vcc midterm Flashcards
Description
- Avoid assumptions
- Physical/material aspects
- Content/subject matter
- Formal analysis
- Exhaustive (i.e. don’t skip ahead)
- Objective
Deduction
- Remain with the image itself, not outside of it
-How does the image make meaning? - Consider the viewer: you as viewer, ideal viewer, etc.
- Subjective
- Is not conclusive
Speculation
- Pose questions
- Develop hypotheses and program of research
- Use ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions
- Form research question(s)
- Determine useful theoretical
perspectives - Leading to conclusions, but still inconclusive awaiting research
Line
one-dimensional can include horizontal, vertical, diagonal & curved lines, have many purposes to delineate form and create direction
- Horizontal
- Vertical
- Diagonal
- Curved
Shape
“Shapes have two-dimensions-height and width– and are usually defined by lines
Geometric
- Circles
- Squares
- Rectangles
- Triangles
- Etc.
Organic
- Mimics nature
form
“Form exists in three dimensions, with height, width, and depth.”
Geometric
* Spheres
* Cubes
* Cones
* Pyramids
Organic
* Mimics nature
Space
“Real space is three-dimensional. Space in a work of art refers to a feeling of depth or three dimensions. It can also refer to the artist’s use of the area within the picture plane.”
Positive space
- The space occupied by main objects within an image
Negative Space
- The space surrounding main objects of an image
Three-dimensional
- Can be literal
- Can be illusionistic, through use of perspective, shading, and colour
Colour
Light reflected off objects
Hue
- gradation
Value
- brightness
Intensity
- strength
texture
surface quality of an object that we sense through touch. All objects have a physical texture. Artists can also convey texture visually in two dimensions
Two-dimensional
- Illusionistic achieved through colour, shading, line, etc.
Three-dimensional
- Literal, often determined by material and finishing
Formal Analysis
Elements of Art
Principles of Design
Elements of Art
(formal analysis)
Line
- Horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved
Shape
- Two-dimensional
- Geometric: circular, rectangular, triangular, etc.
- Organic: imitates nature
Form
- Three-dimensional; literal
- Geometric: Spherical, prismatic, pyramidal, etc.
- Organic: imitates nature
Space
- Positive and negative; illusionistic
- Three-dimensional illusion through perspective, shading, etc.
Colour
- Value, hue, intensity
Texture
- Illusionistic or literal (three dimensional on surfaces)
Principles of Design
(formal analysis)
Balance
- Distribution of the elements of art across an image or object that creates stability
Contrast
- Opposite elements are arranged together
Movement
- Elements of art are used to direct the viewer’s eye to sequential areas of/through an image or object
Emphasis
- Elements of art are used to bring viewer’s eye to particular part of
image or object
Pattern
- Repetition of shape, form, or texture
Proportion
- Relationship of size elements
Unity
- Harmony of the relationship of all elements of composition
Denyse Thomasos
Trinidadian-Canadian artist 1964-2012
- Abstract artist
- worked mainly in acrylic
- Currently featured in retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario until February 20, 2023
- Graduate of UTM
Ekphrasis
(what is it?)
- A type of description that seeks to bring the image before the reader’s eye
- Can include the viewer’s subjective response to viewing the work
- Is sometimes criticized for being overly emotional
Ekphrasis
where did it come from?)
- Ancient Greek poetry
- Common in art history and art journalism prior to the
20th century - Became less common when it became cheaper to reproduce a work of art alongside printed text
- Key thinker: John Ruskin
Myth of mechanical objectivity
machine-made photography “more objective”than painting or drawing done by hand
Visuality
The ways vision is shaped through social context and interaction
- involves social codes
- enacted in a social field that includes images and built environments
- Whereas vision is the literal capacity to see, visuality is how practices of looking function culturally and politically
- Comes from art history and visual culture
- Began as a way to examine how power is enacted in ways that privilege the visual
- Key thinkers: Hal Foster and Nicholas Mirzoeff
Counter visuality
How resistance is enacted through visuality
- Defined by Nicholas Mirzoeff
- struggle for “the right to look”
- claim to autonomy from dominant forces
- assertion of the right to challenge dominant ways of seeing
Representation
The use of language, marks, and images to interpret the world around us
- Systems of representation do not reflect reality so much as mediate, organize, and construct it
- We “see” the material world through representations
- Systems of representation are structured by rules and conventions specific to a given culture
- These rules and conventions are flexible and changing
Semiotics
(what is it?)
- theory of signs concerned with words, images, and objects are vehicles for meaning
- A method of analyzing how people make meaning on a daily basis
- Complex images decoded almost instantly, with little thought to process
- clues may point to intended, unintended, and even merely suggested meanings
- clues may be formal elements of an image or cultural and sociohistorical contexts
- Structuralist
Semiotics
(where did it come from?)
- Philosophy and linguistics
- Late 19th century
- a way to examine how language conveys meaning
- Key thinkers: Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes
- developed into a method for analyzing visual culture in the 20th century
Charles Sanders Pierce
American philosopher
Method: Semiotics
Argued that language and thought are a process of sign interpretation
Meaning is not in perception or representation, but in interpretation and action
- Iconic
- Indexical
- Symbolic
Ferdinand de Saussure
Swis Linguist
Method: Semiotics
Argued that the relationship between words and things is arbitrary and relative
- Signifier vs signified
- Denotation vs connotation
Roland Barthes
French literary theorist and philosopher
Method: Semiotics
Based ideas on Saussurian semiotics
- Sign (composed of the signifier and signified)
- Myth (when the connotative meaning appears as denotative)
Sign
(signifier)
- signifier (sound, written word or image that represents)
- signified (the concept evoked by the signifier)
examples of signs
- shape of trees
Denotation
- The signifier denotes
- First-level analysis
- Literal
Example:
- A group of forests in a meadow with a patch of dead trees on the lower right of the image
Connotation
- Cultural or emotional association that a visual carries
- Subjectively understood by people who share the same cultural code
- Deforestation is destroying the Earth and contributing to climate change
myth
as used by Roland Barthes:
- cultural values and beliefs that allow the connotative meaning to appear denotative
- hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings appear universal
- Universal greatness of French nationals
- Without discrimination, all subjects of the French Empire serve the nation faithfully
iconic
resemble their objects in some way
symbolics
bear no clear relationship to their objects
indexical
coexisted with their objects in the same place at some time
ideology
shared set of values & beliefs where people live out their complex relations to many social networks
- produced & affirmed through social institutions in a given society
- often appear to be natural or given aspects of everyday life, like Barthes’s myth
- reproduced and created by images
Can include wide-ranging concepts such as:
* Nationality
* Good and evil
* Heterosexuality
* Freedom
* Family
Icon
image refers to something (or someone) outside of its individual components & has great symbolic meaning for many
- conveys iconic meaning across many different contexts (often through simplicity)
- circulates through visual networks
- reworks aspects of original into new images
- believed to hold universal meaning (though actually always contextual)
Karl Marx
(Ideology)
- distortion of reality created by capitalism
- those who owned the means of production also controlled the ideas and viewpoints circulated in society
- Came from wanting to understand why the oppressed many did not rise up against the powerful few
- His view of ideology is about domination
- His view of ideology is no longer considered valid
Antonio Gramsci
(Ideology)
- Ideology is constantly negotiated by different groups
- Originated the idea of cultural hegemony
- Dominant ideologies appear as “common sense”
- Dominant ideologies are always in tension with other forces and therefore always changing
- Ideas became influential in visual and media studies in the 1970s and 80s
Louis Althusser
(Ideology)
- Ideology is what connects human unconscious to external reality
- Wrote that without ideology, humans would have no way of thinking about or understanding reality
- Representation is a vehicle for ideology
- Related to theory of “interpellation”
- sometimes critiqued as not leaving room for individual choice
Cultural Hegemony
A process where the dominant group exercises ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ throughout society by winning the ‘consent’ from people
- No longer tied to the means of production
- Explains the way in which the domination of a power
group in modern capitalist societies is secured - Requires complicity from classes that are not dominant
- Also explains how the dominant order can be challenged and contested through popular resistance directed in various cultural forms and practice
-Gave rise to the theory of counter hegemony:
- Movements or subversive cultural elements that emerge to question the status quo
Taste
Shared artistic and cultural values of a particular social community
- interpretation and valuation of images depends on constantly fluctuating cultural codes.
