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Gottfried Kerscher: Henri Focillon’s 'The Life of Forms', “Forms in the Realm of Time,” and George Kubler’s 'The Shape of Time'
Henri Focillon’s 'The Life of Forms', “Forms in the Realm of Time,” and George Kubler’s 'The Shape of Time'
(p. 591 – 611)

Gottfried Kerscher

Henri Focillon’s 'The Life of Forms', “Forms in the Realm of Time,” and George Kubler’s 'The Shape of Time'

PDF, 21 pages

  • history of science
  • gaze
  • physiology

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Gottfried Kerscher

is a professor of art history at the University of Trier. He completed his doctoral thesis, Benedictus Antelami oder das Baptisterium von Parma: Kunst und kommunales Selbstverständnis, in 1986, and his professorial thesis, Architektur als Repräsentation: Spätmittelalterliche Palastbaukunst zwischen Pracht und zeremoniellen Voraussetzungen: Avignon, Mallorca, Kirchenstaat, in 2000. Current research interests include Leges Palatinae (ceremonial and court laws of the Middle Ages); the Trier Cathedral, St. Matthias’ Abbey, and St. Simeon/Porta Nigra in Trier, Germany; and Focillon, Bergson, and Kubler.
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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