Who said a person can't do both? But both have to be done on the certain level of inside knowledge . All 'Modes', and more then four, exist in every professional drawing or painting, with different degree of domination. I have to agree with "The four modes, in my opinion, are nonsense..." WC. The statement by Marcia Hall: "the contrast between the highlights and shadows ..interposes a visual uncertainty or uncertain visibility between the observer and the objective appearance" is very confusing and pretentious. Boris Shoshensky To: [email protected] Subject: Berger Chapter One: Technologies Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:54:03 GMT
>Berger's four modes are for people who like to talk about paintings, but don't create them. (Boris) Why can't a person do both? And why would the one any more important than the other? After all, they both can serve the same high purpose: mental or spiritual stimulation >Berger used the word "technologies" because that is what he was describing. He is limiting his discussion to paint in this section. His use of the word "mode" does not mean the reader should extrapolate to other possible categories of mode. (Kate) To begin with, no , only the "textural mode" is limited to paint. The "graphic' modes involves technologies of representation, like systems of anatomy or various kinds of perspective. And who knows what the "decorative" mode might involve, since it not only includes "the symbolic link of the sacred image of otherworldly figures" but also "the importance, value, and preciousness of the painting's context and support". So "a painting is also decorous because it possesses decorum".. "it decorates not only in the sense of beautifying but also in the sense of honoring" And indeed, when the word "technology" is applied to the imaginative arts, it has to be quite open-ended because, unlike the technologies involved in building roads or draining swamps, the purposes involved are not available for objective analysis. > He is not discussing what the reader might require to enrapture his imagination or provoke his feelings of wonder and joy. (Kate) Nor does he discuss this kind of effect at all. But even if different people are enraptured by different things, I would claim that it's mostly what distinguishes the things that have been sited in the places of the highest honor and survived the test of time, regardless of the various graphic and optic technologies applied. >The four modes, in my opinion, are nonsense because they can't be distinguished one from the other to any clear degree. Yet Berger has, at least, tried to signify objective traits in his four modes, even as they result from the subjectivity of the artist. (William) Perhaps they cannot be distinguished from each other on the surface of a painting - since a mark which might serve a system of perspective, might also be considered a decorative texture. But each of these ideas has its own history of discussion by various art historians. . The decorative mode comes from historians of early Renaissance art, like David Rosand, who discusses "the liturgical situation" of an early Renaissance altar piece. "My choice of graphic as the key term for the early modern scopic regime was initially propted by David Summers's account of its currency in the Medicean circle to which Michelangelo belonged". While, regarding the graphic mode in Van Eyck, Marcia Hall discusses the "reality recorded in a thousand minutely observed details", while Panofsky, Gombrich, Alpers, Kemp, and Baxandall discuss similar issues in books like "The Art of Describing" or "The Rebirth of Pictorial Space". The optical mode comes from James Gibbon's notion that "the visual field is overlaid like a screen or grid on the visual world" and from Marcia Hall who noted that "the contrast between the highlights and shadows ..interposes a visual uncertainty or uncertain visibility between the observer and the objective appearance". And ultimately, Berger sources his graphic/optic distinction to " Wolfflin's distinction between linear and painterly tendencies", and Ortega Y Gasset's "constructions of proximate and distant points of view", and it is also found in Alois Riegel's "opposition between haptic and optic modes". The notion of texture is attributed to a variety of art historians, including Wittkower, Wetering, and Gombrich. The discussion of these modes will be applied to that "often told story that hops from one table of academic discourse to another... the ideology of representationalism" and its place in "bourgeois ideology" where Jonathan Crary has noted that "conservatives tend to pose an account of ever-increasing progress towards versimilitude..... radical historians ... usually see a single enduring aparatus of political and social power..that continues to discipline and regulate the status of an observer" Can this discussion be addressed with the kind of objective criteria that William would like to consider? Or is the objective stuff -- like "listing different sizes of portrait paintings" more appropriate to the science of archeology and it's more limited aims? ____________________________________________________________ Auto Loans Click here to save cash and find low rates on auto loans. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=x-4vySMgdVyKDxcTj7Vg6gAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWIwAAAAA=
