Style - the Content of the Mark

After doing recent readings on the discipline of visual arts criticism, and on photography criticism in particular, I was struck by how much critics express certainty about what they are critiquing, yet how much thinkers about criticism express uncertainty about the legitimacy of critics.

I felt overwhelmed by the ongoing inability of some very hard thinkers to get away from debates over conventional art-historical frameworks or the psychologies of aesthetics, almost invariably spending their time arguing either for or against the usefulness or correctness of intellectual idiosyncracy in demonstrating "artistic meaning" or "artistic value" in a still-image visual work.

What's lost in the general shuffle is the attention to investigation of how meaning in images is finally "authoritative" in the image itself, not just in whatever context the critic finally agrees to be associated with as an authority. Regardless of the observer's perspective, the image has its own terms on which to project significance with its organization of information -- and the key to discussing that organization is in the rhetoric of the decisions that it displays in its construction. At the deepest conceptual level, every premeditated image is simply a "mark", one which was not there before and which has an intentionality of expressing a distinction -- and for which the significance of the distinction is the inherent value of the image. Style is the rhetoric of the mark's ability to express the distinction it is intending, and so style becomes synonymous with the essential "content" of the mark.

To avoid and counterpoint those approaches that dwell on the critic's rhetoric instead of the image's own, this article cuts to the chase by presenting the diagram below.

In this diagram, the key assumption is that all images produced by human construction as premeditated images are driven by a predisposition towards one of two basic motives: to imagine real things, or to present imagined things as if they were real. Produced images can always be positioned somewhere along the span between these two poles, which are more specifically identified as two presentational "intentions", namely the invention of evidence or the evidence of invention. But the imaging is also driven by an essential "referent" that sits closer to either a concept or an observation.

This double axis of concerns results (as below) in being able to detect four essential styles of imaging, each one of which indicates the inherent content of the mark.

It follows from this diagram that a given image (which can span more than one quadrant of the area displayed) may have a complexity originating in more than one dimension, and so there may also be more than the two dimensions (axes) cross-referenced here. But we already have a standardized framework broad enough to manage most of the images we can remember, regardless of place on the historical timeline or geopolitical neighborhoods within the academies of art theory. If an additional dimension emerges as proof to better explain the inherent diversity of image originality, then we'll add it to this diagram. Meanwhile, for the most part, the diagram allows the peripheral (para-image) discussion about why the image producer leaned towards a particular position in the diagram's space, without attempting to reposition the mode of expression that the image itself has as an independent matter of fact during encounter with any unsuspecting viewer.

Carry on from here, distributing your fashion photos, crime scene photos, war correspondent photojournalism, movie freeze-frames, family snapshots, landscapes, portraits, pictorial bios or what have you, it doesn't matter, within the diagram.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack