About Meike Bal

A collection of essays celebrating Mieke Bal - one of Europe’s foremost scholars in art history and visual studies, with a stellar international reputation, this work brings together contributions by senior and younger scholars in the fields of art history and visual studies who reflect on Mieke Bal’s writings and art practice, assessing her contribution and legacies. It is the first collection to consider her writing and art in depth, and to develop and extend her thinking in substantial ways. Themes include some of Bal’s most important ideas and concepts in the visual field, such as the theoretical object, preposterous history, narrativity, vision and the gaze, cultural memory, self-reflexivity-of the artist, the viewer, the scholar. The essays consider historical art - the Sistine chapel, Renaissance altar paintings, and watercolours - alongside more recent film, photography, graffiti, interactive immersive environments, online performance, and areas of visual interest often positioned outside the pages of art history. While Bal has, unsurprisingly perhaps, become a key figure in the debates between art and visual culture, the extraordinarily wide range of visual materials collected here speaks of her path-breaking movement between the visual registers of high art and popular cultures, her resistance to clear-cut distinctions between image and word.