This photo shows a pile of books in the Library at Chelsea College of Art & Design. On the top of the pile is a well worn copy of Ways of Seeing by John Berger a companion publication to the 1972 the BBC broadcast of his television series Ways of Seeing. The work was in part derived from Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
He says that"seeing comes before words".
The use of Magritte's painting is well chosen.
On the facing page is a "wonderwall", our version of your own "museum without walls". Andre Malraux coined this term in his Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1952-54) (The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture), the idea being that photography and the mechanical reproducibility of images shapes our perception of art, along with everything else going on in the world.
Berger then uses on the same page an image showing the perspectivalist view of the world through cones of vision, and places it on the page with a screen shot from Dziga vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, and the famous description by Vertov of the dynamic vision of reality produced by his KINEMA!
Later on Berger explores how Western European art was shaped by an economy of taste, political power and particular social interests. This brings us to the second book in the pile - The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich.
The Story of Art was first published in 1950 and currently is in its 16th edition, is widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the history of the visual arts. Originally intended for adolescent readers, it has sold millions of copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. As you can guess I want to make a comparison with another work by Gombrich - Art and Illusion, (1960), regarded by critics to be his most influential and far-reaching work.
The Story of Art is great narrative, and therefore it is accessible, readable, and informative, but only up to a point.
In our complex information environment the easiest and quickest way to construct a narrative is to edit out 99% of the available bits of information. You can then set out your story board without problems, puzzles, questions and contradictions. Since Art History has moved from its art industry related purpose (that is mainly to validate the authenticity of art objects in an art market where you could trust absolutely nobody) to a set of practices that struggle with as much of the available data as possible, to speculate on what art was and is all about, when we read it now some of what we find in the Story of Art looks somewhat problematic.
For instance, it is a period piece, and therefore is blatantly Eurocentric, with a single chapter on the arts of Islam and China, that lends an awkward sense of interruption to the grand narrative flow. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard challenges what he calls the grand narrative in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), where;
'he proposes what he calls an extreme simplification of the "postmodern" as an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'.[6] These meta-narratives - sometimes 'grand narratives' - are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom. Lyotard argues that we have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives. For this concept Lyotard draws from the notion of 'language-games' found in the work of Wittgenstein.' Wikipedia.
In later editions there is reference to the great archeological discoveries, including the terracotta army in Xian, that are included in a chapter that ends the book on what we could call a revisionist note.
The chapter is called: A Story Without End. However, in his account of Egyptian and Greek cultural contexts, the story points in another kind of direction, and what we find in Art and Illusion, the discussion of art as not simply a narrative account of the visual and historical facts organised in a sequence, but as a theoretical and speculative exploration of the psychology of pictorial representation.
The first thing you come across as you open the book is a cartoon. Do you get the joke?
In an example of humour we encounter the realism - convention conundrum that informs the whole of this book. And the relationship between signs and what they represent, and the notion of code and coding is introduced using a quote from Winston Churchill.
In the chapter Truth and Stereotype the image of Mont St Victoire as the product of the artist Cezanne and a camera produced photo makes an important connection in this exploration/study.
The photo, a process by which nature draws itself automatically with out the aid of the artists pencil or brush is compared with the acts of representation that include what we must admit is a fair amount of psychological projection. The Romanesque erased by the image of the "Gothic"!
And what does a painter like?
She likes what she can paint!
The power of representation is further explored in the chapter Pygmalion's Power (Pygmalion (mythology), in ancient Greek mythology, a sculptor who fell in love with his statue, along with the ability in art to make images out of the mashing of images, the collaging and the doubling and layering of stuff held together by the recognition of audience that an image, or a sign is there!
The skull "sees"!
The convention is broken to represent a slave!
His reflections on the Greek revolution, as he calls it, are brilliant! Making or matching! This idea will be picked up a bit later.
The idea of "progression in art", of development in the European oriented grand narrative, comes to stumble with the new style of late Roman/Byzantine art. But Gombrich has no problem with this, as it confirms the connection between function and form, purposes and representation, or what we might call "connectedness in meaning". The image above is like an identity parade in the Usual Suspects because the art has the function to represent the idea of the new type of power that the Roman Empire was exercising at this time. The image was meant to be "read" in this way! Similarity to appearance is important, but not that important.
This brings us to Conceptual Art.
Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s. In part, it was a reaction against formalism as it was then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg. In 1961 the term "concept art," coined by the artist Henry Flynt in his article bearing the term as its title, appeared in a Fluxus publication.[6] However it assumed a different meaning when employed by Joseph Kosuth and the English Art and Language group, who discarded the conventional art object in favour of a documented critical inquiry into the artist's social, philosophical and psychological status. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indexes, performances, texts and paintings to this end. In 1970 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, the first dedicated conceptual art exhibition, was mounted at the New York Cultural Center. WikipediaThe only recently late Charles Harrison gives us a glimpse of the rich texture of challenges and questions produced as work by Art and Language, in his two volumes of essays.
Art and language we will get on to in a short while but let us begin with Art and Language the conceptual artists playing with our concepts of art using the style of Jackson Pollock in a series of works. In the Story of Art there are fold outs of Van Eyck (see above), Michelangelo and Pollock. So, are they equivalents?
Certainly Pollock is at the heart of the contradiction and impossibilities of representation in mid 20th century modernist art, and powerful material in the mobilization of ideas during the "cold" war!
Since mid 1970s it has been argued by revisionist historians that the style attracted the attention, in the early 1950s, of the CIA, who saw it as representative of the USA as a haven of free thought and free markets, as well as a challenge to both the socialist realist styles prevalent in communist nations and the dominance of the European art markets. The book by Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, and other publications such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, detail how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950–67. Against this revisionist tradition, an essay by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, called Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War, argue that much of this information (as well as the revisionists' interpretation of it) concerning what was happening on the American art scene during the 1940s and 50s is flatly false, or at best (contrary to the revisionists' avowed historiographic principles) decontextualized. Other books on the subject include Art in the Cold War by Christine Lindey, which also describes the art of the Soviet Union at the same time; and Pollock and After edited by Francis Frascina, which reprinted the Kimmelman article. Wikipedia
Serge Guilbaut. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, 1983.
But let's go back to Art and Illusion and Gombrich's introduction to his study. This is what you will find, a drawing and a question!
Art and Language work around a possible double reading, based on concept structuring perception power of ideas/concept/language.
Charles Harrison as an art historian and critic is enabled by this work to explore a myriad of hidden ways of looking, understanding and "seeing" examples of visual art, including Pollock.
An early work of Art and Language:
Is it a version of another map you can find in a major 19th century work exploring the edges of meaning and meaningless, The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. Wikipedia.Nonsense yes, but logical nonsense.
Now we come to the Art and Language challenge to Berger.
Does seeing come before words? What is language?
Here are a few clues, or are they red herrings?
Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). But many French intellectuals perceived it to have a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and architecture. This ushered in the dawn of structuralism as not just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take existentialism's pedestal in 1960s France. Wikipedia.
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar (logical form) is correct but whose semantics are nonsensical, and therefore has no meaning to understand. An example of a category mistake, it was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models. The full passage says:
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Avram Noam Chomsky ( born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics.political dissident, an anarchist,[9] and a libertarian socialist intellectual.
In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms."[10] He also established the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of B. F. Skinner's theoretical book Verbal Behavior, which was the first attempt by a behaviorist to provide a functional, operant analysis of language. Chomsky used this review to broadly and aggressively challenge the behaviorist approaches to studies of behavior dominant at the time, and contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has influenced the philosophy of language and mind.
Randy Harris, author of The Linguistics Wars (1995), has described him as "a hero of Homeric proportions, belonging solidly in the pantheon of our country's finest minds, with all the powers and qualities thereof. First, foremost, and initially he is staggeringly smart. The speed, scope, and synthetic abilities of his intellect are legendary. He is, too, a born leader, able to marshal support, fierce and uncompromising support, for positions he develops or adopts. Often, it seems, he shapes linguistics by sheer force of will."
Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols is a book by American philosopher Nelson Goodman. It is considered one of the most important works of 20th century aesthetics in the Analytic tradition. Originally published in 1968, it was revised in 1976. Goodman continued to refine and update these theories in essay form for the rest of his career.
Languages of Art ostensibly concerns only the philosophy of art, but in the book's introduction, Goodman says that by the "languages" in the book's title, he means "symbol systems" in general. Central to the book's thesis is the concept of reference .
Goodman tries to demonstrate the absurdity of the common assumption that something must resemble another thing to represent it. He compares an object with itself: "An object resembles itself to a maximum degree but rarely represents itself [...] while a painting may represent the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Wellington doesn't represent the painting." For one thing to represent another object, its must not resemble but refer to that thing.
