[As published in An Anthology (1963). Errors are corrected and punctuation is normalized.]
"Concept art" is first of all an art of which the material is "concepts," as the material of for ex. music is sound. Since "concepts" are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language. That is, unlike for ex. a work of music, in which the music proper (as opposed to notation, analysis, a.s.f.) is just sound, concept art proper will involve language. From the philosophy of language, we learn that a "concept" may as well be thought of as the intension of a name; this is the relation between concepts and language. The notion of a concept is a vestige of the notion of a Platonic form (the thing which for ex. all tables have in common: tableness), which notion is replaced by the notion of a name objectively, metaphysically related to its intension (so that all tables now have in common their objective relation to `table'). Now the claim that there can be an objective relation between a name and its intension is wrong, and (the word) `concept', as commonly used now, can be discredited (see my book Philosophy Proper). If, however, it is enough for one that there be a subjective relation between a name and its intension, namely the unhesitant decision as to the way one wants to use the name, the unhesitant decisions to affirm the names of some things but not others, then `concept' is valid language, and concept art has a philosophically valid basis.
Now what is artistic, aesthetic, about a work which is a body of concepts? This question can best be answered by telling where concept art came from; I developed it in an attempt to straighten out certain traditional activities generally regarded as aesthetic. The first of these is "structure art," music, visual art, a.s.f., in which the important thing is "structure." My definitive discussion of structure art can be found in "General Aesthetics"; here I will just summarize that discussion. Much structure art is a vestige of the time when for ex. music was believed to be knowledge, a science which had important things to say in astronomy a.s.f. Contemporary structure artists, on the other hand, tend to claim the kind of cognitive value for their art that conventional contemporary mathematicians claim for mathematics. Modern examples of structure art are the fugue and total serial music. These examples illustrate the important division of structure art into two kinds according to how the structure is appreciated. In the case of a fugue, one is aware of its structure in listening to it; one imposes "relationships," a categorization (hopefully that intended by the composer) on the sounds while listening to them, that is, has an "(associated) artistic structure experience." In the case of total serial music, the structure is such that this cannot be done; one just has to read an "analysis" of the music, definition of the relationships. Now there are two things wrong with structure art. First, its cognitive pretensions are utterly wrong. Secondly, by trying to be music or whatever (which has nothing to do with knowledge), and knowledge represented by structure, structure art both fails, is completely boring, as music, and doesn't begin to explore the aesthetic possibilities structure can have when freed from trying to be music or whatever. The first step in straightening out for ex. structure music is to stop calling it "music," and start saying that the sound is used only to carry the structure and that the real point is the structure--and then you will see how limited, impoverished, the structure is. Incidentally, anyone who says that works of structure music do occasionally have musical value just doesn't know how good real music (the Goli Dance of the Baoule; "Cans on Windows" by L. Young; the contemporary American hit song "Sweets for My Sweets," by the Drifters) can get. When you make the change, then since structures are concepts, you have concept art. Incidentally, there is another, less important kind of art which when straightened out becomes concept art: art involving play with the concepts of the art such as, in music, "the score," "performer vs. listener," "playing a work." The second criticism of structure art applies, with the necessary changes, to this art.
The second main antecedent of structure art is mathematics. This is the result of my revolution in mathematics, which is written up definitively in the Appendix; here I will only summarize. The revolution occurred first because for reasons of taste I wanted to de-emphasize discovery in mathematics, mathematics as discovering theorems and proofs. I wasn't good at such discovery, and it bored me. The first way I though of to de-emphasize discovery came not later than Summer, 1960; it was that since the value of pure mathematics is now regarded as aesthetic rather than cognitive, why not try to make up aesthetic theorems, without considering whether they are true. The second way, which came at about the same time, was to find, as a philosopher, that the conventional claim that theorems and proofs are discovered is wrong, for the same reason I have already given that `concept' can be discredited. The third way, which came in the fall-winter of 1960, was to work in unexplored regions of formalist mathematics. The resulting mathematics still had statements, theorems, proofs, but the latter weren't discovered in the way they traditionally were. Now exploration of the wider possibilities of mathematics as revolutionized by me tends to lead beyond what it makes sense to call "mathematics"; the category of "mathematics," a vestige of Platonism, is an "unnatural," bad one. My work in mathematics leads to the new category of "concept art," of which straightened out traditional mathematics (mathematics as discovery) is an untypical, small but intensively developed part.
I can now return to the question of why concept art is "art." Why isn't it an absolutely new, or at least a non-artistic, non-aesthetic activity? The answer is that the antecedents of concept art are commonly regarded as artistic, aesthetic activities; on a deeper level, interesting concepts, concepts enjoyable in themselves, especially as they occur in mathematics, are commonly said to "have beauty." By calling my activity "art," therefore, I am simply recognizing this common usage, and the origin of the activity in structure art and mathematics. However: it is confusing to call things as irrelevant as the emotional enjoyment of (real) music, and the intellectual enjoyment of concepts, the same kind of enjoyment. Since concept art includes almost everything ever said to be "music," at least, which is not music for the emotions, perhaps it would be better to restrict `art' to apply to art for the emotions, and recognize my activity as an independent, new activity, irrelevant to art (and knowledge).
Copyright by Henry A. Flynt Jr., 1961
Editorial notes on the text
a.s.f. abbreviation for “and so forth”
The 1963 printing may have had the word ‘intesion’ which was a misspelling of ‘intension’.
Philosophy Proper.
Published in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975).
“General Aesthetics”
A manuscript which Flynt worked on in early 1961. Flynt did not preserve the manuscript as such. Some of the material was transferred to later manuscripts in the “aesthetics” series, such as From Culture to Veramusement. The section which is germane here is “Structure Art and Pure Mathematics.” That survives and was published in Henry Flynt: Fragments and Reconstructions from a Destroyed Oeuvre (New York, backworks, 1982).
“Cans on Windows” by La Monte Young.
The embracing title is 2 Sounds (1960).
“my revolution in mathematics”
When Flynt submitted “Concept Art” for publication, he did not include this appendix. The argument of this revolution was transferred to Chapter 5 of the 1963-64 anti-art manuscripts (survives in holograph, was never published), and in “1966 Mathematical Studies,” etc., in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization. Academic notice of these claims appears in Graham Priest, “Perceiving Contradictions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, December 1999.
the above copied from: http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/conart.html
Friday, December 28, 2007
Artistic Conceptions at the Crossing from Analog to Digital Photography, Anette Hüsch
No previous technological development changed photography as intensely as digital image processing. Although the idea of a photographic truth and authenticity was questioned and infiltrated since its earliest beginnings, the quality of retouching and manipulating an existing image nevertheless lags far behind the intervention possibilities offered by computer programs like «Photoshop». Experts could at least recognize the early manipulations of images, whereas nowadays digital interventions are impossible to comprehend: a digitallyaltered or assembled image can no longer be absolutely distinguished from a photograph, since the route taken via digital image processing can lead back to analog forms again. What aesthetic potential the digital image possesses, how perceiving images in general has changed and which ethical questions arise has been discussed ever since. One early and enormously influential contribution to this debate is William T. Mitchell’s book, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, published in 1992. In his analysis, Mitchell – a professor in the Department of Architecture and Media Art at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge/USA – makes a clear distinction between the image produced photochemically and the digital image. [1] His diagnosed differences of nature between the two technical processes and thus accomplished theoretical departure from photography seem to manifest themselves in the artistic context for the moment.
Three years after the publication of Mitchell’s book, the vastly conceived exhibition entitled «Fotografie nach der Fotografie» (Photography After Photography) offered an overview of those art-context tendencies which deal with the influence of digital technologies on photography. The works shown in this framework by Keith Cottingham, the artist duo Anthony Aziz / Sammy Cucher, and the artist Inez van Lamsweerde, known from the world of fashion photography, could almost be considered ‹classics› in the meantime – just as the catalogue of the same name, even today a compendium of important articles on the state of radical change in analog image media under the influence of digital technologies. [2] In retrospect, the articles collected here clarify the extent to which the difference between photography and the new media was considered elementary. According to the majority of the authors, ‹photography after photography› – if it was seen that way at all, could only be defined as thoroughly changed. Discussed less frequently, however, was how visible the similarities between analog and digital technical methods in image-making practices really were. Precisely this question has remained relevant up until today, whether one declares photography dead and then speaks of only the ‹photographic,› or else holds to the term photography. [3] Since especially in the art context – perhaps even more strongly than in private photography and journalism – dealing with electronic image processing is interpreted as the continuation of well-known strategies, and this article will portray it in that light.
Photography, Digital Photography, and Post-Photography
But what exactly is being discussed when the subject is photography or post-photography? The used terms and categories are often vaguely divided from one another, and differentiating between them isessential to analyzing the images.
The common difference between analog and digital media arises from a conceptual simplification described in the following text as only the fundamental, technical differences of nature of two image structures. Because of the image-media painting and photography, their elementary, material connectedness marks them analog media, while using the term ‹digital media› addresses those technologies which generate binary-structured images. In this connection, the term analog explains basic technical differences of nature in the materialness of imagemaking methods such as photography and painting as opposed to the digital code, but without meaning a similarity between the object and what it depicts: while the analog media are casually connected with the factuality of a carrying material, with regard to a data supply in the digital media, no reference can be made to an essential connection to a carrier.
In the given context another highly relevant distinction concerns the terms ‹digital photography› and ‹postphotography›. In contrast to the definition of analog photography, always described so clearly in an incalculable number of texts as a technique which records an image on photosensitive material, the division between photography, digital photography, and post-photography is often handled with far less precision. Since the variants are diverse: images are recorded digitally, photographs are intruded upon at a later stage and without a trace; digital recordings are assembled into a new image – and finally we have those images generated solely on the computer and possessing only the suggestion of photography. In this nuance-laden field of dispositive technical elements, three types of images can be sketched out: ‹analog photography,› ‹digital photography,› and ‹post-photography›. Often enough the terms ‹digital› and ‹post-› photography› are used synonymously, even though each describes a different process. [4] Like with analog photography, the digital variant also relies on the idea of light passing through a lens. But, unlike in analog procedures, the digital apparatus no longer inscribes the light on photosensitive material; instead, it stores it as a series of electronic impulses on a chip: so developing film in a darkroom becomes superfluous. This type of production really does allow itself to becalled ‹digital photography› since, although the chemical light-inscribing process is replaced by an electronic one, the digital procedure nevertheless remains based on the inscribing of light. From the start, photography produced in this manner finds itself in a state requiring no direct material carriers (ignoring the computer’s hardware for a moment) and is easily manipulated electronically.
The description ‹post-photography› harbors in itself two decisive aspects for evaluating the medium: the reference to photography on the one hand, and its technical replacement by ways of digitally designing visual information on the other. [5] Its actual service begins either after the digitalization of whatever well-disposed image material it uses, or manages perfectly well without such reference material. While conventional photography techniques could never do without the object in front of the camera, the photographic depiction in the digital image-production process serves at best as what supplies the start-material. In this sense it would be better to call post-photographic work an image rhetoric, which, in the most extreme case, can design such images using specific computer software, images no longer optically distinguishable from a photograph. And though made in a technical production unlike that of a photograph, they nevertheless comply (sometimes too precisely) with our perceptual conventions.
In digital post-processing – still conceivable as a form of retouching – the collage and montage processes become important when adding or subtracting processes delete or paste parts of photographs – or when the image is designed using only these processes to begin with. Drawing from the montage techniques of painting and photography, the electronically-arranged composite image lets itself to be called a ‹third-degree montage› in which the start-material, like in a photo-collage or collage made of paper, loses its autonomy and becomes part of a new image when combined with other materials. Even in its third variety, the montage principle remains a two-dimensional surface technique able to produce images of a consistent quality without an origin, because it no longer depends on anything visual, based instead on a changeable calculating structure. The newly-made, seemingly photographic image is no longer thedepiction of an object, but merely simulates the representation of one. What the simulation describes here is an emulating procedure, which pretends to be analog photography and, by doing so, follows our seeing habits, trained by looking at photography as well as at film.
The reception of these digital constructions depends on knowing their production route: identifying simulated photographs as digital constructions first allows a further investigation of the images. To make this work in such a field of technical and aesthetic dependencies, inside which the ‹photographic› shows itself, the artistic context takes on a very special function. Since this is the experimentation zone, the area of critical potential where the rapid technical development of the mass media’s flood of images and the changes they instigate in a general understanding of images are accompanied, questioned, and contradicted.
The Niche of Art
Just as when painting, as a reaction to photography, was declared dead; 150 years later, reacting to the new media, one also took leave of photography – because its supposed authenticity was now thoroughly infiltrated. The foundation of this assumed credibility was always a point of controversy. Shortly after the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, its ‹genuineness› and ‹objectivity› were already suspected in totally different conditions of photographic images. Sometimes in the technical process of image production, as in Henry Fox Talbot’s «Pencil of Nature» (1844–1846) and sometimes not quite in the image itself, but rather searched for in the subjective perceiving process, as in P. H. Emerson’s «Naturalistic Photography» (1889). On the other hand, authenticity was thoroughly assembled, caricatured, or infiltrated, like the art photographer Oscar Rejlander did as early as the 1850s in his photo-collages, the so-called «combination printings» meant to verify photography’s claim on art. [6]
No differently than such strategies for legitimizing photography as an artistic medium, the critical reflections and playful examinations of whatever well-disposed expression of the genuine is found in presentday photography as well. In this connection,what the electronic media represent is more like an expanding of the existing forms of staging and manipulation. This clearly distinguishes the art context from all the areas of photographic image production, where even though manipulation and retouching have always been just as much essential components of image-making practices, they were suppressed and hidden just the same, since the belief in photography’s reality effect was and still is considered a constructive part of image reception. For, despite having the last decades of photography theory in particular repeatedly investigate and analyze the utopian character of a purely reproduction-oriented image production, the belief in the depiction is an essential element of photography’s success – especially in journalism or criminology. [7] In this field of work the role of the photographic image is far more greatly jarred, because meanwhile (if still at all) it serves in a very limited capacity as what verifies occurrences, receiving an authorization through a third party and then being accepted as credible. [8] It was precisely this authenticating function that repeatedly questioned artistic photography, since, unlike with the press or legal inquiry, it was never superficially exploited to verify occurrences, but rather reflected, most of all, forms of perception, image-making practices and their relation to reality.
On the Role of Realism and Staging
For several decades now, photographs draw high prices on the art market. The most recent digital intervention possibilities have changed nothing in that respect. These are meanwhile the integrated components of an image production which continues to concern itself with photographic start-material, and whose results are still labeled and treated as photographs. Classical themes as well, such as the body and the portrait, landscapes and architecture, subject matter analog photography already adopted from painting, continue to make up the central contents. In contemporary artistic photography, interpreting this genre of pictorial history oscillates between the conceptual poles of realism and staging. And even though, in view of photography, these terms seem to describe opposites: realism is generally thought of as an expression of the depicting and indexing quality ofphotography, which indiscriminately records whatever occurs before the camera’s lens; and staging, on the other hand, refers to an author’s intervention and the carefully planned arranging of a scene. In the case of digital montaging procedures and electronic arrangements, realism presents itself very clearly now as a result and form of the staged situation: many of the following examples evince a realistic and sometimes documentary-like character – but which only comes about through the scene’s complete arrangement.
Jeff Wall
Early on, long before the development of digital photography and electronic simulation techniques, the works of the photo-artist Jeff Wall were coined ‹staged photography›. Since the end of the 1970s, Wall ranks among the most important present-day photo-artists. The Canadian, who alongside his art training also completed his art history studies, established in his images a reference system, within which he quotes handed-down themes and conceives a complex interplay of visual and psychological forms of staging, using technical conversion modes. Wall voices an appeal against the classical compositional pattern of art and reflects media-related similarities between photography, painting, and film. His images of everyday and, at first glance, thoroughly unspectacular scenes are usually presented in monumental formats as cibachrome slide positives in back-lit display cases. By way of photography, Wall presents himself as a ‹painter of modern life›, who produces seemingly trivial scenes in which he engages art-historical themes and social questions to equal degrees. While referring to the realism of Eduard Manet in particular, and to the nineteenth century in general, he replaces painting, as a medium of realism, with photography – thus declaring it a so-called Painting of the Present. Wall’s realism excludes all the coincidence inherent to photography’s photographic procedure. The images are construed down to the last detail and nothing is left to chance. Unlike with documentary photography, which waits for the decisive moment and invariably records additional arrangements, Wall devotes himself to the tradition of realism as a displaying of the exemplary, which, per se, is already staged. Like a director with a cameraman, Wall does not necessarilystand behind the camera himself, but rather directs the production of his pictures. For a long period he, above all, staged the image before the photographic documenting of it, but, in the 1990s, turned to manipulating images digitally and using them for the montage and post-processing. This is how he arranged the picture «Dead Troops Talk» (1992) in the studio, photographed in individual sections later assembled digitally, and finally simulated a monumental outdoor photograph. Wall is less concerned with comprehensibility and directly identifying drastic interventions than he is with creating suggested, complex reference systems. And to ensure their success the artist meanwhile uses electronic intervention possibilities as well, which he sees as merely the technical expansions of an existing repertoire: «The picture is a relation of unlike things; montage is hidden, masked, but present, essentially. I feel that my digital montages make this explicit, but that they’re not essentially different from my ‹integral› photographs.» [9]
Andreas Gursky
The former student of Bernd Becher, Germany’s most successful photo-artist in the international scene, Andreas Gursky, shares with Wall an interest in the relationship between painting and photography. His likewise large-format images are photographic ‹intensifications› of visual realities, which he stages and postprocesses digitally. Gursky has an interest in ornamental structures and the interaction of architecture with the social fabric, where individuals become part of an anonymous and standardized mass – as in the image «Montparnasse,» for example. The multi-storey, unusually wide building was just too big to photograph all at once. Therefore Gursky made two photographs, which he joined together digitally so that the assembled image resembles a single photograph again. As in a picture puzzle, two levels of image-recognition emerge: from the distance the façade appears to be a flat, ornamental and lifeless structure; under closer inspection, we detect people, furnishings, human activity, and the rigidly-structured façade becomes alive.
