Elizabeth Perrotte
The Dark Side of Enlightenment: Celebrating the Art of Unknowing

“Do not worry if your senses do not know this nothing. Truly, I love it, and it’s all the better for that.” (Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th century, (Spearing, 2001, 94))

Francisco Goya’s famous print, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), manifests an ambivalent attitude toward Enlightenment values. Does the work warn reason to remain vigilant against irrationalism and monstrosity, or does it suggest that Enlightenment thinking has generated its own monstrous outcomes? This lecture opens with Goya’s work alongside other 18th- and 19th-century artists (Jacques Louis David, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner) who shaped new forms of portraiture, landscape, and history painting in complex dialogue with Enlightenment thinking. We also shift gears to introduce key ideas from posthuman and postcolonial thinkers, and engage with work by contemporary artists such as Robert Smithson, Pierre Huyghe, Lubaina Himid, Ellen Gallagher, and Kehinde Wiley. We also explore artworks that urge us to embrace unknowing, challenge ideas of human exceptionalism, and rethink notions of historical progress.