Visual Scepticism

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Margit Kern

The relationship between sceptical currents in philosophy and the art production of a given era has generally been approached in the research by using philosophical texts in order to interpret iconographies –in paintings, for example. The few art-historical publications that address the phenomenon of scepticism do so mainly by asking how specific philosophical texts are reflected in works of art. This research will instead chart a very different path. The focus here is on visual discourses that embody scepticism – not however as visual translations of sceptical ideas found in texts. Instead, we ask how images themselves become sites of performative processes – which are seen as paralleling the dialogical strategies of scepticism – by virtue of their internal medial structures, and moreover on a purely visual level. To refer to this phenomenon, I have coined the term ‘visual scepticism’. A central thesis of this project is that we can expect to see contradictions and negations emerging here that manifest the traits of medial self-interrogation. The aim is to show how images generate inner tension, and how they may operate with dialogical structures that give rise to forms of knowledge. The fundamental question is whether we can speak of visual doubt as a capacity that is inherent in images. In order to provide a basic definition of visual scepticism, the history of ‘doubt in images’ will be traced from the early modern era up until the 21st century with reference to selected examples.