Gursky not only engages electronic processing possibilities for such montage work on photographicreference material; he also accentuates from anew how form and surface relate to one another, as in the extremely colorful, detail-laden picture «Chicago Board of Trade» (1999). In this depiction of the bustling Chicago stock market, Gursky intervenes in such a way that, alongside the wealth of detail in certain sections of the image, one also sees sections so blurred that they seem to dissolve in pure movement. This game played with ‹moving› and ‹motionless› zones irritates the viewer’s gaze, because the documentary character emphasized on the one side seems to dissolve because of the newly-adjusted sharp and blurred sections on the other. Gursky reflects the depicting functions of the medium without assigning the image a photographic authenticity.
Apart from the unalike themes and strategies in their images, in a fundamental manner both Gursky and Wall investigate the relationship between appearance and reality, truth and arrangement. In this connection, each draws from the complete repertoire of contemporary photography in his own specific way. Like Gursky’s subtle interventions in the photographed image, the comprehensively planned Wall-images, void of every trace of coincidence, lead just as much to a reevaluation of realism and staging in the age of digital simulation. Both of these positions exemplify an important tendency in contemporary photography.
Body Images, Modules, and Data Supplies
The word subtle only rarely applies to the interventions carried out on portraits and body images in the 1990s. Parallels between electronic image processing and genome decoding led to images in which the body was interpreted as a changeable material, as an instrument for future experiments, and the projection surface for variable notions of identity. Uncertainties about terms such as ‹subject› and ‹body› were as much on display as articulating fundamental critiques of what was possible with genetic engineering. [10] Still clothed in the suggestion of a photographic image, in each case these body images seem to refer to separate individuals and their specific physicality – even though these are not depictions, but rather more like visions. The factuality of photography obviously no longer applies in these drastically altered images, but nevertheless makes an odd and all too clear appearance.
Portraits Without Models
Through electronic processing, the individual portrait becomes the depersonalized image of types, masks, and visions of possible faces. In the early 1980s, Nancy Burson produced composite images made up of photographic portraits she fused together into a single person of a certain type. Her pliable images of the series «Big Brother» are the result of overlaying portraits of different twentieth-century dictators, which create from photographs of separate individuals an image of the dictatorial.
Viewers unaware of how these images are made see what they believe to be conventional though not particularly sharp, photographic portraits with aesthetic qualities similar to those of mug-shots.
The photographic suggestion is far more perfect in the excruciatingly sharp, color simulations, «Fictitious Portraits,» by Keith Cottingham. Constructed from different visual reference materials, these pictures of an adolescent possess a material quality which perfectly coincides with that of conventional photographs, since the route of digital production culminates again at the route to analog photographic images. Alongside the flowing inter-media borders not always recognizable for the viewer or user, Cottingham reaches back for a style, subject matter, and visual concept with strong ties to the histories of easel painting and photography. His three fictional portraits, identical in size and style, take up the notion of painted easel portraiture, focussing on the tripleportrait variation among other details. Hung side by side in black frames, in the context of the «Photography After Photography» exhibition they seem perfectly akin with conventional photographs – but they radically question the supposed photographic. Here little remains of photography in the sense of a light-inscribed depiction of reality – perceptual and artistic traditions are merely taken up via the photographic suggestion. While Cottingham completes simulations, since 2001 Thomas Ruff travels an opposing route with «Nudes». Andreas Gursky’s university colleague exploits the so-called ‹thumbnails› used in the Internet – thumbnail-size images that indicate the downloading of a larger format. Ruff downloaded such‹thumbnails› of pornographic images and then attached them to a panel image-format. When greatly enlarged, the low resolution of the images turns them into painterly, blurred images. Here the questioning of authorship and artistic character, of appropriating foreign, commercial materials and artistic innovation, as well as questioning a work’s suitability on the art market, is taken to the limit.
In her media-art-network contribution ‹monstrous bodies,› Yvonne Volkhart has deformed faces and distorted bodies express themselves (cf. Yvonne Volkhart: Monstrous Bodies), shown, for example, in portraits by Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, or the manipulated large-format glossy images by the Dutch artist Inez van Lamsweerde:
In «The Dystopia Series» (1994) by Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, perfect digital retouching blatantly presents itself as an offensive manipulation in their images. The portraits maintain all the formal qualities needed to make viewers perceive them as photographs. Yet the faces are dehumanized, unable to receive sensory impressions or communicate, since the openings for their eyes, noses, mouths, and ears are erased with retouching; robbed of its sensory organs, the face demonstrates the sheer inability to live. Inez van Lamsweerde shows individual people – or better figures – such as «Sasja» or the guys in series «The Forest» against a neutral, white background. Van Lamsweerde maintains all of the formal qualities common to fashion photography, from the made-up faces and puppet-like entrance of the figures to the cool and glossy aesthetics – a cliché twisted in the greatest sense of the word. Her body images are, in part, hybrid combinations made up of men, women, and children whose suggested physicality irritates: men are given the hands of women, children the jawbones of adult males. The people photographed here become hybrid beings. Their ambivalence turns them into modern icons, or worse, into the ugly mugs of a highly-civilized western existence.
«I is an Other»
The following women photographers deal with the body in a totally different manner. They reflect personal identity itself, which appears as simply an expression in the image. Whether Vibeke Tandberg orMitra Tabrizian, while these artists use digital intervention possibilities in the photographic image, they make less of a display of such processes than the already presented artists, who explicitly confront the post-human debate. The following images are less concerned with a drastic physicality; they focus instead on interpersonal communication processes and the definition of one’s own self.
In her current works the Norwegian Vibeke Tandberg, while exploring her theme of identity and sexual roles, also distorts her body and shortens its appendages with electronic interventions. Unlike Lamsweerde, in the series «Undo,» Tandberg intervenes in the image of herself as a woman already several months pregnant and exaggerates the proportions of this physicality. Parallel to this, she casts herself in the series «Old man going up and down a staircase» as an older man, indirectly equating the awkwardness of her pregnant body with an older person’s dwindling ability to move. In the context of examining a subject, additive procedures are just as important as deformation strategies. Bettina Hoffmann stages what appear to be everyday scenes in «affaires infinies» (1997-1999). Similar to Tandberg, she makes herself the one and only protagonist, and, following Rimbaud’s dictum, repeatedly portrays ‹a different person›. Even though this always involves situations with several people, Hoffmann communicates only with herself in the end. In a manner nothing like Cottingham’s, she also takes advantage of electronic montaging and doubling possibilities, developing from photographicallygenerated start-material the images she later recombines on the computer. In the process, her staged everyday scenes concentrate on the moment preceding an actual story.
Like Bettina Hoffmann, who works with film and video among other media, Mitra Tabrizian uses a variety of media as well. In her works, Tabrizian combines a documentary-like visual language with advertising aesthetics in order to draw attention to the ideological undercurrents generated whenever any cultural identity is formed. The culture scientist Stuart Hall refers to Mitra Tabrizian’s works as «fictive visual spaces» which would evolve through the interplay of still photography and references tocinematographic images. [11] At times the references to cinematographic scenes are recognizable, as for instance between Tabrizian’s «The Perfect Crime» and the aesthetics of Takeshi Kitano or Quentin Tarantino films. But the artist not only translates such quotes into her own photographic image-making practices; she also expands on contexts and heightens notions of gender and violence. With its bizarre story-line and excessively glaring colors, her «Beyond the Limits» project (2000) recalls comic books or caricatures. But regardless of how vivid the colors, or how dramatic the plot, the protagonists in Tabrizian’s images are characterized by an irritating lack of emotion: a woman lets her baby fall to the ground, a man shoots himself in the head. Everything is clearly recognizable, even the utter stiffness of those depicted – they seem less like human beings and more like artificial, emotionless Cyborgs or avatars.
Architecture and Landscape
Alongside confronting images of people, architectural and landscape photography, always among the central genres of pictorial history, are also essential to the contents of today’s artistic image-making practices. The first photographs often showed buildings – whose depictions inspired as much amazement as euphoria. The claim made by the literary figure Jules Janin, who visited the studio of Jean Louis Mandé Daguerres in 1839, is meanwhile legendary. Janin was so impressed by the daguerreotype that distinguishing between a real object and its depiction struck him as simply obsolete. He celebrated the photograph of Notre Dame as being a complete substitute for the building, since it quasi materially-inscribes itself in the photosensitive surface of the copper plate, and the photograph, as a simulacrum, takes the place of the object. [12]
Form and Surface – or: What is the Image of Architecture?
Through the styling of ornamental structures as well as serial arrangement principles, present-day artistic, architectural and landscape photography analyzes our perception and notion of urban space, nature, and landscapes.
As already discussed in the section «Realism as Staging,» Andreas Gursky accentuates spatial conceptsand surfaces in order to intensify the documentary-photograph impression. The clarity and depth of field of these images – whether an analog or digital exposure – allow viewers to make associations by way of a skillfully conceived and perfectly executed photography. In his first digitally-processed photograph, «Charles de Gaulle,» Gursky strengthens and intensifies the visual impression of the urban structure by multiplying many times over the complexity of a spatial situation with tube-like connecting routes: the image shows more tubes than there are in reality. Although this creates the impression of a ‹real› architecture – at the same time the image’s confusing, ornamental structure offers the gaze no support and heightens the supposed pictorialness. The Berlin-based artist Heidi Specker confronts the relation of building structure and materiality, for which she takes up the visual language of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Specker analyzes examples of modern architecture, primarily those of the ‹international style› of the 1960s and 1970s. She post-processes these images digitally, as she does, for example, in the series «Speckergruppen Bildings» (1996). The term ‹bildings› combines the words ‹Bild› (image) and ‹buildings› and characterizes Specker’s working method: on the one side, her interest in the challenges posed by juxtaposing analog and computer technologies; on the other, her concern for images and building structures. Specker photographs buildings or architectural details, and later scans and processes them: details such as shadows and spatial incongruities caused by depth are eliminated in favor of achieving a flat structure. Since the results are finally produced with an inkjet printer, the works never simulate conventionally-developed photographs, but rather reveal, at least in part, their production route.
Jörg Sasse deals with architectural and landscape photographs similarly, but meanwhile works primarily with anonymous images. For years now he collects private photographs, snapshots of various situations, postprocesses them on the computer, and finally recirculates them – but not as private images; he recirculates them in the context of art (see the Podium Discussion with Jörg Sasse). [13] Through his finalizing ‹Arbeiten am Bild› (Working on the Image, alsothe title of one of his catalogues), Sasse shifts the conceptual focal point of the photographs. [14] He gives the images new titles, merely four-figure combinations of digits, and new production dates, meaning the year in which he post-processed the found material. His works function at the interface between photography and painting. A good example of this is «9137, 2004», a color-drenched stage production altered to the point where it seems to dissolve in fields of color and dramatic lighting conditions, and whose strongly contrasting light and dark zones recall Baroque easel painting. In «8626, 1999» the red house in the forest is transformed into an oversized object, whose color intensity stands in a stark contrast with the darkgreen of the forest and makes this simple scene suggest the surreal.
In a different manner, the American artist Paul Pfeiffer as well plays with the wealth of collective memory. In his series «Landscapes» (2000), the viewer admires a beach landscape: dazzling light, clouds dispersing. One has to stare a while at what seem like conventional landscape images until, literally, traces of something else, another level, reveals itself: it seems as though someone just ran across the sand. One can barely tell that these images are part of a famous portrait series, namely the photographs of Marilyn Monroe by George Barris: Pfeiffer removes the icon from the pictures, and, in place of Monroe’s image, closes the picture shut with the landscape – and therefore closes the open wound. [15] The backdrop of nature formerly the backdrop for the film star, so unspectacular that we fail to recognize it, now becomes the contents of the image, or at least superficially. But, in reality, Pfeiffer is not only concerned with recording how completely the recognition value of these images is tied to the form of Monroe; he also handles as his theme the idea of the landscape in of itself, the cliché view of the sea, and the role that nature plays in staging a film star, in itself a cliché.
Cliché and Reality, Truth and Appearance
These and similar deconstructions of clichés like those discerned in Pfeiffer’s works represent an original suggestion of contemporary photography – the unmasking of the brute design of authenticityand objectivity, and the question of how appearance and reality relate to one another. In the process, artists deal with either analog, digital, or (post-) photographic techniques – depending on which method seems to suit the moment best. Unlike the at times outlandish forms of electronic retouching and simulations of the mid-1990s, a greater interest in subtler image interventions has meanwhile developed – interventions that irritate viewers, exaggerate photographic competence, and reformulate the question of how one distinguishes between reality and the image. In times of digital simulation technologies, the ontological status of photography can no longer be expected to play a central role anyway, since the relationships and boundaries between unmanipulated, manipulated, and simulated images suggestive of the photographic can no longer be clearly explained. By retrieving and reinterpreting classic themes of pictorial history to date, the art context makes clear to us again in how paradoxical a sense we perceive images, most of all the technically-produced ones, and how influenced we are by practiced conventions of seeing.
Although the authentic depiction is a deception, the naive and nonetheless enduring wish for it, even in times of digital image processing, is then satisfied and disappointed to equal degrees. This hardly means that photography is over and done with, as prophesized in many contributions to the exhibition «Photography After Photography,» but rather that photography is experiencing a radical change which leads to highly diverse imagemaking strategies. These are sometimes realized through photographs, and sometimes they merely follow their aesthetic conventions without ever materializing photographically. For precisely that reason photography’s paradigmatic status for our perception seems, for the time being, more reinforced than about to be removed.
[1] William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge/Mass., 1992, p.4.
[2] cf. Individual definitions of terms and nuances, for example the two collections of essays: Herta Wolf (eds.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters (Volume 1) and Diskurse der Fotografie, Volume 2, Frankfurt/Main, 2002 / 2003.
[3] cf. Individual definitions of terms and nuances, for example the two collections of essays: Herta Wolf (eds.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters (Volume 1) and Diskurse der Fotografie, Volume 2, Frankfurt/Main, 2002 / 2003.
[4] cf. on the differentiating of terms, also see: Anette Hüsch, Schrecklich schön. Bild, Material und Körper in der Post-Photographie, in: Belting, Hans; Schulze, Ulrich (eds.): Beiträge zu Kunst und Medientheorie – Projekte und Forschungen an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, 2000, pp. 33-45; Jens Schröter, Virtuelle Kamera. Zum Fortbestand fotografischer Medien in computergenerierten Bildern, in: Fotogeschichte, year. 23. H. 88, 2003, pp. 3-16.
[5] The term post-photography is mostly used in Anglo-American literature. Regrading its first appearance, follow Jens Schröter (see footnote 5) and Trisha Ziff/Pedro Meyer: Post-photographic photography, in: Paul Wombell (eds.), Photovideo. Photography in the Age of the Computer, London, 1991, p. 150 f.. First made popular through Mitchell’s book. cf. also: William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post- Photographic Era, Cambridge/Mass.,1992.
[6] Oscar Rejlander and Henry Robinson became known through combination printing, the montaging of several negatives and producing photographs from them. In 1857, Rejlander created his best-known composite image: The Two Ways of Life. Made of over 30 negatives, it measured 78,7 x 40,6 cm, considered unusually large dimensions for that period.
[7] Cf. on deconstructing photographic objectivity alongside nineteenth-century image production a. o. articles, in: Peter Geimer (eds.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, Frankfurt/Main, 2002.
[8] On the digital photograph as a, per se, ‹doubtful› or «dubitative image» (Peter Lunenfeld) cf. the article by Susanne Holschbach, noting the passage Digital Trouble.
[9] Jeff Wall interviewed by Arielle Pelec, in: Thierry de Duve/Boris Groys/Arielle Pelec (eds.), Jeff Wall, London, 1996, p.11.
[10] On the theme of changes in body images in the new-media age, also see the articles in the Cyborg Bodies module.
[11] Cf. also the article: «The Way We Live Now» by Stuart Hall, in: Mitra Tabrizian, Beyond the Limits, Göttingen, 2004, pp.7-11.
[12] Jules Janin: Der Daguerreotyp (1839), in: Wolfgang Kemp (eds.), Theorie der Fotografie I. 1839-1912, Munich, 1999, pp.46-51, p.49. On the idea of photographic dematerialization cf. the article by Jens Schröter, see the passage: Von der Materie abgelöste Form – das «Denkmälerarchiv Fotografie».
[13] On the artistic picture archive, see article by Jens Schröter, the section Ver-Öffentlichung des Privaten.
[14] Jörg Sasse, Arbeiten am Bild, München, 2001.
[15] The methodology of digital subtraction cf. the work-cycle Interiors (1997-2000) by Isabell Heimerdinger.
