Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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What is an image and what is image power? |
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Author: Dirk J VAN DEN BERG Abstract (E): Despite its status as contested discipline, art historiography may be of assistance to visual culture studies in answering the call for a fundamental reconsideration of the prolific picture category of visual imagery within the broad image domain. As a strategy of ideological resistance, reconsideration of this category is essential in order to counter entrenched tendencies such as popular "picture theories of visual perception", the pervasive "picturalising" of non-pictorial image categories and ocularcentrism’s ideological authority. Abstract (F): Bien qu’elle soit une discipline de plus en plus contestée, l’histoire de l’art peut rendre de grands services aux études visuelles (« visual culture studies ») en apportant des réponses aux questions relatives à la définition de la notion d’ « image » qui à la fois se mutliplie et se brouille dans le domaine de la culture visuelle. L’étude renouvelée de la notion d’ « image » relève d’une manière de résistance idéologique et s’oppose à toute une série de tendances complices qui se généralisent aujourd’hui : les théories « imagées » de la perception visuelle, la « picturalisation » des catégories non-visuelles ou encore l’autorité idéologique de l’ocularocentrisme. Key words: Art history, power of images, visual studies, visual perception, ocularocentrism |
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On occasion seemingly innocent questions may have the effect of opening the proverbial can of worms -- uncovering underlying issues, making us aware of crucial issues obfuscated by technical jargon and popular opinion. Food for thought, such questions are worth pondering. They often come to haunt us, frequently fostering heated discussions and affording the persuasive nuancing of points of view when clashing critical positions are being debated. Human vision or the visual experience of the environment being naively self-evident to the sighted, everyone seems to have an answer ready, unaware about the minefield of issues at stake in the question: "what is an image?" (cf Mitchell 1984, Boehm 1994). The opening questions of the title will be answered below with a number of theses calculated to counter commonly held received ideas or mistaken opinions regarding visual images and imagery. Provocatively simplified to foreground the ideological complications of doxa, the theses' primary aim is to recommend certain contributions from the discipline of art historiography to burgeoning critical and inter-disciplinary interactions collectively sailing under the flag of "culture studies". At the outset care should be taken to distinguish new multi-disciplinary formations from conservative schools of "cultural history". The latter include established approaches to intellectual historiography, Kulturgeschichte or Geistesgeschichte. The contributions of numerous art historians in this regard are based on path-breaking work by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars on the humanist legacy of classical antiquity and Renaissance art, among others by Jacob Burckhardt and Erwin Panofsky. In recent years the initiative within this school has shifted decisively towards a Warburgian kulturwissenschaftliche (cultural anthropological) critique of the classical legacy in Western cultural memory.[1] Gaining momentum towards the close of the twentieth century, critical impulses associated with a series of radical turns and transformations in several discourses[2] challenged the soundness of erstwhile authoritative ideas and assumptions concerning "art" and "culture". Varied reactions to late modernist Bilderflut conditions (the pervasive deluge of images proliferating in the mass media of advanced capitalist societies' culture industries) featured prominently among impulses toward postmodern deconstruction. The overwhelming intensity of visual image production, reproduction, transmission and dissemination in global mass media networks resulted in extreme degrees of visual saturation, threatening literacy in the Gutenberg galaxy, especially culturally literate intercourse with visual images from the elite or high art, past and present (cf Kaufmann 1988). Similar to the neighbouring areas of philosophical, historical and literary studies, the art historical discipline saw the slaying of former holy cows in the wake of postmodern turns. A foundational set of systematic categories -- the conceptual framework sustaining the discipline's inherent biases and partialities -- has become suspect, increasingly considered to be tainted or severely compromised by its philosophical and historical roots in the global Aufklärung project of modernity (an as yet incompleted project according to Jürgen Habermas 1987). The questioning title of Hans Belting (1987) -- The end of art history? -- clearly encapsulates the perceived consequences of an ideologically-burdened categorial framework directing modern research programmes as well as curatorial practices in humanistic art historiogaphy. The following concise catalogue summarises a set of central categories of art historiography that has been shaken if not pulled down as former pillars in the disciplinary edifice:
One reaction to the critical deconstruction of art historiography's foundational framework or disciplinary discourse has been the transformation (some would rather say the dissipation) of the discipline into visual theory, visual anthropology, media studies and visual culture studies. Initiated by John Berger's Ways of seeing (1972), these new developments imply a massive expansion of the field of study, now embracing all of human visual culture -- in its totality and in its multifarious specifics. The transformed discipline daily discovers new and often surprising connections with diverse special fields studying particular aspects of imagery, visualising processes, forms of visual representation, cultural expressions of "visuality" and the imperious hold of "scopic regimes". Sweeping notions of "global visual culture" are replacing former encyclopedic and philosophical ideals regarding a "universal history of art". Nonetheless, art history's universal