Visual Art and Self-Construction

• Asks how we can know a decentred and partly unconscious self, and shows how particular artworks can help us to address this challenge
• Illustrates how both artists and audience members can use artworks as a means of cultivating or controlling specific aspects of the self
• Draws on the work of artists including Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois
• Demonstrates the specific contribution that visual art makes to projects of the self by discussing a variety of mediums and contemporary developments in artistic practice

Starting from criticisms of a simple, given self found in Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault, Katrina Mitcheson addresses the problem of how a complex self is constructed, and how a hermeneutics of the self can avoid reproducing a subjugated self.

Critically examining Ricoeur’s narrative account of self-construction, Mitcheson makes the case that the narrative model overlooks the variety of processes that can contribute to forming a self and neglects the materiality of these processes. She develops an alternative account of a plural and corporeal hermeneutics of the self: exploring how visual art can operate as a critical technology of the self. Art not only exposes practices that contribute to our subjugation, but can also discover, explore and affect bodily processes, enabling experimentation in self-construction.