In “Depicting by gestures” (Gesture, 8 (3)), I have explored the methods by which hand gestures depict the world. Here I explore how gestures themselves are depicted. Many paintings and sculptures show human bodies in motion or showcase traces of body movements, including gestures of the hand. The issue is how the artists succeeded in depicting or insinuating movement in media that are inherently still, and how such arrested gestures function in pictures of social life so that these are perceived as “legible interactions” (Gombrich). By scrutinizing the changing logic of representation of embodied communication in the visual arts, gesture researchers can gain insights into the relationships between movement, form, meaning, and context, and recontextualize their own analytic methodologies within the broader discourse in the humanities on human behavior and its interpretation (Streeck, 2003). In the following, I examine a number of characteristic attempts, made during different periods of Western art-history, to solve this problem: in Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic art; in some medieval illuminations; in the early and late Renaissance; and in the 20th century styles of “écriture automatique” and Abstract Expressionism. Each of the strategies involved is predicated on three types of analysis: of ways in which body motion communicates meaning, of visual perception, and of the nature of pictorial representation.
2022. Informal Learning in Museums. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, ► pp. 448 ff.
Ehmer, Oliver & Geert Brône
2021. Instructing embodied knowledge: multimodal approaches to interactive practices for knowledge constitution. Linguistics Vanguard 7:s4
Özer, Demet & Tilbe Göksun
2020. Gesture Use and Processing: A Review on Individual Differences in Cognitive Resources. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Due, Brian L., Simon Bierring Lange, Mie Femø Nielsen & Celine Jarlskov
2019. Mimicable embodied demonstration in a decomposed sequence: Two aspects of recipient design in professionals' video-mediated encounters. Journal of Pragmatics 152 ► pp. 13 ff.
Kell, Clare & John Sweet
2017. Widening possibilities of interpretation when observing learning and teaching through the use of a dynamic visual notation. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 54:2 ► pp. 162 ff.
Steier, Rolf, Palmyre Pierroux & Ingeborg Krange
2015. Embodied interpretation: Gesture, social interaction, and meaning making in a national art museum. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 7 ► pp. 28 ff.
Steier, Rolf
2014. Posing the Question: Visitor Posing as Embodied Interpretation in an Art Museum. Mind, Culture, and Activity 21:2 ► pp. 148 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Learning Together. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, ► pp. 383 ff.
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