Roaming Eyes: The Freedom to See

UW Center for Visual Cultures lecture by Lilliana Ramos Collado, 4:30 pm, 3/28, Elvehjem Building-Room L140.

press release: There is a tendency in visual culture theory to still abide – probably inadvertently – by Marshall McLuhan’s eventful phrase (1962, 1967) “The medium is the message,” later rephrased as “The medium is the massage,” which proposes that the medium itself will distort “reality” by composing and displaying images meant to force biased contents onto the viewer. I will challenge this persistent idea of a passive viewer by exploring how landscapes and cityscapes – where the subject’s changing position and point of view create an equally changing scene – may lead the viewer to restate meaning and form beyond the visual, thus defying deliberate contents, unleashing the freedom to see in a more complex sensory context, and redefining their visual culture. When discussing the landscape experience, I will focus on anthropologist David Le Breton’s Éloge de la marche (2000) and Tacita Dean’s Place (2005); and, for the cityscape experience, artist Félix González-Torres Untitled [The empty bed] (1991) billboards posted on several Manhattan buildings, and Michel de Certeau’s 1995 essay Practices of Space.

Biography: Lilliana Ramos Collado teaches architecture theory/history at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. She has published three poetry books, Útimos poemas de la rosa(Erizo Editorial, 2013) being the latest, and several books on art theory, history and criticism, the latest being Puerto Rico: Gateway to Landscape (2014). Ramos has published widely on art, literature, architecture and heritage in scholarly and non-scholarly journals and magazines, was Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art head curator, and also Executive Director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, a position equivalent to Minister of Culture. Her latest book on architecture and heritage, La patria en ruinas: siete visitas a la catástrofe, is due next May.

Sponsors: Events made possible thanks to the financial support of the Anonymous Fund and LACIS. We are also grateful for the support of the Departments of Art, Art History and Spanish and Portuguese.