Mental image and material image: comparative approaches 2/2
The rediscovery of the role of the material in art by anthropology (Gell, 1998) corresponds to the failure of semiotics to understand its symbolic role. It parallels the revolution of the cognitive sciences which questions the "computational" theories of cognition as a mental representation of the world, amodal and without affects (Vial Kayser, 2021 and 2023). Instead, "modal, grounded or situated" theories of the imaginary as a living memory of a situation, and of the appraisal of the "embodiment" of concepts by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) follow up on Husserl and Sartre’s views of imagination as a “presentation” of a past situation (1936/2012). This concept of imagination clarifies Barthes' s postulate that photography is the imprint of presence and the imagination of absence. As William James proposed, it postulates that the origin of all representation is the body situated in matter.
From the years 1960, the artists explored this lead, notably Arte povera for which art is founded on the mnemonic and affective association with matter, sometimes qualified of alchemical (Celant, 1967). The subsequent challenge to a purely iconological (mental) approach by art historians and theorists (Foster, 1996) proposes that matter makes sense with our emotions or representations through analogical equivalence (Beaune et al., 2017), sometimes referred to as "resonance" (Rosa, 2018 or Strauss, 1992), "mirror" effect (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007) or empathic perception (Huys & Vernant, 2019) in which the role of the body and affects is central. Should we thus speak of the "matter" of the work or of the “material” of the aesthetic experience as the meeting between an object, a performative practice and a system of interpretation, i.e. the subjective “imaginary”?
We ask: what are the modalities of the incorporation of concepts into form and of the perception of form and matter as “mental images”? Is there an empathic, sensory-motor immediacy or a symbolic correspondence? In what way does the imaginary preserve the qualities of the matter, of the physical experience? What is the role of the body (or its absence) and of culture in the formation of this imaginary of matter (or non matter)? In what way do the arts act as a bridge, as a dynamic interplay between the real and the imaginary, the material and the symbolic?