museological scope remains effective -- admittedly no longer as normative idealist construct but as an empirical state of affairs resulting from de facto Western domination. The sole common denominator among multiplying areas and topics of specialisation in the multi-disciplinary study of visuality seems to be rudimentary ideology-critical stances regarding issues of power ("politics") and desire ("erotics"). In general, visual culture studies' main concern is visual representations of race, class and gender -- by far the most popular topics in run-of-the-mill publications. Visual theory tends to be more reflexive, investigating philosophical assumptions steering the critical discourses underlying such disciplinary expansion or inter-disciplinary interaction (cf Carter 1990, Bryson et al 1991). Should art historiography indeed be reincarnated in the guise of "visual culture studies" or, at the least, remain cognisant of its new situation in this inter-disciplinary constellation, it will have to be in dual capacity -- as "theory of images" (Bildwissenschaft) and "history of images" (Bildgeschichte).[3] Interpretation of images that incorporates both theory and history in cultural analysis is essential for the success of art historiographical involvement in cultural studies. Transforming "art history" into an "expanded history of images" has not proceeded without negative effects. Particularly frustrating is the extreme degree of fragmentation of a vastly expanded empirical field of visual material, all but unsurveyable in its limitless dilation and its interminable stream of local case studies involving countless special interests. The likelihood is real of visual culture studies degenerating into a "free-for-all" squatters' area, as is its exploitation by intreprenieurial and activist researchers from formerly powerful disciplines (for instance, departments of English, history and anthropology), particularly when the critical stance is driven primarily by political and financial allegiances, ideologically untempered by self-critical and systematic questioning. The provocative "Visual culture questionnaire" (October 1996) revealed that a likely outcome of this situation may well be that we are preparing a new generation of proficient consumers of visual culture rather than informed and passionate critics of exploitative culture industry and mass communication media. Against this background one may indeed pose the question: What could a questionable art historiography (an essentially contested and disputed discipline as suggested above) contribute to the new field of visual culture studies? What could be considered as the art historian's typical contribution to interdisciplinary investigations of visual material? In this regard I want to single out one attribute of art historians -- their visual expertise. Their schooling is primarily a matter of acquiring an educated, experienced eye and a committed imagination as demonstrated, for example, by the nineteenth-century flourishing of museum-based Kunstkennerschaft. From the time that connoisseurs began specialising in the "attribution" and "authentication" of works of art on the basis of the expert eye's ability to detect unique artistic "hands", professional art historians were expected to have mastered and refined advanced and specialised forms of "visual literacy". Certain components of art historians' visual expertise were held in common with colleagues in other empirical disciplines. Two of these may be singled out:
However, there are more complex forms of vision associated with competencies that are unique to the discipline of art history. Among these the following warrant special mention:
Such acts of imaginative visualising are central to something that, for want of a better term, may be called "iconological discourse" -- in other words, intrinsically visualising forms of argumentation and adumbration in which images do not merely serve to illustrate, exemplify or supplement verbal theorising. As in ordinary visual experience, yet with higher levels of reflection and conscious freedom of restraint, the art historian's way of negotiating the world of visuality comprises "hetero-imaginal" movements of visual material. This sets into motion remarkable reverberations in the responsive spectator's imagination, frequently involving unconscious or fantastic imagery, figurative meanings, cognitive schemes, worldviews, ideological image values and powers. A first thesis may be advanced against this background sketch of radical doubts about art historiography's foundational categories as opposed to the discipline's enduring special involvement in the field of visuality. The thesis is prompted by the art historical penchant for approaching any image as if it were a potential work of art requiring special attention and imaginative efforts of meaning. The notion of investigating how images behave in circumstances approaching the condition of art emanates from a crucial position in philosophical anthropology which finds the embodied human imagination a more convincing basis for the global scope of visual culture studies than sensory perception, species-specific optics or neurological "hard-wiring" (cf Kearney 1988). Thesis 1The central category at the very core of visual culture studies, "image" (including its cognates Bild, beeld, imago, eikon and their derivatives) is completely polysemic and utterly ambiguous. The incredible diversity of the image domain, coupled with the inherent ambivalence of any individual image, surpass anything we might imagine -- one reason for the persistent recurrence of image suspicion, as displayed in historical instances of repression, censure and destruction of images. Three exemplary cases may be cited to convey some idea of the diversity and ambiguity of image categories. They represent undertakings, from different points of view, to map the varied classes within the broad domain of the image. The first example concerns a leading figure in perception psychology, J J Gibson, who put forward the notion of "perception as environmental systems". Gibson (1971, 1978 & 1979) challenges a prevailing concept -- the "arrested image" according to his terminology -- with a contrasting critical idea of "progressive image formation". He bases his critique on the progressive processing of "information contained in