Lecturer in History of Art at University College London.
Visit Maria H. Loh’s website here.
Every confrontation with horror is, in essence, a confrontation with the unknown. Forcing ourselves to look with critical attention at early modern representations of horror, this paper will push beyond the staid clichés about the Renaissance as a period of extraordinary beauty and order. Bringing together an abiding concern for what Noël Carroll identified as art-horror, what Slavoj Žižek referred to as the enjoyment of non-meaning, and what Linda Williams identified as the frenzy of the visible, we will turn instead to embrace a messier, murkier, experimental, and experiential (both an affective and sensate) history that focuses on the status of representation in a historical context before the Modernist imposition of Art and Science as twin systems of rationalization and containment.
Related: Maria H. Loh, ‘Outscreaming the Laocoön: Sensation, Special Affects, and the Moving Image’, in: Oxford Art Journal (2011) 34 (3), pp. 393-414.