THE PARLIAMENT OF IMAGES. AGENCY AND INTENTIONALITY IN BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND VISUAL STUDIES

In recent times many art theorists and historians began to understand images as entities endowed with agency and intentionality. Some will accuse these positions of being new forms of animism. My aim in this paper is to analyze possible arguments to understand the agency of the visual without falling into mysticism. The thesis will be the following: the agency of the image is not a kind of magical power, but the actualisation of a potency of the visual by the spectator. In other words, it is the gaze of the beholder that "gives life" to the image.