Paul Michel Foucault was a French philosopher whose theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge. To understand how his thoughts has been highly influential even for how we understand art, firstly we need to understand his methodology. For Foucault, the society always sees and classifies the reality that surround us in order to make it more understandable. Usually, we tend to do it following some sort of natural qualities such as colour, behaviour, morphology and so go forth. However, Foucault states that how is actually done does not depend in some sort of natural disposition but on cultural reasons. Therefore, each society in each historic period sees the reality according to what they believe is the truth and consequently all this truths makes what we know as knowledge, which he called connaissance. One example could be how in the Middle Age because the in a natural way we see the planet Earth as horizontal, is become a scientific knowledge that the planet was flat. Having this into account how we can relate this to art? Well, usually all the art theorist has seen the art and more in particular the paintings as connaissance as long as they express the knowledge of that time reality. Say, how paintings spread the sacred scriptures, which were the knowledge of that time, or how the actual reality is in the realistic paintings in the modern era. On the contrary, Foucault insisted on a further distinction between this connaissance and the knowledge that comes from the paintings, which he called savoir. In this savoir, he considers that the perception of the reality that came from a painting depends not only upon the painter’s culture, attitude, tradition and the time when he did the piece, but also from the culture of the person who is analysing the piece of art. That is why, how a painting and the knowledge that it possesses could be interpreted in a completely different way if it is done by a person from the 18th century or a person nowadays. All this is explained by Foucault in the painting of Las Meninas from Velazquez. For him, this painting is the perfect example of this savoir as in the painting it exist the ambiguity of who the real models are, either the kings of the viewers. As a consequence, Foucalt argues that this piece gives more importance to what is representing is how the viewer will embrace that, instead of just showing the reality of the moment. I completely agree with Foucault’s thesis about art, specially having into account that the contemporary art is mostly produce bearing in mind the viewer’s interpretation rather than showing the reality. Funny thing is that even this concept of how the observer affects in what is studying it has been extended into science with theories such as the General Relativity and the Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. Bibliography:
Michel Foucault and the point of painting, CM. SOUSSLOFF. History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method. Volume 32, Issue 4, pages 734–754, September 2009 The order of things: an archeology of the human sciences, M. FOUCAULT. New York: Vintage Books, 1973 Las Meninas. Las palabras y las cosas, EC. FROST. Madrid:Siglo XXI, 1978
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLaura Miranda Moreno Archives
January 2017
Categories |