Seeing Differently

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "e;world picture"e; expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "e;beyond"e; or "e;post-"e; identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "e;identify"e; works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "e;post-identity"e; given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "e;is,"e; and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "e;queer feminist durational"e; process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "e;art"e; and "e;interpreter,"e; potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.