How do I represent ‘nation’ visually? A844 Exercise 1.5.3
Friday, 21 Sep 2018, 16:40
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Friday, 21 Sep 2018, 16:43
How do I represent ‘nation’
visually? A844 Exercise 1.5.3
1 Return to Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Communities and read from
p. 86 ‘The “naturalizations” of Europe’s dynasties …’ to p. 90 ‘… become an
“English” language’.
As Anthony D. Smith has noted in
analysing Anderson’s impact, ‘mass reading publics in vernacular administrative
languages (a kind of “high culture”) were enabled to imagine themselves as
sovereign, but finite, political communities, i.e. as nations, through the
products of “print languages”. In other words, the boundaries of the nation
came to coincide with those of a “print-community”’ (Smith, 1999, p. 49).
·
What, then, are the implications of this
for us as historians of art, architecture, design and visual culture rather
than the printed word?
·
Are those bodies tasked with saving art
and built heritage for ‘the nation’ in fact dealing in easily recognised
stereotypical constructions – and what are the implications of this for the use
of public money to fund their activity?
1 The passage itself does not give clues to help in these rather difficult
questions. However, a caveat is a good place to start. That is that visual
nature of a medium does not distinguish it from language when it is written rather than spoken. That is because written (or
typed, language has a visual form that allows for variability across a range of
options: character of script or font, variations in character of script and
font, contextualisation of the visual verbal sign (is it on a large high-street
window, in a mirror, on a piece of paper, on a visible page of a book) etc.
This is particularly important when we compare national-vernacular language
communities with the cultures that preceded them with ‘a script language that embodied the TRUTH’ (see
preparatory blog). The latter used language labels (see Byzantine Christian
art in particular where WORD is flesh) as if it embodied the same truths as the
visualised non-linguistic body. National art & architecture both can
(buildings rarely don’t) bear linguistic labels, especially where that building
‘represents’ a NATION, SUCH AS a National gallery or Museum.
That said language is part of the
cognitive machinery with which viewers interpret visual material, Hence, the contextual
discourse which surrounds the visual, including that introjected and projected
into the viewer’s visual-interpretative processes will also be important.
However perhaps there are other issues. Visual forms
can also reflect processes such as Russification across an expanded Russian
Empire (88) or Anglicisation across the Indian Raj. These forms manifest themselves
in stereotyped clothing design with particular contexts, such as
administration) in which the empire shows itself as ‘English/British’, whilst
permitting a sphere of action (provided it is politically quiescent) that
remains diverse. The important thing is that the imperial nation has a hold on
hierarchies where real power is exerted. Hence in Scotland ‘Scottishness’ in
dress/costume is invented in the nineteenth century because organs of power (law,
commerce, government, administration etc.) remain firmly organised in English
print that rules over those ‘folk’ forms. Even elements of architecture (such
as the bungalow) can be taken, imitated in an English version from subaltern
cultures such as that of old Bengal. Of course, it is very complicated.
However, certain landscapes can single also ‘national
stereotypes’ as can stereotypes of climate and smell. I think though this is
getting complicated. I’ll look at the ‘revealed discussion’ before going on
with this and add a note if necessary.
2 I don’t think these bodies are dealing with
forms that, like language, can be described as having evolved into a
recognisable national form (although of course languages don’t really naturally
evolve – they reflect power relationships just like any other human
construction). Thus nations build a national visual culture often by adopting a
bricolage of visual forms that take on national authority – In Britain the role
of classical and some Baroque architecture - or by framing the visual in a
certain formal setting into which its features are manipulated or composed. Thus
art can be changed by the grandiosity of its framing, its placement at a height
to which viewers raise their eyes, its context relationally with ‘other
furniture’ in a gallery. It is removed from street culture or even native
domestic culture or from practices that might be repugnant to a certain
construction of ‘Britishness’. In a sense, we see Landseer doing this with
Scottishness. We certainly see it in the Raj or in religious cultures which
must succumb to an imperial-national stereotype, as Buddhist Nepal to China, or
Mumbai to the Anglicised visual forms of Bombay.
