Edited by Richard Meyer

Through an interlocking series of texts and images, Representing the Passions explores how extreme sensations such as wonder, misery, ecstasy, and rage have been portrayed at different moments in Western culture. Moving across multiple fields of creative endeavor and intellectual inquiry―from classical artifacts to Chicano art, political protest to operatic performance, René Descartes's writings on the soul to the Internet's digitized flesh―this book reveals how the passions have elicited, eluded, and transformed the act of representation.

In addition to contributions by visual artists Anne and Patrick Poirier and video artist Bill Viola, Representing the Passions offers a provocative set of case studies by Horst Bredekamp, Page du Bois, Martha Feldman, Stefan Jonsson, Elizabeth Liebman, Carol Mavor, Teresa McKenna, Richard Meyer, David Román, Debora Silverman, and David Summers.

This book was published to coincide with Bill Viola: The Passions, an exhibition that was on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from January 24 to April 27, 2003.

Richard Meyer is associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California and the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art.