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

Deborah Cherry is Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art at the University of Amsterdam. Mieke Bal is a leading scholar in art history and visual studies, with an international reputation in the English-speaking world. Recognised as one of the most innovative and distinctive thinkers in critical theory, her work is also widely read in translation. The author of many prize-winning and acclaimed studies, Bal’s innovative approaches have had a profound and lasting impact on the study of the art and visual culture, history of art and visual studies.

About Mieke Bal provides the first sustained scholarly assessment of Bal’s writings in art history, visual studies and critical theory. With contributions by distinguished senior scholars and stellar younger writers, About Mieke Bal considers Bal’s writings in depth, developing and extending her thinking in exciting and provocative ways, and providing enlightening reflection on many of her most important ideas and concepts. At the centre of the book is a conversation between Mieke Bal and Michael Ann Holly that reflects on Bal’s characteristic entanglement of the professional, the familial, and the political, identifying a key characteristic - ‘restlessless’ - which has yielded Bal’s extraordinarily wide-ranging interests across the humanities.

Well-known for Reading Rembrandt, Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (1991) and Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999), this collection considers the art of the past alongside more recent film, photography, graffiti, interactive immersive environments, online performance, and areas of visual interest often positioned outside the pages of art history.