Aesthetics of intermediality

If 'art thinks', as Mieke Bal contends, what are the operative concepts it generates, and how do visual culture studies capture the nature of aesthetic or visual thought? This essay analyses contemporary art projects by Gabriel Orozco, Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, and iCinema as both 'gestural' and 'intermedial' productions. Invoking a concept of gestural criticism derived from Georgio Agamben, Bennett argues that gesture is an operative method rather than subject matter in art, and a key to understanding mediality and relations between media. This focus is extended into a broader methodological argument for visual cultural studies that attends to the specifics of media and aesthetic operations within an interdisciplinary field, building on methodological critiques by both Bal and Brian Massumi, and citing the precedent of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne project.