CAA 2026 Presentation: Michel Foucault’s Picture Object: Lighting, Perception, and the Modern Viewer on Lighting the Artwork: Sensory Perception and Shifting Contexts of Displays →

Looking forward to presenting Michel Foucault’s Picture Object: Lighting, Perception, and the Modern Viewer on Lighting the Artwork: Sensory Perception and Shifting Contexts of Displays at CAA 2026

Wednesday, February 18, 2026: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM, Hilton Chicago, Salon C-6

Panel chairs: Marlen Schneider, Université Grenoble Alpes and Romain Thomas, Institut national d'histoire de l'art

From Peter Paul Ruben’s Ecstasy of St Gregory (1608), a masterpiece that has been rejected once placed in the Roman church Santa Maria in Vallicella due to its unsettling lighting effects in situ, up to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) that unfolded its full sensual potential and artifice only when leaving the studio and being installed in its public setting – artworks often undergo dramatic perceptual shifts when presented outside their space of creation. Lighting effects add to the materiality of the artwork in a somewhat unstable and ephemeral way, either by being deliberately integrated in its creation and exhibition, or by unintentional modification of the surrounding light. This panel explores how lighting conditions affect the sensory and aesthetic reception of artworks. It invites contributions that examine light not as a motif, but as an external, contextual and performative agent — one that may dialogue with, enhance, or disrupt the artwork’s visual and material presence. We encourage proposals engaging with aesthetic reception theory (e.g., Kemp 1998; Wilder 2020), historical lighting technologies (Underhill 2017, 2018), or approaches from sensory studies. How did the evolution of lighting techniques impact artistic practice and display? In what ways did they interact with historical theories on the physical, artistic or even spiritual dimension of light, which also could determine the viewer’s expectations and appreciation of the object? Can knowledge of historical lighting conditions be reintegrated into today’s curatorial strategies?

Presentation: Michel Foucault’s Picture Object: Lighting, Perception, and the Modern Viewer
Michel Foucault is a French historian and philosopher who interestingly uses art, specifically, A Bar at the Folies-Bergèreby Édouard Manet 1882, to demonstrate a foundational shift in the history of representation in the modern image. He asserts that during the 19th century, “Manet reinvents (or perhaps he invents) the picture-object, the picture as a materiality, the picture as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves” (Foucault 31). Foucault’s interest is in the experience of reality and the viewer’s relationship with the physical object of the image. Through the picture-object as Nicolas Bourriaud states “Manet invents the figure of the modern viewer, questioned by a pictorial object which renders him conscious of his presence and of his position within a much larger system” (Bourriaud in Foucault 17). Foucault’s modern representation of the image as picture-object locates the art in space where the conditions of the exhibition, specifically lighting, fundamentally shift our experience of the work. This paper examines Foucault’s theory of the picture-object, with particular attention to how external, contextual lighting produces both the modern image and the modern viewer.

PRESENTATIONS

• Sparkling, Bejeweled Columns as Spatial Bodies

  Emilia Cottignoli, Stanford University

• "The Art of Lighting Art": Authenticity through Artifice at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

  Rebecca Svehla, University of Wisconsin-Stout

• Michel Foucault’s Picture Object: Lighting, Perception, and the Modern Viewer

  Ms. Elyse Longair, MFA, Chair, Services to Artists Committee, CAA

• Scattered Signals in Smoke: Rethinking Laser Light Through Nam June Paik’s Baroque Laser

  HAE Rin Do, University of California, Irvine