- Counter to Aesthetics: branch of philosophy concerned with judgments of beauty
- “good” taste entails cultural education about value
- Connoisseur: someone with educated taste
- Cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu): cultural
knowledge that allows for social advantages - originally understood to “trickle down” from upper, educated classes
- cultural values and tastes move in variety of directions
Images and objects do not have inherent value
awarded monetary, social, and political value in particular social contexts
Value of art object
- authenticity and uniqueness
- reproducibility and role in popular culture
- previous ownership (little to do with artist)
Museums, institutions, and individual collectors
- responsible for valuing of art works
- communicate value through display
- shape looking practices
Institutional Critique
- Institutions enact power passively through education, cultivation of taste, and daily routines
- Viewers can be encouraged to see the politics of the museum itself
modernity
-Emergence of mass markets and audiences, national media cultures
- Workers found escape in new “leisure culture”
- factories dangerous, apartments cramped
- many consuming same products
- Skyscrapers built as monuments to progress and capital, dominated urban skyline
the Modern Subject
Epistemic shifts: changes to period-specific knowledge systems
The available ways of being/conceptualization of the self
Enlightenment:
(the modern subject)
Cartesian Dualism, named after René Descartes
- basis of the Enlightenment notion of the individual with agency that is capable of acting upon the world
- Mind/Body divide
19th century
(the modern subject)
Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud
- how the mind works that emphasizes the role of the unconscious and desire
Capitalist alienation, theorized by Karl Marx
- social relations in Capitalist societies alienate individuals from their full potential
20th century
(the modern subject)
Mirror stage, theorized by Jacques Lacan
- phase of development where the infant first experiences a sense of alienation
Foucault’s theory of power
- Power is not made by individuals, but through them in discourse, which is an institution’s rules and concepts
the Gaze
A way of looking actively that involves a range of techniques
theorized by Jacques Lacan
- Psychoanalysis: understanding spectatorship & unconscious processes supporting looking practices
- gaze of the other degrades ‘my’ being-for-oneself and transforms it into a being-for-others
- Shows viewer’s on trend in a social and contextual field of looks, objects, and other sensory information
- Made famous in cinema studies
- 3 male gazes
- 1 the way the camera looks in any filmed situation is voyeuristic, most films are made by men
-2, gaze of men within a particular film, is structured making women appear as objects; - 3, gaze of the actual male spectator
- 1 the way the camera looks in any filmed situation is voyeuristic, most films are made by men
- Scholars working on race, ethnicity, class, and queer theory complicated Mulvey’s work by looking at an intersectional gaze.
