Image & Narrative

While googling for stuff on visual communication, I stumbled upon Image [&] Narrative, which has a number of relevant articles for class and probably for our developing papers. The site describes Image [&] Narrative as

a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term. Beside tackling theoretical issues, it is a platform for reviews of real life examples.

Lots of neat stuff there.

 

 

Visibility

So much has been written about the relative invisibility of queers that not much more needs to be said, however, suffice to say that mainstream representations wrest definitional control away from the subjects it seeks to present. That is, mass media defines the terms, boundaries and place of GLBTQ folks. This is particularly problematic when encountering and existing within heterosexist social practices.

Other areas of visibility show some promise. Philly’s gayborhood saw the installation of rainbow street signs to demarcate the gay frequented part of town. This is a good step towards full social inclusion as it articulates a presence in a public space. Here we are! On our terms!

What is most interesting with queer visibility occurs in the absence of the dominant class. I’m speaking mainly about resort towns that cater to a majority gay and lesbian crowd, like Fire Island. Here, a slightly different type of identity is enacted. This identity is unencumbered by dominant societal restrictions, or rules of social decorum like the forced closet of compulsory heterosexuality. It is a social space of visible embodied queeerness.

Does this visible queer space represent a subversive practice, undermining dominant social practices? Unfortunately it does not. Who is left out? Does this place represent the spectrum of queer desire? Does it exlcude individuals while constructing an image of what it measn to be gay?

The visible presentation of queer seems to be white, urban and male. I think this may be the dominant representation of alterante sexuality in mass mediated images as well. Unfortunately, as a means of signifying, visibility has as part of its process an exclusionary function that adheres to sexist and racist assumptions of dominant class standards.

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

There’s a store in Old City that takes its inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s provocative essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The name of this overpriced boutique shop is called, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Its “about” section describes itself thusly:

In this troubling epoch of industrial commodification, standardization of reproduction, and fomentation of a society of shallow spectacle, Art In The Age issues a challenge and rally cry. We fight fire with fire, subsuming the onslaught of watered down facsimiles and inaccessible displays with thought-provoking products of real cultural capital

Wow. The proprietors take their work seriously. Their work in selling authenticity and “deliver[ing] inspiration and aspiration back to The People,” that is. And by People I assume they mean those that can afford to shop at the store (seriously, its expensive).

While I do suppose there is a certain uniqueness in that, being a boutique store, they can only present their products incrementally and to relatively small audiences, it is odd that a store inspired by Benjamin’s ideas not only exists but claims great artistic integrity in selling overpriced, screenprinted, mass-produced t-shirts.

And speaking of authenticity and boutique stores, Art in the Age (the shop) provides a nice illustration of Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra. These shops present themselves as some sort of ideal in the reaction to big box retailors. This simulation of master craftspeople directly providing their goods to the public plays on a false distinction between artificiality and authenticity.

I would go so far as to say that it obscures the “real” and deters from the issue that its “a model of a real without origin or reality” (Simulacra, p. 1). What exactly is a boutique store presenting in its image of artistry? Does this refer to anything real? Indeed, Art in the Age is hyperreal.

I think  Debord would probably avoid shopping in this store (Benjamin and Baudrillard would totally buy stuff there, though) and it provides a nice example of spectacular commodification. Even authenticity is a spectacle in this store, something to be bought and traded in an economic system. I guess this is what Debord means when he describes the commodity and its “complete colonization of social life” (Society, p. 29). A stroll through this store lends weight to his claim that “commodities are all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity” (p. 29). Art in the Age sells a lot more than those expensive screen printed t-shirts. It markets an image and a feeling. Yes, they sell spectacles.

Also, see that peacoat on the frontpage? I want that.

Relevant Website

Hey all,

I found this website called Sociological Images. It presents and discusses  images and their ideological implications. While not 100% related to the stated objectives of visual communication and culture (some of the images are demographic graphs and indexes about polling results and such which nonetheless say something about our cultre), it does offer some insight into the world of images, particularly the gendered nature of many visual tropes.

Lady Gaga is a fraud.

Whilst watching the latest instalment of Saturday Night Live I was bombarded with a figure that has been dominating the billboard charts: lady gaga. Seriously, this has to be an extremly convoluted joke upon this fine country of ours.

Informed by Baudrilard I must say, contrary to any claims of  “originality”, that the image of lady gaga  is a mere copy of New York Upper East Side “art personality.” Not only a copy, but a copy of a copy. Indeed, an image without an original. Lady Gaga is what one expects from a so-called provacative performer. She hasn’t broken any boundaries; she’s merely presented an “edgy” image. An image we’ve come to expect from “envelope-pushing” artists.

I’m gonna get a lot of nasty comments for this, but, fuck Lady Gaga.