© Media Art Net 2004
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Three years after the publication of Mitchell’s book, the vastly conceived exhibition entitled «Fotografie nach der Fotografie» (Photography After Photography) offered an overview of those art-context tendencies which deal with the influence of digital technologies on photography. The works shown in this framework by Keith Cottingham, the artist duo Anthony Aziz / Sammy Cucher, and the artist Inez van Lamsweerde, known from the world of fashion photography, could almost be considered ‹classics› in the meantime – just as the catalogue of the same name, even today a compendium of important articles on the state of radical change in analog image media under the influence of digital technologies. [2] In retrospect, the articles collected here clarify the extent to which the difference between photography and the new media was considered elementary. According to the majority of the authors, ‹photography after photography› – if it was seen that way at all, could only be defined as thoroughly changed. Discussed less frequently, however, was how visible the similarities between analog and digital technical methods in image-making practices really were. Precisely this question has remained relevant up until today, whether one declares photography dead and then speaks of only the ‹photographic,› or else holds to the term photography. [3] Since especially in the art context – perhaps even more strongly than in private photography and journalism – dealing with electronic image processing is interpreted as the continuation of well-known strategies, and this article will portray it in that light.
Photography, Digital Photography, and Post-Photography
But what exactly is being discussed when the subject is photography or post-photography? The used terms and categories are often vaguely divided from one another, and differentiating between them isessential to analyzing the images.
The common difference between analog and digital media arises from a conceptual simplification described in the following text as only the fundamental, technical differences of nature of two image structures. Because of the image-media painting and photography, their elementary, material connectedness marks them analog media, while using the term ‹digital media› addresses those technologies which generate binary-structured images. In this connection, the term analog explains basic technical differences of nature in the materialness of imagemaking methods such as photography and painting as opposed to the digital code, but without meaning a similarity between the object and what it depicts: while the analog media are casually connected with the factuality of a carrying material, with regard to a data supply in the digital media, no reference can be made to an essential connection to a carrier.
In the given context another highly relevant distinction concerns the terms ‹digital photography› and ‹postphotography›. In contrast to the definition of analog photography, always described so clearly in an incalculable number of texts as a technique which records an image on photosensitive material, the division between photography, digital photography, and post-photography is often handled with far less precision. Since the variants are diverse: images are recorded digitally, photographs are intruded upon at a later stage and without a trace; digital recordings are assembled into a new image – and finally we have those images generated solely on the computer and possessing only the suggestion of photography. In this nuance-laden field of dispositive technical elements, three types of images can be sketched out: ‹analog photography,› ‹digital photography,› and ‹post-photography›. Often enough the terms ‹digital› and ‹post-› photography› are used synonymously, even though each describes a different process. [4] Like with analog photography, the digital variant also relies on the idea of light passing through a lens. But, unlike in analog procedures, the digital apparatus no longer inscribes the light on photosensitive material; instead, it stores it as a series of electronic impulses on a chip: so developing film in a darkroom becomes superfluous. This type of production really does allow itself to becalled ‹digital photography› since, although the chemical light-inscribing process is replaced by an electronic one, the digital procedure nevertheless remains based on the inscribing of light. From the start, photography produced in this manner finds itself in a state requiring no direct material carriers (ignoring the computer’s hardware for a moment) and is easily manipulated electronically.
The description ‹post-photography› harbors in itself two decisive aspects for evaluating the medium: the reference to photography on the one hand, and its technical replacement by ways of digitally designing visual information on the other. [5] Its actual service begins either after the digitalization of whatever well-disposed image material it uses, or manages perfectly well without such reference material. While conventional photography techniques could never do without the object in front of the camera, the photographic depiction in the digital image-production process serves at best as what supplies the start-material. In this sense it would be better to call post-photographic work an image rhetoric, which, in the most extreme case, can design such images using specific computer software, images no longer optically distinguishable from a photograph. And though made in a technical production unlike that of a photograph, they nevertheless comply (sometimes too precisely) with our perceptual conventions.
In digital post-processing – still conceivable as a form of retouching – the collage and montage processes become important when adding or subtracting processes delete or paste parts of photographs – or when the image is designed using only these processes to begin with. Drawing from the montage techniques of painting and photography, the electronically-arranged composite image lets itself to be called a ‹third-degree montage› in which the start-material, like in a photo-collage or collage made of paper, loses its autonomy and becomes part of a new image when combined with other materials. Even in its third variety, the montage principle remains a two-dimensional surface technique able to produce images of a consistent quality without an origin, because it no longer depends on anything visual, based instead on a changeable calculating structure. The newly-made, seemingly photographic image is no longer thedepiction of an object, but merely simulates the representation of one. What the simulation describes here is an emulating procedure, which pretends to be analog photography and, by doing so, follows our seeing habits, trained by looking at photography as well as at film.
The reception of these digital constructions depends on knowing their production route: identifying simulated photographs as digital constructions first allows a further investigation of the images. To make this work in such a field of technical and aesthetic dependencies, inside which the ‹photographic› shows itself, the artistic context takes on a very special function. Since this is the experimentation zone, the area of critical potential where the rapid technical development of the mass media’s flood of images and the changes they instigate in a general understanding of images are accompanied, questioned, and contradicted.
The Niche of Art
Just as when painting, as a reaction to photography, was declared dead; 150 years later, reacting to the new media, one also took leave of photography – because its supposed authenticity was now thoroughly infiltrated. The foundation of this assumed credibility was always a point of controversy. Shortly after the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, its ‹genuineness› and ‹objectivity› were already suspected in totally different conditions of photographic images. Sometimes in the technical process of image production, as in Henry Fox Talbot’s «Pencil of Nature» (1844–1846) and sometimes not quite in the image itself, but rather searched for in the subjective perceiving process, as in P. H. Emerson’s «Naturalistic Photography» (1889). On the other hand, authenticity was thoroughly assembled, caricatured, or infiltrated, like the art photographer Oscar Rejlander did as early as the 1850s in his photo-collages, the so-called «combination printings» meant to verify photography’s claim on art. [6]
No differently than such strategies for legitimizing photography as an artistic medium, the critical reflections and playful examinations of whatever well-disposed expression of the genuine is found in presentday photography as well. In this connection,what the electronic media represent is more like an expanding of the existing forms of staging and manipulation. This clearly distinguishes the art context from all the areas of photographic image production, where even though manipulation and retouching have always been just as much essential components of image-making practices, they were suppressed and hidden just the same, since the belief in photography’s reality effect was and still is considered a constructive part of image reception. For, despite having the last decades of photography theory in particular repeatedly investigate and analyze the utopian character of a purely reproduction-oriented image production, the belief in the depiction is an essential element of photography’s success – especially in journalism or criminology. [7] In this field of work the role of the photographic image is far more greatly jarred, because meanwhile (if still at all) it serves in a very limited capacity as what verifies occurrences, receiving an authorization through a third party and then being accepted as credible. [8] It was precisely this authenticating function that repeatedly questioned artistic photography, since, unlike with the press or legal inquiry, it was never superficially exploited to verify occurrences, but rather reflected, most of all, forms of perception, image-making practices and their relation to reality.
On the Role of Realism and Staging
For several decades now, photographs draw high prices on the art market. The most recent digital intervention possibilities have changed nothing in that respect. These are meanwhile the integrated components of an image production which continues to concern itself with photographic start-material, and whose results are still labeled and treated as photographs. Classical themes as well, such as the body and the portrait, landscapes and architecture, subject matter analog photography already adopted from painting, continue to make up the central contents. In contemporary artistic photography, interpreting this genre of pictorial history oscillates between the conceptual poles of realism and staging. And even though, in view of photography, these terms seem to describe opposites: realism is generally thought of as an expression of the depicting and indexing quality ofphotography, which indiscriminately records whatever occurs before the camera’s lens; and staging, on the other hand, refers to an author’s intervention and the carefully planned arranging of a scene. In the case of digital montaging procedures and electronic arrangements, realism presents itself very clearly now as a result and form of the staged situation: many of the following examples evince a realistic and sometimes documentary-like character – but which only comes about through the scene’s complete arrangement.
Jeff Wall
Early on, long before the development of digital photography and electronic simulation techniques, the works of the photo-artist Jeff Wall were coined ‹staged photography›. Since the end of the 1970s, Wall ranks among the most important present-day photo-artists. The Canadian, who alongside his art training also completed his art history studies, established in his images a reference system, within which he quotes handed-down themes and conceives a complex interplay of visual and psychological forms of staging, using technical conversion modes. Wall voices an appeal against the classical compositional pattern of art and reflects media-related similarities between photography, painting, and film. His images of everyday and, at first glance, thoroughly unspectacular scenes are usually presented in monumental formats as cibachrome slide positives in back-lit display cases. By way of photography, Wall presents himself as a ‹painter of modern life›, who produces seemingly trivial scenes in which he engages art-historical themes and social questions to equal degrees. While referring to the realism of Eduard Manet in particular, and to the nineteenth century in general, he replaces painting, as a medium of realism, with photography – thus declaring it a so-called Painting of the Present. Wall’s realism excludes all the coincidence inherent to photography’s photographic procedure. The images are construed down to the last detail and nothing is left to chance. Unlike with documentary photography, which waits for the decisive moment and invariably records additional arrangements, Wall devotes himself to the tradition of realism as a displaying of the exemplary, which, per se, is already staged. Like a director with a cameraman, Wall does not necessarilystand behind the camera himself, but rather directs the production of his pictures. For a long period he, above all, staged the image before the photographic documenting of it, but, in the 1990s, turned to manipulating images digitally and using them for the montage and post-processing. This is how he arranged the picture «Dead Troops Talk» (1992) in the studio, photographed in individual sections later assembled digitally, and finally simulated a monumental outdoor photograph. Wall is less concerned with comprehensibility and directly identifying drastic interventions than he is with creating suggested, complex reference systems. And to ensure their success the artist meanwhile uses electronic intervention possibilities as well, which he sees as merely the technical expansions of an existing repertoire: «The picture is a relation of unlike things; montage is hidden, masked, but present, essentially. I feel that my digital montages make this explicit, but that they’re not essentially different from my ‹integral› photographs.» [9]
Andreas Gursky
The former student of Bernd Becher, Germany’s most successful photo-artist in the international scene, Andreas Gursky, shares with Wall an interest in the relationship between painting and photography. His likewise large-format images are photographic ‹intensifications› of visual realities, which he stages and postprocesses digitally. Gursky has an interest in ornamental structures and the interaction of architecture with the social fabric, where individuals become part of an anonymous and standardized mass – as in the image «Montparnasse,» for example. The multi-storey, unusually wide building was just too big to photograph all at once. Therefore Gursky made two photographs, which he joined together digitally so that the assembled image resembles a single photograph again. As in a picture puzzle, two levels of image-recognition emerge: from the distance the façade appears to be a flat, ornamental and lifeless structure; under closer inspection, we detect people, furnishings, human activity, and the rigidly-structured façade becomes alive.
Gursky not only engages electronic processing possibilities for such montage work on photographicreference material; he also accentuates from anew how form and surface relate to one another, as in the extremely colorful, detail-laden picture «Chicago Board of Trade» (1999). In this depiction of the bustling Chicago stock market, Gursky intervenes in such a way that, alongside the wealth of detail in certain sections of the image, one also sees sections so blurred that they seem to dissolve in pure movement. This game played with ‹moving› and ‹motionless› zones irritates the viewer’s gaze, because the documentary character emphasized on the one side seems to dissolve because of the newly-adjusted sharp and blurred sections on the other. Gursky reflects the depicting functions of the medium without assigning the image a photographic authenticity.
Apart from the unalike themes and strategies in their images, in a fundamental manner both Gursky and Wall investigate the relationship between appearance and reality, truth and arrangement. In this connection, each draws from the complete repertoire of contemporary photography in his own specific way. Like Gursky’s subtle interventions in the photographed image, the comprehensively planned Wall-images, void of every trace of coincidence, lead just as much to a reevaluation of realism and staging in the age of digital simulation. Both of these positions exemplify an important tendency in contemporary photography.
Body Images, Modules, and Data Supplies
The word subtle only rarely applies to the interventions carried out on portraits and body images in the 1990s. Parallels between electronic image processing and genome decoding led to images in which the body was interpreted as a changeable material, as an instrument for future experiments, and the projection surface for variable notions of identity. Uncertainties about terms such as ‹subject› and ‹body› were as much on display as articulating fundamental critiques of what was possible with genetic engineering. [10] Still clothed in the suggestion of a photographic image, in each case these body images seem to refer to separate individuals and their specific physicality – even though these are not depictions, but rather more like visions. The factuality of photography obviously no longer applies in these drastically altered images, but nevertheless makes an odd and all too clear appearance.
Portraits Without Models
Through electronic processing, the individual portrait becomes the depersonalized image of types, masks, and visions of possible faces. In the early 1980s, Nancy Burson produced composite images made up of photographic portraits she fused together into a single person of a certain type. Her pliable images of the series «Big Brother» are the result of overlaying portraits of different twentieth-century dictators, which create from photographs of separate individuals an image of the dictatorial.
Viewers unaware of how these images are made see what they believe to be conventional though not particularly sharp, photographic portraits with aesthetic qualities similar to those of mug-shots.
The photographic suggestion is far more perfect in the excruciatingly sharp, color simulations, «Fictitious Portraits,» by Keith Cottingham. Constructed from different visual reference materials, these pictures of an adolescent possess a material quality which perfectly coincides with that of conventional photographs, since the route of digital production culminates again at the route to analog photographic images. Alongside the flowing inter-media borders not always recognizable for the viewer or user, Cottingham reaches back for a style, subject matter, and visual concept with strong ties to the histories of easel painting and photography. His three fictional portraits, identical in size and style, take up the notion of painted easel portraiture, focussing on the tripleportrait variation among other details. Hung side by side in black frames, in the context of the «Photography After Photography» exhibition they seem perfectly akin with conventional photographs – but they radically question the supposed photographic. Here little remains of photography in the sense of a light-inscribed depiction of reality – perceptual and artistic traditions are merely taken up via the photographic suggestion. While Cottingham completes simulations, since 2001 Thomas Ruff travels an opposing route with «Nudes». Andreas Gursky’s university colleague exploits the so-called ‹thumbnails› used in the Internet – thumbnail-size images that indicate the downloading of a larger format. Ruff downloaded such‹thumbnails› of pornographic images and then attached them to a panel image-format. When greatly enlarged, the low resolution of the images turns them into painterly, blurred images. Here the questioning of authorship and artistic character, of appropriating foreign, commercial materials and artistic innovation, as well as questioning a work’s suitability on the art market, is taken to the limit.
In her media-art-network contribution ‹monstrous bodies,› Yvonne Volkhart has deformed faces and distorted bodies express themselves (cf. Yvonne Volkhart: Monstrous Bodies), shown, for example, in portraits by Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, or the manipulated large-format glossy images by the Dutch artist Inez van Lamsweerde:
In «The Dystopia Series» (1994) by Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, perfect digital retouching blatantly presents itself as an offensive manipulation in their images. The portraits maintain all the formal qualities needed to make viewers perceive them as photographs. Yet the faces are dehumanized, unable to receive sensory impressions or communicate, since the openings for their eyes, noses, mouths, and ears are erased with retouching; robbed of its sensory organs, the face demonstrates the sheer inability to live. Inez van Lamsweerde shows individual people – or better figures – such as «Sasja» or the guys in series «The Forest» against a neutral, white background. Van Lamsweerde maintains all of the formal qualities common to fashion photography, from the made-up faces and puppet-like entrance of the figures to the cool and glossy aesthetics – a cliché twisted in the greatest sense of the word. Her body images are, in part, hybrid combinations made up of men, women, and children whose suggested physicality irritates: men are given the hands of women, children the jawbones of adult males. The people photographed here become hybrid beings. Their ambivalence turns them into modern icons, or worse, into the ugly mugs of a highly-civilized western existence.
«I is an Other»
The following women photographers deal with the body in a totally different manner. They reflect personal identity itself, which appears as simply an expression in the image. Whether Vibeke Tandberg orMitra Tabrizian, while these artists use digital intervention possibilities in the photographic image, they make less of a display of such processes than the already presented artists, who explicitly confront the post-human debate. The following images are less concerned with a drastic physicality; they focus instead on interpersonal communication processes and the definition of one’s own self.
In her current works the Norwegian Vibeke Tandberg, while exploring her theme of identity and sexual roles, also distorts her body and shortens its appendages with electronic interventions. Unlike Lamsweerde, in the series «Undo,» Tandberg intervenes in the image of herself as a woman already several months pregnant and exaggerates the proportions of this physicality. Parallel to this, she casts herself in the series «Old man going up and down a staircase» as an older man, indirectly equating the awkwardness of her pregnant body with an older person’s dwindling ability to move. In the context of examining a subject, additive procedures are just as important as deformation strategies. Bettina Hoffmann stages what appear to be everyday scenes in «affaires infinies» (1997-1999). Similar to Tandberg, she makes herself the one and only protagonist, and, following Rimbaud’s dictum, repeatedly portrays ‹a different person›. Even though this always involves situations with several people, Hoffmann communicates only with herself in the end. In a manner nothing like Cottingham’s, she also takes advantage of electronic montaging and doubling possibilities, developing from photographicallygenerated start-material the images she later recombines on the computer. In the process, her staged everyday scenes concentrate on the moment preceding an actual story.