In terms of Britain, art will be selected and
displayed too in ways that subordinate local cultures or other forms of
diversity brought about by class, ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, and sexual
orientation in such a way that, though allowed to persist sometimes, they do
not ‘challenge’ central orthodoxies. Again, as with above, I’ll reconsider
after Revealed Discussion’ in an addendum.
2 With these questions in mind, look
carefully at the following work by contemporary Scottish artist Calum
Colvin: Anger (1993).
Figure 1.1 Calum Colvin, Anger,
1993, cibachrome, 37 x 46 cm. British Council Collection. Photo: Bridgeman
Education.
· What aspects of national identity or an
‘imagined community’ of Scottish (and/or British) nationhood are being
interrogated here?
·
The
reproduction is difficult to see and is not clear to me how much the visual elements
are meant to be contra-distinguished or to merge. Thus the anachronistic
elements, such as pictures of kilted battle set against Campbell’s soup tins
and a McDonald’s printed logo may be intended to have relation to one visual
scenario, or one (the older-fashioned one, may be overlaid on the other. The McDonalds
logo may be on a painted flag that has been damaged in battle or may be a logo
seen through damage done to a visual overlay of ideological Scottishness
(fighting men in kilts) in an underlying set of images. But of course both
McDonald and Campbell are important clan names in Scotland as well as global
brands of a modern visual world. In fact here we have a complex setting of
Americanised ‘Scottish names’ with a kitsch fiction of their origin in Scots as
‘tribal’ emblems. Is it that historical diversity in Scotland is being reduced
here to the commodified standards of globalisation?
If there is a flag holding up the
McDonalds logo, its pole is made of one of the many marks that scar the surface
of the painting. Is it a pole or a scar on a picture surface or a terrestrial
perceptual effect caught in static time? Are these marks shooting trails from
bombs in modern warfare or again just damage done to the Scottish scene that
has been painted? Even some visual elements seem to me ambiguous or liminal. Of
course there is a bridge (a good boundary metaphor), river, loch and mountains,
but is that a desirable built dwelling at the other side of the river bordering
the loch or the forested mountain background I sometimes see it as.
·
Where, is it suggested, do challenges
to/appropriations of this perception of the nation come from?
·
I think
the answer I suggested above is probably what is wanted here. The appropriation
of Scottish culture is by global USA culture which now uses English as its
print-medium.
However there is an appropriation
too of Scottishness by a very male myth of Scotland – the same that generated Braveheart. A very masculine aggression
subverts all else at both sides of anachronisms we see here, involving too a
kind of appetitive sexuality in which flesh becomes meat. I do not know what to
make of the object, if such it is, in the bottom right of the picture. It seems
organic and animal and has several layers of what look like teeth but could be
stones, which advance on the fighting men. It has a queering effect on the
picture – an effect that fails to allow us to find norms by which to interpret
itself.
· How are they presented in visual form?
·
I expect
I will be totally off-key here. I think the issue here is that norms by which
we interpret visual objects, such as outline forms, stereotyped colour
relationships, visual proto-typicality (as a cognitivist might see it) are all
compromised. That we cannot know for sure WHAT we are seeing, or that what we
see changes as we take in diversities across a wide range of object-form,
spatial-temporal, dimensional (depths versus surfaces) and tactile ambiguities
and liminalities. There is even a play I would say between visual pleasure and
disgust (that object I mention above with the potential to ‘teeth’). Of course
what must happen is that form has become difficult to regulate. It is difficult
to see how such a picture is ‘composed’ – its rhythms and so on – and I suppose I feel before it a kind
of radical discomposure in which images are uncertain to interpretation, and
perhaps to recognition.
·
I have
given a very driven interpretation of this. What shall I see in ‘Revealed
Discussion’ (which makes it sound like the Revelation from the Gods – the breaking
of the seals)? Let’s go and look.
