Description
Taylor & Francis Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime 2010 Edition by Claire Raymond
In her feminist inquiry into aesthetics and the sublime, Claire Raymond reinterprets the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Placing Woodman in a lineage of women artists beginning with nineteenth-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, Raymond compels a reconsideration of Woodman's achievement in light of the gender dynamics of the sublime. Raymond argues that Woodman's photographs of decrepit architecture allegorically depict the dissolution of the frame, a dissolution Derrida links to theories of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Woodman's self-portraits, Raymond contends, test the parameters of the gaze, a reading that departs from the many analyses of Woodman's work that emphasize her dramatic biography. Woodman is here revealed as a conceptually sophisticated artist whose deployment of allegory and allusion engages a broader debate about Enlightenment aesthetics, and the sublime. Table of contents :- Contents: Introduction: geometry of time: Francesca Woodman and the Kantian sublime; Mistresses; Woodman's mirror is an enlightenment mirror; Shaken sublime; Inner force , or, the revelatory body; Mechanics of evanescence; Among the ruins: vertigo, philobats, and statues; Epilogue: the question of Narcissism; Works cited; Index.