53. In the Viewer’s World: Images as Indices to Phenomenological Experience

History of Art has focused primarily on two of the semeiotic typologies identified by Charles Saunders Peirce: the mimetic, linking image to subject through verisimilitude, and the symbol, attaining meaning through abstract language.  Peirce’s third typology, the indexical, opens up another affordance of conveying meaning by directing viewers’ attention away from the object to their personally experienced world.  Studying artworks for resemblance or symbolism focuses on the object itself, while the indexical dissolves any boundaries between it and the world it points to.

This session seeks papers on artefacts from any cultural period exploring the myriad ways in which audiences phenomenologically construct meaning from the relationships between artworks and familiar places marked by direct pointers to the viewer’s world, and how this relationship opens up new interpretive understandings of how they functioned for their original audiences.  Indexical works can function in a variety of ways, via mimesis, as in the Piazza della Signoria setting in Ghilandaio’s Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule, mapping, as in Matthew Paris’ Chronica Majora, metonymy, as in the plaid blanket and fan in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Birth of the Virgin marking the manufacturing world of Siena, iconic embodiment, as in Jasper John’s flag paintings, or aesthetics, as in the Classical vision of Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion.

Papers should seek to restore how artworks indexically functioned in their spectators’ world as integral parts of their environments, reopening meanings too typically obscured by their removal from their original sites and isolated through photographic reproductions.

Themes: Indexicality, Semeiology, Phenomenology

Lead Convenor: Michael Grillo, University of Maine, United States

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.