Like Bettina Hoffmann, who works with film and video among other media, Mitra Tabrizian uses a variety of media as well. In her works, Tabrizian combines a documentary-like visual language with advertising aesthetics in order to draw attention to the ideological undercurrents generated whenever any cultural identity is formed. The culture scientist Stuart Hall refers to Mitra Tabrizian’s works as «fictive visual spaces» which would evolve through the interplay of still photography and references tocinematographic images. [11] At times the references to cinematographic scenes are recognizable, as for instance between Tabrizian’s «The Perfect Crime» and the aesthetics of Takeshi Kitano or Quentin Tarantino films. But the artist not only translates such quotes into her own photographic image-making practices; she also expands on contexts and heightens notions of gender and violence. With its bizarre story-line and excessively glaring colors, her «Beyond the Limits» project (2000) recalls comic books or caricatures. But regardless of how vivid the colors, or how dramatic the plot, the protagonists in Tabrizian’s images are characterized by an irritating lack of emotion: a woman lets her baby fall to the ground, a man shoots himself in the head. Everything is clearly recognizable, even the utter stiffness of those depicted – they seem less like human beings and more like artificial, emotionless Cyborgs or avatars.
Architecture and Landscape
Alongside confronting images of people, architectural and landscape photography, always among the central genres of pictorial history, are also essential to the contents of today’s artistic image-making practices. The first photographs often showed buildings – whose depictions inspired as much amazement as euphoria. The claim made by the literary figure Jules Janin, who visited the studio of Jean Louis Mandé Daguerres in 1839, is meanwhile legendary. Janin was so impressed by the daguerreotype that distinguishing between a real object and its depiction struck him as simply obsolete. He celebrated the photograph of Notre Dame as being a complete substitute for the building, since it quasi materially-inscribes itself in the photosensitive surface of the copper plate, and the photograph, as a simulacrum, takes the place of the object. [12]
Form and Surface – or: What is the Image of Architecture?
Through the styling of ornamental structures as well as serial arrangement principles, present-day artistic, architectural and landscape photography analyzes our perception and notion of urban space, nature, and landscapes.
As already discussed in the section «Realism as Staging,» Andreas Gursky accentuates spatial conceptsand surfaces in order to intensify the documentary-photograph impression. The clarity and depth of field of these images – whether an analog or digital exposure – allow viewers to make associations by way of a skillfully conceived and perfectly executed photography. In his first digitally-processed photograph, «Charles de Gaulle,» Gursky strengthens and intensifies the visual impression of the urban structure by multiplying many times over the complexity of a spatial situation with tube-like connecting routes: the image shows more tubes than there are in reality. Although this creates the impression of a ‹real› architecture – at the same time the image’s confusing, ornamental structure offers the gaze no support and heightens the supposed pictorialness. The Berlin-based artist Heidi Specker confronts the relation of building structure and materiality, for which she takes up the visual language of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Specker analyzes examples of modern architecture, primarily those of the ‹international style› of the 1960s and 1970s. She post-processes these images digitally, as she does, for example, in the series «Speckergruppen Bildings» (1996). The term ‹bildings› combines the words ‹Bild› (image) and ‹buildings› and characterizes Specker’s working method: on the one side, her interest in the challenges posed by juxtaposing analog and computer technologies; on the other, her concern for images and building structures. Specker photographs buildings or architectural details, and later scans and processes them: details such as shadows and spatial incongruities caused by depth are eliminated in favor of achieving a flat structure. Since the results are finally produced with an inkjet printer, the works never simulate conventionally-developed photographs, but rather reveal, at least in part, their production route.
Jörg Sasse deals with architectural and landscape photographs similarly, but meanwhile works primarily with anonymous images. For years now he collects private photographs, snapshots of various situations, postprocesses them on the computer, and finally recirculates them – but not as private images; he recirculates them in the context of art (see the Podium Discussion with Jörg Sasse). [13] Through his finalizing ‹Arbeiten am Bild› (Working on the Image, alsothe title of one of his catalogues), Sasse shifts the conceptual focal point of the photographs. [14] He gives the images new titles, merely four-figure combinations of digits, and new production dates, meaning the year in which he post-processed the found material. His works function at the interface between photography and painting. A good example of this is «9137, 2004», a color-drenched stage production altered to the point where it seems to dissolve in fields of color and dramatic lighting conditions, and whose strongly contrasting light and dark zones recall Baroque easel painting. In «8626, 1999» the red house in the forest is transformed into an oversized object, whose color intensity stands in a stark contrast with the darkgreen of the forest and makes this simple scene suggest the surreal.
In a different manner, the American artist Paul Pfeiffer as well plays with the wealth of collective memory. In his series «Landscapes» (2000), the viewer admires a beach landscape: dazzling light, clouds dispersing. One has to stare a while at what seem like conventional landscape images until, literally, traces of something else, another level, reveals itself: it seems as though someone just ran across the sand. One can barely tell that these images are part of a famous portrait series, namely the photographs of Marilyn Monroe by George Barris: Pfeiffer removes the icon from the pictures, and, in place of Monroe’s image, closes the picture shut with the landscape – and therefore closes the open wound. [15] The backdrop of nature formerly the backdrop for the film star, so unspectacular that we fail to recognize it, now becomes the contents of the image, or at least superficially. But, in reality, Pfeiffer is not only concerned with recording how completely the recognition value of these images is tied to the form of Monroe; he also handles as his theme the idea of the landscape in of itself, the cliché view of the sea, and the role that nature plays in staging a film star, in itself a cliché.
Cliché and Reality, Truth and Appearance
These and similar deconstructions of clichés like those discerned in Pfeiffer’s works represent an original suggestion of contemporary photography – the unmasking of the brute design of authenticityand objectivity, and the question of how appearance and reality relate to one another. In the process, artists deal with either analog, digital, or (post-) photographic techniques – depending on which method seems to suit the moment best. Unlike the at times outlandish forms of electronic retouching and simulations of the mid-1990s, a greater interest in subtler image interventions has meanwhile developed – interventions that irritate viewers, exaggerate photographic competence, and reformulate the question of how one distinguishes between reality and the image. In times of digital simulation technologies, the ontological status of photography can no longer be expected to play a central role anyway, since the relationships and boundaries between unmanipulated, manipulated, and simulated images suggestive of the photographic can no longer be clearly explained. By retrieving and reinterpreting classic themes of pictorial history to date, the art context makes clear to us again in how paradoxical a sense we perceive images, most of all the technically-produced ones, and how influenced we are by practiced conventions of seeing.
Although the authentic depiction is a deception, the naive and nonetheless enduring wish for it, even in times of digital image processing, is then satisfied and disappointed to equal degrees. This hardly means that photography is over and done with, as prophesized in many contributions to the exhibition «Photography After Photography,» but rather that photography is experiencing a radical change which leads to highly diverse imagemaking strategies. These are sometimes realized through photographs, and sometimes they merely follow their aesthetic conventions without ever materializing photographically. For precisely that reason photography’s paradigmatic status for our perception seems, for the time being, more reinforced than about to be removed.
[1] William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge/Mass., 1992, p.4.
[2] cf. Individual definitions of terms and nuances, for example the two collections of essays: Herta Wolf (eds.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters (Volume 1) and Diskurse der Fotografie, Volume 2, Frankfurt/Main, 2002 / 2003.
[3] cf. Individual definitions of terms and nuances, for example the two collections of essays: Herta Wolf (eds.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters (Volume 1) and Diskurse der Fotografie, Volume 2, Frankfurt/Main, 2002 / 2003.
[4] cf. on the differentiating of terms, also see: Anette Hüsch, Schrecklich schön. Bild, Material und Körper in der Post-Photographie, in: Belting, Hans; Schulze, Ulrich (eds.): Beiträge zu Kunst und Medientheorie – Projekte und Forschungen an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, 2000, pp. 33-45; Jens Schröter, Virtuelle Kamera. Zum Fortbestand fotografischer Medien in computergenerierten Bildern, in: Fotogeschichte, year. 23. H. 88, 2003, pp. 3-16.
[5] The term post-photography is mostly used in Anglo-American literature. Regrading its first appearance, follow Jens Schröter (see footnote 5) and Trisha Ziff/Pedro Meyer: Post-photographic photography, in: Paul Wombell (eds.), Photovideo. Photography in the Age of the Computer, London, 1991, p. 150 f.. First made popular through Mitchell’s book. cf. also: William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post- Photographic Era, Cambridge/Mass.,1992.
[6] Oscar Rejlander and Henry Robinson became known through combination printing, the montaging of several negatives and producing photographs from them. In 1857, Rejlander created his best-known composite image: The Two Ways of Life. Made of over 30 negatives, it measured 78,7 x 40,6 cm, considered unusually large dimensions for that period.
[7] Cf. on deconstructing photographic objectivity alongside nineteenth-century image production a. o. articles, in: Peter Geimer (eds.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, Frankfurt/Main, 2002.
[8] On the digital photograph as a, per se, ‹doubtful› or «dubitative image» (Peter Lunenfeld) cf. the article by Susanne Holschbach, noting the passage Digital Trouble.
[9] Jeff Wall interviewed by Arielle Pelec, in: Thierry de Duve/Boris Groys/Arielle Pelec (eds.), Jeff Wall, London, 1996, p.11.
[10] On the theme of changes in body images in the new-media age, also see the articles in the Cyborg Bodies module.
[11] Cf. also the article: «The Way We Live Now» by Stuart Hall, in: Mitra Tabrizian, Beyond the Limits, Göttingen, 2004, pp.7-11.
[12] Jules Janin: Der Daguerreotyp (1839), in: Wolfgang Kemp (eds.), Theorie der Fotografie I. 1839-1912, Munich, 1999, pp.46-51, p.49. On the idea of photographic dematerialization cf. the article by Jens Schröter, see the passage: Von der Materie abgelöste Form – das «Denkmälerarchiv Fotografie».
[13] On the artistic picture archive, see article by Jens Schröter, the section Ver-Öffentlichung des Privaten.
[14] Jörg Sasse, Arbeiten am Bild, München, 2001.
[15] The methodology of digital subtraction cf. the work-cycle Interiors (1997-2000) by Isabell Heimerdinger.
© Media Art Net 2004
above copied from: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/artistic%20concept/print/
VISUAL COMMUNICATION AS A PRIMARY SYSTEM, Sandra Moriarty
Journal of Visual Literacy 14:2 (1994): 11-21
VISUAL COMMUNICATION AS A PRIMARY SYSTEM
In a review of the contributions of various philosophers to semiotics, Thomas Sebeok, founder and director of the Center for Language and Semiotic Studies at Indiana University observed that Bacon, for one, "did not commit the vulgar error of identifying language with communication." (1991, p. 71) In other words, in Sebeok's view, language is only one type of communication and it is narrow-minded, if not vulgar, to privilege language over other types of sign systems.
On the other hand, equally respected Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco, declares that, "general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity--languages--and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals." (1986, p. 12) Either Eco defines language more broadly than Sebeok or he is declaring, in opposition to Sebeok, that language is not only the most important sign system but that it encompasses the whole of human signification.
My aim here is not to deny the importance of verbal language, for clearly the two communication systems--visual and verbal-- are interdependent. Instead, I wish to emphasize the need for the development of theories of visual communication that parallel the emphasis historically place on language-based communication and to present an initial theory of visual communication as a primary form of communication different from but equally as important as language-based communication.
The Debate in Perspective
Sebeok's comments reflect the view of the semiotics field whose leading thinker was turn-of-the century American philosopher C.S. Peirce. Peircian semiotics with its roots in philosophy is concerned with the study of signs and considers sign systems to be much broader than language. Peirce developed a logic-centered orientation grounded in empirical observation.
The continental approach, called semiology, was formulated largely by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure during the early years of the 20th century. Semiology is rooted in a study of language and the two-part sign relationship between a signifier and its signified. Saussure who, although he admits that signs can be other than words, focuses most of his attention on how meaning is created through words. His work as well as that of his followers largely concentrates on linguistic based theories and forms of analysis.
In contrast, Peirce's tripartite system for analyzing signs includes iconic, indexical and symbolic categories of meaning, which provide a much richer field for visual analysis. Symbols are arbitrary and meaning is agreed to through convention; icons and indexes are "motivated," that is they are more likely to resemble their object in some way. Peirce defines an icon as similar to its subject--a representation such as a drawing or photograph where likeness or resemblance is a determining characteristic. An index is physically connected with its object as an indication that something exists or has occurred, such as a footprint means someone walked by or smoke means there is a fire.
Given the broader view of semiotics, it is no wonder that visual communication is more likely to find a home with Peirce than with Saussure. While "visual semiotics" has an intuitive logic, one can only wonder if the term "visual semiology" as used by Metz (1980, p. 63) is a contradiction in terms.
Semiologists see language, particularly verbal language, as the primary communication system and "distinguish sharply between intentional conventionalized devices (which they call signs) and other natural or unintentional manifestations which do not, strictly speaking, deserve such a name." (Eco, 1979, p. 15; Worth, p. 107) In this scheme, indexical signs, for example, are given little consideration. Worth agrees with the notion that intentionality is a requirement of communication. However, Eco describes the Peircean approach as "more comprehensive and fruitful" because as he explains, "It does not demand the qualities of being intentionally emitted and artificially produced." Furthermore, it broadens the concept of sign and introduces the idea of an interpretant, a concept that is extremely important in understanding the complexities of visual meaning.
Eco, nevertheless, as the opening quotes demonstrate, seems to posit a language-based semiology. One reason for what appears to be Eco's confusion is that he has tried in his own work to marry the Cartesian mentalism of the continental semiology with the pragmatics of post-Peircean semiotics. In spite of these integrative efforts, he still appears to privilege language and relegate non-linguistic sign systems to the periphery of semiotics. In his A Theory of Semiotics he describes his view of language-based semiotics in this way: (1979, p. 172),
"every theory of signification and communication has only one primary objective, i.e. verbal language, all other languages being imperfect approximations to its capacities and therefore constituting peripheral and impure instances of semiotic devices."
Turn-of-the century semiotics, however, is not the earliest or most definitive work on signs and their relationship to language, as Eco reminds us in his book, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Many of these earlier approaches were not as wedded to language as the root of communication and thinking. Historically the classical Greeks, particularly Aristotle, were reluctant to equate signs and words, although in the semiotics of the Stoics, the theory of language finally becomes associated with the theory of signs. Augustine, however, fifteen centuries before Peirce, recognized the genus of signs of which linguistic signs were only one species. (Eco, 1986, p. 27, 31, 33) The debate about words and their relationship to other signs has been going on for a long time.
The Primary Modeling System
Questions about the primacy of language are of interest to scholars in visual communication because embedded in this discussion is a presumption of the role and importance of visual communication as secondary or peripheral. Peirce, and more recently Thomas Sebeok, founder of the Indiana University semiotics research center, present us with a theory of semiotics that is not only broader than a language-based sign system, it also treats both nonverbal and visual communication with the respect due to seminal communication systems.
But first let's consider the concept of a primary system. The Soviet and Eastern European school (Lotman, Zaliznjak, Ivanov, and Toporov among others), even though it bases its work on the concept of sign systems and is considered a school of semiotics rather than semiology, has done much to privilege language through its use of the phrase "primary modeling system." In Lotman's view, language is a primary modeling system through which "the other systems are expressed." (Eco, 1986 p. 32)
The concept of a primary modeling system, which Sebeok reviews in his book, A Sign is Just a Sign, has been central to the Soviet school since the early 1960s. In the Soviet view, secondary systems are large, global controlling operations like social, cultural, and ideological systems that organize behavior. At their base, providing an infrastructure for these larger systems, is natural based language which the Soviets call the primary modeling system. In other words, language is a primary system because it is the base on which are built more complex social/cultural systems such as myth and religion which are described as superstructures. (Sebeok 1991, p. 50)
The reason the Soviet theory may seem confusing is because the word "primary" can also suggest important, privileged, or first in development, as well as a base for other more complex systems, as the Soviets use it. If primary means first or most important, then secondary in a more common usage would naturally mean systems that are of lesser importance, rather than the global systems designated by the Soviets. In this use, other types of specialized systems dependent upon language, such as writing as well as myth and religion, what Sebeok called superstructures, would be referred to as secondary.
Eco provides an example of this terminological tangle. He explains the theory of primary modeling systems and, in the process, appears in his interpretation to modify the Soviet's use of the phrase "secondary" to mean derivative: "verbal language could be defined as the primary modeling system, the others being only 'secondary,' derivative (and partial) translations of some of its devices." The word derivative carries with it notions of antecedency, as well as implying secondary in importance.
Saussure, however, was clearly focused on the relative importance of language and presumably would have used the word "primary" to make a distinction of importance for language. In his "course in General Linguistics," he observes (Davis and Schleifer, 1989),
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems.
Lotman and Uspensky elaborated on the Soviet view of language as a primary modeling system in the 1970s and explained that, "language is viewed as carrying out a specific communicative function by providing the collective with a presumption of communicability." (Sebeok, 1991, p. 50) And that presumption seems to mean that communicability begins with language. Eco elaborates on that notion and makes the point that language is primary because language is how we express our thoughts: (1979, p. 172),
"it could be defined as the primary way in which man translates his thoughts, speaking and thinking being a privileged area of a semiotic inquiry, so that linguistics is not only the most important branch of semiotics but the model for every semiotic activity.
Which Came First: Words or Pictures?
But where does visual communication lie in this debate about the primacy of communication systems? Presumably the Soviets would see it as either a tertiary form of communication or a superstructure built on language. This conflicts with the view of Plato, among others, who has Socrates describe in the Phaedo two worlds: the first of which is a murky world of imperfection as seen through the tangled and inept medium of speech and the second being an "upper world" of perfection and light where all things are communicated visually, unmediated, and without the need for words. Burgin makes the point, however, that Plato's rather naive view of imagery still effects the way we talk and think about art and particularly about the ineffable purity and credibility of representative images--i.e. "seeing is believing.". (Burgin, 1983, p. 243)
Although, Christian Metz suggests in his classic work, "The Perceived and the Named," that, "It would be a fruitless quarrel that would initially seek to know whether it is language that informs perception or perception which informs language," he still comes down on the side of language as a primary system. (1980, p. 59-63) He argues that language, compared with "all nonlinguistic codes," is a metalanguage--i.e. a universal communication code that makes the exchange of information from other codes possible (principally formalized languages, mathematical notation, chemical notation). Language is used to introduce these codes, explicate them and define their field of validity. He clearly is on the side of the linguists:
"Every semiologist has noted that language, through its relationship with other codes, occupies a non symmetrical and privileged position in that it affects the quantitative extension of the material of the signified (the total field of 'things that once can say')."
He concludes that "Language can say, even if sometimes only with approximation, what all the other codes can say, while the inverse is not true." When he specifically discusses visuals he suggests that "language does much more than transcode vision;" in his view language is needed not only to explicate vision but to complete it--i.e. by supplying a name.
Sebeok, who clearly believes that a debate about which came first, language or perception, is not fruitless but important, speculates that language evolved in prehistory first as an adaptive function principally to enhance imitative signaling (a visual function)--the evolutionary focus was more on language-as-modeling-system rather than on speech-as-communication. Furthermore, at the time language evolved, homo habilis is thought to have had very sophisticated visual and nonverbal sign system repertoires but a primitive verbal system limited to gutturals rather than articulate, linear speech. In this sense, Sebeok argues that, "properly speaking, language itself is a secondary modeling system." He concludes that "the general belief that language replaced the cruder systems is totally wrong." (1991, p. 57, 71)
Child development scholars would agree that visual communication skills are not secondary, derivative, impure or peripheral and, in fact, develop earlier than verbal skills in children. Burgin, in his essay "Seeing Sense," notes that Freud, in line with Piaget's analysis of children's developmental processes, describes the primary processes as preceding the secondary processes in the mental development of the individual" and that the primary processes "are pre-verbal in origin and thus prefer to handle images rather than words." He continues, "Where words are handled they are treated as far as possible like images." (1983, p. 231) This mirrors the way the perceptual process work where, as Worth explains, the natural world presents itself directly to the information processing system. (1981, p. 171)
The willingness to privilege language as the primary communication system has also led to such works such as Neil Postman's criticism of television in which he argues that most of the world's current problems can be traced to the switch from written to visual communication--i.e. from reading books to watching television. A similar critique was delivered to the International Visual Literacy Association by Daniel Maher who pointed to a cultural shift that, in his view, has made the word subordinate to the image. He argues that the mass media, presumably television, "represents the epitome of the image dominating over the word" and, as a result, language is being reduced from, in his terms, a symbol system to a sign system. In other words, as a result of the image rather than the word containing the meaning, language is degenerating.
A more balanced view of the relationship between the two sign systems is Sebeok's model of a communication system based on two "mutually sustaining repertoires of signs, the zoosemiotic nonverbal, plus superimposed, the anthroposemiotic verbal." (1991, p. 55) Sebeok speculates that "the latter is the modeling system the Soviet scholars call primary but which, in truth, is phylogentically as well as ontogenetically secondary to the nonverbal." In other words, the primary/secondary or superstructure/substructure relationship does not hold between visual and verbal communication systems as it does between spoken and written language where written language is more clearly dependent upon the primacy of spoken language.
Array of Sign Systems
An important notion introduced in the preceding comments is the idea that human language is only one of many sign systems and within this broader world language is certainly not "primary." In many civilizations, particularly prehistorical and non-Western societies, forms of communication relying on other sensory systems are far better developed and language plays a less dominant role. In other words, there is a large world of communication sign systems and language-based sign systems are only one part of that universe.
Several writers, for example, have reviewed the breadth of communicative sign systems and identified a number of other semiotic based fields of study where meaning is communicated by means other than language. Eco builds his array "starting from the apparently more 'natural' and 'spontaneous' communicative processes (zoosemiotics, or animal communication systems) and going on to more complex 'cultural' systems such as language. The following terms, for example, are used to identify areas of communication study from the natural world (Eco 1979; Sebeok 1991): protosemiotics (the solar system), zoosemiosis (animal communication), and biosemiosis, which is a general term for all types of biological study including such areas as zoosemiosis (animal communication), endosemiotics (communication at the molecular and cellular level), phytosemiotics (vegetable systems, i.e. photosynthesis), and mycosemiotics (fungi signaling systems).
Anthroposemiosis, a form of biosemiosis, includes human communication and this is where human communication appears in this broad array of natural based communication systems. And as Sebeok noted, human communication includes language based systems, which he calls anthroposemiotic (both spoken and written language). as well as nonverbal or zoosemiotic systems. Actually zoosemiotic is defined as non-human or animal communication, so nonverbal is probably a better term, although it has its limitations since it is based on an oppositional logic.
To answer the question regarding where visual communication fits, the answer is that human communication is both anthroposemiotic (language based) and nonverbal. In the nonverbal area, for example, written language is communicated visually as are many other nonverbal language or notation systems (Braille, mathematical, musical and choreographic codes), symbolic systems (dress, cosmetics, heraldry, road signs, maps, engineering and architectural schematics, algebra, chemistry tables) and many forms of what we call visual communication (film codes, color systems, layout, composition, aesthetics, etc.). In areas more closely tied to what Sebeok was referring to when he used the word zoosemiotics, we find other sensory communication systems, such as kinesics and proxemics, and sensory codes such as the language of perfume, as well as indexical and iconographic sign recognition. This variety of communication systems that are not language based, however, illustrates Sebeok's point about the "vulgar error."
Relatively speaking, human language-based communication actually falls rather far down on the array of sign systems. By privileging human language, some might argue that we are actually guilty of speciesism.
The Factor of Abstraction
Most scholars who see language as the primary sign system (for humans) do so because of the complexity and richness of language and its ability to express abstract as well as reality-dependent information. As Eco analyzes this line of reasoning, he seems to come down on both sides of the fence. First, he points out that, only language has the quality of "effability," which he explains as follows (1979, p. 172):
The effability power of verbal language is undoubtedly due to its great articulatory and combinational flexibility, which is obtained by putting together highly standardized discrete units, easily learned and susceptible to a reasonable range of non-pertinent variations.
By that he is suggesting that every human experience, as well as thought, can be expressed through verbal language, while the opposite is not true. However, he also points to experiences that can't, in fact, be expressed well in language, such as the "meaning" of certain Neapolitan gestures. In fact, he admits that there is a vast realm of "unspeakable" but not "unexpressible" content. However, he finally concludes that non-linguistic communication is also important, if not as important as language, and calls for a broader semiotic inquiry into other legitimate sign systems recognizing that verbal language is not "the privileged vehicle for thought alone." (1979, p. 174)
The question of where thought occurs is fuzzy because the perceptual and cognitive systems are interwoven. The perceptual process (all senses, not just visual or auditory) is engaged before information is processed. Processing involves the manipulation of concepts and reasoning. Thoughts are often defined as "mental representations" which suggests the importance of visual perception and memory in thinking. Gibson explains how thought operates at both the verbal and visual levels (1971, p. 34):
Not only do we perceive in terms of visual information, we also can think in those terms. Making and looking at pictures helps us to fix these terms. We also can think in terms of verbal information, as is obvious, and words enable us to fix, classify and consolidate our ideas. But the difference is that visual thinking is freer and less stereotyped than verbal thinking: there is no vocabulary of picturing as there is of saying. As every artist knows, there are thoughts that can be visualized without being verbalized.
There are actually two views on how thoughts are stored, as Miller and Burton explain (1994). The first position based on the concept of mental representations suggests that these "thoughts" are stored as imagery internally coded in a spatial structure. The second view, which is derived from Lotman's "language of thought" hypothesis, is that they are stored as propositions encoded verbally in linear or sequential order. Although thought can involve both pictorial and semantic elements, it is probably best described as a conceptual process that moves beyond both words and pictures and into an abstract meaning-based format or platform for managing ideational relationships.
Reasoning is thought by many to be primarily verbal because of the power of classical logic which drives the analysis of deduction and induction through verbal framing. But reasoning does not have to be verbally based, as in the case of aesthetics, theoretical mathematics, and ideation or creative thinking.
Geisser has studied logical reasoning, particularly in deaf people, and concludes that the deaf rely more on visual processing and thus have more problems with inferential reasoning. (1991) In contrast, semioticians argue that the Peircian concept of abduction, which is reasoning based on hypothesis building from clues in the natural environment, is a good indication of non-language based inferential reasoning. Abduction reasons from what Hoopes calls "statistical inference" (1991) which relies more on educated guessing than rules of logic (induction, deduction), but, regardless, is a highly developed form of inference building that originates primarily from visual and other sensory cues. Eco and Sebeok in The Sign of Three refer to it as "the conjectural paradigm" and point to its use in medical diagnosis and detective fiction. (1983) Sherlock Holmes, whose author, Conan Doyle, was trained as a doctor, is an example used by Eco and Sebeok to demonstrate how abductive reasoning is based on observations and inferences.
Gregory, in his book, The Intelligent Eye, doesn't discuss abduction, but he does base a good deal of his theory of visual thinking on the concept of "hypothesis objects," which suggests that we puzzle out meaning through a structured process of hypothesis building about the things we are perceiving. These "units of seeing and thinking" are based on the objects we look at, although the units themselves are not necessarily words or pictures. (1970)
The role of syntax in language is another point in the debate about the ability of visual thinking to deal with complexities and abstractions. Worth, in his classic article, "Pictures Can't Say Ain't," makes the argument that visuals cannot deal with what is not. His point is that negation is dealt with in language through syntax and there is nothing in the visual information system that parallels that construct. He does mention, however, illusions and impossible pictures which certainly demonstrate that visuals can deal with the unimaginable, as well as the impossible. And certainly the ubiquitous circle-with-a-slash symbol has been adapted to many situations of negation. Even if Worth is correct, the lack of negation does not necessarily mean that visual perception has no role in abstract thinking.
Given the work by visual communication and semiotic scholars in the areas of inference, hypothesis building, and abductive reasoning, it's difficult to conclude that visual perception and thinking are not important in abstract reasoning and that abstraction is tied exclusively to language-based information processing.
The Arbitrary Factor
The base of the linguistic analyst's primary modeling system is spoken language; writing is a superstructure built on this base. Both forms of language--spoken as well as written--represent highly arbitrary sign systems that have to be learned in order to be interpreted. The arbitrary factor is both a measure of the complexity of the system but also an indication of the socio-cultural system available to help with linguistic interpretation, a support system which is largely lacking in visual perception and communication.
Verbal messages are highly conventionalized; we are taught to speak and read these signs through extensive educational protocols either managed at home by family (spoken language) or at school (written language). Visual signs are more often iconographic or indexical and those forms of interpretation are, as Sebeok noted in a discussion of nonverbal communication, largely "wired in" rather than arbitrary and conventional. (1991, p. 65) Messaris makes the argument convincingly in his book Visual Literacy that we understand graphic, film, and video images, not through learning a code but by transferring real world interpretational processes that we use in everyday perception. (1994)
Our natural perceptual processes, in other words, govern much of our learning. Even visual signs that are arbitrary, such as street signs, are rarely formally taught to us. We acquire visual competency through development and experience rather than training--in other words, for our basic nonverbal and visual communication skills we are largely self-taught and that includes such sophisticated skills as making sense of MTV, watching multiple television channels simultaneously, and negotiating freeways as we puzzle out a map.
The "hard wiring" of the basic visual perception processes, however, doesn't suggest that visual interpretation is an unsophisticated form of understanding any more than the concept of deep structure suggests that language learning is less complex or sophisticated. In fact, Miller and Burton even speculate that the deep structure of language developed from perception. (1994, p. 72)
Even though visual perception and thinking may be self taught, our skill levels in certain areas that are important to us, such as making sense of MTV or reading a map or schematic, can be extremely high. We do need training, however, if we want to deliberately develop more specialized visual skills in order to track something in the woods, puzzle out the images of the cells we see in a microscope, read a negative or X-ray, or understand a Picasso painting. If we want to become proficient in producing visual messages, in almost every case we need specialist training. Some people are born painters, and most people have some limited ability to sketch, but most visual sign production calls for training.
Another aspect of the complexity of visual sign interpretation is the lack of a system for assigning conventional meanings for visual communication elements that are arbitrary, such as visual symbols. This suggests that visual information is subject to more active personal interpretation--more so than with language. As Gibson says, visual perception is "richer and more inexhaustible," i.e. more open to personal interpretation.
The interpretation of visual information, like semiotic approaches to meaning interpretation, are therefore highly subjective and highly projective, which puts more demands on a viewer than on a listener or reader. Because of the resemblance factor for icon interpretation and the experience factor for index interpretation, the formal training may be needed less than for language--although the life experience may be more demanding if there were a way to measure such a thing-- but regardless, the visual and nonverbal systems operate relatively untutored in our society, at least in comparison to language. With visuals we are much more on our own, both in learning and in interpreting, and that's why I believe visual learning in our contemporary society is equally as challenging an accomplishment as verbal learning.
The Argument for the Primacy of Visual Communication
For these reasons, I would like to suggest that visual communication is as much a primary system as verbal language, and that language based communication has been inappropriately privileged in contemporary Western culture. This is not to say that visual communication is more important, or language less so. The argument here is that an equally important form of communication--visual communication--has been ignored because of the strong emphasis our culture and the academy have placed on language.
In terms of development, the visual sign system is antecedent to language. In terms of complexity, visual interpretation can be seen as being more complex than verbal interpretation, primarily because of the lack of a conventionalized sign system and a formalized training protocol. Visual communication could also be considered primary because the viewer has to learn as well as manage more of the visual interpretative function independently. Finally, visual communication is neither derivative, nor peripheral to language, and therefore the designation of "secondary," "tertiary" or a "superstructure" built on language is inappropriate.
A more appropriate model would be one built on Paivio's notion of dual coding which states the visual and verbal information are encoded and decoded by separate specialized perceptual and cognitive systems. (1971, 1986 ) One system is visual/pictorial and manipulates the elements of imagery simultaneously; the other is linguistic and propositional and operates in sequence. As Miller and Burton explain, "The two systems are assumed to be structurally and functionally distinct." (1994, p. 73) Although independent, the two subsystems are also interdependent so that a visual concept can be converted into a verbal label and vice versa. A more recent approach to explaining the interaction between the two systems is the metaphor of interactive parallel processing.
We'll close this argument with another quote from Sebeok who has concluded that we should broaden our concept of communication: "Our habit of thinking of communication as consisting exclusively of language has delayed the study of communication." (1991, p. 57). By redefining the notion of a "primary" system and including visual communication as well as verbal, we may move further towards a more thorough analysis of the complexities of communication.
References
Burgin, Victor. 1983. "Seeing Sense." In Howard Davis and Paul Walton, eds. Language, Image and Media. New York: St. Martin's Press.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1989. "The Object of Linguistics" from "Course in General Linguistics" as reprinted in Robert C. Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Longman.
Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Midland Book Edition.
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Midland Book Edition.
Eco, Umberto and Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. (1983). The Sign of Three. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gibson, J.J. (1971) "The Information Available in Pictures." Leonardo. 4 (Winter), p. 27-35.
Gregory, R. L. 1970. The Intelligent Eye. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hoopes, James. 1991. Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Maher, Daniel R. 1990. "MTV and Sesame Street: Visual Images and Language," Investigating Visual Literacy, Proceedings of the 1989 IVLA conference.
Messaris, Paul. 1994.Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, & Reality. Boulder CO: Westview Press.
Metz, Christian. 1980. "The Perceived and the Named," Visual Communication 6:3, 56-68.
Pavio, Allan. 1971. Imagery and Verbal Processes. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Pavio, Allan. 1986. Mental Represenations: A Dual Coding Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1991. A Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Worth, Sol. "Pictures Can't Say Ain't." Chapter 7 in Studying Visual Communication. Sol Worth and Larry Gross, eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
abouve copied from: http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/primelang.html
VISUAL COMMUNICATION AS A PRIMARY SYSTEM
In a review of the contributions of various philosophers to semiotics, Thomas Sebeok, founder and director of the Center for Language and Semiotic Studies at Indiana University observed that Bacon, for one, "did not commit the vulgar error of identifying language with communication." (1991, p. 71) In other words, in Sebeok's view, language is only one type of communication and it is narrow-minded, if not vulgar, to privilege language over other types of sign systems.
On the other hand, equally respected Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco, declares that, "general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity--languages--and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals." (1986, p. 12) Either Eco defines language more broadly than Sebeok or he is declaring, in opposition to Sebeok, that language is not only the most important sign system but that it encompasses the whole of human signification.
My aim here is not to deny the importance of verbal language, for clearly the two communication systems--visual and verbal-- are interdependent. Instead, I wish to emphasize the need for the development of theories of visual communication that parallel the emphasis historically place on language-based communication and to present an initial theory of visual communication as a primary form of communication different from but equally as important as language-based communication.
The Debate in Perspective
Sebeok's comments reflect the view of the semiotics field whose leading thinker was turn-of-the century American philosopher C.S. Peirce. Peircian semiotics with its roots in philosophy is concerned with the study of signs and considers sign systems to be much broader than language. Peirce developed a logic-centered orientation grounded in empirical observation.
The continental approach, called semiology, was formulated largely by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure during the early years of the 20th century. Semiology is rooted in a study of language and the two-part sign relationship between a signifier and its signified. Saussure who, although he admits that signs can be other than words, focuses most of his attention on how meaning is created through words. His work as well as that of his followers largely concentrates on linguistic based theories and forms of analysis.
