¹