Art in History: Resisting Social Invisibility

I seek to understand the skill of looking, the solid basis of art history, but specifically the “how to” of it that we take too easily for granted. That looking leads to seeing is not obvious. In this article I develop a theoretical metaphor that is social, ethical, and visual, and can help art history in its mission. This is how it came to me. Once, on the street, I heard a man, of obviously foreign background, murmur to himself: “they don’t even look at me”. That was the moment when the seed of the short film embedded in this article was sown, and the theoretical metaphor of visibilisation came up. The consequence of this not looking and not talking in some sort of engagement with him, is that he radically does not belong, is not part of, the group within which he exists physically – the crowd.