In contrast, Peirce's tripartite system for analyzing signs includes iconic, indexical and symbolic categories of meaning, which provide a much richer field for visual analysis. Symbols are arbitrary and meaning is agreed to through convention; icons and indexes are "motivated," that is they are more likely to resemble their object in some way. Peirce defines an icon as similar to its subject--a representation such as a drawing or photograph where likeness or resemblance is a determining characteristic. An index is physically connected with its object as an indication that something exists or has occurred, such as a footprint means someone walked by or smoke means there is a fire.
Given the broader view of semiotics, it is no wonder that visual communication is more likely to find a home with Peirce than with Saussure. While "visual semiotics" has an intuitive logic, one can only wonder if the term "visual semiology" as used by Metz (1980, p. 63) is a contradiction in terms.
Semiologists see language, particularly verbal language, as the primary communication system and "distinguish sharply between intentional conventionalized devices (which they call signs) and other natural or unintentional manifestations which do not, strictly speaking, deserve such a name." (Eco, 1979, p. 15; Worth, p. 107) In this scheme, indexical signs, for example, are given little consideration. Worth agrees with the notion that intentionality is a requirement of communication. However, Eco describes the Peircean approach as "more comprehensive and fruitful" because as he explains, "It does not demand the qualities of being intentionally emitted and artificially produced." Furthermore, it broadens the concept of sign and introduces the idea of an interpretant, a concept that is extremely important in understanding the complexities of visual meaning.
Eco, nevertheless, as the opening quotes demonstrate, seems to posit a language-based semiology. One reason for what appears to be Eco's confusion is that he has tried in his own work to marry the Cartesian mentalism of the continental semiology with the pragmatics of post-Peircean semiotics. In spite of these integrative efforts, he still appears to privilege language and relegate non-linguistic sign systems to the periphery of semiotics. In his A Theory of Semiotics he describes his view of language-based semiotics in this way: (1979, p. 172),
"every theory of signification and communication has only one primary objective, i.e. verbal language, all other languages being imperfect approximations to its capacities and therefore constituting peripheral and impure instances of semiotic devices."
Turn-of-the century semiotics, however, is not the earliest or most definitive work on signs and their relationship to language, as Eco reminds us in his book, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Many of these earlier approaches were not as wedded to language as the root of communication and thinking. Historically the classical Greeks, particularly Aristotle, were reluctant to equate signs and words, although in the semiotics of the Stoics, the theory of language finally becomes associated with the theory of signs. Augustine, however, fifteen centuries before Peirce, recognized the genus of signs of which linguistic signs were only one species. (Eco, 1986, p. 27, 31, 33) The debate about words and their relationship to other signs has been going on for a long time.
The Primary Modeling System
Questions about the primacy of language are of interest to scholars in visual communication because embedded in this discussion is a presumption of the role and importance of visual communication as secondary or peripheral. Peirce, and more recently Thomas Sebeok, founder of the Indiana University semiotics research center, present us with a theory of semiotics that is not only broader than a language-based sign system, it also treats both nonverbal and visual communication with the respect due to seminal communication systems.
But first let's consider the concept of a primary system. The Soviet and Eastern European school (Lotman, Zaliznjak, Ivanov, and Toporov among others), even though it bases its work on the concept of sign systems and is considered a school of semiotics rather than semiology, has done much to privilege language through its use of the phrase "primary modeling system." In Lotman's view, language is a primary modeling system through which "the other systems are expressed." (Eco, 1986 p. 32)
The concept of a primary modeling system, which Sebeok reviews in his book, A Sign is Just a Sign, has been central to the Soviet school since the early 1960s. In the Soviet view, secondary systems are large, global controlling operations like social, cultural, and ideological systems that organize behavior. At their base, providing an infrastructure for these larger systems, is natural based language which the Soviets call the primary modeling system. In other words, language is a primary system because it is the base on which are built more complex social/cultural systems such as myth and religion which are described as superstructures. (Sebeok 1991, p. 50)
The reason the Soviet theory may seem confusing is because the word "primary" can also suggest important, privileged, or first in development, as well as a base for other more complex systems, as the Soviets use it. If primary means first or most important, then secondary in a more common usage would naturally mean systems that are of lesser importance, rather than the global systems designated by the Soviets. In this use, other types of specialized systems dependent upon language, such as writing as well as myth and religion, what Sebeok called superstructures, would be referred to as secondary.
Eco provides an example of this terminological tangle. He explains the theory of primary modeling systems and, in the process, appears in his interpretation to modify the Soviet's use of the phrase "secondary" to mean derivative: "verbal language could be defined as the primary modeling system, the others being only 'secondary,' derivative (and partial) translations of some of its devices." The word derivative carries with it notions of antecedency, as well as implying secondary in importance.
Saussure, however, was clearly focused on the relative importance of language and presumably would have used the word "primary" to make a distinction of importance for language. In his "course in General Linguistics," he observes (Davis and Schleifer, 1989),
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems.
Lotman and Uspensky elaborated on the Soviet view of language as a primary modeling system in the 1970s and explained that, "language is viewed as carrying out a specific communicative function by providing the collective with a presumption of communicability." (Sebeok, 1991, p. 50) And that presumption seems to mean that communicability begins with language. Eco elaborates on that notion and makes the point that language is primary because language is how we express our thoughts: (1979, p. 172),
"it could be defined as the primary way in which man translates his thoughts, speaking and thinking being a privileged area of a semiotic inquiry, so that linguistics is not only the most important branch of semiotics but the model for every semiotic activity.
Which Came First: Words or Pictures?
But where does visual communication lie in this debate about the primacy of communication systems? Presumably the Soviets would see it as either a tertiary form of communication or a superstructure built on language. This conflicts with the view of Plato, among others, who has Socrates describe in the Phaedo two worlds: the first of which is a murky world of imperfection as seen through the tangled and inept medium of speech and the second being an "upper world" of perfection and light where all things are communicated visually, unmediated, and without the need for words. Burgin makes the point, however, that Plato's rather naive view of imagery still effects the way we talk and think about art and particularly about the ineffable purity and credibility of representative images--i.e. "seeing is believing.". (Burgin, 1983, p. 243)
Although, Christian Metz suggests in his classic work, "The Perceived and the Named," that, "It would be a fruitless quarrel that would initially seek to know whether it is language that informs perception or perception which informs language," he still comes down on the side of language as a primary system. (1980, p. 59-63) He argues that language, compared with "all nonlinguistic codes," is a metalanguage--i.e. a universal communication code that makes the exchange of information from other codes possible (principally formalized languages, mathematical notation, chemical notation). Language is used to introduce these codes, explicate them and define their field of validity. He clearly is on the side of the linguists:
"Every semiologist has noted that language, through its relationship with other codes, occupies a non symmetrical and privileged position in that it affects the quantitative extension of the material of the signified (the total field of 'things that once can say')."
He concludes that "Language can say, even if sometimes only with approximation, what all the other codes can say, while the inverse is not true." When he specifically discusses visuals he suggests that "language does much more than transcode vision;" in his view language is needed not only to explicate vision but to complete it--i.e. by supplying a name.
Sebeok, who clearly believes that a debate about which came first, language or perception, is not fruitless but important, speculates that language evolved in prehistory first as an adaptive function principally to enhance imitative signaling (a visual function)--the evolutionary focus was more on language-as-modeling-system rather than on speech-as-communication. Furthermore, at the time language evolved, homo habilis is thought to have had very sophisticated visual and nonverbal sign system repertoires but a primitive verbal system limited to gutturals rather than articulate, linear speech. In this sense, Sebeok argues that, "properly speaking, language itself is a secondary modeling system." He concludes that "the general belief that language replaced the cruder systems is totally wrong." (1991, p. 57, 71)
Child development scholars would agree that visual communication skills are not secondary, derivative, impure or peripheral and, in fact, develop earlier than verbal skills in children. Burgin, in his essay "Seeing Sense," notes that Freud, in line with Piaget's analysis of children's developmental processes, describes the primary processes as preceding the secondary processes in the mental development of the individual" and that the primary processes "are pre-verbal in origin and thus prefer to handle images rather than words." He continues, "Where words are handled they are treated as far as possible like images." (1983, p. 231) This mirrors the way the perceptual process work where, as Worth explains, the natural world presents itself directly to the information processing system. (1981, p. 171)
The willingness to privilege language as the primary communication system has also led to such works such as Neil Postman's criticism of television in which he argues that most of the world's current problems can be traced to the switch from written to visual communication--i.e. from reading books to watching television. A similar critique was delivered to the International Visual Literacy Association by Daniel Maher who pointed to a cultural shift that, in his view, has made the word subordinate to the image. He argues that the mass media, presumably television, "represents the epitome of the image dominating over the word" and, as a result, language is being reduced from, in his terms, a symbol system to a sign system. In other words, as a result of the image rather than the word containing the meaning, language is degenerating.
A more balanced view of the relationship between the two sign systems is Sebeok's model of a communication system based on two "mutually sustaining repertoires of signs, the zoosemiotic nonverbal, plus superimposed, the anthroposemiotic verbal." (1991, p. 55) Sebeok speculates that "the latter is the modeling system the Soviet scholars call primary but which, in truth, is phylogentically as well as ontogenetically secondary to the nonverbal." In other words, the primary/secondary or superstructure/substructure relationship does not hold between visual and verbal communication systems as it does between spoken and written language where written language is more clearly dependent upon the primacy of spoken language.
Array of Sign Systems
An important notion introduced in the preceding comments is the idea that human language is only one of many sign systems and within this broader world language is certainly not "primary." In many civilizations, particularly prehistorical and non-Western societies, forms of communication relying on other sensory systems are far better developed and language plays a less dominant role. In other words, there is a large world of communication sign systems and language-based sign systems are only one part of that universe.
Several writers, for example, have reviewed the breadth of communicative sign systems and identified a number of other semiotic based fields of study where meaning is communicated by means other than language. Eco builds his array "starting from the apparently more 'natural' and 'spontaneous' communicative processes (zoosemiotics, or animal communication systems) and going on to more complex 'cultural' systems such as language. The following terms, for example, are used to identify areas of communication study from the natural world (Eco 1979; Sebeok 1991): protosemiotics (the solar system), zoosemiosis (animal communication), and biosemiosis, which is a general term for all types of biological study including such areas as zoosemiosis (animal communication), endosemiotics (communication at the molecular and cellular level), phytosemiotics (vegetable systems, i.e. photosynthesis), and mycosemiotics (fungi signaling systems).
Anthroposemiosis, a form of biosemiosis, includes human communication and this is where human communication appears in this broad array of natural based communication systems. And as Sebeok noted, human communication includes language based systems, which he calls anthroposemiotic (both spoken and written language). as well as nonverbal or zoosemiotic systems. Actually zoosemiotic is defined as non-human or animal communication, so nonverbal is probably a better term, although it has its limitations since it is based on an oppositional logic.
To answer the question regarding where visual communication fits, the answer is that human communication is both anthroposemiotic (language based) and nonverbal. In the nonverbal area, for example, written language is communicated visually as are many other nonverbal language or notation systems (Braille, mathematical, musical and choreographic codes), symbolic systems (dress, cosmetics, heraldry, road signs, maps, engineering and architectural schematics, algebra, chemistry tables) and many forms of what we call visual communication (film codes, color systems, layout, composition, aesthetics, etc.). In areas more closely tied to what Sebeok was referring to when he used the word zoosemiotics, we find other sensory communication systems, such as kinesics and proxemics, and sensory codes such as the language of perfume, as well as indexical and iconographic sign recognition. This variety of communication systems that are not language based, however, illustrates Sebeok's point about the "vulgar error."
Relatively speaking, human language-based communication actually falls rather far down on the array of sign systems. By privileging human language, some might argue that we are actually guilty of speciesism.
The Factor of Abstraction
Most scholars who see language as the primary sign system (for humans) do so because of the complexity and richness of language and its ability to express abstract as well as reality-dependent information. As Eco analyzes this line of reasoning, he seems to come down on both sides of the fence. First, he points out that, only language has the quality of "effability," which he explains as follows (1979, p. 172):
The effability power of verbal language is undoubtedly due to its great articulatory and combinational flexibility, which is obtained by putting together highly standardized discrete units, easily learned and susceptible to a reasonable range of non-pertinent variations.
By that he is suggesting that every human experience, as well as thought, can be expressed through verbal language, while the opposite is not true. However, he also points to experiences that can't, in fact, be expressed well in language, such as the "meaning" of certain Neapolitan gestures. In fact, he admits that there is a vast realm of "unspeakable" but not "unexpressible" content. However, he finally concludes that non-linguistic communication is also important, if not as important as language, and calls for a broader semiotic inquiry into other legitimate sign systems recognizing that verbal language is not "the privileged vehicle for thought alone." (1979, p. 174)
The question of where thought occurs is fuzzy because the perceptual and cognitive systems are interwoven. The perceptual process (all senses, not just visual or auditory) is engaged before information is processed. Processing involves the manipulation of concepts and reasoning. Thoughts are often defined as "mental representations" which suggests the importance of visual perception and memory in thinking. Gibson explains how thought operates at both the verbal and visual levels (1971, p. 34):
Not only do we perceive in terms of visual information, we also can think in those terms. Making and looking at pictures helps us to fix these terms. We also can think in terms of verbal information, as is obvious, and words enable us to fix, classify and consolidate our ideas. But the difference is that visual thinking is freer and less stereotyped than verbal thinking: there is no vocabulary of picturing as there is of saying. As every artist knows, there are thoughts that can be visualized without being verbalized.
There are actually two views on how thoughts are stored, as Miller and Burton explain (1994). The first position based on the concept of mental representations suggests that these "thoughts" are stored as imagery internally coded in a spatial structure. The second view, which is derived from Lotman's "language of thought" hypothesis, is that they are stored as propositions encoded verbally in linear or sequential order. Although thought can involve both pictorial and semantic elements, it is probably best described as a conceptual process that moves beyond both words and pictures and into an abstract meaning-based format or platform for managing ideational relationships.
Reasoning is thought by many to be primarily verbal because of the power of classical logic which drives the analysis of deduction and induction through verbal framing. But reasoning does not have to be verbally based, as in the case of aesthetics, theoretical mathematics, and ideation or creative thinking.
Geisser has studied logical reasoning, particularly in deaf people, and concludes that the deaf rely more on visual processing and thus have more problems with inferential reasoning. (1991) In contrast, semioticians argue that the Peircian concept of abduction, which is reasoning based on hypothesis building from clues in the natural environment, is a good indication of non-language based inferential reasoning. Abduction reasons from what Hoopes calls "statistical inference" (1991) which relies more on educated guessing than rules of logic (induction, deduction), but, regardless, is a highly developed form of inference building that originates primarily from visual and other sensory cues. Eco and Sebeok in The Sign of Three refer to it as "the conjectural paradigm" and point to its use in medical diagnosis and detective fiction. (1983) Sherlock Holmes, whose author, Conan Doyle, was trained as a doctor, is an example used by Eco and Sebeok to demonstrate how abductive reasoning is based on observations and inferences.
Gregory, in his book, The Intelligent Eye, doesn't discuss abduction, but he does base a good deal of his theory of visual thinking on the concept of "hypothesis objects," which suggests that we puzzle out meaning through a structured process of hypothesis building about the things we are perceiving. These "units of seeing and thinking" are based on the objects we look at, although the units themselves are not necessarily words or pictures. (1970)
The role of syntax in language is another point in the debate about the ability of visual thinking to deal with complexities and abstractions. Worth, in his classic article, "Pictures Can't Say Ain't," makes the argument that visuals cannot deal with what is not. His point is that negation is dealt with in language through syntax and there is nothing in the visual information system that parallels that construct. He does mention, however, illusions and impossible pictures which certainly demonstrate that visuals can deal with the unimaginable, as well as the impossible. And certainly the ubiquitous circle-with-a-slash symbol has been adapted to many situations of negation. Even if Worth is correct, the lack of negation does not necessarily mean that visual perception has no role in abstract thinking.
Given the work by visual communication and semiotic scholars in the areas of inference, hypothesis building, and abductive reasoning, it's difficult to conclude that visual perception and thinking are not important in abstract reasoning and that abstraction is tied exclusively to language-based information processing.
The Arbitrary Factor
The base of the linguistic analyst's primary modeling system is spoken language; writing is a superstructure built on this base. Both forms of language--spoken as well as written--represent highly arbitrary sign systems that have to be learned in order to be interpreted. The arbitrary factor is both a measure of the complexity of the system but also an indication of the socio-cultural system available to help with linguistic interpretation, a support system which is largely lacking in visual perception and communication.
Verbal messages are highly conventionalized; we are taught to speak and read these signs through extensive educational protocols either managed at home by family (spoken language) or at school (written language). Visual signs are more often iconographic or indexical and those forms of interpretation are, as Sebeok noted in a discussion of nonverbal communication, largely "wired in" rather than arbitrary and conventional. (1991, p. 65) Messaris makes the argument convincingly in his book Visual Literacy that we understand graphic, film, and video images, not through learning a code but by transferring real world interpretational processes that we use in everyday perception. (1994)
Our natural perceptual processes, in other words, govern much of our learning. Even visual signs that are arbitrary, such as street signs, are rarely formally taught to us. We acquire visual competency through development and experience rather than training--in other words, for our basic nonverbal and visual communication skills we are largely self-taught and that includes such sophisticated skills as making sense of MTV, watching multiple television channels simultaneously, and negotiating freeways as we puzzle out a map.
