About Mieke Bal

A collection of essays celebrating Mieke Bal - one of Europe’s foremost scholars in art history and visual studies, with a stellar international reputation. Brings together contributions by senior and younger scholars in the fields of art history and visual studies who reflect on Mieke Bal’s writings and art practice, assessing her contribution and legacies The first collection to consider her writing and art in depth, and to develop and extend her thinking in substantial ways Themes include some of Bal’s most important ideas and concepts in the visual field, such as the theoretical object, preposterous history, narrativity, vision and the gaze, cultural memory, self-reflexivity—of the artist, the viewer, the scholar The essays consider historical art – the Sistine chapel, Renaissance altar paintings, and watercolours—alongside more recent film, photography, graffiti, interactive immersive environments, online performance, and areas of visual interest often positioned outside the pages of art history While Bal has, unsurprisingly perhaps, become a key figure in the debates between art and visual culture, the extraordinarily wide range of visual materials collected here speaks of her path-breaking movement between the visual registers of high art and popular cultures, her resistance to clear-cut distinctions between image and word

Notes on contributors vi 1 Conversation pieces: about Mieke Bal 1 Deborah Cherry 2 Piecemeal translation 7 Murat Aydemir 3 Time of history and time out of history: the Sistine Chapel as ‘theoretical object’ 26 Giovanni Careri 4 Reading the Annunciation 49 Hanneke Grootenboer 5 Visual archives as preposterous history 64 Ernst van Alphen 6 What does a woman want? Art investigating death in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? 83 Griselda Pollock 7 Reading, writing, filming, dreaming, dressing 106 Michael Ann Holly and Mieke Bal 8 Killing kool: the graffiti museum 118 Sonja Neef 9 Aesthetics of intermediality 132 Jill Bennett 10 Je vous 151 Kaja Silverman Selected bibliography 168 Index 185