Jones is a feminist art-historian writer and critic. This text comes from the section of the book Art and Thought and provides a feminist point of view to the problems of perception. Specifically, how we read, engage and interpret Gustave Courbet’s painting of The Origin of the World (1866).
Jones expresses, with the help of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the notion of embodiment, a way of seeing and being in the world. Merleau-Ponty believed that we exist in the world perceiving through our bodies, our experience mediated through it has a corporeal element which tints our perception when reading an art work or an image. Because of this process it will mirror our own experience and we will project this experience back when attempting to make sense of and read an art work. The signifier or art work, and what is signified or read, is both a relational and fluid reciprocal circuit between the author of the art work, the art work, and viewer.
Merleau-Ponty puts forth an opposing view to French philosopher Rene Descartes, whose representation theory of perception was birthed in the time when ideas had to co-exist alongside, and not conflict, with the idea of God. Descartes put forth the idea of a Cartesian theatre “ideas appearing before my mind” (Hass p. 16), a reduction of the experience to ideas before the mind. Merleau-Ponty aimed to break down Cartesian thought by, instead of breaking down experience and looking at it in isolation and in doing so losing an essential part of how experience functions as a whole, believed that the five senses worked together with the mind to form important overlapping qualities that become the sum greater than the parts. So that experience, ideas and memory become a simultaneous synergy, a way of being in the world.
I find currency with Mearleau-Ponty's view on embodiement and am interested in perception as a 'whole' experience. This for me creates something visceral engaging both mind and body.
Bibliography
Barbaras, Renaud. Desire and Distance. Satnford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Hass, Lawrence. Merleau-Ponty's Philosphy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Jones, Amelia. “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: the uses of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology in Art History.” Art and Thought. Ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. pp. 71-90.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.
Rubin, James H. Courbet. London, UK: Phaidon Press, 1997.
Steeves, James B. Imagining Bodies. Pittsburgh, California: Duquesne University Press, 2004.
