Rachel Clancy’s reading list from ‘The Thought Below’ bookshelf.

Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

E.H Gombrich, 1960

A groundbreaking account of perception and art, from one of the twentieth century’s most important art historians

E. H. Gombrich is widely considered to be one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century, and Art and Illusion is generally agreed to be his most important book. Bridging science and the humanities, this classic work examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of modern theories of information and learning in visual perception. Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines ideas about the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments, he ranges over the history of art, from the ancient Greeks, Leonardo, and Rembrandt to the impressionists and the cubists. But the triumphant originality of Art and Illusion is that Gombrich is less concerned with the artists than with the psychological experience of the viewers of their work.

Ways of Seeing

John Berger, 2008

Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'

'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett, 2010

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea

Erika Balsom, 2018

The result of Erika Balsom’s 2017 residency with the Govett-Brewster as International Film Curator in Residence, An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea complicates the Romantic myth of the ocean as a dark, monstrous void of unknowable depths, populated by alien creatures.

Across five themes—the elemental contingencies of water, the fascination of submarine cinematography, representations of littoral labour, approaches to the Middle Passage and illegalized migration, and the materiality of global maritime circulation—An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea drifts idiosyncratically through the history of cinematic representations of the sea, approaching the ocean as a vast and fluid archive traversing nature and culture.

Through the essay Balsom asks: what if we understood the ocean not as dividing us but as connecting us? What politics, what ethics, would follow?

Balsom comments, “Sigmund Freud’s notion of oceanic feeling refers to the sensation of an unbreakable bond between oneself and the outside world. I was interested in taking this metaphor literally, returning it to its aquatic origins. The essay looks over a century of cinema to ask how the cinematic motif of the ocean might shed light on what it means to belong to the whole of the world in our time of ecological, humanitarian, and political emergency.”

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Georges Perec, 1974

The pieces in this volume show George Perec to be at times playful, more serious at other, but writing always with the lightest of touches. He had the keenest of eyes for the 'infra-ordinary', the things we do every day - eating, sleeping, working - and the places we do them in without giving them a moment's thought. But behind the lightness and humour, there is also the sadness of a French Jewish boy who lost his parents in the Second World War and found comfort in the material world around him, and above all in writing.