I’ll start by clarifying that I see the vernacular as a flexible classification of art and the aesthetic as an element of art is general, and thus an element of the vernacular. The “everyday,” in my opinion, has a distinct aesthetic that functions in specific ways that engender its “everydayness.”
As I thought about the relationship between the vernacular and how we see, Marguerite Helmers came to mind. She discusses the importance of narrative in understanding/making meaning in the visual. In displaying an image, a curator will seek to (re)construct a narrative that frames our understanding of the art. This builds on the narrative that the viewer shapes and relies on as a way of making/finding meaning in the piece. The fodder of this narrative, however, is not only what is visible before the viewer. Helmers observes that although a spectator may be naïve about “painterly symbolism, the spectator may be quite sophisticated with narrative options, learned from the realm of the visual an verbal cultural imaginary.” I think that it is the nature of this narrative that contributes to the characterizes the vernacular as well as how and what we see in "the everyday."
As we construct narratives around the vernacular, these narratives are more immediate than the narratives that we construct around, say, “high art.” Let’s take, for example, the silhouettes in the iPod’s popular ad campaign. The vernacular function of these images is emblematic of the vernacular in general. In these silhouettes, strategically placed in various contexts as they are, we can literally fill ourselves – or some fantasy of ourselves -- into the image. There is a rather literal space for us in these images as they simultaneously reflect and materialize a piece of our lived experience.
Another example is the several mosaics found in Pompeii of dogs lying on the floor. Often found in the entryway of homes, we are able to locate ourselves within these images in an immediate and material way. The narrative that we construct, as did contemporaries of these images, is one in which we are active participants and respondents. These images are in active dialogue with the material circumstances that surround us.
Although non-vernacular art enters and shapes our experience, it is not, I think in active and material dialogue with the materialities that we most immediately embody. We cannot, as with high art, embody the narratives that we construct as a way of making meaning and seeing ourselves on a local level. This material seeing of ourselves is an indication of the more narrow aesthetic functioning in the vernacular. As “the aesthetic” varies in both degree and kind, the aesthetic of the vernacular is shaped by circulation and context. The vernacular can be read through its circulation in the everyday (here, an acknowledgment of the different “vernaculars” that exist in our society).
For example, I think that the Mona Lisa has become vernacular. This reflects the changing aesthetic of the image. Here, I am suggesting that this is largely attributable to the increased circulation and the subsequent presence of this image in our daily lives. The Mona Lisa has become an image where thenarrative constructed as a way of making meaning is significantly different from the narrative constructed by viewers who only saw the image displayed in the Louvre. Here again, we are seeing broader circulation and increased circulation (ie we see it more frequently and in more forms – coffee cup, etc.).
As for the relationship between these influences and visual rhetoric: Helmers articulates a critical component of the relationship between the above and visual rhetoric when she writes that visual rhetoricians “consider the temporal and spatial implications of context: the ways in which the meaning of a single image can alter dramatically due to placement, context, cropping and captioning.” To this, I would add circulation. However, when we are considering the rhetoricity of an image both the vernacular and the aesthetic are contingent upon and often relative to individual contexts from which narratives emerge that encase our understandings of images as well as the overlapping and divergent flows of images through and around these contexts – flows that locate meaning on a soda bottle, in a museum, or on the sidewalk.
No comments:
Post a Comment