Panopticon (18th century)
Power of Surveillance
made by Jeremy Bentham as a proposal for model prison architecture
- Central observation tower inside circular building means all prisoners can be fully and constantly seen by prisoner guards
- complete lack of privacy would enforce standards of behaviour
- Describes modern social subjects’ regulation of their own behavior
The Other
(Georg Friedrich Hegel: dialectic)
A category of subjectivity set up in binary opposition to a culture’s dominant subject category
describe consciousness as a power struggle
- some theorists described alienation in late modernity
- Frantz Fanon: 1952 Black Skin, White Masks
- From Postcolonial theory: a body of scholarship that analyzes how Western discourses have constituted the human subjects of non-Western locations as lacking agency or voice
Orientalism
The ways that Western cultures conceive of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures as other
an academic discipline in the West
- The term was transformed by Edward Said in his book title of a book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978)
- Argues that Orientalism (the academic discipline) aided imperial domination
- West created an “Other” through its cultural representations of Islamic civilizations
- This “Other” is often depicted as backward, irrational, sexually deviant, menacing, etc
Realism
style of representation understood to accurately represent the real
- in given time and place subject to contestation, often levied powerfully in visual expression of political movements
- Sometimes tied to ethical ideas about accuracy
social realism
(types of realism)
a 19th-century style documenting true conditions of immigrants and working class to prompt social reform
constructive
(types of realism)
- geometric abstraction that represented changing social life of modernizing Soviet state
- valued industrial materials
took multiple forms
in public spaces
rejected by Stalin as too abstract for majority of populace
Social Realism
(types fo realism)
- classical pictorialist realism used in USSR, promote government ideologies
- citizens seen as happy in cheerful colour palettes
- other views and styles seen as disservice to state
despite danger Constructivists continued their practices
Poetic Realism
(types of realism)
French film style influenced by Surrealism
- dramatized social conditions of working class, often by focusing on tragic antiheroes
Neorealism
(types of realism)
Italian film style that captured untrained actors in urban ghettoes of Rome on grainy, black-and-white film
Episteme
Accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in given historical period
Michel Foucault’s Oder of Things (1966)
- There can only be one episteme at a given time
- Not a body of knowledge itself; rather, the set of conditions that make knowledge possible
- “everyday reality” is itself grounded upon a dominant episteme
Perspective
set of techniques for depicting spatial depth within two-dimensional pictorial space
- signifier of ‘the real’ across different periods
- suggesting physical depth not inherently more realist approach to organizing image field
- often single, fixed spectator position
- signifying scientific progress
Linear Perspective
Filippo Brunelleschi
Leon Battista Albert
Rationalism
Cartesian space
Filippo Brunelleschi: picture as window where sight is organized
- first used instruments to measure distances accurately
Leon Battista Alberti: linear perspective as geometric system
- perspective derived from nature itself
Rationalism: knowledge of world from reason
space knowable through measuring with tools that correct human perception
perspective system displaces individual with mechanical device
Cartesian space: a physical, three-dimensional space that can be mathematically measured
Perspective and the Body
Techniques for rendering space advanced at different pace from those for rendering body as dimensional
- Potentially distorting or deceptive aspects of viewing systems have been understood differently over time
Anatomical foreshortening
perspectives and body
technique used to make the body appear to recede in space
The Camera Obscura
darkened chamber in which light rays bouncing off well-lit object or scene create an inverted projection on surface inside chamber
- affirms empiricism’s basic tenets
- found in artists’ studios as drawing instrument
Challenges to Perspective
- Human vision more complex than world organized around system of lines
- eyes in constant motion when we look
sight is composite of different views and glances - Many modern artists working after invention of photography defied perspective
- Impressionism: painting style that depicts same scene many times to evoke changes in light over time
Challenges to Perspective
- Many modern artists questioned organization around Cartesian subject as fixed center of pictorial world
abstract expressionism: artistic style that records the artist’s emotions and physicality during painting process
conceptual art: artistic practice in which concept is more important than visual product
Perspective in Digital Media
- Many perspectives on a multiplicity of virtual worlds in the same screen
Often emphasizes the phenomenological experience of the body
“Player” connotes embodiment, interaction with active world beyond limited experience of looking
Isometric perspective
Common form of perspective used in video games that has planes that do not converge
- Lacks visible horizon
-Modular
-Flattened
-Virtual space: an electronically made space that resembles physical space but cannot be measured
Two-point perspective
Lines converge to vanishing points to the right and to the left, and objects in the image appear to move off toward points on either side of the horizon line
One-point perspective: parallax
Receding horizontal planes perpendicular to the depth axis moving horizontally at different speeds to simulate the effect of watching something move along an open vista. The further a plane is away from the viewer, the more slowly it moves across the screen.
