Obscure imaginings: visual culture and the anatomy of caves

Abstract

This article speculates about the theory and practice of visual culture by examining the potent linkages between the figure of the cave and the making of images. Because the cave functions as a signifier for the artistic imperative, an endorsement of art history’s place in cultural representation and also as a mythic beginning point in the Western hegemony of the visual, its figuration carries within it a set of suppositions on which the visual depends but which are rendered subservient or effaced in the genealogy of visualization. We focus in particular on the creation of Alexander Pope’s grotto and on a comparison between Robert Smithson’s and Ana Mendieta’s evocations of the cave.

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