the ambient optic array", immediately accessible in the optic field of bodily mobile sentient beings moving through the visual world with its relatively constant "affordances" (such as the horizon, angles, surfaces and gradings). Gibson claims that surfaces have actually perceived "affordance meaning" while the marks on a surface may have "referential meanings", provided they are produced by a "graphic act" and re-ceived by an "imaginative act". His insistence on surfaces or screens as image carriers is significant (cf Steer 1989, Costall 1990). It is a valuable reminder that every image represents something in some respect and for somebody, hence necessitating media of representation (cf Sparshott 1983). Actions of human representation and mediation count among the essential conditions of imagery, even to the extent that the embodied human selfhood -- itself an image, an image bearer and a position of image formation and habituation -- may be taken as the destination of imagery. Gibson (1980: xv-xvii) broadly distinguishes ten kinds of visual image:
The diversity of the classes of images in Gibson's list is noteworthy as well as the fact that the sequence of items included in his catalogue comprises an argument in critique of "arrested images" and "retinal images". As will become evident, the latter category confusion is widespread and by no means restricted to psychology and physiology (cf Barlow et al 1990). The prolific author, James Elkins, an American art historian trained as a painter, provides a second example. He positions himself as a critic of semiotic image categories, particularly the popular Peirceian notion of the image as icon in distinction from index and symbol. He aspires to grasp the "sub-semiotic basis" of visual material that resists semiotic classification as signs. His writings converge on the undefinable conceptual core of his line of reasoning -- "the image as material trace". The choice of examples and his analyses are therefore calculated to deliberately stretch or torture semiotic categories to the breaking point. Opting for the generic term gramma (indicating a common origin in interlacings of writing, notation and picturing), Elkins (1999) distinguishes seven kinds within the domain of the image. The critical aim of his classification of images is significant, since the term gramma evidently engages Gibson's lapidary phrase "marks on a surface". Disregarding ideal-typical cases of "pure pictoriality" and "pure (alphabetic) writing", Elkins presses and worries the outer and inner limits of this single Gibson category by analising some rather perplexing variants of the "pictorial image":
The notion that "the object stares back", advanced and explored in Elkins (1997), emphasises image power as the uncontrollable effect or hold that images have on the imagination of spectators. Thus "affective image" may be taken as his core concept. A third case is W J T Mitchell, one of the pioneers of visual theory and of a poststructuralist "pictorial turn" in the USA. As literary scholar he developed his concepts from oppositions of word and image --- from the ancient power struggle between verbal and visual processes of signification. Less specialised in the areas of perceptual and pictorial imagery, his conception of the domain of images is much broader than that of either Gibson or Elkins. Mitchell (1986: 10) proposes a "family of images" covering the field of visuality in five branches: graphic images (pictures, statues, designs), optical images (mirrors, projections), perceptual images (sense data, "species", appearances), mental images (dreams, memories, ideas, fantasmata) and verbal images (metaphors, descriptions), summarised in the Mitchell's well-known table: The three examples of image classifications reviewed above are not intended to cover the whole image domain systematically, nor are they meant to pursue countless historical variations in visual culture. They nonetheless reveal the effects of ideological and discursive interests on systematic distinctions between various kinds of imagery. A second thesis rises from the ideologising of the diversity of image concepts and radical ambiguity and polyvalency of images: Thesis 2As modern Westernised people, all of us, against our will, are victims of reduced yet popular "picture theories of perception". As a consequence we are always already ideologically infected in our own bodies, ideologically obsessed even in our most personal and private experience ("nobody can see for or on behalf of somebody else"). As a rule, human production and reception of images in visually mediated communication implicate the full range of slippery image categories distinguished among Gibson, Elkins and Mitchell. Each action may be initiated by a specific kind of image but any serious engagement with imagery will eventually generate connections between diverse categories. Despite this principal assumption we nonetheless have at our disposal only extremely reduced conceptions of the image. As historical subjects of prevailing modern "scopic regimes" -- recall Heidegger's (1977) striking description of modernity as der Zeitalter der Weltbild ("the age of the world picture") -- we are deeply embroiled in Western ideological culture and cannot escape its effects. In general, we have come to conceive and experience the spectrum of image categories one-sidedly on the spatial model of graphic images and, even more reductively, on the picture as a technical variety of graphic image -- in effect "picturing vision" in a literal sense (Snyder 1980). In the West, pictures attained model status as rationalising agents in the aftermath of the Renaissance. Accordingly, the "picture" ("graphic image" or Gibson's "arrested image") began "colonising" the spectrum of image categories -- the pictorial model extending its influence from left to right in terms of Mitchell's "family of images" in the table above. "The age of the world picture" germinated during the early modern era, before experimental science, mathematical construction, technological design, pictorial art and narrative rhetoric differentiated into separate disciplines of knowledge, each involving its own modern social institutions. During the Renaissance the picture category derived its model status from its historical positioning at points of intersection between these areas