·
In fact
what is revealed goes much deeper than I did and is better because it knows and
uses discourse about the materials used and compositional techniques. I have to
say, that constituted real learning for me. I’m gratified. I* won’t add though
so that other people, if they chance to see this, get the revelation from that
discussion that I did.
How do I represent ‘nation’ visually? A844 Exercise 1.5.3
How do I represent ‘nation’ visually? A844 Exercise 1.5.3
1 Return to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and read from p. 86 ‘The “naturalizations” of Europe’s dynasties …’ to p. 90 ‘… become an “English” language’.
As Anthony D. Smith has noted in analysing Anderson’s impact, ‘mass reading publics in vernacular administrative languages (a kind of “high culture”) were enabled to imagine themselves as sovereign, but finite, political communities, i.e. as nations, through the products of “print languages”. In other words, the boundaries of the nation came to coincide with those of a “print-community”’ (Smith, 1999, p. 49).
1 The passage itself does not give clues to help in these rather difficult questions. However, a caveat is a good place to start. That is that visual nature of a medium does not distinguish it from language when it is written rather than spoken. That is because written (or typed, language has a visual form that allows for variability across a range of options: character of script or font, variations in character of script and font, contextualisation of the visual verbal sign (is it on a large high-street window, in a mirror, on a piece of paper, on a visible page of a book) etc. This is particularly important when we compare national-vernacular language communities with the cultures that preceded them with ‘a script language that embodied the TRUTH’ (see preparatory blog). The latter used language labels (see Byzantine Christian art in particular where WORD is flesh) as if it embodied the same truths as the visualised non-linguistic body. National art & architecture both can (buildings rarely don’t) bear linguistic labels, especially where that building ‘represents’ a NATION, SUCH AS a National gallery or Museum.
That said language is part of the cognitive machinery with which viewers interpret visual material, Hence, the contextual discourse which surrounds the visual, including that introjected and projected into the viewer’s visual-interpretative processes will also be important.
However perhaps there are other issues. Visual forms can also reflect processes such as Russification across an expanded Russian Empire (88) or Anglicisation across the Indian Raj. These forms manifest themselves in stereotyped clothing design with particular contexts, such as administration) in which the empire shows itself as ‘English/British’, whilst permitting a sphere of action (provided it is politically quiescent) that remains diverse. The important thing is that the imperial nation has a hold on hierarchies where real power is exerted. Hence in Scotland ‘Scottishness’ in dress/costume is invented in the nineteenth century because organs of power (law, commerce, government, administration etc.) remain firmly organised in English print that rules over those ‘folk’ forms. Even elements of architecture (such as the bungalow) can be taken, imitated in an English version from subaltern cultures such as that of old Bengal. Of course, it is very complicated.
However, certain landscapes can single also ‘national stereotypes’ as can stereotypes of climate and smell. I think though this is getting complicated. I’ll look at the ‘revealed discussion’ before going on with this and add a note if necessary.
2 I don’t think these bodies are dealing with forms that, like language, can be described as having evolved into a recognisable national form (although of course languages don’t really naturally evolve – they reflect power relationships just like any other human construction). Thus nations build a national visual culture often by adopting a bricolage of visual forms that take on national authority – In Britain the role of classical and some Baroque architecture - or by framing the visual in a certain formal setting into which its features are manipulated or composed. Thus art can be changed by the grandiosity of its framing, its placement at a height to which viewers raise their eyes, its context relationally with ‘other furniture’ in a gallery. It is removed from street culture or even native domestic culture or from practices that might be repugnant to a certain construction of ‘Britishness’. In a sense, we see Landseer doing this with Scottishness. We certainly see it in the Raj or in religious cultures which must succumb to an imperial-national stereotype, as Buddhist Nepal to China, or Mumbai to the Anglicised visual forms of Bombay.