The "hard wiring" of the basic visual perception processes, however, doesn't suggest that visual interpretation is an unsophisticated form of understanding any more than the concept of deep structure suggests that language learning is less complex or sophisticated. In fact, Miller and Burton even speculate that the deep structure of language developed from perception. (1994, p. 72)
Even though visual perception and thinking may be self taught, our skill levels in certain areas that are important to us, such as making sense of MTV or reading a map or schematic, can be extremely high. We do need training, however, if we want to deliberately develop more specialized visual skills in order to track something in the woods, puzzle out the images of the cells we see in a microscope, read a negative or X-ray, or understand a Picasso painting. If we want to become proficient in producing visual messages, in almost every case we need specialist training. Some people are born painters, and most people have some limited ability to sketch, but most visual sign production calls for training.
Another aspect of the complexity of visual sign interpretation is the lack of a system for assigning conventional meanings for visual communication elements that are arbitrary, such as visual symbols. This suggests that visual information is subject to more active personal interpretation--more so than with language. As Gibson says, visual perception is "richer and more inexhaustible," i.e. more open to personal interpretation.
The interpretation of visual information, like semiotic approaches to meaning interpretation, are therefore highly subjective and highly projective, which puts more demands on a viewer than on a listener or reader. Because of the resemblance factor for icon interpretation and the experience factor for index interpretation, the formal training may be needed less than for language--although the life experience may be more demanding if there were a way to measure such a thing-- but regardless, the visual and nonverbal systems operate relatively untutored in our society, at least in comparison to language. With visuals we are much more on our own, both in learning and in interpreting, and that's why I believe visual learning in our contemporary society is equally as challenging an accomplishment as verbal learning.
The Argument for the Primacy of Visual Communication
For these reasons, I would like to suggest that visual communication is as much a primary system as verbal language, and that language based communication has been inappropriately privileged in contemporary Western culture. This is not to say that visual communication is more important, or language less so. The argument here is that an equally important form of communication--visual communication--has been ignored because of the strong emphasis our culture and the academy have placed on language.
In terms of development, the visual sign system is antecedent to language. In terms of complexity, visual interpretation can be seen as being more complex than verbal interpretation, primarily because of the lack of a conventionalized sign system and a formalized training protocol. Visual communication could also be considered primary because the viewer has to learn as well as manage more of the visual interpretative function independently. Finally, visual communication is neither derivative, nor peripheral to language, and therefore the designation of "secondary," "tertiary" or a "superstructure" built on language is inappropriate.
A more appropriate model would be one built on Paivio's notion of dual coding which states the visual and verbal information are encoded and decoded by separate specialized perceptual and cognitive systems. (1971, 1986 ) One system is visual/pictorial and manipulates the elements of imagery simultaneously; the other is linguistic and propositional and operates in sequence. As Miller and Burton explain, "The two systems are assumed to be structurally and functionally distinct." (1994, p. 73) Although independent, the two subsystems are also interdependent so that a visual concept can be converted into a verbal label and vice versa. A more recent approach to explaining the interaction between the two systems is the metaphor of interactive parallel processing.
We'll close this argument with another quote from Sebeok who has concluded that we should broaden our concept of communication: "Our habit of thinking of communication as consisting exclusively of language has delayed the study of communication." (1991, p. 57). By redefining the notion of a "primary" system and including visual communication as well as verbal, we may move further towards a more thorough analysis of the complexities of communication.
References
Burgin, Victor. 1983. "Seeing Sense." In Howard Davis and Paul Walton, eds. Language, Image and Media. New York: St. Martin's Press.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1989. "The Object of Linguistics" from "Course in General Linguistics" as reprinted in Robert C. Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Longman.
Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Midland Book Edition.
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Midland Book Edition.
Eco, Umberto and Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. (1983). The Sign of Three. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gibson, J.J. (1971) "The Information Available in Pictures." Leonardo. 4 (Winter), p. 27-35.
Gregory, R. L. 1970. The Intelligent Eye. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hoopes, James. 1991. Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Maher, Daniel R. 1990. "MTV and Sesame Street: Visual Images and Language," Investigating Visual Literacy, Proceedings of the 1989 IVLA conference.
Messaris, Paul. 1994.Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, & Reality. Boulder CO: Westview Press.
Metz, Christian. 1980. "The Perceived and the Named," Visual Communication 6:3, 56-68.
Pavio, Allan. 1971. Imagery and Verbal Processes. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Pavio, Allan. 1986. Mental Represenations: A Dual Coding Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1991. A Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Worth, Sol. "Pictures Can't Say Ain't." Chapter 7 in Studying Visual Communication. Sol Worth and Larry Gross, eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
abouve copied from: http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/primelang.html
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without strings—Words-in-Freedom, F.T. Marinetti
The Futurist Sensibility
My Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, with which I invented essential and synthetic lyricism, imagination without strings, and words-in-freedom, deals exclusively with poetic inspiration.
Philosophy, the exact sciences, politics, journalism, education, business, however much they may seek synthetic forms of expression, will still need to use syntax and punctuation. I am obliged, for that matter, to use them myself in order to make myself clear to you.
Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that these various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on their psyches.
An ordinary man can in a day’s time travel by train from a little dead town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust, and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a great capital city bristling with lights, gestures, and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China, the London and New York suffragettes, Doctor Carrel, and the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo. He can admire Japanese athletes, Negro boxers, tireless American eccentrics, the most elegant Parisian women, by paying a franc to go to the variety theater. Then, back in his bourgeois bed, he can enjoy the distant, expensive voice of a Caruso or a Burzio.
Having become commonplace, these opportunities arouse no curiosity in superficial minds who are as incapable of grasping any novel facts as the Arabs who looked with indifference at the first aeroplanes in the sky of Tripoli. For the keen observer, however, these facts are important modifiers of our sensibility because they have caused the following significant phenomena:
Acceleration of life to today’s swift pace. Physical, intellectual, and sentimental equilibration on the cord of speed stretched between contrary magnetisms. Multiple and simultaneous awareness in a single individual.
Dread of the old and the known. Love of the new, the unexpected.
Dread of quiet living, love of danger, and an attitude of daily heroism.
Destruction of a sense of the Beyond and an increased value of the individual whose desire is vivre sa vie, in Bonnot’s phrase.
The multiplication and unbridling of human desires and ambitions.
An exact awareness of everything inaccessible and unrealizable in every person.
Semi-equality of man and woman and a lessening of the disproportion in their social rights.
Disdain for amore (sentimentality or lechery) produced by the greater freedom and erotic ease of women and by the universal exaggeration of female luxury. Let me explain: Today’s woman loves luxury more than love. A visit to a great dressmaker’s establishment, escorted by a paunchy, gouty banker friend who pays the bills, is a perfect substitute for the most amorous rendezvous with an adored young man. The woman finds all the mystery of love in the selection of an amazing ensemble, the latest model, which her friends still do not have. Men do not love women who lack luxury. The lover has lost all his prestige. Love has lost its absolute worth. A complex question; all I can do is to raise it.
A modification of patriotism, which now means a heroic idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people.
A modification in the idea of war, which has become the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force.
The passion, art, and idealism of Business. New financial sensibility.
Man multiplied by the machine. New mechanical sense, a fusion of instinct with the efficiency of motors and conquered forces.
The passion, art, and idealism of Sport. Idea and love of the “record”.
New tourist sensibility bred by ocean liners and great hotels (annual synthesis of different races). Passion for the city. Negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes. Ridicule of the “holy green silence” and the ineffable landscape.
The earth shrunk by speed. New sense of the world. To be precise: One after the other, man will gain the sense of his home, of the quarter where he lives, of his region, and finally of the continent. Today he is aware of the whole world. He little needs to know what his ancestors did, but he must assiduously discover what his contemporaries are doing all over the world. The single man, therefore, must communicate with every people on earth. He must feel himself to be the axis, judge, and motor of the explored and unexplored infinite. Vast increase of a sense of humanity and a momentary urgent need to establish relations with all mankind.
A loathing of curved lines, spirals, and the tourniquet. Love for the straight line and the tunnel. The habit of visual foreshortening and visual synthesis caused by the speed of trains and cars that look down on cities and countrysides. Dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. “Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!”
Love of depth and essence in every exercise of the spirit.
So these are some elements of the new Futurist sensibility that has generated our pictorial dynamism, our antigraceful music in its free, irregular rhythms, our noise-art and our words-in-freedom.
Words-in-freedom
Casting aside every stupid formula and all the confused verbalisms of the professors, I now declare that lyricism is the exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself with life, of filling life with the inebriation of oneself. The faculty of changing into wine the muddy water of the life that swirls and engulfs us. The ability to color the world with the unique colors of our changeable selves.
Now suppose that a friend of yours gifted with this faculty finds himself in a zone of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck, earthquake, and so on) and starts right away to tell you his impressions. Do you know what this lyric, excited friend of yours will instinctively do?
He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as they come to him. The rush of steam-emotion will burst the sentence’s steampipe, the valves of punctuation, and the adjectival clamp. Fistfuls of essential words in no conventional order. Sole preoccupation of the narrator, to render every vibration of his being.
If the mind of this gifted lyrical narrator is also populated by general ideas, he will involuntarily bind up his sensations with the entire universe that he intuitively knows. And in order to render the true worth and dimensions of his lived life, he will cast immense nets of analogy across the world. In this way he will reveal the analogical foundation of life, telegraphically, with the same economical speed that the telegraph imposes on reporters and war correspondents in their swift reportings. This urgent laconism answers not only to the laws of speed that govern us but also to the rapport of centuries between poet and audience. Between poet and audience, in fact, the same rapport exists as between two old friends. They can make themselves understood with half a word, a gesture, a glance. So the poet’s imagination must weave together distant things with no connecting strings, by means of essential free words.
Death of free verse
Free verse once had countless reasons for existing but now is destined to be replaced by words-in-freedom.
The evolution of poetry and human sensibility has shown us the two incurable defects of free verse.
Free verse fatally pushes the poet towards facile sound effects, banal double meanings, monotonous cadences, a foolish chiming, and an inevitable echo-play, internal and external.
Free verse artificially channels the flow of lyric emotion between the high walls of syntax and the weirs of grammar. The free intuitive inspiration that addresses itself directly to the intuition of the ideal reader finds itself imprisoned and distributed like purified water for the nourishment of all fussy, restless intelligences.
When I speak of destroying the canals of syntax, I am neither categorical nor systematic. Traces of conventional syntax and even of true logical sentences will be found here and there in the words-in-freedom of my unchained lyricism. This inequality in conciseness and freedom is natural and inevitable. Since poetry is in truth only a superior, more concentrated and intense life than what we live from day to day, like the latter it is composed of hyper-alive elements and moribund elements.
We ought not, therefore, to be too much preoccupied with these elements. But we should at all costs avoid rhetoric and banalities telegraphically expressed.
The imagination without strings
By the imagination without strings I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation.
Up to now writers have been restricted to immediate analogies. For instance, they have compared an animal with a man or with another animal, which is almost the same as a kind of photography. (They have compared, for example, a fox terrier to a very small thoroughbred. Others, more advanced, might compare the same trembling fox terrier to a little Morse Code machine. I, on the other hand, compare it with gurgling water. In this there is an ever vaster gradation of analogies, there are ever deeper and more solid affinities, however remote.)
Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things. An orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, can embrace the life of matter only by means of the most extensive analogies.
When, in my Battle of Tripoli, I compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme fatale, I intuitively introduced a large part of the universe into a short episode of African battle.
Images are not flowers to be chosen and picked with parsimony, as Voltaire said. They are the very lifeblood of poetry. Poetry should be an uninterrupted sequence of new images, Or it is mere anemia and greensickness.
The broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to amaze.
—Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature
The imagination without strings, and words-in-freedom, will bring us to the essence of material. As we discover new analogies between distant and apparently contrary things, we will endow them with an ever more intimate value. Instead of humanizing animals, vegetables, and minerals (an outmoded system) we will be able to animalize, vegetize, mineralize, electrify, or liquefy our style, making it live the life of material. For example, to represent the life of a blade of grass, I say, “Tomorrow I’ll be greener.”
With words-in-freedom we will have: Condensed metaphors. Telegraphic images. Maximum vibrations. Nodes of thought. Closed or open fans of movement. Compressed analogies. Color Balances. Dimensions, weights, measures, and the speed of sensations. The plunge of the essential word into the water of sensibility, minus the concentric circles that the word produces. Restful moments of intuition. Movements in two, three, four, five different rhythms. The analytic, exploratory poles that sustain the bundle of intuitive strings.
Death of the literary I
Molecular life and material
My technical manifesto opposed the obsessive I that up to now the poets have described, sung, analyzed, and vomited up. To rid ourselves of this obsessive I, we must abandon the habit of humanizing nature by attributing human passions and preoccupations to animals, plants, water, stone, and clouds. Instead we should express the infinite smallness that surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms, the Brownian movements, all the passionate hypotheses and all the domains explored by the high-powered microscope. To explain: I want to introduce the infinite molecular life into poetry not as a scientific document but as an intuitive element. It should mix, in the work of art, with the infinitely great spectacles and dramas, because this fusion constitutes the integral synthesis of life.
To give some aid to the intuition of my ideal reader I use italics for all words-in-freedom that express the infinitely small and the molecular life.
Semaphoric adjective
Lighthouse-adjective or atmosphere-adjective
Everywhere we tend to suppress the qualifying adjective because it presupposes an arrest in intuition, too minute a definition of the noun. None of this is categorical. I speak of a tendency. We must make use of the adjective as little as possible and in a manner completely different from its use hitherto. One should treat adjectives like railway signals of style, employ them to mark the tempo, the retards and pauses along the way. So, too, with analogies. As many as twenty of these semaphoric adjectives might accumulate in this way.
What I call a semaphoric adjective, lighthouse-adjective, or atmosphere-adjective is the adjective apart from nouns, isolated in parentheses. This makes it a kind of absolute noun, broader and more powerful than the noun proper.
The semaphoric adjective or lighthouse-adjective, suspended on high in its glassed-in parenthetical cage, throws its far-reaching, probing light on everything around it.
The profile of this adjective crumbles, spreads abroad, illuminating, impregnating, and enveloping a whole zone of words-in-freedom. If, for instance, in an agglomerate of words-in-freedom describing a sea voyage I place the following semaphoric adjectives between parentheses: (calm, blue, methodical, habitual) not only the sea is calm, blue, methodical, habitual, but the ship, its machinery, the passengers. What I do and my very spirit are calm, blue, methodical, habitual.
The infinitive verb
Here, too, my pronouncements are not categorical. I maintain, however, that in a violent and dynamic lyricism the infinitive verb might well be indispensable. Round as a wheel, like a wheel adaptable to every car in the train of analogies, it constitutes the very speed of the style.
The infinitive in itself denies the existence of the sentence and prevents the style from slowing and stopping at a definite point. While the infinitive is round and as mobile as a wheel, the other moods and tenses of the verb are either triangular, square, or oval.
Onomatopoeia and mathematical symbols
When I said that we must spit on the Altar of Art, I incited the Futurists to liberate lyricism from the solemn atmosphere of compunction and incense that one normally calls by the name of Art with a capital A. Art with a capital A constitutes the clericalism of the creative spirit. I used this approach to incite the Futurists to destroy and mock the garlands, the palms, the aureoles, the exquisite frames, the mantles and stoles, the whole historical wardrobe and the romantic bric-a-brac that comprise a large part of all poetry up to now. I proposed instead a swift, brutal, and immediate lyricism, a lyricism that must seem antipoetic to all our predecessors, a telegraphic lyricism with no taste of the book about it but, rather, as much as possible of the taste of life. Beyond that the bold introduction of onomatopoetic harmonies to render all the sounds and noises of modern life, even the most cacophonic.
Onomatopoeia that vivifies lyricism with crude and brutal elements of reality was used in poetry (from Aristophanes to Pascoli) more or less timidly. We Futurists initiate the constant, audacious use of onomatopoeia. This should not be systematic. For instance, my Adrianople Siege-Orchestra and my Battle Weight + Smell required many onomatopoetic harmonies. Always with the aim of giving the greatest number of vibrations and a deeper synthesis of life, we abolish all stylistic bonds, all the bright buckles with which the traditional poets link images together in their prosody. Instead we employ the very brief or anonymous mathematical and musical symbols and we put between parentheses indications such as (fast) (faster) (slower) (two-beat time) to control the speed of the style. These parentheses can even cut into a word or an onomatopoetic harmony.
Typographical revolution
I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book of passéist and D’Annunzian verse, on seventeenth-century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials, vegetables, mythological missal ribbons, epigraphs, and roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of our Futurist thought. Not only that. My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colors of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for the violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words.
I oppose the decorative, precious aesthetic of Mallarmé and his search for the rare word, the one indispensable, elegant, suggestive, exquisite adjective. I do not want to suggest an idea or a sensation with passéist airs and graces. Instead I want to grasp them brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.
Moreover, I combat Mallarmé’s static ideal with this typographical revolution that allows me to impress on the words (already free, dynamic, and torpedo-like) every velocity of the stars, the clouds, aeroplanes, trains, waves, explosives, globules of seafoam, molecules, and atoms.
Thus I realize the fourth principle of my First Futurist Manifesto: “We affirm that the world’s beauty is enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”
Multilinear Lyricism
In addition, I have conceived multilinear lyricism, with which I succeed in reaching that lyric simultaneity that obsessed the Futurist painters as well: multilinear lyricism by means of which I am sure to achieve the most complex lyric simultaneities.
