Image-Thinking - (Refractions) by Mieke Bal (Hardcover)

About the Book

In this rich, highly illustrated book, Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think - as artists and writers - about our own creative work.

Book Synopsis

In this rich, highly illustrated book, Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Sharing a lifetime of experience of writing about art, making films and installations, as well as curating exhibitions, she shows us how these may be brought into dialogue with insights from theory.
Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think - as artists and writers - about our own creative work. This is Mieke Bal at her most personal and her best.

From the Back Cover

Art making as thinking In this rich and highly illustrated book Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Sharing a lifetime of experience of writing about art, making films and installations, as well as curating exhibitions, she shows us how these may be brought into dialogue with insights from theory. Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think - as artists and writers - about our own creative work. This is Mieke Bal at her most personal and her best. Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic and video artist. She has published over forty books, most recently Narratology in Practice (2021) and Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (2021). Emma & Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic (2017) demonstrates her integrated approach to academic, artistic and curatorial work. Her film Reasonable Doubt (2016), on René Descartes and Queen Christina, explores the social aspects of thinking. Currently she is exhibiting a sixteen-channel video work Don Quixote: Sad Countenances.

Review Quotes

Astonishing, necessary, and beautifully written, Image-Thinking is a brilliant contribution to visual thought, art criticism and curatorial practice. An excellent book that teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and reflect -as visual artists or writers- about our own works.-- "Miguel Ángel Hernández, University of Murcia"

Pictures, images, image-texts, representations, pathos-formulae, inscriptions--the theoretical journeys we have made in art history, film/cinema studies, visual studies and cultural analysis to Mieke Bal's concept and practice of image-thinking passes through a creatively and theoretically generative half-century transformed at every stage by her own astonishing intellect, fearless questioning and generative boundary-crossing. Embracing and transforming our uses of, and encounters with, video and digital moving image--in its portable and ubiquitous form, from its casual daily recording to its aesthetically daring deployment in contemporary artistic practice, Mieke Bal's traverse of analysis, film, affect and memory, becoming and wordlessness unsettles divisions. As she dances effortlessly between positions of maker and thinker, analyst and theorist, she creates the thinking image and asksus to see thought in/with/beyond the image. Image-thinking glories in its own contradiction of our tiresome divisions between image and text, narrative and scene, time and recurrence to unfold an amazing story of Mieke Bal's ever- astonishing creativity an exhibilarating intellectual audacity.-- "Griselda Pollock, Professor Emerita, University of Leeds"

About the Author

Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator. She has published over 40 books, most recently Endless Andness: The Politics of Abstraction According to Ann Veronica Janssens and Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Her video project, Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker, is widely exhibited and in 2017 was combined with paintings by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum in Oslo. After Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina (2016) she made a 16-channel video installation On Quijote: Sad Countenances and the short essay film It's About Time! Reflections on Urgency.