In terms of Britain, art will be selected and displayed too in ways that subordinate local cultures or other forms of diversity brought about by class, ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation in such a way that, though allowed to persist sometimes, they do not ‘challenge’ central orthodoxies. Again, as with above, I’ll reconsider after Revealed Discussion’ in an addendum.
2 With these questions in mind, look carefully at the following work by contemporary Scottish artist Calum Colvin: Anger (1993).
Figure 1.1 Calum Colvin, Anger, 1993, cibachrome, 37 x 46 cm. British Council Collection. Photo: Bridgeman Education.
· What aspects of national identity or an ‘imagined community’ of Scottish (and/or British) nationhood are being interrogated here?
· The reproduction is difficult to see and is not clear to me how much the visual elements are meant to be contra-distinguished or to merge. Thus the anachronistic elements, such as pictures of kilted battle set against Campbell’s soup tins and a McDonald’s printed logo may be intended to have relation to one visual scenario, or one (the older-fashioned one, may be overlaid on the other. The McDonalds logo may be on a painted flag that has been damaged in battle or may be a logo seen through damage done to a visual overlay of ideological Scottishness (fighting men in kilts) in an underlying set of images. But of course both McDonald and Campbell are important clan names in Scotland as well as global brands of a modern visual world. In fact here we have a complex setting of Americanised ‘Scottish names’ with a kitsch fiction of their origin in Scots as ‘tribal’ emblems. Is it that historical diversity in Scotland is being reduced here to the commodified standards of globalisation?
If there is a flag holding up the McDonalds logo, its pole is made of one of the many marks that scar the surface of the painting. Is it a pole or a scar on a picture surface or a terrestrial perceptual effect caught in static time? Are these marks shooting trails from bombs in modern warfare or again just damage done to the Scottish scene that has been painted? Even some visual elements seem to me ambiguous or liminal. Of course there is a bridge (a good boundary metaphor), river, loch and mountains, but is that a desirable built dwelling at the other side of the river bordering the loch or the forested mountain background I sometimes see it as.
· Where, is it suggested, do challenges to/appropriations of this perception of the nation come from?
· I think the answer I suggested above is probably what is wanted here. The appropriation of Scottish culture is by global USA culture which now uses English as its print-medium.
However there is an appropriation too of Scottishness by a very male myth of Scotland – the same that generated Braveheart. A very masculine aggression subverts all else at both sides of anachronisms we see here, involving too a kind of appetitive sexuality in which flesh becomes meat. I do not know what to make of the object, if such it is, in the bottom right of the picture. It seems organic and animal and has several layers of what look like teeth but could be stones, which advance on the fighting men. It has a queering effect on the picture – an effect that fails to allow us to find norms by which to interpret itself.
· How are they presented in visual form?
· I expect I will be totally off-key here. I think the issue here is that norms by which we interpret visual objects, such as outline forms, stereotyped colour relationships, visual proto-typicality (as a cognitivist might see it) are all compromised. That we cannot know for sure WHAT we are seeing, or that what we see changes as we take in diversities across a wide range of object-form, spatial-temporal, dimensional (depths versus surfaces) and tactile ambiguities and liminalities. There is even a play I would say between visual pleasure and disgust (that object I mention above with the potential to ‘teeth’). Of course what must happen is that form has become difficult to regulate. It is difficult to see how such a picture is ‘composed’ – its rhythms and so on – and I suppose I feel before it a kind of radical discomposure in which images are uncertain to interpretation, and perhaps to recognition.
· I have given a very driven interpretation of this. What shall I see in ‘Revealed Discussion’ (which makes it sound like the Revelation from the Gods – the breaking of the seals)? Let’s go and look.
· In fact what is revealed goes much deeper than I did and is better because it knows and uses discourse about the materials used and compositional techniques. I have to say, that constituted real learning for me. I’m gratified. I* won’t add though so that other people, if they chance to see this, get the revelation from that discussion that I did.