The dancing image in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1770–1870

Abstract

In the visual culture of empire between 1770 and 1870 a new species of image emerged that showed the figure in states of extraordinary metamorphosis. These “dancing images” showed the figure in a state of metamorphosis not out of a newly accomplished representational approach to solving the persistent problem in art of how to translate the movements of a three-dimensional body to a two-dimensional picture plane but rather because these images broke apart in the attempt at doing so. The edges of the figure’s fragmented pieces shivered with the passing of embodied energies that the dancing image had only partially succeeded in arresting. The history of such images is not a history of the picturesque; it is a history of that which cannot be pictured—a history, as it were, of the picture-non-esque, that which cannot be arrested by “the tight weave of signifiers” composing the aesthetic text. Convulsed in motion, these dancing images work as new historiographical operators revealing the interlocking histories of the body and of art in the era of British colonial expansion. The period under consideration begins with the dissemination of artists, military draftsmen, networks of native artists, colonial patronage systems, and image-making apparatuses (printing presses, photographic equipment) across the “imperial meridian” and concludes with the onset of chronophotography and film, which took over as the most progressive ontological medium for exploring the problem of representing movement in images post1870. The history of art during this period must, then, be written not as the progress and development of the picturesque style but rather as a fraught history of the attempts to represent the energetic movement of bodies in antagonism with each other and with the world. Such a history indicates that there is a missing episode in this story between the spectacular, multimedia art of the