of cultural change. Inspired by the search for scientific knowledge and a desire for technological control, early modern optics discovered various mechanical analogies between the human eye and new optical instruments of scientific observation such as the camera obscura, telescope and microscope. On the basis of these mechanical analogies epoch-making connections were established between optical or retinal images and pictures made by human hands. Such analogies are evidently the topic of an eighteenth-century comparison of the human eye and the camera obscura (Figure 1). Johannes Kepler was merely the first of many to define the optical image as a reversed or upside-down picture (pictura), establishing analogies between optical configurations in the retinal mosaic and the perspectival design of graphic images or pictures (cf Lindberg 1982, Lepsky 1986, Panofsky 1991, Damisch 1994). The picture's expanding scope in "modernising vision" during "the age of the world picture" dilated from the composition of paintings to the system of mapping co-ordinates in cartography, the axis system of graphic charting or diagramming, the registration of camera images, the projection of film images on cinematic screens or television tubes, the digital design of computer graphics to various formats of digital imaging on monitor screens. These technological advances are indicative as well of escalating degrees of mechanisation and industrialisation of human vision (cf Crary 1988, Debray 1995).
Figure 1: Comparative depiction of the human eye and the camera obscura. Early eighteenth-century book illustration With optical image-formation based on the model of anthropogenic pictures, graphic depictions in return are easily conceived in terms of visual perception (taking graphic images as "quasi-percepts").[5] Furthermore, the "picturalising" of image categories was not restricted to the discovery and explication of analogies between pictures and eyes. The "picturalising" of the image domain continued inexorably till the full spectrum of invisible and inner-bodily images were modelled on, or reconceived in pictorial terms -- one reason some prefer "iconicity" as a term for the image domain. The "colonising" process also affected mental and verbal imagery,[6] the images of memory, dreams, metaphors, fictive imaginary fantasies, eidetic or notional images like place and body images, human and gender images, images of the self and of others, role models, corporate images, city images, images of history and of communal destinies, heroes, martyrs and enemies, images of societal order, nature, the world and of the divine, etc.[7] The ideologisation of human culture typically feeds on and exploits such networks and constellations of embodied imagery in the field of visuality. Ideological powers are active in the field of visuality, shaping the production and reception of symbolic forms of human identity, reflected in the frequently violent cultural dynamic of contesting images of humanity, society, history, the world and the gods or idols. This involves the construction of imaginary fixations whose distorting effects are due to their cancer-like growth in the image domain and their relentless dissemination in visual culture. Such ideological fixations are typically images of "what goes without saying" (Ricoeur 1986, cf Van den Berg 1993) -- images that empower and disempower, images that conceal and reveal, images that identify and stereotype, images that blind people and that make people see, images that console and images that damn. Spiritual blindness, sighted persons who nonetheless do not or wish not to see -- these are apt descriptions of the ideological disabilities of human vision and imagination (metaphorically similar to pathologies of vision like "blind spots" and "tunnel vision" examined in Elkins 1997). Containing many histories of contested images (cf Moseneder 1997), visuality in the end belongs to the domain of imago where normative ideological image powers, image values and communal human identities are at stake (cf Marin 1993, Van den Berg 1996: 12-23). In the history of visuality relations between symbolic images of the self and others, images of self-interest and of alien cultures are distorted into ideological confrontations between self-images and threatening images of enemies. Western concepts of picturing or depiction are reductive in unduly emphasising technical procedures of image making, with production aesthetics superseding reception aesthetics. Pictorial images are made by means of iconic reductions -- products of "miniaturising" processes (among others framing cuts, motif selection, scale diminution, reduction of dimensions, decrease of light and colour intensities, exclusion of movement, sound and animation).[8] Of far greater significance, however, is the fact that such reductions enable the users of images to register major advantages, in particular with respect to the objectification, fixation, filtering, ordering and manipulation of visual information as a means of expanding the power of human knowledge and concerted control of the whole of reality. One of the engines driving this "picturalising of the domain of images" was perspective design (the "fatal triangle" of projective geometry) and, underlying it, Leone Alberti's finestra aperta or open window, picture metaphor. With representation reduced to depiction, the depictive image is assumed to be a transparent medium that affords a dominating or controlling survey ("regime") of depicted realities and fictionalities. One of the most regularly reproduced images in visual culture textbooks, Albrecht Dürer's renowned wood-cut print of 1525 (Figure 2), offers a classical illustration of this notion. Notice the focused concentration and immobilised monocular gaze of the picture maker or draughtsman. A series of pregnant terms may be used to describe this manner of looking. It may be characterised as instrumentally measured, notionally attentive and concentrated staring, as analytically laying bare or dissecting, as rationally synthetising or composing -- in short, exemplifying controlled calculation and objectifying fixation. Such terms all allude to features of a way of seeing that has acquired a certain notoriety in visual culture studies as "the gaze" -- a visual counterpart of the crucial idea that knowledge is power.
