On Apr 8, 2010, at 8:58 PM, Michael Brady wrote: > I am coming more and more around to a view probably similar to Cheerskep's. > Communications comes down to saying to someone, "There, that's what I have to > say. What does that make you think of?"
Expanding on this: I used to think that representational images mimicked the retinal image of an object or scene. I used to shrink for the voguish phrase, "reading a painting," which I took to mean something far more subjective than Panofsky's study of iconology or the like. "Reading" a painting seemed to point to something more than figuring out what the symbols signified ... and much less. It initially sounded to me like a way of magnifying the mundane verb "look at" or "view." Along those lines, I thought that realistic portrayals depended on the degree of verisimilitude of technique, and the epitome of them were the Dutch still life paintings or the Superrealists' paintings of storefronts or crystal compotes filled with fruit and surrounded by half-filled glasses, Chuck Close portraits, etc. How did extremely well-drawn or painted images that were not so hyperrealistic fit in? Where did a Schiele or Hockney drawing fit? A Modigliani? What about the blunter style of Hopper? on and on. I realized that images, being reduced proxies of their referents enclosed within some kind of bounded space that isolates it from the rest of what we can see, operate on us more as things to be read, as writing or codes (which is what writing is), and thus that we perceive the painting or sculpture and interpret the forms of the images in a way much closer to reading than to how we perceive an actual person walking toward us. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
