Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image

Refuting the assumption that art is a representational practice, Bolt’s striking argument engages with the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, C.S.Peirce and Judith Butler to argue for a performative relationship between art and artist. Drawing on themes as diverse as the work of Cézanne and of Francis Bacon, the transubstantiation of the Catholic sacrament and Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, she challenges the metaphor of light as enlightenment, reconceiving this ‘revealing’ light as the blinding ‘glare’ of the Australian sun, and suggests that too much ‘light’ may in fact reveal nothing. This stimulating book questions many of the fundamental assumptions ingrained in us about the nature of art.