Embodied Fantasies ― From Awe to Artifice

Central to the theory and practice of art, embodied fantasy is also under the consideration of those in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive sciences, philosophy, and phenomenology. These twenty essays cover this range, including imagination, sensible difference, thwarted expectations, places and space, posing and exposing. Topics include what imagining has to do with images, bio-ethics and luminous ores, what kind of relationship exists between visibility and overlooking, synchronies of vision and touch, the schematism of the modalities, Carsten Holler's SOMA and Matthew Barney's Cremaster, embodying the cave in phenomenal art, experimentally induced psychosis in nineteen century France, the strange friendship of Wolgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Naoko Tanaka's "Die Scheinwerferin," patterns which connect, the Modern Projection Planetarium, planetary design, staging nature, fantasy in a non-given world, seeing red, dance as an embodied fantasy of writing, self-portraits in Facebook, spiegelei, Matthew Barney, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Adolph Menze. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the nexus of art and the biological sciences. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the JP Getty Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in Japan. Her seminal text The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (co-authored with the late Dorothy Nelkin) was published in 2004. She is the Chair of the Fine Arts Department of School of Visual Arts in New York since 2005.
Sabine Flach is Professor for Contemporary Art and Art Theory (visiting) at School of Visual Arts in New York. Her current research focuses on Epistemology and Methodology of Contemporary Art; Praxis and Theory of Contemporary Art; Aisthesis and Media of Embodiment; Epistemology and Aesthetics of Visual Thinking; Emotions and Culture of the Senses; Knowledge of the Arts; Art and Art Theories of the 19th and 20th Centuries; Concepts of Nature.