Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art

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In this work, Dario Gamboni explores ambiguity in modern art, considering images that rely to a very particular degree on an imaginative or a projected response from the viewer to achieve their effect. Ambiguity was an important strand in the aesthetic employed with increasing frequency during the late 19th and early 20th century by such artists as Odilon Redon, Cezanne, Gauguin, James Ensor and the Nabis. Similarly, the Cubists subverted traditional representational conventions, asking the viewer to decipher the image to extract its full meaning, and this device was taken up in the various experiments leading to "abstraction". The author explores the sources, intentions and effects associated with ambiguous images by examining the viewer's degree of participation, the nature of the latent or "potential" image and its relation to issues of representation and abstraction. He also draws on psychology, semiotics, literary theory, the "art of the insane" and popular visual riddles in his quest to realize the potential image.

Author Bio

Dario Gamboni is Professor of Art History at the University of Geneva. His books include The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (Reaktion, 1997)