More than meets the eye : embodied engagement with After the Last Supper

Abstract

In this article I argue that the thread spool installation, After The Last Supper (2005), by American artist, Devorah Sperber, negotiates the relationship between two modes of aesthetic spectatorship which operate in interrelated ways. The first is based on a modernist notion of aesthetic spectatorship as reflectively detached and contemplative, while the second mobilizes a person’s embodied and engaged participation in the work. The installation is investigated here not only as a representation of scientific facts, but rather as a material presentation that elicits embodied responses in active participants. By taking into account the material physicality of the work – its surface, texture and spatial extension – as well as a viewer’s somatic responses to these features, the nature of bodily encounters not only with the installation, but also with images in a digital world, are investigated.