What Sharon Thinks...: September 2012

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Visual Rhetoric and Argument [Sketches by M.C. Escher]

Escher - Drawing Hands, 1948

Let’s explore the work of M.C. Escher (Dutch Artist, 1898-1972). When you look at this drawing (above) “Drawing Hands”, from 1948, you see two hands, but what are they doing? Explore it carefully. You see they are more-or-less drawing, but what? They happen to be drawing each hand ‘into existence’, which makes the hand images rise above the flattened cuff, and off the page to create the paradox. This was Escher’s trademark, of sorts, and it creates ambiguity of the mind, thus creating a visual argument. I guess it could have text, but I think that would merely complicate the design, so, let’s argue about it.

I have rather an obsession with tessellations; probably why I like Escher’s work so much. They occur about everywhere from flooring to nature, architecture, and more. They are regular and obtuse, polygons and circles, but have some symmetry. Look at the piece below and tell me what you see. Heads, alright, but how many, and what gender? Does it matter? What are they heads of? Who? You can see so much, but you have to wonder what it’s saying to you. The negative space reveals something embedded below, but how is that significant? Man, I love this stuff!

Escher - Eight Heads, 1922

Look at the next one. Look closely to see what the water is doing. What are the people in this sketch doing? Where are they? What is their meaning? The artist had the intention of putting them in there for you (or himself) but to create illusion, a kind of billboard of conveyance. What does it say?

Escher - Waterfall, 1961

WHAT SHARON THINKS IS… I believe these sketches all to be excellent examples of what Visual Rhetoric is about. It is the underlying message in what is presented, in whatever form it is given.

Hmmm, Visual Rhetoric… What the hell is it?

Any time I see the word “rhetoric” I cringe. It has such a sinister sound; one you just have to know that it equates awful. Just say the word: “R – H – E – T – O – R – I – C ”. Yikes! I guess most any word that ends with an “ick” doesn’t sound so great. “Visual”. Yes, that’s a word I can relate to! I know this from the lens of a camera, the lens of my eye, and the little lenses happening all around me.

When you put the two together, I’m not sure that I believed that you could get something related to academia.

Photon Language?
Receptor Words?
Pretty Prose?
Picture Discourse?
Optical Speech?
Artfully Communicating?
Graphically Speaking?

Using some dissection, as you see above, it conveys something that could mean a lot of different things to an array of colorful people, merely interpreting the individual definitions. The relationship of these two words brings immediately to mind the works of Alison Bechdel; Fun Home, where she’s giving her account of growing up in comic form, not to mention her current life happenings. I guess that would be visual rhetoric. Videos, ads, commercials, brochures, and a host of other media, campaigning and advertising could also offer highly persuasive content, and does.

The combination of linguistic content with added visual components allows consumers and the general public the susceptibility of this powerful influence; visual rhetoric, and we are surrounded by it each day. From Sirc, it would be compositional media which allows both textual pleasure from collections of text and imagery (Box Logic, 116).

The world is full of arguments! Why would visual rhetoric be any different? Of course there will be differences in what is interpreted from a perceived image, not to mention what text will do to us. No two people are going to see exactly what you are visualizing! They can’t! This association, then, would be known as the argument. It is the arrangement of defined elements on a page, font selection, and images which all create and define “argument”.

WHAT SHARON THINKS IS… Visual Rhetoric is a sketchbook narrative of all that is seen and unseen and a more modernist view of a lens, any lens, which unfurls a story.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

So, What is Studium and Punctum?

In order to help me process this new knowledge of Barthes studium and punctum, I need to read a little more to help direct me in a forward direction. I now have the book Camera Lucida so that I can put into perspective what it is that we are actually looking at.

About Studium (Barthes):

“What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which does not mean, at least not immediately, “study”, but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity.” (26)

“It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the setting, the actions.” (26)

It is cleaver that he derived a word to encompass what it is that he sees. I would have never picked this word, but I guess that it works. So studium is the actual where, when and the what of the actual photo. Now I get it!

About Punctum (Barthes):

“The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time is it not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out f it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exist to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that is also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely these marks are so many points.” (26-27)

“This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (26-27)

He continues: “Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium.The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like“. (27)

This opens the door to describe about anything in the photo and would be related to what you are immediately affected by when you look at the image, but it should be noted that just because an image contains a studium doesn’t mean that it must contain a punctum… He seems clear about that!

So, let's dissect the photo below:

The studium here would have to be easy... A child investigates the new baby, but is it a boy or a girl?
The punctum is the mother's lap that they both appear on, her hand in the foreground, the yellow bracelet on the toddlers wrist, the traditional institutional chair in the background. These are the other "clues" of the photo offering me the punctum.