This document discusses the concept of alterity, or otherness, from an art historical perspective. It begins by defining alterity as how Western culture historically viewed the self in contrast to others. It then explores how postmodernism emphasizes relationships between self and other through figures defined by terms like alterity, absence, and uncertainty. The document examines how anthropology and feminist discourses have discussed gendered and racialized others. It also analyzes how artworks have addressed themes of doubles, doppelgängers, virtual worlds, and technologies in relation to notions of self and alterity.

1. The future
of the
image
Week 3:
Radical
Alterity
Deborah Jackson

2. Art and Alterity
The notion of the ‘Self’ has
historically been presented as
a prevalent characteristic of
Western culture, and defined
as the essential quality that
makes a person distinct from
all others, responsible for the
thoughts and actions of an
individual
Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio
(1985)

3. What is alterity?
Cathy Wilkes. Non Verbal (2006)

4. Reality itself is
unrepresentable, an
d as a consequence
the world can only
be represented
through that which it
is not.
Hal Foster. Return of the
Keith Haring Real (1996)
Pop Shop (1988)

5. REPRESENTATION IS
NOT NEUTRAL;
IT IS AN ACT OF
POWER
IN OUR CULTURE.
Craig Owens (1992)

6. Intersubjectivity: self and other
• A major trait of postmodernity is
its emphasis on the relationship
between self and other
• Postmodernism privileges figures
of negativity, figures defined
under such terms as
alterity, absence, uncertainty and
the other

7. Postmodernism and Alterity
According to Jean-François Lyotard,
postmodernism is characterized:
• by incredulity toward master
systems of thought in which there’s
a place for everything and
everything has its place and
• by the affirmation of pluralism, the
non-totalizing, creative search for
whatever does not fit nicely into
systematized knowledge.
A search, in other words, for Rineke Dijkstra
otherness or alterity. Beach Portraits (1992-98)

8. Adolescence can be
viewed as a period
when repressed selves
return to the conscious
mind, this series
elaborates on the
altered alterities that
emerge as a result of
this identity phase-
shift.

9. The concept of alterity, from an art historical
understanding, originated as a Western definition of otherness.
Yinka Shonibare. Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998)

10. The Cultural Construction of the ‘other’ as different
• In anthropological terms
alterity refers to the
construction of cultural
others
• Anthropology – the science
of alterity
• Radical alterity — a
culturally constructed Other
radically different from Us
Tracey Moffat
Adventure Series (2003)

11. Gendered Selves
• Discourses of gendered selves
parallel discourses of racial
identity
• This appears in feminist discourses
discussing woman as
Other, particularly those
discourses opposing patriarchy
• Women, like colonised
subjects, have been relegated to
the position of 'other', 'colonised'
by various forms of patriarchal
domination" Cindy Sherman
Untitled #122 (1983)

12. Mirror Stage
• The gaps between
the imaginary, the
symbolic, and the
real
• The unconscious is
the discourse of
the Other
Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976)

13. The Fetishization of Alterity
• Globalized cultural
diversity and the
consumption of alterity
• The binary oppositions by
which Western thought
had defined what is called
real have become
thoroughly
polluted, contaminated, an
d untenable

14. Postmodernity seeks to
live alterity as its destiny
and not to be the source of
alterity in so far as
postmodernity chooses
not to produce the
differentiated or
disseminated other.
Douglas Gordon
Divided Self

15. The need to acknowledge
and preserve the radical
difference or alterity, which is
constitutive of every
individual
Douglas Gordon
Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy
Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn
Monroe (1996)

16. Ontology and Alterity
The theme of alterity is
prominent in many works
of art, in many modalities;
in films, novels, and the
visual arts, artists have
addressed this complex
domain.
Fight Club (1999)

17. Avatar (2009)
Related to this tradition of art is the narrative of
escape from the constricting self that involves
encounters with that which is radically other, but a
radical other that activates a fresh self.

18. Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) can be seen as dealing with a radical otherness
of the self and how, when this radical other-that-is-self is encountered by
other-as-self, it is treated by them as an alien disgusting sub human – a
cockroach.

19. Double
selves, doppelgan
gers and
multiplicities are
often used as
means of
exploring alterities
Jeff Koons, Triple Hulk Elvis I (2007)

20. A doppelgänger is a tangible double of a living person in
fiction, folklore, and popular culture that typically represents evil. In the
vernacular, the word doppelgänger has come to refer to any double or
look-alike of a person. The word also is used to describe the sensation of
having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, in a position where there is
no chance that it could have been a reflection.
http://mubi.com/lists/doppelganger

21. Identity and Alterity
The monster, a figure of
radical alterity or difference
Marcus Harvey
Myra
(1995)

22. Fiction of the other
Today’s society is based
on a generalized
‘relationalism’, rather
than on individualism. A
kind of dispersed form of
connectedness in the
postmodern era.
Rirkrit Tiravanija

23. Otherness and technology
Technologies, such as
tv, alters the sense of
alterity, and in doing so
alters all elements of
society, including
politics, ideas, ethics, ec
onomics and social
structures
Nam June Piak TV Buddha (1974)
Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture

24. In Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1954) he
argues that the one dimensionality of consciousness
apparent in post-industrial society is indicative of an
eradication of the sense of alterity.

25. Technological Rationality
Sylvie Fleury Crystal Custom Commando (2008)

26. Is cyberspace
liberatory?
This suggests the
ability to "computer
crossdress" and
represent oneself as a
different
gender, age, race, etc.
Peter Steiner
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”
The New Yorker (1993)

27. Virtual Reality works by deceiving the senses of the user into
thinking that what they are experiencing is something real.
“The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What does it
enable? What new thought does it make possible to think? What
new emotions does it make it possible to feel?”
Brian Massumi
(Introduction to Deleuze and Guattarri’s A Thousand Plateus)

28. Virtuality and cybernetics:
Posthuman identity
Technologies have made
thoroughly ambiguous the
difference between natural and
artificial, mind and body, self-
developing and externally
designed, and many other
distinctions that used to apply to
organisms and machines. A Dutch TV program had a brilliant idea:
have men put on devices that simulate
childbirth contractions and film the
results.

29. The Turing Test

30. The Human in
Virtual Worlds
• The emoticon is the
artificial warrant and
guarantee of the
human
• Emoticons are used
when there is a lack
of verbal or visual
clues, in text only
forums
• They invoke
faces, they are the
referent of the

31. Privileging
of the
rational, h
uman
subject
Marcus
Coates Journey to
a Lower World
(2004)
Performance still

32. Interior Alterity
• where individuals explore
their internal self or identity
as a means of substituting
for the lost experience of the
other.
Yinka Shonibare
Revolution Kid (Fox) (2012)

33. ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF
LOVE AND GRACE