ON NOT KNOWING

HOW AND WHAT

One of the problems about trying to open up photographs, to get a grasp on how they work (at least at the level of meaning) was for a long time hampered by the concepts brought to them from literature of ‘form’ and ‘content’ which seemed from the start to fragment and divide the object which in our initial encounter we had experienced as a unity. Content was embodied in form, depended on it but was also understood as separate from it, it was what the object (photo) meant. Rather like liquid in a vessel, it could be designated as separable from its specific presentation and transferrable; in that respect form was accepted as a necessary but lightweight adjunct to the main business of visual communication, the content. Even in the late 1970s one can see Sontag battling with the same issues which as semiotics, and Barthes and Metz’s writings became more extensive and better circulated get displaced. Using the latter it is possible to offer an analysis which begin to show that what something means is at least as dependent on the “how” of what it means as much as what is shown. Using the latter it became possible to think around photographs not just in terms of what they show but how they show what they show and the part that plays in what the photographs means.    

Hollywood Movie Premier 1958

 

For example, to make this more concrete, using ideas from Barthes and Metz we can approach Robert Frank’s image Hollywood Movie Premier 1958, (Frank 1958). This black and white photograph has centrally placed and occupying about two thirds of the picture plane an image of a glamorous blond starlet, head and shoulders. Not just the caption but her clothes, hair style, jewellery, etc suggest that it is the 1950s and America or do so if one already has certain knowledge that allows that detail of recognition. Behind her at a distance, between her shoulders and the photo’s edges, at the opposite side of the (unseen) red carpet to the photographer are a line of women, in appearance much less glamorous or expensively dressed. The initially odd thing about the photograph given the then rules of good composition and clear subject matter is that the centrally placed woman who occupies most of the picture, and therefore one expects to be the subject, is (slightly) out of focus, the women beyond are sharply in. In effect, one wants to say, this is a photograph about fandom not about the movie starlet and that it is so is because of the ‘how’ of its imaging. Metz writes about what he designates as ‘specific’ and ‘non-specific’ codes that combine in an image: the former being those elements that contribute to the meaning of the image that are specific to the medium, e.g. in the case of photography, framing, depth of field, tonal values, angle of shot, etc, the latter codes that are at work in and that we have learnt from more general social experience, e.g. facial expressions, body postures, hair styles, clothes/fashion, interior design, architectural features, etc. The Frank photograph draws upon and puts all these codes into play but what makes it have the particular meaning that is being claimed here, as opposed to other possible photographs that could have been taken at the same moment from the same spot is its focus and depth of field. The same event (what Barthes calls the ‘pro-photo’ event, the event/scene before the camera (Barthes [1961] 1977) could have been shot using the same depth of field but with the actress in focus and the spectators out in which case it would have become a more orthodox image of her with blurred background, it could also have been shot with a greater depth of field in which case both she and the spectators would have been in focus. The point being that in each of these alternatives the event before the camera would have been the same, what gives the actual photograph its particular meaning as being a study of fandom is how it was photographed: how it is what is it is makes it what it is. An image is always a combination of a pro-photo event and its manner of recording, though common sense tells us otherwise (and many forms of photography, e.g. advertising, fashion, pornography play on that), the pro-photo event is not in itself retrievable from the image. Metz’s writing at this point focused on ‘signifiers’ internal to the ‘text’/image, rather than as is discussed later, how one’s reading a signifier or even recognising a signifier as such is dependent upon knowledge that one brings to the ‘text’ and the context of one’s encounter.


What is exemplified here is that the work drawn off of semiotics in relation to the visual demonstrates that engaging with images is active, involves an act of reading or decoding. This it is suggested is true of all images not especially art images, that in reading all images certain knowledges and competences are drawn on. What marks the difference on this account between high and ‘low’, ‘mass’, ’popular’ culture is not that one is engaged with actively and the other passively but the different knowledges that are drawn on in those engagements. The binaries art/mass culture, active/passive consumption become uncoupled.


Refs:

i) Frank Robert, 1959, The Americans. Grove Press. New York: 140
ii) Metz C, 1973 “ Methodological Propositions for the Analysis of Films” Screen (Spring/Summer):89-101.
iii) Barthes R, (1961) 1977. “The Photographic Message” in Image-Music-Text trans Heath S. Fontana. London.

       

     

ON NOT KNOWING

 

ON NOT KNOWING

Growing up in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, at least if growing up in a non-metropolitan culturally determined area of the UK, one still imbibed certain ideas about culture, not least about “art’.  As became famously claimed a little later of a certain brand of lager, art managed to get to the parts of us that other culture had not reached. From the late 19thC, in Tolstoy’s claim that ‘’art is differentiated from activity of the understanding which demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry) by the fact that is acts on people independently of their state of development and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, or of forms, infects any man whatever his plane of development’’(i) through to the later formalist claims of Bell and Fry, that one needed  only a sense of line colour and form to gain access/connect to art (ii), the separation of knowledge and the experience of art was well engrained in popular consciousness. Even if not a few of us felt a degree of discomfort at that: the elation and pleasure one experienced at “getting it” so easily displaced by a level of humiliation and inadequacy and anger if one didn’t: feeling one’s own muteness no less than ‘inappropriate’ comments  broadcast, even amplified one’s exclusion by/from the work.  The sharpest version of what I am trying to describe I think happened to me at the first Warhol museum show I ever saw, and initiated a change of mind that has lasted ever since about that received relationship between art and knowledge.

Orange Disaster Five Deaths. 1963

Marilyn Diptych, Tate Modern, 1962

Probably the most conspicuous differences between the Warhol paintings and their source material is one of the context of encounter and scale, though also of course all the features that Morphet adumbrates. The interesting thing  about the latter then becomes (not so much their shared features with established art but the difference that those properties make to our perception of the work as opposed to our perception of the source. What I  what to suggest is that the Warhol works underscore and make it impossible for us to ignore something that  we in a sense already know but in our normal encounter with these images where we are more preoccupied with what the image references, i.e. to look ‘through’ it to the ‘star’, accident,etc, that what we are looking at, is an image. All of Warhol’s work are not just images, but literally, and more strictly, images of images, and it is that we are shown. That imaging is not a copy of the real but is constructive of what the real it to us, what tragedy, what glamour, disaster, and desirability consist in. Further one might argue that the work also discloses how those meanings (despite what has been claimed for art) are not in the pictures – which are ‘simply’ and visibly deposits of pigment on a surface – but located somewhere else. It would probably be excessive to claim that the Warhols’ paintings at that time said where, (it took the dissemination of post-structuralist theory to make that possible) but they did evidence that the meaning of a work was not unconnected with the knowledge in relation to which it was read, and at least as devastatingly to me, and the likes of me, what work meant was not granted by divine authority but determined by what (and therefore whose) knowledge was in the ascendancy at a given time. And therefore open to challenge.

 Notes:
i) Tolstoy Leo “What is Art” (1898) 1969 OUP. London. p178
ii) Bell Clive.   “Art” (1913) 1958 Capricorn Bks . New York. P 28.
iii) “Warhol” 1971. Tate Gallery London. Text by Morphet Richard. P 20.

 

A more analytic and more detailed documentation of these issues is to be found in ”Missing Warhol” RM in Art Monthly No 130, Oct 1989.