Image-Thinking

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 ?ngel Hern?ndez, 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"