Denotation and exemplification are both types of reference. Goodman calls denotation the "core of representation." Something is denoted when it is referred to by a label but does not "possess" it.
Back to Berger, we find a discussion about advertising and publicity in chapter 7. Including this dimension of mass/popular culture in the same frame as the products of "high culture" was a novelty back in 1972, and as mentioned before in part inspired by Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
The de-coding of ads as cultural artefacts (different from art in one important respect, ads are not designed to provoke critcal thinking but to arouse the desire and impulse to consume) goes back to Umberto Eco in Bologna, Roland Barthes in Paris, Pop Art in London, and Marshall McLuhan in Toronto.
At this point we need to mention Semiotics.
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, into three branches:
- Semantics: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.
- Syntactics: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.
- Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them.
Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco are among the best known semioticians.
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver as efficiently and effectively as possible. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognise that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense. Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.
Perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of language. In a sense, the difference is a difference of traditions more than a difference of subjects. Different authors have called themselves "philosopher of language" or "semiotician". This difference does not match the separation between analytic and continental philosophy. On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned about non-linguistic signification. Philosophy of language also bears a stronger connection to linguistics, while semiotics is closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology. Wikipedia.
Pop artists like Eduardo Paolozzi used stuff like this to make a new art, embracing and critical in equal measure.
From the late 40's Marshall McLuhan brought a whole new approach to the study of culture and communication.
The Mechanical Bride (1951)
McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp.Like his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is unique and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order – what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.
Examples of advertisements
- A nose for news and a stomach for whiskey: McLuhan analyzes an ad for Time Magazine in which he likens a reporter depicted as a romantic character from a Hemingway novel and asks "Why is it [his] plangent duty to achieve cirrhosis of the liver?"
- Freedom to Listen - Freedom to Look: An ad for the Radio Corporation of America depicts a rural family doing their business with the radio on. Earlier in the Bride McLuhan notes "We still have our freedom to listen?" and here "Come on kiddies. Buy a radio and feel free - to listen."
- For Men of Distinction - Lord Calvert: An ad for Lord Calvert whiskey depicts nine gentlemen holding a glass of their whiskey, while McLuhan notes the lack of non-artists amongst them; "Why pick on the arts? Hasn't anyone in science or industry ever distinguished himself by drinking whiskey?"
- The Famous DuBarry Success Course: An ad for beauty creams complete with female model in a swimsuit hawks itself as a "success course" complete with "tuition", to which McLuhan asks, "Why laugh and grow fat when you can experience anguish and success in a strait jacket?"
Culture is our business!
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan.
The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message".
In Part One, McLuhan discusses the differences between hot and cool media and the ways that one medium translates the content of another medium. Briefly, "the content of a medium is always another medium."
In Part Two, McLuhan analyzes each medium (circa 1964) in a manner that exposes the form, rather than the content of each medium. In order, McLuhan covers The Spoken Word, The Written Word (as in a manuscript or incunabulum), Roads and Paper Routes, Numbers, Clothing, Housing, Money, Clocks, The Print (as in pictorial lithograph or woodcut), Comics, The Printed Word (as in Typography), Wheel, Bicycle and Airplane, The Photograph, The Press, Motorcar, Ads, Games, Telegraph, The Typewriter, The Telephone, The Phonograph, Movies, Radio, Television, Weapons, and Automation.
Throughout Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan uses historical quotes and anecdotes to probe the ways in which new forms of media change the perceptions of societies, with specific focus on the effects of each medium as opposed to the content that is transmitted by each medium. McLuhan identified two types of media: "hot" media and "cool" media. This terminology does not refer to the temperature or emotional intensity, nor some kind of classification, but to the degree of participation. Hot media are those that require low participation from users, since they foster detachment. Conversely, cool media are those that require strong user participation, since they urge users to engage themselves completely in their use. Radio, for example, is defined as a hot medium, since listening does not require complete involvement from the user. In contrast, television is a cool medium, since it requires more user participation.
Wikipedia.
Making or Matching?
The mention of making and matching we found at first in Gombrich's Art and Illusion is how we will end the blog with McLuhan and the mention of Fashion. The word fashion means to make.
In War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) McLuhan says that fashion is the poor man's art!
Philip Courtenay
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