(Parenthetically, I appreciate her representation of the queer commnunity. But Lady Gaga makes queer safe for mainstream heterosexist society. Do us a favor, Lady Gaga, and place radical sexual politics on the forefront. Don’t erase us in your basterdization of hough couture)

My Friend Umberto

As a child I once engaged a classmate in an argument. The argument involved a crayon, the color of which I would now call azure. At the time, a time of cultural conditioning and semiotic introduction, I deemed the crayon light blue whereas my school chum considered it baby blue. A heated argument ensued; my defense being that that, since we are no longer babies, the qualifier baby does not apply to this shade of blue.

This conundrum and the ensuing screaming match was not an aesthetic matter, but rather, according to Umberto Eco, was “a cultural one, and as such it is filtered through a linguistic system.” Of course, Umberto Eco was not my kindergarten teacher nor was he an acquaintance of mine, otherwise he would of enlightened me to our interpretation of color through a cultural lens, i.e., the means and ways through which we interpret our perceptual world. In other words, how we make sense of sensation is determined linguistically.

In the case of the azure crayon and its ambiguous hue, both my classmate and I were distinguishing it against various other crayons, noting that it was not just plain blue. And, considering the constant admonishments we received to “stop acting like babies,” the word that signifies  that crayon was of importance, in that the pertinences of my world at the time pointed to a practical vocabulary to describe my crayons.  I believe this gives weight to Umberto’s claim that “a signification system allows its possible users to isolate and name what is relevant to them from a given point of view.” While we did exhibit the discernment necessary for “perceptual categorization” our paticular range of experience was (and is) made meaningful through culturally practical value.

Besides nostalgia, I also write to lament the fact that Umberto and I didn’t get to hang out as youngsters (or when I was a child, rather). It’s too bad really, as the argument (and everything, all the time, really) “[dealt] with verbal language in so far as it [conveyed] notions about visual experience.” An important lesson that Umberto could have imported upon me was that I “must…understand how verbal language makes the non-verbal experience recognizable, speakable and effable.” He would of lectured me and said something along the lines of:

In everyday life, our reactivity to colour demonstrates a sort of inner and profound solidarity between semiotic systems. Just as language is determined by the way in which society sets up systems of values, things and ideas, so our chromatic perception is determined by language.

Than you, my friend Umberto.

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words

I have heard the lamentation/celebration that we increasingly live in a visual world. It was a topic of discussion in class this evening and a point well taken. Indeed, with the ascedency of facebook and photographic media devices it does seem as if the visual world is expanding.

Does this expanded visual world translate to a world with less written or spoken language and more communication enacted strictly visually? In a word, no. It is a testament to the centrality of language that we can speak of a visual world and convey ideas through images.

Barthes, in The Rhetoric of the Image, argues that an image only makes sense by way of a intrepretive framework made possible by language. The spoken and written word is what binds the signifier and signified. In order for an image to make sense we must interpret it linguistically.

Often, images prove ambiguous. More, they provide a simplification, a shorthand, for large and complex discourses. WWII photos denote an immediate idea of the war and The United States place in it, while simultaneously connoting a narrative of history imbued with ideology. These denotations and connotations require constant reinforcement through the continued use of words.

Thus Saving Private Ryan reorients conceptions of WWII imagery by reifying the particular ideology surrounding the pictures from this time. the film utilizes language to anchor the meanings we asscoiate with iconic photographs.

A picture is worth a 1000 words because it needs 1000 words. It needs a discourse in order to ground it. So: signs refer to other signs and an image does not exist independant of language.

Barthes

Barthes grants symbols and signs a life all their own, suggesting a stable, although arbitrary, relationship between the signifier and the signified. While he does articulate the cultural, shared meanings of the images we encounter, Barthes ultimately provides a sketch of symbols and symbol systems that remain relatively fixed. Indeed, an interpretation of an image can call to mind both an immediate experience, such that a road may remind us of travel, and a larger narrative surrounding the idea of roads, like efficiency and commerce. This is the denotive and connotative power of images, respectively.

While this schematic overview proves useful in the interpretation of images and their function in society, it strikes me as discounting of human agency. What of our manipulation of signs and the often transitory nature of images? The meaning of images is a shared experience but through this experience we often appropriate and reappropriate images to fit our often changing narratives about our world and our place in it.

The image of the road suddenly means something quite different when placed in conjunction with a traffic jam. Further, a traffic jam can upset our notions of efficiency and commerce and suggest alternate means of transportation and commerce, even bringing to mind the failings of our reliance on automobiles.

The image of the road still signifies certain cultural beliefs, which, I believe, is a testament to the power of ideology; however, that meaning is not set in stone. The shared meanings that an image denotes and connotes make interpretation easy and gives it a taken for granted quality. A belief in the stability of signs is actually our complicity in their use and power.

While the example I gave is somewhat frivolous, our interaction with signs can alter our world. Perhaps we can alter what we see when we encounter an image.

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