In Response to Echo
Beyond Mimesis or Dissolution as Scopic Regime (with Special Attention to Camouflage)
By (author) B. Baert
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) tells the story of Echo and Narcissus. Echo’s love for Narcissus ended in a cruel twist of fate. This essay treats the impact of Echo on art history through the lenses of gender, speech and hearing; Echo as textilization and sacrifice; Echo as chthonic art; and, finally, Echo and le desir mimetique. This approach develops a new hermeneutic to reintegrate the sonoric senses, camouflage theory, gender epistemology, and the anthropological substrata of nature, love and death into our Western obsession for mimetic thinking.
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) tells the story of Echo and Narcissus. Echo’s love for Narcissus ended in a cruel twist of fate. Already punished with an echo for a voice, the nymph suffered further as she petrified and her bones became stones. The study of art has long focused on the Narcissus-mirror syndrome as a paradigm for painting (Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)). Echo had no place in this masculine scopic discipline. Recent approaches have rehabilitated Echo from a visual, cultural and gendered point of view. Echo cries; she cries for an alternative to the mirror paradigm and oculocentrism. She helps us break free from Narcissus in favour of visual modalities such as dissolution, camouflage and contamination, in short, disappearance as an alternative to the scopic regime. In this essay I treat the impact of Echo on art history through the lenses of: gender, speech and hearing; Echo as textilisation and sacrifice; Echo as chthonic art; and, finally, Echo and le desir mimetique. With this approach, I develop a new hermeneutic to reintegrate the sonoric senses, camouflage theory, gender epistemology, and the anthropological substrata of nature, love and death into our Western obsession for mimetic thinking.
- By (author) B. Baert
Other Titles in this Series
Signed ‘PAN’
Erwin Panofsky's (1892-1968) "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" (Princeton, 1938)
Volume 18
Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries
Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression
Volume 2
The Right Moment
Essays Offered to Barbara Baert, Laureate of the 2016 Francqui Prize in Human Sciences, on the Occasion of the Celebratory Symposium at the Francqui Foundation, Brussels, 18-19 October 2018
Volume 20
Rocks and Tears
Niobe's Fate and the Dynamics of Form. Lecture on the Occasion of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftungsprofessur 2023
Volume 25
Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. Part II
Aby Warburg's (1866-1929) Butterflies as Art Historical Paradigms
Volume 4
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