Figure 2: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), The artist and his model (ca 1527). Wood-cut print from Unterweysung der Messung "The gaze" (as opposed to the mobile "glance") may therefore be taken as alternative term for the "picturalising of the domain of images". Its various aspects are revealed in proliferating variations on this theme, for instance "notional gaze", "discursive gaze", "disembodied gaze", "male gaze", "voyeur gaze", "colonial gaze", "flâneur gaze", "tourist gaze", "nostalgic gaze", "paranoid gaze", "logocentric gaze" and "philosopher's gaze" (cf Bryson 1983 & 1988, Jay 1986, Olin 1996, Levin 1999). Crucial as a cultural site of ideological power and resistance, the gaze introduces a third thesis: Thesis 3As modern people, inhabitants of a globally Westernised world, all of us are at once both practitioners and the victims of ocularcentrism -- the shape of logocentrism in the field of visuality. The history of technologised picturalising in the image domain is driven by older and more powerful ideological traditions. This is reflected in terms like "the nobility of sight" compared to the other senses (Jonas 1954); the archaic origin of theoretikos as eye-witnessing spectator of divine vision at religious ceremonies (Habermas 1972), and "the modern hegemony of sight" (cf Jay 1986, 1888a & 1988b, Levin 1993). The cardinal role of visual metaphors in defining the validity and legitimacy of scientific or theoretical thought's grasp of self-evident truth in Western rationalism's theo-ontological and metaphysical traditions is common knowledge (cf Rorty 1980, Miles 1985). One merely has to be reminded of the currency and frequency of (dead) metaphors like "the light of reason", "revelation", "observation", "scrutiny", "insight", "supervision", "seeing through something", "point of view", Wesenschau or "clear and distinct concepts". Twisting the Cartesian cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), the motto video ergo sum ("I see, therefore I am") captures this pervasive trend in a terse formulation. It secures the empowered position of knowing subjects over against any object of knowledge, at the same time preserving seemingly opposing ideals of freely adopted alternative points of view versus universal claims, distanced detachment of observation versus metaphysical "presence" -- all based metaphorically on aspects of human vision. Ocularcentrism is so deeply ingrained as a fundamental trait of our ideological culture that its "postmodern deconstruction" tends to similarly conceptualise itself in visual terms, for instance Jean-François Lyotard's figurative use of anamorphosis (the extreme perspectival deformation of pictorial images). Certainly one of the best-known examples is Michel Foucault's notion of the "gaze" as panoptic domination. This is based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (Figure 3), an architectural design for a circular prison building, where a single, invisible and omnipotent sentinel in a central tower keeps watch over the many visible and powerless prisoners incarcerated in the circular array of cells. Not confined to penal institutions, the disciplining machinery of vigilant panoptic surveillance eventually "colonised" the clinic, hospital, asylum, boarding school, military barrack, factory floor, administrative head-office and archive. For Foucault (1973 & 1980), the Panopticon's asymmetrical power relations visualise the idea of a "scopic regime of surveillance" -- a new take on the soul's bodily confinement in the dark and phantasmagoric interior of Plato's grotto. This entails a dominant and pervasive system that disempowers human subjects at the point of their visual exposure to others, subjecting their visibility[9] to a disciplining, visualising power whose authority itself is of invisible, discursive origin but, more importantly, internalised by individuals who become their own overseers -- inspecting, guarding and disciplining themselves.
