The Double: Identity and Difference in Visual Art

This session explores the theme of “doubling” in the visual arts. Doubling is a grammar of resemblance and difference involving the combination of forms that appear alike and unalike. In works of doubling, the presentation of two shapes, images, or bodies, often in a symmetrical format, forces us to compare them. We are made conscious of our binocularity—the fact that we are endowed with two eyes that reconcile distinct impressions, allowing us to perceive depth. The art of doubling splays and divides vision; it causes us to “see double” and to see ourselves seeing. Ultimately, a viewer’s body and psychic self are the subject of these works.

Papers could explore one or more doubled formats: works that repeat an image or form; works that incorporate reversal or mirroring; works that stage perceptual “dilemmas,” making it impossible to choose between two possibilities; or works that explore a psychological or bodily double such as a mirrored or shadowed self, persona, twins, or pairs (lovers, artist duos, etc.) Doubling is found in pre-modern, early modern, and modern and contemporary art, and in Western and non-Western traditions; papers will suggest the extraordinary variety of doubled formats. The panel extends the chronological and geographical scope of the exhibition The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900 held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2022.