Visual Art and Self-Construction

Drawing on the work of a range of visual artists including Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois, Katrina Mitcheson explores how visual art can help us to know ourselves, when the self is complex, decentred and partially unconscious.

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Demonstrates how visual art can work as a powerful technology of the self

Asks how we can know a decentred and partly unconscious self, and shows how particular artworks can help us to address this challenge
Illustrates how both artists and audience members can use artworks as a means of cultivating or controlling specific aspects of the self
Draws on the work of artists including Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois
Demonstrates the specific contribution that visual art makes to projects of the self by discussing a variety of mediums and contemporary developments in artistic practice

Starting from criticisms of a simple, given self found in Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault, Katrina Mitcheson addresses the problem of how a complex self is constructed, and how a hermeneutics of the self can avoid reproducing a subjugated self.

Critically examining Ricoeur's narrative account of self-construction, Mitcheson makes the case that the narrative model overlooks the variety of processes that can contribute to forming a self and neglects the materiality of these processes. She develops an alternative account of a plural and corporeal hermeneutics of the self: exploring how visual art can operate as a critical technology of the self. Art not only exposes practices that contribute to our subjugation, but can also discover, explore and affect bodily processes, enabling experimentation in self-construction.