On several parallel lines, the poet will throw out several chains of color, sound, smell, noise, weight, thickness, analogy. One of these lines might, for instance, be olfactory, another musical, another pictorial.
Let us suppose that the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies dominates the others. In this case it will be printed in a heavier typeface than the second and third lines (one of them containing, for example, the chain of musical sensations and analogies, the other the chain of olfactory sensations and analogies).
Given a page that contains many bundles of sensations and analogies, each of which is composed of three or four lines, the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies (printed in boldface) will form the first line of the first bundle and will continue (always in the same type) on the first line of all the other bundles.
The chain of musical sensations and analogies, less important than the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies (first line) but more important than that of the olfactory sensations and analogies (third line), will be printed in smaller type than that of the first line and larger than that of the third.
Free expressive orthography
The historical necessity of free expressive orthography is demonstrated by the successive revolutions that have continuously freed the lyric powers of the human race from shackles and rules.
In fact, the poets began by channeling their lyric intoxication into a series of equal breaths, with accents, echoes, assonances, or rhymes at pre-established intervals (traditional metric). Then the poets varied these different measured breaths of their predecessors’ lungs with a certain freedom.
Later the poets realized that the different moments of their lyric intoxication had to create breaths suited to the most varied and surprising intervals, with absolute freedom of accentuation. Thus they arrived at free verse, but they still preserved the syntactic order of the words, so that the lyric intoxication could flow down to the listeners by the logical canal of syntax.
Today we no longer want the lyric intoxication to order the words syntactically before launching them forth with the breaths we have invented, and we have words-in-freedom. Moreover our lyric intoxication should freely deform, reflesh the words, cutting them short, stretching them out, reinforcing the center or the extremities, augmenting or diminishing the number of vowels and consonants. Thus we will have the new orthography that I call free expressive. This instinctive deformation of words corresponds to our natural tendency towards onomatopoeia. It matters little if the deformed word becomes ambiguous. It will marry itself to the onomatopoetic harmonies, or the noise-summaries, and will permit us soon to reach the onomatopoetic psychic harmony, the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought. But one may object that my words-in-freedom, my imagination without strings, demand special speakers if they are to be understood. Although I do not care for the comprehension of the multitude, I will reply that the number of Futurist public speakers is increasing and that any admired traditional poem, for that matter, requires a special speaker if it is to be understood.
above copied from: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/destruction.html
My Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, with which I invented essential and synthetic lyricism, imagination without strings, and words-in-freedom, deals exclusively with poetic inspiration.
Philosophy, the exact sciences, politics, journalism, education, business, however much they may seek synthetic forms of expression, will still need to use syntax and punctuation. I am obliged, for that matter, to use them myself in order to make myself clear to you.
Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that these various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on their psyches.
An ordinary man can in a day’s time travel by train from a little dead town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust, and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a great capital city bristling with lights, gestures, and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China, the London and New York suffragettes, Doctor Carrel, and the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo. He can admire Japanese athletes, Negro boxers, tireless American eccentrics, the most elegant Parisian women, by paying a franc to go to the variety theater. Then, back in his bourgeois bed, he can enjoy the distant, expensive voice of a Caruso or a Burzio.
Having become commonplace, these opportunities arouse no curiosity in superficial minds who are as incapable of grasping any novel facts as the Arabs who looked with indifference at the first aeroplanes in the sky of Tripoli. For the keen observer, however, these facts are important modifiers of our sensibility because they have caused the following significant phenomena:
Acceleration of life to today’s swift pace. Physical, intellectual, and sentimental equilibration on the cord of speed stretched between contrary magnetisms. Multiple and simultaneous awareness in a single individual.
Dread of the old and the known. Love of the new, the unexpected.
Dread of quiet living, love of danger, and an attitude of daily heroism.
Destruction of a sense of the Beyond and an increased value of the individual whose desire is vivre sa vie, in Bonnot’s phrase.
The multiplication and unbridling of human desires and ambitions.
An exact awareness of everything inaccessible and unrealizable in every person.
Semi-equality of man and woman and a lessening of the disproportion in their social rights.
Disdain for amore (sentimentality or lechery) produced by the greater freedom and erotic ease of women and by the universal exaggeration of female luxury. Let me explain: Today’s woman loves luxury more than love. A visit to a great dressmaker’s establishment, escorted by a paunchy, gouty banker friend who pays the bills, is a perfect substitute for the most amorous rendezvous with an adored young man. The woman finds all the mystery of love in the selection of an amazing ensemble, the latest model, which her friends still do not have. Men do not love women who lack luxury. The lover has lost all his prestige. Love has lost its absolute worth. A complex question; all I can do is to raise it.
A modification of patriotism, which now means a heroic idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people.
A modification in the idea of war, which has become the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force.
The passion, art, and idealism of Business. New financial sensibility.
Man multiplied by the machine. New mechanical sense, a fusion of instinct with the efficiency of motors and conquered forces.
The passion, art, and idealism of Sport. Idea and love of the “record”.
New tourist sensibility bred by ocean liners and great hotels (annual synthesis of different races). Passion for the city. Negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes. Ridicule of the “holy green silence” and the ineffable landscape.
The earth shrunk by speed. New sense of the world. To be precise: One after the other, man will gain the sense of his home, of the quarter where he lives, of his region, and finally of the continent. Today he is aware of the whole world. He little needs to know what his ancestors did, but he must assiduously discover what his contemporaries are doing all over the world. The single man, therefore, must communicate with every people on earth. He must feel himself to be the axis, judge, and motor of the explored and unexplored infinite. Vast increase of a sense of humanity and a momentary urgent need to establish relations with all mankind.
A loathing of curved lines, spirals, and the tourniquet. Love for the straight line and the tunnel. The habit of visual foreshortening and visual synthesis caused by the speed of trains and cars that look down on cities and countrysides. Dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. “Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!”
Love of depth and essence in every exercise of the spirit.
So these are some elements of the new Futurist sensibility that has generated our pictorial dynamism, our antigraceful music in its free, irregular rhythms, our noise-art and our words-in-freedom.
Words-in-freedom
Casting aside every stupid formula and all the confused verbalisms of the professors, I now declare that lyricism is the exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself with life, of filling life with the inebriation of oneself. The faculty of changing into wine the muddy water of the life that swirls and engulfs us. The ability to color the world with the unique colors of our changeable selves.
Now suppose that a friend of yours gifted with this faculty finds himself in a zone of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck, earthquake, and so on) and starts right away to tell you his impressions. Do you know what this lyric, excited friend of yours will instinctively do?
He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as they come to him. The rush of steam-emotion will burst the sentence’s steampipe, the valves of punctuation, and the adjectival clamp. Fistfuls of essential words in no conventional order. Sole preoccupation of the narrator, to render every vibration of his being.
If the mind of this gifted lyrical narrator is also populated by general ideas, he will involuntarily bind up his sensations with the entire universe that he intuitively knows. And in order to render the true worth and dimensions of his lived life, he will cast immense nets of analogy across the world. In this way he will reveal the analogical foundation of life, telegraphically, with the same economical speed that the telegraph imposes on reporters and war correspondents in their swift reportings. This urgent laconism answers not only to the laws of speed that govern us but also to the rapport of centuries between poet and audience. Between poet and audience, in fact, the same rapport exists as between two old friends. They can make themselves understood with half a word, a gesture, a glance. So the poet’s imagination must weave together distant things with no connecting strings, by means of essential free words.
Death of free verse
Free verse once had countless reasons for existing but now is destined to be replaced by words-in-freedom.
The evolution of poetry and human sensibility has shown us the two incurable defects of free verse.
Free verse fatally pushes the poet towards facile sound effects, banal double meanings, monotonous cadences, a foolish chiming, and an inevitable echo-play, internal and external.
Free verse artificially channels the flow of lyric emotion between the high walls of syntax and the weirs of grammar. The free intuitive inspiration that addresses itself directly to the intuition of the ideal reader finds itself imprisoned and distributed like purified water for the nourishment of all fussy, restless intelligences.
When I speak of destroying the canals of syntax, I am neither categorical nor systematic. Traces of conventional syntax and even of true logical sentences will be found here and there in the words-in-freedom of my unchained lyricism. This inequality in conciseness and freedom is natural and inevitable. Since poetry is in truth only a superior, more concentrated and intense life than what we live from day to day, like the latter it is composed of hyper-alive elements and moribund elements.
We ought not, therefore, to be too much preoccupied with these elements. But we should at all costs avoid rhetoric and banalities telegraphically expressed.
The imagination without strings
By the imagination without strings I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation.
Up to now writers have been restricted to immediate analogies. For instance, they have compared an animal with a man or with another animal, which is almost the same as a kind of photography. (They have compared, for example, a fox terrier to a very small thoroughbred. Others, more advanced, might compare the same trembling fox terrier to a little Morse Code machine. I, on the other hand, compare it with gurgling water. In this there is an ever vaster gradation of analogies, there are ever deeper and more solid affinities, however remote.)
Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things. An orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, can embrace the life of matter only by means of the most extensive analogies.
When, in my Battle of Tripoli, I compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme fatale, I intuitively introduced a large part of the universe into a short episode of African battle.
Images are not flowers to be chosen and picked with parsimony, as Voltaire said. They are the very lifeblood of poetry. Poetry should be an uninterrupted sequence of new images, Or it is mere anemia and greensickness.
The broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to amaze.
—Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature
The imagination without strings, and words-in-freedom, will bring us to the essence of material. As we discover new analogies between distant and apparently contrary things, we will endow them with an ever more intimate value. Instead of humanizing animals, vegetables, and minerals (an outmoded system) we will be able to animalize, vegetize, mineralize, electrify, or liquefy our style, making it live the life of material. For example, to represent the life of a blade of grass, I say, “Tomorrow I’ll be greener.”
With words-in-freedom we will have: Condensed metaphors. Telegraphic images. Maximum vibrations. Nodes of thought. Closed or open fans of movement. Compressed analogies. Color Balances. Dimensions, weights, measures, and the speed of sensations. The plunge of the essential word into the water of sensibility, minus the concentric circles that the word produces. Restful moments of intuition. Movements in two, three, four, five different rhythms. The analytic, exploratory poles that sustain the bundle of intuitive strings.
Death of the literary I
Molecular life and material
My technical manifesto opposed the obsessive I that up to now the poets have described, sung, analyzed, and vomited up. To rid ourselves of this obsessive I, we must abandon the habit of humanizing nature by attributing human passions and preoccupations to animals, plants, water, stone, and clouds. Instead we should express the infinite smallness that surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms, the Brownian movements, all the passionate hypotheses and all the domains explored by the high-powered microscope. To explain: I want to introduce the infinite molecular life into poetry not as a scientific document but as an intuitive element. It should mix, in the work of art, with the infinitely great spectacles and dramas, because this fusion constitutes the integral synthesis of life.
To give some aid to the intuition of my ideal reader I use italics for all words-in-freedom that express the infinitely small and the molecular life.
Semaphoric adjective
Lighthouse-adjective or atmosphere-adjective
Everywhere we tend to suppress the qualifying adjective because it presupposes an arrest in intuition, too minute a definition of the noun. None of this is categorical. I speak of a tendency. We must make use of the adjective as little as possible and in a manner completely different from its use hitherto. One should treat adjectives like railway signals of style, employ them to mark the tempo, the retards and pauses along the way. So, too, with analogies. As many as twenty of these semaphoric adjectives might accumulate in this way.
What I call a semaphoric adjective, lighthouse-adjective, or atmosphere-adjective is the adjective apart from nouns, isolated in parentheses. This makes it a kind of absolute noun, broader and more powerful than the noun proper.
The semaphoric adjective or lighthouse-adjective, suspended on high in its glassed-in parenthetical cage, throws its far-reaching, probing light on everything around it.
The profile of this adjective crumbles, spreads abroad, illuminating, impregnating, and enveloping a whole zone of words-in-freedom. If, for instance, in an agglomerate of words-in-freedom describing a sea voyage I place the following semaphoric adjectives between parentheses: (calm, blue, methodical, habitual) not only the sea is calm, blue, methodical, habitual, but the ship, its machinery, the passengers. What I do and my very spirit are calm, blue, methodical, habitual.
The infinitive verb
Here, too, my pronouncements are not categorical. I maintain, however, that in a violent and dynamic lyricism the infinitive verb might well be indispensable. Round as a wheel, like a wheel adaptable to every car in the train of analogies, it constitutes the very speed of the style.
The infinitive in itself denies the existence of the sentence and prevents the style from slowing and stopping at a definite point. While the infinitive is round and as mobile as a wheel, the other moods and tenses of the verb are either triangular, square, or oval.
Onomatopoeia and mathematical symbols
When I said that we must spit on the Altar of Art, I incited the Futurists to liberate lyricism from the solemn atmosphere of compunction and incense that one normally calls by the name of Art with a capital A. Art with a capital A constitutes the clericalism of the creative spirit. I used this approach to incite the Futurists to destroy and mock the garlands, the palms, the aureoles, the exquisite frames, the mantles and stoles, the whole historical wardrobe and the romantic bric-a-brac that comprise a large part of all poetry up to now. I proposed instead a swift, brutal, and immediate lyricism, a lyricism that must seem antipoetic to all our predecessors, a telegraphic lyricism with no taste of the book about it but, rather, as much as possible of the taste of life. Beyond that the bold introduction of onomatopoetic harmonies to render all the sounds and noises of modern life, even the most cacophonic.
Onomatopoeia that vivifies lyricism with crude and brutal elements of reality was used in poetry (from Aristophanes to Pascoli) more or less timidly. We Futurists initiate the constant, audacious use of onomatopoeia. This should not be systematic. For instance, my Adrianople Siege-Orchestra and my Battle Weight + Smell required many onomatopoetic harmonies. Always with the aim of giving the greatest number of vibrations and a deeper synthesis of life, we abolish all stylistic bonds, all the bright buckles with which the traditional poets link images together in their prosody. Instead we employ the very brief or anonymous mathematical and musical symbols and we put between parentheses indications such as (fast) (faster) (slower) (two-beat time) to control the speed of the style. These parentheses can even cut into a word or an onomatopoetic harmony.
Typographical revolution
I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book of passéist and D’Annunzian verse, on seventeenth-century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials, vegetables, mythological missal ribbons, epigraphs, and roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of our Futurist thought. Not only that. My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colors of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for the violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words.
I oppose the decorative, precious aesthetic of Mallarmé and his search for the rare word, the one indispensable, elegant, suggestive, exquisite adjective. I do not want to suggest an idea or a sensation with passéist airs and graces. Instead I want to grasp them brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.
Moreover, I combat Mallarmé’s static ideal with this typographical revolution that allows me to impress on the words (already free, dynamic, and torpedo-like) every velocity of the stars, the clouds, aeroplanes, trains, waves, explosives, globules of seafoam, molecules, and atoms.
Thus I realize the fourth principle of my First Futurist Manifesto: “We affirm that the world’s beauty is enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”
Multilinear Lyricism
In addition, I have conceived multilinear lyricism, with which I succeed in reaching that lyric simultaneity that obsessed the Futurist painters as well: multilinear lyricism by means of which I am sure to achieve the most complex lyric simultaneities.
On several parallel lines, the poet will throw out several chains of color, sound, smell, noise, weight, thickness, analogy. One of these lines might, for instance, be olfactory, another musical, another pictorial.
Let us suppose that the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies dominates the others. In this case it will be printed in a heavier typeface than the second and third lines (one of them containing, for example, the chain of musical sensations and analogies, the other the chain of olfactory sensations and analogies).
Given a page that contains many bundles of sensations and analogies, each of which is composed of three or four lines, the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies (printed in boldface) will form the first line of the first bundle and will continue (always in the same type) on the first line of all the other bundles.
The chain of musical sensations and analogies, less important than the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies (first line) but more important than that of the olfactory sensations and analogies (third line), will be printed in smaller type than that of the first line and larger than that of the third.
Free expressive orthography
The historical necessity of free expressive orthography is demonstrated by the successive revolutions that have continuously freed the lyric powers of the human race from shackles and rules.
In fact, the poets began by channeling their lyric intoxication into a series of equal breaths, with accents, echoes, assonances, or rhymes at pre-established intervals (traditional metric). Then the poets varied these different measured breaths of their predecessors’ lungs with a certain freedom.
Later the poets realized that the different moments of their lyric intoxication had to create breaths suited to the most varied and surprising intervals, with absolute freedom of accentuation. Thus they arrived at free verse, but they still preserved the syntactic order of the words, so that the lyric intoxication could flow down to the listeners by the logical canal of syntax.
Today we no longer want the lyric intoxication to order the words syntactically before launching them forth with the breaths we have invented, and we have words-in-freedom. Moreover our lyric intoxication should freely deform, reflesh the words, cutting them short, stretching them out, reinforcing the center or the extremities, augmenting or diminishing the number of vowels and consonants. Thus we will have the new orthography that I call free expressive. This instinctive deformation of words corresponds to our natural tendency towards onomatopoeia. It matters little if the deformed word becomes ambiguous. It will marry itself to the onomatopoetic harmonies, or the noise-summaries, and will permit us soon to reach the onomatopoetic psychic harmony, the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought. But one may object that my words-in-freedom, my imagination without strings, demand special speakers if they are to be understood. Although I do not care for the comprehension of the multitude, I will reply that the number of Futurist public speakers is increasing and that any admired traditional poem, for that matter, requires a special speaker if it is to be understood.
above copied from: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/destruction.html
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