Figure 3: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), Panopticon (1791) The Panopticon represents one of many striking examples of ideological conundrums brought about by complicating connections constructed between diverse areas in the image domain or, to formulate this in another way, puzzling interlacings between various phases of visualising. Mitchell[10] designates such connective images as "hypericons". Examples of such enthralling image nexuses from the history of Western ocularcentrism include Plato's grotto allegory, empiricist Aristotle's tabula rasa or impressions on an empty wax tablet, the aiming archer's drawn bow as medieval image of intentionality, Locke's dark room (human consciousness as camera obscura), Goethe's "Dann schließe ich die Augen" ("then I closed my eyes") for the physiological generation of entoptic images (Crary 1990), Karl Marx's inverted camera obscura image for false consciousness (Mitchell 1986:168-172), Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit figure, Sartre's voyeur, the Aura of Walter Benjamin's dialectical images, Richard Kearney's (1987) postmodern "labyrinth of reflecting mirrors" or Martin Jay's (1993) "downcast eyes". The unfolding of any hypericon entails an arduous, ideologically mapped voyage of exploration, full of twists and turns, through the entire image domain. However, it soon turns out that the picture category's apparently assured status in the image domain is highly questionable. Hence, the picture category has to be fundamentally reconsidered if we are indeed to counter the ideological authority of "picture theories of visual perception", the pervasive "picturalising" of non-pictorial image categories and, finally, the underlying ocularcentrism. Art historiography can assist visual culture studies in this critical task. In itself deeply infected by these ideological distortions,[11] art historiography nonetheless is the most experienced discipline in the compound undertaking of interpreting pictures, framing theoretical categories and facing ideological powers. Hence my final thesis: Thesis 4With the objective of initiating resistance against ocularcentric "scopic regimes" we need dynamic, progressive and action-orientated concepts of the image, appreciating images in temporal and human terms as bodily events which involve ideologically shaped performative acts of the imagination that open picture categories to visual display rhetoric. A full arsenal of arguments is required to unseat received ideas once they have been firmly established. On this occasion the most rudimentary ideas will have to suffice to outline an alternative perspective on the pictorial image. Pictures are not merely passive objects of perception. As quasi-subjects they "look back" at us, returning our gazes. As human beings we are not passive recipients of optical stimuli but responsive subjects, responsible for our actions in the field of visuality. We are touched and moved by pictures; they address us, affectively petitioning our attention. In turn we engage them in imaginative interactions, often even interpreting them against the grain. Though inanimate, they are animated by our actions; though silent in themselves they "speak to us" when we genuinely engage them. They bodily project imaginary worlds in the eyes of the attentive observer. Undoubtedly graphic images are made by means of iconic reductions that arrest them on spatial screens. Yet they only serve their purposes or begin to approach their completion in spectatorial actions of iconic augmentation.[12] As is the case with all cultural products, pictures are made for us (pro nobis), destined for spectators' imaginative responses. A "stilled" picture (in other words, spatially fixed as motionless, inanimate and silent image) may have a presentational effect of being objectively there, being at once and totally present on its own pictorial terms of reference.[13] In reality, however, pictorial representation comprises extremely nuanced configurations at various levels. Pictures contain clues to be traced, gaps to be filled, connections to be made, ambiguities to be negotiated, games to be played, puzzles to be solved, codes to be deciphered, meanings to be construed, conjectures to be tested, positions to be adopted, conclusions to be drawn -- all of this by spectators bodily performing human acts of imaginative appropriation. Saccadic eye movements of subjects viewing pictures are regularly recorded in perception psychology laboratory tests. One such case, the experiments of Alfred Yarbus (1967), may be used to demonstrate aspects of image processing Gibson had in mind with "progressive imagery" (Figure 4). Such mechanical recordings plot optical vision's minute focal area[14] rapidly scanning a picture surface[15] in search of meaning, in each case hunting down clues to answer a particular leading question about the depicted subject matter.[16] Traces of a spectator's bodily interactions with a pictorial image, each recording registers one fleeting moment of "progressive image formation" in the give-and-take between picture and spectator -- each plotting the course of one act in a lasting picture-spectator encounter. Together composing the picture as a performative event, countless such sequences of affective moments and interruptions emerge progressively from repetitive actions of "pictorial generativity" -- a felicitous term for picture-viewing competences put forward in Flint Schier's (1986) Deeper into pictures. Picture-events are infinite in variety. Run-of-the-mill pictures attract no more than a first cursory glance, passing virtually unnoticed, while certain horrific or repulsive pictures cannot even be seen (cf Elkins 1997). Compelling pictures or at times mere arresting pictorial detail[17] may be major incidents leaving the spectator appalled or elated, exhausted or, on extremely rare occasions, in tears, while certain dark or enigmatic pictures may for long refuse communication -- confusing, frustrating, intriging or absorbing their spectators (cf Gröwe 1986).
