Image/Text

[malsperanza]

tipgardner writes: ...you were making the point that images are narrative.

Sort of. Some images have a narrative; many do not. My main point was that we tend to gravitate toward narrative, so we "read" images for their narrative and draw meaning from them via story.

This is essentially a textual/verbal approach to confronting a work of art. It is a kind of reading. It is not based on looking. So it works fine for an image that is fundamentally narrative, but not so well for the majority of images, which are not. E.g., there is no narrative decipherable in the Mona Lisa, so we tend to make up stories about her: she is enigmatic; she is a noblewoman; she is pregnant; she was Leonardo's lover. (One of those statements is simply false, two are silly, and one is not very useful.) To treat an image this way is a surefire way to miss its meaning and reduce its value.

So when we wring hands and lament the illiteracy of our culture, and point to our dependence on images (TV, movies, the pictures in newspapers), as the cause, we aren't really saying that we're a visual society. Because we have debased the image--it is merely a vehicle for verbal, narrative meaning. We are still a literate (word-oriented) culture, not visual. Frex, it doesn't matter to most movies whether they are beautiful or not, as long as they tell their story well. If they are beautiful, that's lagniappe.

I am not convinced, though, that one has any more legitimacy than the other.

Nor I, indeed. :-) It isn't a question of choosing one over the other, but rather of understanding that each conveys meaning very differently--and perhaps is suited to different kinds of communications and different kinds of understandings.

The Logos that unites word with understanding--and sometimes unites understanding with faith and redemption--is a very different creature from the Image which unites material substance (color, line, shape) with understanding--and perhaps also with faith and redemption, on occasion. That the image may be an image of an identifiable figure (Christ on the Cross; a smiling lady before a landscape with her hands folded) does not mean that the materiality of the image is irrelevant to its meaning, or subordinated to the story that may or may not be embedded within it.

This is very hard for our post-Gutenberg culture to grasp. The meaning(s) of the Mona Lisa may have as much to do with brushstroke, color, scale, light, as with the fact that she was Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. For if we only look at a painted Crucifixion for the story it refers to, would we not be better off reading that story? Why is the distilled, concise, emblematic, symbolic image so powerful? How does it open a door to faith and redemption (or other forms of transcendence) that the text does not? For the two forms of access to transcendence are not interchangeable.

The bridge behind Mona Lisa's left shoulder is a real bridge over a tributary of the Arno near the town of Vinci, but if we want to achieve some kind of understanding of the painting--get its full value, learn all that Leonardo intended us to know, enter that transcendent realm in which beauty and ideas are one--that bit of information is probably not as valuable to us as looking at how the bridge is painted. We may also wonder why it's in the painting at all, and what the relationship is between the serene figure and that turbulent landscape behind her.

The poverty of our visual means is such that we seek--or invent--narrative solutions to nonnarrative problems. What is that enigmatic smile? Is she smiling? Why is she smiling? Why has this little painting, among all the possible paintings in the world, become such a totem for us, such a metaphor? ...A metaphor for what secular transcendent unnameable mystery to which we attach the label (the Word) "Art"?

For every 30 lbs of books on the Mona Lisa (and there are hundreds), one Marcel Duchamp suffices to give better answers--for all that his explanation does little to resolve these wordy enigmas.