Mimicry, camouflage, transvestism, chance or cryptic anamorphism, fascination – all ways of changing clothes, habits and habitats in nature as well as in culture, in any symbolic field created by human beings during their history. Art and artification, aestheticization, stylization and beautification are all practices reflecting the need and desire for biological as well as social adaptation, all performances producing functional and fictional frames, boundaries or hierarchies in ordinary life, including the artworld. They can persuade and convince by creating consensus (...) and belief, but they can also lead to a different common sense, a sensorium – a sensorial medium and an aesthetic mediation open to a new world and to new experiences. -/- By investigating mimetism as a fundamental and polymorphic aesthetic performance, this issue of «Aisthesis» aims to rethink the concept, value, and function of mimesis and its media in the context of camouflage, simulation, and dissimulation, where images do not reveal themselves as such, but are to be perceived unambiguously as what they are not – as hieroglyphs or puzzles. In the animal kingdom, as well as in war or in ordinary public life, camouflage consists in taking on the traits, colours, and shapes of a given form or environment. This is a twofold process: on the one hand, by blending two or more shapes in one, the camoufleur seeks to remain hidden and to mislead the others in order to keep a vital secret or an ephemeral whim; on the other hand, however, he/she aims to be recognized by a specific milieu or group, thus betraying a craving for communication and familiarity, as well as a need to convey an agreeable appearance and to share a way of life. (shrink)

Starting from Erwin Panofsky’s well-known polemical exchange of letters with Barnett Newman, and taking into account some few hints to contemporary artists which can be found into the Princeton Professor’s private correspondence, this essay deals with the theoretical reasons why one of the most original and influent art historians of the whole 20th Century has never really come to terms with even the notion of “abstract” art. It then focuses on the seemingly paradoxical concept of “abstract sublime” as proposed by (...) Robert Rosenblum and further developed by Jean-François Lyotard in order to show how iconographic-iconological analysis could be fruitfully applied to non-figurative works of art. (shrink)

The world of the image has traditionally been considered as different and separate from the real world. This separation has been ensured by some kind of framing device, be it the pedestal of a statue, the frame of a painting, or the cinema screen. However, recent developments in image-making techniques have resulted in the production of hyper-realistic, immersive, and interactive virtual environments that make the threshold between image and reality blur, thus eliciting in the experiencer a strong feeling of being (...) incorporated into a quasi-real world. This book introduces the concept of "un-framing" as a key to understanding this radically new iconoscape. (shrink)

In his lifelong effort to overcome the limits of Panofsky’s iconological method, Max Imdahl tried to sketch out an «iconic understanding» which is pre-reflexive, performed below the level of conceptual and verbal explication. Under the auspices of Konrad Fiedler’s theoretical position, Imdahl opposed the Panofskian «recognizing view» with a more formalistic «seeing view», in order to gain access to a third form of vision which he called «knowing view». After outlining Imdahl’s critic of the reduced and unilateral significance of «form» (...) and «formal composition» in Panofsky’s approach, I will clarify how far Imdahl has gone in the analysis of what should be properly defined as an authentic logic of images . Then, focusing on a paradigmatic case study, I will show the importance of the syntax of an image (i.e. the positioning of its elements on the left or on the right, underneath or above, in the back or in the front) for its semantic meaning. (shrink)