Ebook: A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

Metaphor, which allows us to talk about things by comparing them to other things, is one of the most ubiquitous and adaptable features of language and thought. It allows us to clarify meaning, yet also evaluate and transform the ways we think, create and act.
While we are alert to metaphor in spoken or written texts, it has, within the visual arts, been critically overlooked. Taking into consideration how metaphors are inventively embodied in the formal, technical, and stylistic aspects of visual artworks, Mark Staff Brandl shows how extensively artists rely on creative metaphor within their work. Exploring the work of a broad variety of artists – including Dawoud Bey, Dan Ramirez, Gaëlle Villedary, Raoul Deal, Sonya Clark, Titus Kaphar, Charles Boetschi, and more– he argues that metaphors are the foundation of visual thought, are chiefly determined by bodily and environmental experiences, and are embodied in artistic form. Visual artistic creation is philosophical thought. By grounding these arguments in the work of philosophers and cultural theorists, including Noël Carroll, Hans Georg Gadamer, and George Lakoff, Brandl shows how important metaphor is to understanding contemporary art.
A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art takes a neglected feature of the visual arts and shows us what a vital role it plays within them. Bridging theory and practice, and drawing upon a capacious array of examples, this book is essential reading for art historians and practitioners, as well as analytic philosophers working in aesthetics and meaning.
It is the contention of this book that there are visual metaphors, ones recognized simply by looking, not through some linguistic process of decoding. These visual, analogical juxtapositions can be comparable to linguistic metaphors, yet also are often fascinatingly dissimilar. Optical tropes are frequently more polysemic, reciprocal, embodied, mixed, merged, medium-specific, even more impure than their textual cousins. Visual trope creation is a thought process, involving the fact that metaphors in art are embodied in two ways: first, mental concepts are constructed tropaically from bodily experiences; second, these tropaic insights are embedded by creators in the formal elements of artworks.
Visual thinking is sophisticated reflection, and comprehensively practiced by contemporary artists, even those who cannot articulate this well in words. Philosophical theory is implemented in this book in order to better grasp how this is done, employing the resources of analytic aesthetics and cognitive metaphor theory most predominantly, yet also pragmatic analysis and some continental theory. Philosophers utilized range from Noël Carroll, David Carrier, R. A. Sharpe, and Tiziana Andina, through Hans Georg Gadamer, George Lakoff, and Mark Turner.
Linking striven-for content, discovered form, antithetical historical and critical cultural awareness, visual metaphor is as an area of vital conceptual importance to contemporary art, the discipline at the center of this book.
Brandl analyzes how contemporary artists are creating new visual metaphors to live by, through discussing a wide range of contemporary artists including Dawoud Bey, Dan Ramirez, Gaëlle Villedary, Raoul Deal, Sonya Clark, Titus Kaphar, Charles Boetschi, Leonard Bullock, and many more.