Figure 4: Recordings of saccadic eye movements scanning Ilya Repin's The unexpected visitor (1884) Telling features of pictorial vision are not registered in mechanical recordings of saccadic eye movements. A number of invisible but vision-enabling conditions deserve mention. Pictures and fields of vision never coincide. Thus the spectator always sees more than just a single picture; variable actions, frames and contexts of display rather than isolated and arrested images permeate the individual field of vision. Picture-events as such cannot be recorded. Thus spectators with differing degrees of visual memory are required to start anew with every performance of pictorial spectation or fresh imaginative appropriation. Pictures affect each other, often in surprising ways, whether seen together or in succession, or returning to the same picture after longer or shorter periods of time. Spectators project pictorial images in peripheral vision, held indistinctly as emergent wholes or "schematic maps" (Hochberg 1968), forecasting and foretelling the eventful outcome of a picture performance. This coincides with the progressive collection of visual meaning from the imaginative interplay of visual protension and retension in close readings of pictorial detail.[18] Spectators respond to pictures with imaginative collusion, finding and playing along with imaginary roles pictures project for prospective viewers, gradually fleshing out the contours of appropriation and critical distance, eventually bonding with, censuring or rejecting the representation. ConclusionAs such a picture-event represents merely one link, the pictorial manifestation in submerged chains of imagery of diverse invisible kinds. When negotiating a picture -- this "surface with markings" -- we thus have to be aware of ideology-infected and embodied networks of images that each individual spectator and subcultural community of spectators, involuntarily contribute to any picture's performativity. This conclusion corroborates that of Hans Belting in his latest publication, Bild-Antropologie (2001). He describes the image sciences' field of investigation as "der Mensch als Ort der Bilder" (the human being as the place of images), the body upon and within which the ideological war of images takes place. Illustrations
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Footnotes[1] For instance, Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne project or Bilderatlas from the first decades of the twentieth century heralded current practices in visual culture studies such as the use of reproductive images and combining images from art history with contemporary mass media images (cf Woodfield 2001). [2] Among others the so-called "linguistic turn", structuralist semiotics, poststructuralism, New Historicism and latterly also the "pictorial" or "iconic turn" (cf Foster 1988, Krauss 1993, Mitchell 1994, Melville & Readings 1995, Debray 1995, Leppert 1996, Sachs-Hombach & Rehkämper 1999, Hubert Burda Stiftung 2002). [3]Bildgeschichte (cf Belting 1994, Gaskell 1991) involves the history of images in general, focusing on changing cultural functions of imagery in an expanded field visual material (cf Leppert 1996, Haskell 1993, Burke 2001), distinct from the confined aesthetic field of art history (cf Roskill & Carrier 1983). [4] Cf among others Paulsson 1967, Boehm 1978, Bätschmann 1984, Heelan 1985, Morrison 1988. [5] An understanding of graphic images as "quasi-percepts" is followed almost involuntary by the contested idea of depictions as unmediated forms of iconic "presence". The latter is in conflict with the notion of conventional, socially mediated representation, hence the continual contrasting of concepts like index and icon, mimesis and construction, nature and culture, physis en nomos (cf Hasenmueller 1989). [6] Deeply flawed by the notion of Vorstellungen in the "mind's eye", the mental imagery category has in the wake of nominalism been contaminated by diverse "pictorial" features , for instance by a psychologised "quasi-perceptual" comprehension of ideas in empiricist traditions and by rational schematicism in idealist traditions (cf Collins 1991). The notion of "logical pictures" in early Wittgenstein's Tractatus offers an extreme example (cf Mitchell 1986: 14-19, Elkins 1999: 57-67). [7] These various kinds of imagery are intensively explored in art history where they often appear as ideologically charged motifs, topics or themes of modern paintings and sculptural monuments. The notional "picturalising" of "non-pictorial" image categories, on the other hand, explains conceptual mechanisms characteristic of "picture theories of visual perception" -- ideological changes affecting the broad field of visuality at the basis of the history of visual arts. [8] Bryson (1981) correctly highlights the graphic metaphor of diminution, reduction or "miniaturising". Visual depictions entail technical diminutions, formal reductions or mediated semiotic filtering of visual information. Spatial truncation of dimensions, diminution of scale, loss of tonal intensities, restriction of chromatic range result in the typical pictorial