Precarious visualities: new perspectives on identification in contemporary art and visual culture

Since its emergence in the field of art history in the 980s, visuality – a
notion that refers to the visible condition of art, to the fact that art is,
partially at least, a matter of vision (in its production, exhibition, cir-
culation, and reception) – has been key to the decentring of both the
artist and the viewing subject in its relation to the image. Vision came
to be systematically understood as an act conditioned by culture, social
class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and geography. The fruitfulness of
poststructuralist art historical research in this area of study is clearly
noticeable in its manifold assessment of alternative modes of repre-
sentation that counter the predominance of the perspectival system in
Western art to criticize approaches that tend to essentialize the subject
(by situating the artist or the viewer outside of language and ideology)
or that turn perspective into a foundationalist signifying system (by1810
defining it as an unproblematic mode of representation of the world,
structurally similar to human vision).1810