motionlessness, lifelessness, silence or "stillness" -- pictorial qualities at first valued negatively but in due course positively. Initially they were seen as the pictorial art's "deficiencies" that early modern picture makers had to conquer in order to master the "difficulties" of pictorial enargeia as desired quality of imaginary vividness. The modern era revalued this "stillness" as a positive sign of the medium-specific, formally aesthetic, figurative potential of autonomous painting (cf Edwards 1984: 208-10, Morrison 1988: 296-325, Willems 1989). [9] More accurately, the "visibility" of subjects has to be understood here as discourse's systemic functioning, that is as visual representability, "depictabilty" or "picturability", including individual "data-images" in digital data-banks interlinked in the "electronic Panopticon" as investigated by David Lyon in The electronic eye: the rise of surveillance society (1994). Picture archives or image data-banks are thus necessary adjuncts of the panoptic gaze. [10] According to Mitchell (1986: 5-6) hypericons concern "the way we depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure the practice of figuration. These doubled pictures, images, and figures [...] are strategies for both giving in to and resisting the temptation to see ideas as images. Plato's cave, Aristotle's wax tablet, Locke's dark room, Wittgenstein's hieroglyphic are all examples of the 'hypericon' that, along with the popular trope of the 'mirror of nature', provide our models for thinking about all sorts of images — mental, verbal, pictorial, and perceptual. They also provide [...] the scenes in which our anxieties about images can express themselves in a variety of iconoclastic discourses, and in which we can rationalize the claim that, whatever images are, ideas are something else." [11] Cf Preziosi 1989 on the distortive effects of the panoptic gaze and the archives in the discipline, and the debates collected in Bryson et al 1991, Melville & Readings 1995 & Cheetham et al 1998. [12] Based on François Dagognet's idea of augmentation iconique, Ricoeur proposes a radical revaluation of the idea of miniaturising. Graphic images' iconic functioning resemble the metaphoric processes of imaginative schematising used by Ricoeur to explain fiction's function of world projection. The painters' technical reductions and medial reductions of visuality are seen as systematising and schematising instruments of metaphorical condensation and imaginary world-projection in the pictorial medium: "Thus we are referred to the primary meaning of the word fiction: fictio comes from facere. When the image is made, is is also able to remake the world" (Ricoeur 1979: 129); "Far from yielding less than the original, pictorial activity may be characterized in terms of an 'iconic augmentation', where the strategy of painting, for example, is to reconstruct reality on the basis of a limited optic alphabet. The strategy of contraction and miniaturization yields more by handling less. In this way the main effect of painting is [...] to increase the meaning of the universe by capturing it in the network of its abbreviated signs" (Ricoeur 1976: 420, cf Gilmour 1986: 52-109). [13] Consider the extreme positions in this regard -- the first of "transparency" where the picture itself becomes "invisible", being replaced by the illusion of the depicted object's "real presence", the second of "opaqueness" or "non-transparency" where the supposedly "non-representative" picture only shows its own means of pictorial design. [14] The foveal area only comprises about two percent of the field of vision. [15] Eyes movement consists of approximately four rapid jumps ("saccades") per second, each separated by fleeting moments of rest on certain points ("fixations"). The sequence of saccadic movements and the duration of fixations are involuntary (cf Frangenberg 1990: 144-147). [16] Yarbus (1967) tested his subjects by asking them seven questions about an image, each question had to be answered within three minutes. In the present connection the kind of questions to be answered from pictures is a major but secondary issue. The point at issue is pictorial imagery's constitution as affording the guided searching function of visual perception. [17] Cf the sharp distinction Barthes (1984) draws between studium and punctum in the perception of photographic images. [18] Mostly transpiring below the threshold of consciousness, the steady and dynamic flux of vision's temporal interface between protension and retension releases or impedes anticipated nuances of evasive meaning. The nuances are continually being recalled, retraced, reviewed and reconsidered for possible assimilation into particular picture-events or cumulative appropriations of an image, for example facilitating the reading and interpretation of ambiguous proleptic and analeptic relations of visual narration. |
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Prof Dirk J van den Berg, Dept of Art History and Visual Culture Studies, University of the Free State, P O Box 339, Bloemfontein 9300, e-mail: vdbergd@hum.uovs.ac.za |
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